Advent Season Thoughts

Dec 09, 2024

Hello from Morningside, and welcome to another edition of Thoughts!

Let’s consider the economics of “technical debt.” Rather than borrowing money, one borrows functionality. That functionality gets paid back over time as one’s systems take more and more time to update. Eventually, no new functionality is possible. With too much debt, one even begins to lose functionality over time.
Core architecture teams in big organizations, much like central banks, issue technical debt. When they deliver a new framework, teams across the organization can get to their desired functionality sooner, but with less transparency into what got built. As such, their systems become harder to maintain and to update over time. The core architecture team then collects interests: loss in functionality in other teams’ software correlates with increased justification for the core architecture team’s ongoing engagement.
I had OpenAI’s o1 expand further on the analogy. Some gems included: legacy systems are equivalent to sovereign debt, bloat is equivalent to currency devaluation, and code linters are equivalent to credit rating agencies:

If modern-day traders are known as quants because they use quantitative reasoning to make sense of how money moves through society, then economists and policy experts should be known as quals.

When the next election rolls around, I’d like to propose a safe mechanism for casting protest votes against the two-party system: if your state is deep-red or deep-blue, and your last name begins with the first letter of your state, then vote “Mickey Mouse.” The true level of dissatisfaction could then be extrapolated from the prevalence of that letter among last names, but the actual numbers would be low enough to not risk spoiling the election for either candidate.

Viewed a certain way, American venture capital is just a massive tax loophole whose chief end result has been to latch casino technology onto every American’s brain, while paying for some billionaire apocalypse bunkers along the way.
In this light, Europe wasn’t left behind by the Big Tech boom, but rather spared by it:

If memes operate like viruses, then the 2017 Women’s March could perhaps be understood as a superspreader event for the “woke mind virus” that supposedly cost the Democrats so dearly from an electoral standpoint. But an alternate framing is that that event was a cytokine storm reacting to a different virus – MAGA – and that wokeness can instead be thought of as an antibody. In that lens, MAGA’s persistent anti-wokeness makes it an immunodeficiency virus. Indeed, at the time of writing it seems plain that much of its viral success has stemmed from disarming its strongest critics.

For a long time, my top three guilty pleasure breakfast cereals were Frosted Cheerios, Cocoa Puffs, and Honey Ohs. Recently I discovered one that combines the strengths of each: Oreo O’s. Do not let me near a box of those.

Prediction: generative AI art will reach a cap in quality because taste can’t be bought, and the humans paid to train it will begin to find its artwork better than that of great artists, and its poetry better than Shakespeare. And they will do so before AI comes even remotely close, per the best-trained eyes, to outstripping the greats.

If screens are so bad for kids, parents will need to turn to new ways technologies can be used to distract their young ones. I think it’s too early to put the last nail in the coffin of Chuck-E-Cheese style animatronics. The future will be robot shows, available at every venue to mesmerize children screen-free.

As someone who tries to postpone the moment I look at my phone in the morning as late as possible, I often find I’ve inadvertently canceled plans as the natural text message – “Are we still meeting later today?” – that my friends have sent me went unanswered for too long. To alleviate this, I would like to propose an acronym to be shared at the time a plan is made: “uyhfm mtatt,” short for “unless you hear from me, meet there at that time.”
We already use 3D printing to mold ergonomic furniture and comfortable prosthetics, which distribute body weight into more optimal states of rest. But what about mechanisms to distribute body weight into more optimal states of motion? Think of an exoskeleton that forces you into perfect form while you go for a run, or a rowing machine adapted to your exact body shape that fully guides your range of motion. The design of these machines will call for 4D printing.
I would like to propose a mechanism for tying mandate length to mandate size (as determined by the number of votes) in democracies. In my system, one can cast a vote for as many candidates as one likes. Whichever candidate has the most votes gets to rule, but only for exactly as many seconds as the number of votes that they received. This way, whoever appealed to the greatest number of voters gets to rule, but only for the length of time signified by the breadth of their appeal.

Candid Selfie