congratulations eigen, you have walked into the aspect of life i have spent years dedicating thought to.
consider this thread a letter to you – read it, or don’t. i am sure in the long run somebody will find it interesting anyway
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RT @eigenrobot
"this is all bullshit" is fine as an insight and i think weve mapped that space pretty well
what i feel we havent managed as effectively is "ok great so what do we even do about it"
https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1470331258030866434
this is the very core thing with which i differ from you and everyone else in your online tribe.
to whatever extent i have been voluntarily disenfranchised, muted, put on a list, it is either directly due to disagreeableness or due to a conforming compulsion downstream of that.
i call it voluntary because i would rather be disagreeable than become lost.
in doing this, i have found answers to many of the problems that plague our society that seemingly no one is able to solve.
i dont have all the answers, but i do have a few, and these are pragmatic and comprehensive solutions that will actually work in the real world.
i noticed that your replies are partially dominated by ideology. i think you know how well that works.
so, one of the things i have come to solve is the kind of two-pronged “political problem” and “complexity problem” of software, esp. on the Web.
i solved this through patience, intellect and stubbornness, and created many things that together will help repair computing.
outside of computing i have other plans as well, once i have enough money to execute them.
one exciting one is solving the housing crisis. i eschew YIMBY and NIMBY and all the rich interests who dont really get it
because of the fed lately i do expect real estate to completely crash soon in a way it hasnt done in hundreds of years
but thats okay because i actually have a sustainable incentive structure to do what im going to do there
im going to build lots of cheap rental housing, charging a nominal amount of rent for a place to live.
the place i currently live in kind of does the same thing – it just lacks competent management, is kinda made like shit, etc. i will change that.
if circumstances become crazy enough it is possible i might not charge rent in dollars anymore, but one thing that will remain constant is the equitable give-and-take relationship i maintain with my tenants. its no matter how that is denominated.
pivoting away from real estate, i will also be making inroads in automobile works. i am already acquainted with body shops and general mechanics, and i have been put into contact with the specialists who do rebuilds and work on carburettors.
the plan is simple: rebuild and maintain old cars, pre-1985. the flipping will happen kind of naturally
new cars may be fuel efficient but thats about the only thing going for them. there is a disgusting amount of cost disease in maintaining cars made in this century
even so, working on newer cars isnt entirely off the table, its just worse from a liability standpoint. i would not care to pay into rent-seeking diagnostic machines like most mechanic shops do.
this highlights the core difference of thinking behind what i will be doing.
you have to cut the bullshit out in order to get things done, and whatever bullshit you do tolerate needs to come from small places that can be isolated and dealt with – not big places with armies of lawyers with whom you are JWF’d.
there is absolutely nothing revolutionary about this, contrary to popular myth.
life will carry on and people will work jobs and raise kids amidst all of this the same as they always did.
its just the model of business that has to change.
when we notice that things like AWS are decaying, what were really seeing from a business standpoint is them becoming unreliable. ditto newer model cars, real estate being priced out of everyones reach, etc.
when these things happen, it leaves a vacuum of demand.
because most millenials and gen x are so fantastically delusional, happily kidding themselves about everything that doesnt personally inconvenience them, they are locked into a place where they are never going to seize this opportunity and call bullshit on their peers.
theyre never going to do the things necessary to get that done, which comes down to a few big social things i think youve seen me speak about before:
1. divorcing from optics games that enshrine conformity
2. being willing to be seen as mean or crazy by people you might respect
this is why it brought me to laughter for a minute when i saw you had tweeted this, and why i still have reservations about if you *really* want to go down this road.
this is not a road of adventure and excitement. its a road of hardship and loneliness and delayed victory.
what you will do, i dont know. probably nothing going from past patterns observed.
but if you want to be a relevant part of the future, you should be dumping every spare amount of leverage and cash you have into the laps of people who are willing to get shit done. just saying.
one of those things is C*, a programming language that does what Rust et al failed to do: make complex critical systems manageable.
another is a WIP called Project Tristan. this is a fully-productized proof of the ideas i mentioned in the form of a simple game console.