jeff

h1 '22

I haven't written anything throughout the first half of the year because I've been too busy learning. Learning about the history and future of economics and technology, which are two of the three core pillars I believe one needs to paint a better map that reflects our territory. The third pillar is law and policy; I'll learn whatever's necessary to help better my understanding in economics and technology, but currently and for the forseeably future, government doesn't pique my interest.

To keep things short, I'll only be sharing with you the questions I currently have and the resources I'm using in attempt to answer them. One thing I'm starting to realize is that the more I learn, the more I know nothing; at the end of the day, the things I think I know are just probabilities of reality.

questions

economics

• how much of the current inflation crisis is caused by supply-side commodity constraints such as oil and energy? and how much of it is caused by the increasing the monetary supply by 27%?
• are four to eight year presidential cycles a premature optimization to tyrranical, absolute monarchies? it seems like the incentives of elected presidents' are more short-term rather than long; it's better for approval ratings to continue our addiction to the leveraging period in the long term debt cycle with quantitative easing, rather than letting the economy heal naturally with recessions (and possibly depressions)
• can we improve the system to better align the incentives of our leaders with ours? would a system that leans more towards a monarchy be better for us long-term?
• what's better? commodity or fiat money?
• what's better? keynesian economics or austrian economics? is there a spectrum? is there a happy compromise between the two schools of thought?
• why is bitcoin not being treated as an inflation hedge?
• if it was treated as an inflation hedge, how do we prevent deflationary spirals to unlock the use-case of money?
• are there any real use-cases for web3?

technology

• are platform teams dead?
• if so, what does each thin guardrail abstraction look like for each section of infrastructure? compute? network? storage? provisioning? observability?
• how do we improve the observability of a system, allowing us to discover unknown unknowns?
• what should infrastructure look like for different stages of a company? 1e0 engineers? 1e1? 1e2? 1e3+?
• how do i get started in systems programming?
• what is society's response to innovation?
• what does the history of technology look like? computing? personal computing? internet? cryptography?
• what do the internals of protocols look like? how do you implement them? Ethernet? IP? TCP? SSL? HTTP? gRPC? SMTP? DNS? DVCS? Raft? BitTorrent? IPFS? Bitcoin? Ethereum? Uniswap? ZK Proofs?
• what do the internals of the the big three computing foundations look like? how do you implement them? operating system? a compiler? a database?

resources

economics

• finance lessons by martin shkreli
• inflation crisis with lyn alden
• will bitcoin replace central banks with lyn alden
• principles for big debt crises by ray dalio
• principles for dealing with the changing world order by ray dalio
• the fourth turning: what the cycles of history tell us about america's next rendezvous with destiny by william strauss and neil howe
• systems of survival: a dialogue on the moral foundations of commerece and politics by jane jacobs
• the dictator's handbook: why bad behavior is almost always good politics by bruce bueno de mesquita
• the death and life of great american cities by jane jacobs
• seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed by james c. scott
• the bitcoin standard by saifedean ammous
• the fiat standard by saifedean ammous by vijay boyapati
• the bullish case for bitcoin
• the network state: how to start a new country by srinivasan
• the sovereign individual: mastering the transition to the information age by james dale davidson

technology

• men, machines, and modern times by elting e. morison
• the soul of a new machine by tracy kiddler
• the dream machine: j.c.r. licklider and the revolution that made computing personal by m. mitchell waldrop
• a people's history of computing in the united states by joy lisi rankin
• dealers of lightning: xerox parc and the dawn of the computer age by michael a. hiltzick
• where wizards stay up late: the origins of the internet by katie hafner
• the code book: the science of secrecy from ancient egypt to quantum ryptography by simon singh
• database reliability engineering: designing and operating resilient database systems by campbell and majors
• observability engineering: aschieving production excellence by majors, fong-jone, and miranda
• site reliability engineering: how google runs production systems by petoff, murphy, and beyer