Back on Substack, in Japan
Looks like a 14 day gap in posting — the last couple weeks have been particularly crazy for me, but plenty of amazing things happening in the world overall, too.
(In Japan/Asia for the rest of March, and into April — going to Real World Crypto, ETH Tokyo, ETH Taipei, and some other meetings, then Consensus in Austin, then Financial Cryptography in Croatia. Looking forward to being back home in Puerto Rico.
Ate absolutely non-keto food for a few weeks, although now I’m sick of it and returning to The Way. Turned 44; had an owl placed on my head by a friendly shopkeeper. Trying to get caught up on a bunch of meetings and calls, too; the time zone difference from Japan to the US is really inconvenient.)
Most interesting news of the past 14 days is probably GPT-4 (which is amazing!), although the riots/protests in France, Israel, and the pretty much existential war about to kick off in Armenia are big too, just mostly negative. Ukraine war continues; my theory is it will continue as a “forever war” until there’s a politically expedient way to end it, and the best way I can think of is for Putin to accept some terms which are relatively unfavorable to Russia (keeping the Sebastopol naval base, and possibly Crimea, and some form of self-determination vote for Donetsk and Luhansk), but giving the role of peace mediator to…Donald J Trump, as a way to poison US domestic politics for another 6+ years. Not sure if it will happen, but it’s the most trolling possible timeline.
The War on Crypto/Choke Point 2.0 continues apace; being on the more regulated side of crypto, it’s mostly a tailwind for me, but goes against most of what I believe is best for the world. Hopefully some Congressional inquiries (“Thank You Again Nic Carter” is becoming almost as common a refrain as “Oh no, Balaji Was Right Again.”) will resolve this, but otherwise a rough 2+ years ahead. Great time to build, unclear if it’s a time to scale.
Relativity Space having a relatively successful launch of their 3D printed rocket was inspiring; great to see competition for SpaceX. Lots of great stuff happening in space startups these days; excited to see supersonic planes from companies like Boom Aerospace as well.
On the social media/new app front, big fan of Airchat, from Brian Norgard, Naval Ravikant, and team; I’ve been on the app since early days and it’s an interesting experience which has one me over, even though I prefer text to voice. Turns out I prefer async text > async voice > sync text > sync voice, but the app uses speech recognition to auto-transcribe so it’s really just voice input and choice of text or voice for consumption.
Finally gave up on Alaska MileagePlan and switched to American Airlines AAdvantage as of 1 April; looks like I can abuse an AA credit card, Rocketmiles hotel bookings, and a status challenge to get/maintain top-tier Executive Platinum without even flying, although I’ll also use it for crediting my AA and OneWorld flights going forward. Alaska’s devaluation of JAL redemptions was the last straw for me.