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Thinking

What I'm thinking about. Bullets, not essays. Last updated 2026-08-31.

Energy & manufacturing

  • Cost to produce = atoms + energy + technical debt. Everything above atoms + energy is debt.
  • Waste is technical debt. If you have greater than zero waste, you haven't done the technical work to delete it.
  • Labour is technical debt. A machine could do it; the machine hasn't been built yet.
  • Suppliers embed their own technical debt into their prices. Deleting it cascades into vertical integration.
  • Factories will end up wherever clean, abundant, cheap energy is. Everything else follows.
  • All stuff can, and should, cost approximately energy to make.
  • House prices are 99% debt. Factory-built houses cut the cost by two orders of magnitude.
  • Manufacturing is noble — in many ways more so than farming. Farming is more ancient and romantic. Dirt and seeds is lazy.
  • Why not pyrolyze everything? Garbage is feedstock.

Food & farming

  • Solar panels convert sunlight at ~22%. Crops convert at ~1%. Every crop is a waste of energy.
  • Food is approximately 100% technical debt. The atoms are cheap and the energy comes from the sun.
  • The order of operations: stop creating farmland; cover arid land in solar; make synthetic meat at better energy conversion than the animal — and make it delicious; reforest the freed grazing land; solve synthetic starch last.
  • Grazing & cereal production land is overpriced. Vineyards & orchards are underpriced. Greenhouses near population centers are max undervalued.
  • There's zero reason synthetic wine and juice won't be a thing. It just requires the will and the market.
  • Dutch greenhouses beat Moroccan fields: better product, less freight, more security, highly automatable, almost no land.
  • Canada was an outpost. Taste is real now and the standard of living stays high, so food must be local, high-taste, high-variety. Missing tech: better LEDs, aerogel glazing, non-metallic frames.
  • Hobby farms end up as cute examples of how humans used to eat.
  • A hundred years ago everybody had to feed themselves, so people lived where that was easier. We've drifted.
  • Maple syrup: every producer, every vintage, all the same. Freshness is oversold. The syrup is missing bitter and vanilla — pursue perfection instead.
  • If agriculture paid 10x, anyone of sufficient cognition could become a farmer quickly. So farming is not a technical skill — almost nothing is.

Cities & water

  • All the water a city needs tomorrow is already there today. It was there yesterday but got flushed.
  • Delete the sewers. Treat water where it's used and supply only the evaporation losses. Fix water treatment = save cities.

Startups & people

  • In startups early = wrong.
  • Atoms and electrons should someday be as easy to manipulate as bits.
  • A 10–100x better battery company is a $100BN company.
  • There will be no next startup mecca — an equalization. It becomes OK to be where your business needs to be. Raise where you can, run where you need to, get back to work.
  • Resumes equalize away personality. Personality and group fit are the most important hiring attributes.
  • Budgets are fake. Retroactive, trend-based budgeting works.
  • Society lost the plot on “if everyone founds, no one farms.” Founders are measurably worse for society — except every once in a while.
  • The visible founder population is filtered toward impersonators. A costly signal that loses its cost invites mimics. Most founders are farmers pretending.
  • System design is the real skill at the top end of coding. It isn't knowing javascript.
  • Lawyering and coding are artificially valued — scarcity of training. IQ is the actual scarcity.
  • Strong top-down management is a failure of culture. Everyone is a doer. No heroes.
  • Software investing is gambling — the business model is hope. Dividends, not exits. Industrial, not software.

AI & world models

  • LLMs won't solve engineering of physical things. The world models being pitched are more LLM pretending not to be hype.
  • An actual world model is a massive physics simulation: add matter, measure outcomes. No robot data required.
  • Robotics is a cheat. They want to train on world data they don't have. Robots have data.
  • LLMs solve for language. Video and images will have their models. Physics and matter in space deserves a model.
  • Everything except software, science, and the softs is mechanical. The root of it all is 3d shapes.
  • Most existing design is not optimal. Training on it teaches a model to design poorly. It has to generate, test, and learn.
  • If humans are living in a simulation, it's a physics simulation.
  • Distillation is enshittification at scale. Student models aren't better than the teacher — at best more compact.
  • LLMs can research, summarize, and translate at scale. They can't judge or reason. Never let them fabricate confidence.
  • The human is the only truth. The machine guesses, the human approves, the human does less and less — but the guesses never stop being guesses.
  • Tasks aren't real. Outcomes are real. Tasks are just vehicles.
  • Frontier LLM companies win for a minute; open-source wins long term; the wealth moves to infra. Nvidia lasts longer because chip cycles — then somebody else makes silicon. China ripped off ASML in a few years.
  • The middle office will be absorbed the way the middle absorbed the back. Business becomes strategy, front office, and software. Governance is not an executive function — it's an audit layer.

Canada & minerals

  • Canada: high extraction, low refining, very low manufacturing. Reindustrialize the missing middle.
  • Put a nuclear reactor next to the oil sands. Output mostly hydrogen.
  • Mineral “endowments” are survivor bias. Found already = where it is. Those aren't endowments — those are reserves.

Humanity & history

  • Humanity's reshaping events are the same every time: unhappy people dying trying to survive. Only the outcomes evolved.
  • The human superpower is memory, not prediction.
  • Where are the smart people? Fuck the internet — where is the next salon happening? Smart people are diffuse now; cherish any cluster.

Predictions

  • Banking goes from discrete transactions to minute-by-minute value exchange.
  • Social media and direct advertisement become illegal / grey / opt-in only. Facebook charges a subscription.
  • Tradwife is just the tip of the trad life movement.
  • Tariffs will be reimagined as carbon import tax.

Curiosities

  • Gin gets called flavoured vodka like that's an insult. More synthetic = more human. Humans build. Empirical doesn't even call theirs gin. Grow the world's best grapes hydroponically and make perfect wine.
  • Golf is a game, not a sport — they risked nothing. Wrestling tops because intimacy. Swimming and cross-country: nobody sees you, there's no prize — noble. Team sports are culturally encouraged, and culturally encouraged ≠ noble.
  • Assume some theropods got smart. Re-review every past paleo find for overlooked signals — it's automatable, and nobody does it because those fields lack computer-science literacy.
  • Parties: perishability is the key. The rest feels like not knowing how to use Amazon.