Month: December 2022

From this Substack (via Hacker News): "What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?"

The whole article is worth reading. It ends in this:

> The Gordian knot we find ourselves in now is that good economic news is bad financial news. A strong economy means that the Fed will keep hiking rates which is bad for financial assets. Such was the case with the recent strong jobs report, which caused markets to crash. If we had an actual recession now, stocks would paradoxically explode upward because the Fed would have to revert back to cheap money. This alone says everything about how the circuits of value within finance capital have grown disconnected from the economic base.

From Bloomberg:

Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy a 4% stake in London Stock Exchange Group Plc in a $2.8 billion cloud-computing deal that pushes big tech further into financial markets.

We’re seeing the global, multi-continent, multi-national equivalent of South Korean chaebols being created before our eyes. These are true gigacorporations.

I also think it’s striking that because so many are listed in the USA, while investors around the world may use products by these tech giants, they don’t actually participate in the wealth created by them.

Being able to access the USA stock markets is going to become increasingly important over the next few years. At this point, the friction and costs associated with setting up a USA brokerage account and moving money cross-border into that account put it out of the reach of most people globally.

Given this, it does seem inevitable to me that tokenized stocks are a genie that can’t be put back into the bottle. For the average non-US investor, the essence is to get price exposure to these massively influential stocks, not necessarily to own them along with the associated voting rights. Synthetic stock tokens like those by Mirror have the potential to be attractive creators of wealth for non-Americans around the world.

People have been publishing interactions with the dialogue-optimised artificial intelligence ChatGPT. See this subreddit for several examples, and this memorable one.

A friend asked me what applications I thought we’d make with the technology. Here’s what I think we’ll see (along with scores others):

I think ELI5s are going to be transformed. Learning in general. Manuals.

Perhaps a renaissance in written porn.

Cold call emails are going to become highly personalised if marketers point your LinkedIn profile and public posts to the algorithm

Parallel to porn – always a pioneer – engaging stories for kids will be auto generated. Combined with dall-e, stable diffusion and other visual art generators, entire books will be generated on demand. A new one every evening

And while we are some time away, ultimately we will ask it questions to intractable problems. Court cases. The Middle East problem. Questions of morality.

Update 12 December 2022:

Well that didn’t take long:

Sunny, cool December day. Morning aeropress. I’ve just had breakfast reading a book on the Kindle. Have the day’s todo list to plunge into after this.

📱