Definite Optimist Weekly Roundup #5

zkEVMs, AI Acceleration vs Alignment, and The Next Decade in Industrials

American Dynamism

LETS GO

John Coogan @johncoogan

this is the top YouTube result for "American Dynamism" 🫡🇺🇸

zkEVMs

Polygon announced their zkEVM this week. Why does this matter? Because they enable new breakthroughs in Ethereum scalability without requiring developers to learn an entirely new programming language and toolchain in the case of protocols like StarkNet (although StarkNet is pretty dope).

This thread does a good job of explaining it and walking through some of the other approaches.

foobar @0xfoobar

1/ Explaining the zkEVM - what it is - how zk-rollups compare with other rollup types - the competitive landscape for zk-rollup creators And who really was first 😉

Fusion

Nuclear fusion funding has been effectively 0 since the 70s. To solve our climate problems, we are going to have to invest in alternatives. It’s on us for investing so little in solutions for the last several decades.

tobi lutke @tobi

Can't stop thinking about this and go: ☹️ "The reason we don't have fusion already is because we, as a civilization, never decided that it was a priority. Fusion funding is literally peanuts: In 2016, the US spent twice as much on peanut subsidies as on fusion research."

AI Alignment vs AI Accelerationism

Some in tech are growing skeptical of the AI ethics & alignment community. After all, the other side of the AI Ethics debate is that we need to get to AGI at all costs:

Sam Altman @sama

either we figure out how to make AGI go well or we wait for the asteroid to hit

There seems to be a risk that the AI alignment movement turns into the equivalent of the anti nuclear movement that reared its head beginning in the 1970s. I don’t know enough about the topic to give a coherent opinion of my own yet, but it’s worth reading this post for a different point of view.

AI alignment & EA vs the pro AGI twitter schizos & e/acc:

Notes on e/acc principles and tenets

The Next Decade in Industrials

This episode of Invest Like the Best with Eric Mandelblatt was really instructive on the current state of supply chains & US industrials. We’re entering a strange period of supply shortages that aren’t going to be mitigated by standard free market forces due to ethical & political constraints around producing CO2 emissions.

We need to dramatically increase production of rare earths and other metals (i.e. copper) needed for electrification. There is also a risk that governments are too ambitious for their own good on emissions targets. If we’re too aggressive about reducing fossil fuel usage (i.e. we cut back on fossil fuel production faster than we’re able to build the materials for electrification), it could have a catastrophic impact, with the developing world bearing the brunt of the pain.

There is going to be a remarkable incentive to do two things:

1) Build new technology that makes clean energy plentiful & more economic (i.e. fusion, improved renewables tech, EV batteries which use less raw materials, etc)

2) Produce 10x the amount of raw materials needed for renewables and EVs.

On a more tactical note for founders, Dival Banerjee (the founder of Vuecason and solid twitter follow) re-shared this post on metrics and milestones for hardware companies. You can read the full report here.

Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth

There has never been a better time to disrupt physical industries. The @EclipseVentures team has teamed up with @SVB_Financial to deliver The State of HaaS report, including standardized metrics to build the foundation of industrial tech businesses: bit.ly/3RJW6KS

Network States

Vitalik on network states:

vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin

What do I think about network states? This one somehow ended up VERY long, but.... oh well, enjoy!

vitalik.caWhat do I think about network states?

This network state dashboard is 🔥

Balaji Srinivasan @balajis

How do we get the first network state with diplomatic recognition? We’ll need a pipeline of hundreds, perhaps thousands of startup societies. Fortunately, there are already 20+ such societies today. So we set up a little dashboard to track them: thenetworkstate.com/dashboard

Enlightenment 2.0

Are we in the midst of Enlightenment 2.0? The internet is allowing knowledge to spread at a rate we’ve never seen before. If anything, the web allows us to keep the spirit of the existing enlightenment alive 💡

Samuel Arbesman @arbesman

The Enlightenment 2.0: A recent trend of software + web tech recapitulating the institutions and ideals of the Enlightenment. Rebooting coffeehouse culture, Republic of Letters, scientific dissemination, and even education, via tech meeting the liberal arts... 🧵 1/

Weekly Inspiration

To be great means being a fool in the beginning. Have the courage to do something that feels undignified:

Samo Burja @SamoBurja

Many of life's most difficult and important choices feel undignified at first.

Paul Graham @paulg

One of the biggest reasons it gets harder to do new things as you get older is that new things are generally undignified at first (indeed, this is an excellent heuristic for discovering them) and the older you get, the more dignified you're expected to be.