> There's a breaking point of widespread democratized (runnable by like 1-5 people, or a small community) technology where these companies don't have the same ability to absorb all these gains
That is actually a technological solution for a societal problem that I see as a way out:
A device that produces food, water, energy and does sanitation for a family of 4-5 people. This device would make it possible to give families higher leverage in any negotiation because they can not be forced to work for survival.
We have the tech, only limiting factor is the size, but we will find a way.
- Solar Foods [1] (Protein production with CO2 and solar energy with a fermentation process)
Yep, exactly. I hope and expect to see automated vertical farm systems as cheap consumer products soon enough, for one. Though I also don't think we necessarily need to reinvent the wheel with this stuff - it doesn't have to be some independent micro system (which are typically much less convenient than mass-produced systems). We can still use standard farming/water/energy-production/sanitation - we just need to reduce the bottom-line cost of those services (which I am still strongly betting AI will impact hard) and make it so creating a competing system takes much less capital to boot up, in case existing services decide they want to try and charge the same consumer prices while eating up all the efficiency gains from AI.
We don't need to settle for lower quality, or convenience. We just need to ensure capitalism does what it's supposed to, and pass on the efficiency gains down to the consumer.
Though also, for my money - water, energy, sanitation? Those are already very cheap, and will get cheaper naturally. And food is cheap if you keep to basics. Automated housing construction and automated high-quality-meal kitchens (not just basics) seem like the areas to tackle for real cost savings. Ultimately the last bastion will be rent seeking on land though - which could be alleviated by creating housing alternatives off the conventional grid, or uplifting the quality of services in much of the developing world so there are much more options of safe areas to live (which again, is happening fast already and will happen much faster with a rapid improvement from AI tooling).
My argument is this is the natural way capitalism works - or is supposed to work - and we should treat that with hearty skepticism. But the only way this doesn't happen seems to be if there are monopolistic forces actively holding it back. Otherwise there really should be an abundance of cheap options for living coming to consumers in the near future, which would effectively be close to a UBI, and a "living off the land" alternative to wage labor.
(P.S. for housing, my bets are more on modular housing production in a factory setting becoming highly automated - the quality level of those builds is already quite high. But also just automation on the materials production all the way down the stack. There's hope for in-place construction savings (robots!) but I think that'll come much later. Logistics transportation was already due for some major improvements before AI reared its head - cheap electric engines just enable some very different structures that effectively have a net-0 cost of operation when combined with solar. Any innovation on that front would dramatically reduce the cost of everything else.
Dark kitchens are already a thing, and expect them to keep growing - especially as the tools improve. You could probably supply a whole city with the same wide variety of well-cooked dishes from a single facility with efficient transport. There's an element of dystopia there as cook jobs disappear and thus the personal touch, but the consumer reality (should be) basically-free meals at the same quality we expect from restaurants, on demand.)
Here's [1] a data analysis looking into the phenomenon:
"Professionals with higher cognitive ability drop out of STEM careers earlier and faster", "High-ability workers are faster learners, in all jobs. However, the relative return to ability is higher in careers that change less, because learning gains accumulate"
I'm part of a team that does (very small-scale compared to the big NGOs) logistics (food, clothing, baby stuff, hygiene, everything) and provides/mediates shelter in the North East of Germany and sending food, first aid kits and medical supplies to the borders/directly to Ukraine with the supplies and support of the people of the city I'm living in (I'm managing one of the provisional warehouses).
We have bus companies driving people and other things.
If you'd like to work together, I'd love to talk. Petrol has become pretty expensive, so pooling resources makes a lot of sense.
95% of everything is logistics. Fully agree with the quote.
Yes, happy to talk with anybody involved in similar efforts so definitely reach out. My contact information is in my profile.
We are mostly sourcing supplies from the US at this point.
Tampa is our pack/repack and pallet departure point. We have pallet space aboard flights from Florida through Germany to Poland and Romania, available every other day or so. We have trucks in Cluj, Romania but not in Poland. Romanian and Polish Governments have waived customs and we have a direct line for whatever other needs arise - they've been incredibly supportive - perhaps worried about Putin's further ambitions. Someone we know flies with the pallets from US departure and stays with them until they're handed off to someone else we know inside Ukraine who distributes to support and defense units in country. There is a lot of fraud involved in mass mobilization and cross-border transport so this level of accountability is important to us.
Very few people in Ukraine thought Putin would invade, and even if he invaded, almost nobody thought he would cross the Dnieper river (in the south) and make a run for Kiev. The Ukrainians we know, very "ordinary" people, have dug in. There is no concept in their minds of a negotiated peace that leaves Russia in control of Ukraine. They would rather fight it out. As a result it feels like it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. We are focused on combat medical supplies at this point but as time drags on there will no doubt be a great need for food, clothing, and similar items you mentioned.
I've used nearly the same code for years with a trampoline function (JMP instruction instead of simply writing the code right there), so not too sure about it being a new technique.
In my opinion, CreateRemoteThread is the function that usually triggers AVs and injecting code into processes is the suspicious part.
Would love to read more about this because my understanding is that the increase in M2 money supply is a big part of the current inflation (very simplified - it's way more complex when looking at money velocity and supply chains in general).
Current inflation is mostly supply-side driven. Having said that, M2's biggest jump in its history was in early 2020 (see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL). Its slope before and after is more or less the same. However, I don't think inflation will lag it by more than a year.
> If I decide in the future (perhaps once my account is to that 50-100M range) that the site is more of a liability for me than an asset, I may close it, with or without grandfathering.
I'd like to offer to take care of it and manage all aspects of it if you ever get annoyed by it. These algorithms are life-changing and the more (and especially lower income) people have access to them, the better.
The performances of the models are almost unbelievable. I only saw something similar with alphahub.us in the past (but higher max. drawdowns) - what do you think of them?
I'm interested in running the Gold Plan, are there any resources on how to set up a fully automatic trading system with it? I'd love to connect.
Alphahub looks interesting, but their algorithms are quite different from mine. Theirs are picking individual stocks and sending out a signal at a regular frequency, every day, telling you what they think will be the best performing for that day.
By contrast, our models only send out signals on average of once per 2-4 weeks depending on the model. Our signals are always macro signals--they have an opinion only on where they see the overall market (S&P 500) heading next. The signals are irregular. During extremely calm times like in 2013 or 2017, there can be months without a signal. On the other hand, during highly volatile times like the COVID crash in 2020, there can be multiple signals per day, but there will never be more than 1 per hour.
Naturally, their drawdowns will be worse because individual stocks are inherently more risky than the index. As far as which will be the best absolute performer over the long term? I guess we'll have to wait and see :)
One last note about ours that could make a difference depending on your account type and country of residence. Since our models are macro models, if you live in the USA and implement them exactly by trading the S&P 500 Futures, you'll save money in taxes as all gains are taxed at 60% long term and 40% short term regardless of holding period. Alphahub gains will be taxed always at 100% short term rates unless held for more than a year which is unlikely with their systems.
I'm glad to hear you are interested in setting up your own automatic trading system! I'm in the process of writing some docs on exactly how it works, but in essence, we'll give you an access token for the API and then you can call it from your bot locally or in the cloud to get the live signals for all the models you have access to.
You talk in plural form, but I can only find information about you on the page. With this kind of alpha, I'd expect a team of quant traders and physicists working on it (I actually talked with the creator of alphahub.us, he's a physicist). Are you intending to work full-time on it and what are the other plans (I saw you started a job at a new company)? Not trying to be skeptical, but this could be something life-changing if it works - already pretty hyped tbh.
The alphahub.us strategy has execution problems because some of the smaller companies in the NASDAQ have low trading volume, so it doesn't scale as easily as a macro strat. I've talked with people who run it and it runs into scalability issues even with limited amounts of capital. Still trying to find the catch with your offer because it looks amazing.
I do have the habit of talking in plural form. The site was built by my wife and I together, but I built 100% of the models myself. I did work on this full time for over 2 years before recently starting a new job. Now, I've got the models to a place where it becomes very difficult to improve them. I used to be able to make huge progress in a week, now I can spend 100 hours trying different theories and may not end up with any progress. That can be frustrating, so I decided, the models are fantastic right now, the execution framework is very stable, I'm happy with how they are performing, I'm going to let them run.
As mentioned, I'm not rich (1.4M in bot, ~2M total net worth), a SWE job paying 400-600k is quite meaningful to me even with 40-60% returns on my portfolio for the time being, just as potential profits from this website (also perhaps in that range within a year or two?) are also meaningful. If the website fails to generate significant revenue, I may shut it down. Also, I enjoy working on satisfying things, and now that the models are mature and the website is mostly finished except minor details, I'm happy to have a team and a project for now :)
That's also a good call out on the scaling problems--another reason our models trade the SPX futures, literally the most liquid financial instrument in the world. By my slippage calculations, the models don't need significant scaling updates until at least 1B+ is being traded.
> But if I was in my 20s or early 30s, I'd be looking to leave tech entirely and go into something else where experience is actually appreciated and valued.
I'm in my 20s and think about this a lot although I already moved to management (with a lot of software development, still) as well.
There's a great article [1] analyzing this problem (quotes from the article: "Professionals with higher cognitive ability drop out of STEM careers earlier and faster", "High-ability workers are faster learners, in all jobs. However, the relative return to ability is higher in careers that change less, because learning gains accumulate").
Knowledge depreciates a lot faster in software development than many other fields. That's why I really think about going into finance or sales (still fast-paced), but attending expensive top business schools and starting as an analyst with a low salary again is pretty rough after already building my current skillset. Currently feel a bit stuck with my career options right now. Money's still good and the work is fun, but working in a field that is set up to be a grinding mill as an IC is not an entertaining thought. High-tech projects will still be fun, I guess, but still definitely something to consider. Specializing early on may mitigate this.
For sales: After attaining product-market fit and everything becoming more stable, it’s all about sales. Software development in the growth stage turns into an endless grind of features and bug fixes and is regularly seen as simply a cost. Sales is the mechanism that allows the business to get new customers, so this is something which has a higher impact in the growth stage.
For finance: Managing finance and deals is one of the most important aspects in any business. You can make the same money compared to tech without a ceiling and I’m personally interested in economics and financial topics.
Both have a quantifiable aspect (deal/fund size, new revenue/customers) that makes it easier to measure your impact on the business. This means that it’s easier to get a fair compensation - although bad performance will get noticed easily, too. And the knowledge in these areas compound, especially in sales.
On a personal note, I’m interested in psychology and economics and can build connections with others quickly, so these two fit quite well and I'm convinced that sales and finance are important ingredients for any type of work (philanthropic included).
Best of all worlds would be to build a MVP using software development skills until product-market fit is reached, then being able to grow customers using sales skills and then supporting further growth with external capital and managing an exit using finance skills. - In reality, these are all separate roles, but I'd like to be able to work in these other two areas, too.
> But when you stop and think about it for a sec you realize that we need intermediaries or else the richer will become unstoppable kings with control that cannot be deflated.
I agree. This is something that I'm not sure people who go into crypto fully understand with the resulting consequences. The FED is basically printing money and I can understand people who don't agree with the inflationary mechanism that is built into fiat currencies - this is one of the main criticisms of the fiat system because it's debt-based.
On the other hand, having no means to get taxes (because of anonymous currencies like Monero and anonymous wallets) and having no control over the currency is a safe way to a plutocracy. Some would argue that we're already living in a plutocracy, but currently we have democratic ways to intercept (although we're currently not good at exercising that power). But if it's technologically impossible to intervene, there's not a lot of ways to fix this.
Why is there no way to get taxes? Taxes were collected throughout history, beginning with the earliest recorded history, when nothing was electronic. Cash still enables tax collecting.
Because you can't know how much the person really has (edit: and receives) with crypto. Historically, you could simply walk to their properties and look at their wealth and tax accordingly (like serfs getting taxed on their agricultural output based on the land size they worked with). Or you could look at their bank accounts or (like the Panama papers) find their off-shore accounts.
But now, they can hide enormous wealth in an untraceable way on many wallets. It's not entirely new - tax evasion is as old as taxes - but it's easier and accessible now for large wealth that was more difficult to hide in the past. If crypto stays legal, you can't control this aspect.
In practice crypto isn’t used much as a medium of exchange, though, and when you try to cash in your coins you will get nailed for any evasion or criminal behavior. It’s possible that buying things directly with crypto will become more widespread, but expect this to trigger more laws and reporting requirements so that your transactions can be taxed.
It's still very young. If crypto gets relevant adoption, it'll be impossible to discern legitimate transactions from illegitimate ones. If it's technologically impossible, you can have all the laws you want - you're not able to enforce them. People will have their official wallets for tax collection and their anonymous ones for everything else (and will do their main transactions with them).
> buying things directly with crypto will become more widespread
I'm expecting this to be the case if adoption happens.
This seems very optimistic to me. I’m reminded of the xkcd where the cryptography enthusiasts imagine that 4096-bit security will protect their secrets, but in reality no one bothers with that. If the government requires ID for crypto purchases, they can shut down businesses that don’t comply. Businesses will comply. The tax agency can audit you and see if you have nice stuff that’s not accounted for. If you have a significant source of income from unreported crypto, this will likely be evident in many ways — business relationships, web presence, letters in the mail. Very few people can actually turn into ghosts, even with crypto.
I know crypto millionaires that had to show their e-mails to the tax officers to show which addresses were used for getting paid. I really hope you're right.
We don’t tax wealth. When someone wants to use crypto to buy something real - like property - should be able to collect taxes then. Maybe tax authorities transition away from taxing trades and more towards taxing physical stuff.
Same for me. I'm programming Web3 and Solidity contract interactions. It's just refreshing to have a new aspect (contracts and money) that you can easily interact with now.
I agree with the comments condemning the resource consumption. I also see big problems with the resulting loss of control over currencies that governments could face. I'm trying to be a part of this development because if it doesn't go away, these systems could be a defining part of the future. But if I'm honest, I'd like crypto in most of its current form to go away - it's very likely that it can damage democracies and we're currently already busy saving our democratic processes from social media, inequality and manipulation. Maybe crypto has a solution to these problems, but currently I'm not convinced. I've talked to founders of the biggest crypto currencies and the vision of most of them is highly anarchistic and idealistic (a DAO as a government replacement, taxes will be paid in a voluntary form or something like that) which makes me deeply sceptical. But maybe that's just me being uncomfortable that a multi-billionaire is explaining to me how he wants to change how the world is governed.
That is actually a technological solution for a societal problem that I see as a way out:
A device that produces food, water, energy and does sanitation for a family of 4-5 people. This device would make it possible to give families higher leverage in any negotiation because they can not be forced to work for survival. We have the tech, only limiting factor is the size, but we will find a way.
- Solar Foods [1] (Protein production with CO2 and solar energy with a fermentation process)
- Omni Processor which recycles human waste [2]
- Tiger Toilet [3]
- Low cost waste water treatment [4]
- And potato production in a small vertical setup
[1]: https://solarfoods.com
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tdlqjGlN3A
[3]: http://www.easol.in/tiger-toilet-overivew
[4]: https://www.tbfenvironmental.in