Tweets are reminders to myself. Replies are me trolling friends. @bigridgemtnclub @yeomanpodcast @periodicalink @ioncompany
Mostly ATL & WNC
Joined June 2008
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Geoff Graham retweeted
I have a theory that money printing is a demon-summoning witch séance that steals the souls of children not yet born.
My working hypothesis is that everything that is enabled by or results from money printing is unnatural in an unholy sort of way. Nukes. WWI and subsequent wars. Interstate highway system. Etc. Or at least the form it took as a result of the money printing is tainted by the sin of parasitism—the old preying not merely on the young but on the not yet born. What do you make of that idea?
Kingsnorth (and maybe others) referred to AI as a kind of unholy summoning. The money printing connection never occurs to them, but I wonder about it.
Geoff Graham retweeted
I want the guy to be able to have his folding table and the restaurateur to be able to open his bar.
When you have these stupid rules and only rigorously enforce them with people who have something to lose, you end up with a zillion sketchy fly-by-nights and a bunch of dominant compliance-proficient chains.
Absent the BS, you’d have very few sketchy operators, a couple giant chains, and tons and tons of great small and mid-sized independent operators.
Years ago, I invested a small amount of money in a restaurant / bar on Sunset Blvd in Echo Park.
A woman who lived like a mile away objected to our conditional use permit, delaying the liquor license for a YEAR, causing the place to fold.
But this guy can set up a folding table and sell whatever he wants and no one says "boo".
*Totally* unfair to entrepreneurs who play by the rules.
Geoff Graham retweeted
In response to AI, some schools have started teaching. Wild times.
Talked to a Stanford prof last night who told me that AI has led to students all acing all the homeworks, never showing up to office hours, and then failing the final exams in-person.
So in response the department is changing the TA's purpose, by eliminating office hours and requiring students meet with TAs 1:1 and walking them through each coding assignment to demonstrate they actually understand what's going on in the code.
Geoff Graham retweeted
someone asked me today what I really want for my children and I think, more than anything, I want them to grow up believing that life is good. so good that they want more of it, and want to give more of it to the world.
AI, like the cow, is a human-created technology. It is a tool.
Yuval understands that if people control their own tools then technocrats can’t control people. He wants you to become so afraid of tools that you will turn them over to the technocrats who insist they will wisely and safely manage your access to them.
The more your access to tools is managed by technocrats, the less autonomy you have and the more dependent and subjected you become. If this goes too far, you become like the cow, which is to say, you become the technocrat’s tool.
This is what Yuval wants, which is why he is telling you to be afraid of AI. He also tells you to be afraid of small farms, cattle, etc.
Your child’s elementary school is designed the way it is because its purpose is to promote institutional dependence. A safe and pleasant walk to school presents dangerous opportunities for autonomy that will undo important institutional conditioning.
If you accept that one of the primary purposes of schooling is to promote institutional dependence, then you understand why children may no longer walk to and from school.
There is simply too much opportunity during the walk for autonomy.
Geoff Graham retweeted
Modernists have to answer this. On the other hand, never in my life have I seen an ugly pre-Modernist building.
I visited Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley today. It was designed by, and currently houses, the architecture faculty.
The UC Berkeley website notes that "Wurster is often voted Berkeley's ugliest building."
I visited because I was curious about whether it would in person seem as unattractive as it does in photos. And, in short: it does. It's gaunt, austere, and filmed in grime. On an elysian campus, it stands out for its bleak hostility. It reminds me of the German submarine base in Bordeaux.
The UC Berkeley page agrees that it was never designed to be attractive, quoting the curator of their design archives: “Wurster and his handpicked architects didn’t want anything romantic, or sentimental — they hated the idea of ‘making pretty buildings. They wanted a serious building.”
I guess we have to concede success relative to their stated goals, but it does make one wonder what it all says about architecture as a discipline.
To accommodate the intensity of its use, the interior has been made a bit too institutional (high handrails, vinyl upholstery, awkward elevator shaft, plastic column capitals within reach of those on the upper balcony, etc).
Jefferson would approve of the regular dinners and constant traffic, but he’d disapprove of the manner in which they’re accommodated. Fortunately, nothing is egregious or irreversible.
Geoff Graham retweeted
went to visit a friend who’s a ceramicist and works in a studio with no phone signal in a tiny yorkshire village. he doesn’t listen to podcasts or music, only occasionally uses the radio, and when I asked him what he thinks about all day he just said “well, pots mostly”
Geoff Graham retweeted
He just described every war of the modern era.
The brightest future for SaaS is a path toward niche platforms designed, built, and operated by closely-held businesses that understand and truly care about the customers they are serving.
This is great for innovation and entrepreneurs, and bad news for institutional investors.
Here's the desktop demo. It's a fully functioning version of the real thing. Plan is to launch in a month, so "setting up shop" puts you on a wait list. But, if you'd want to be early tester, reach out and we will talk.
scribeline.app/demo
Had such polls existed at the time, Lincoln would have censored them because he would have been in the low 20s.
But to his credit, he did have a 100% approval rating among the small subset of industrialist tycoon voters.
Geoff Graham retweeted
For recurring revenue products, churn (as @johnloeber notes) is a lagging indicator of company health.
Some super basic predictors of church/retention:
1) Are most users for within each account regularly logging in? (Unlikely to churn)
2) Does the account have only one active user? (Likely to churn)
Sure, there are more indicators, but just those two numbers will get you 80% of the way there.
It’s easy to build a customer health dashboard, flag each account red/yellow/green based on those metrics, and then track % of accounts that are red/yellow/green.
The barriers to launching something new and running your own small business—payroll, bookkeeping, navigating the regulatory landscape, etc—are falling.
OH “It’s not a car. It’s a robot that’s shaped like a car.”
The reason people are so excited and impressed by Elon’s flying car, despite its impracticability, is that it’s one of the first times in recent memory of a physical innovation. Not another app, not another software, not another chatbot, a real three dimensional thing that changes how we interact with the physical world. I think this is what the irritation with tech has been for many “luddites” of late, it all seems to be pulling us into a screen. Whereas Elon’s invention seems to be finally doing the opposite. If you’re building things in the real world too, even if it’s paintings, cashmere sweaters, books or sculptures, you’ll appreciate this.
