"The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment."
We wrote “Agents won’t replace law. They need a constitution.” Thesis: agent-mediated markets can cut search/negotiation/enforcement costs—but only inside a rights-first frame: price what you can; protect what you must. Otherwise the agent runtime becomes a planner in disguise.
Modern states already buy the future at auction. We discover the price of electrons with capacity markets and Contracts for Difference (CfDs). We allocate spectrum with bids, not favors. We set congestion tolls that reshape traffic in days. Yet when it comes to the most valuable public good after clean air, good jobs at a family wage, we revert to press releases, discretionary grants, and flat tax credits that subsidize the already inevitable. We buy stories of job creation rather than the jobs.
Reverse-auction capitalism is the alternative. Instead of guessing how much subsidy will coax a firm to hire, the state becomes a price taker: it runs transparent, competitive auctions where employers bid the minimum public spend per net-new, verified full-time equivalent they are willing to accept for a fixed duration. The auction clears. The cheapest credible bids win. Payments flow only as jobs materialize and persist. No more paying list price for headlines. We pay the clearing price of employment, discovered in public.
The inspiration is not mystical. Energy ministries used CfDs to crash the cost curve of offshore wind by forcing developers to compete on a single, legible number, the price per megawatt-hour they would accept for years, with clawbacks if wholesale prices ran high. The genius was not subsidy; it was discipline: standard contracts, long horizons, ruthless comparability, and settlement against a public reference. When the product is electricity, the reference is the market price. When the product is work, the reference is the family wage and a bundle of job-quality standards that make a life livable.
Let’s translate the mechanism. Define the bid object in plain human terms: one full-time equivalent position at or above a published family-wage benchmark, with benefits and protections, held by a named worker for at least twenty-four consecutive months. Employers bid the subsidy per FTE they require to create and maintain those positions. Government publishes a calendar of auctions by region and sector. Bids are ranked from lowest to highest subsidy per verified FTE. Winners sign a standard Employment CfD: the public top-up is paid quarterly, but only after an independent oracle verifies that the job is real, the wage is right, and the worker is still on the rolls.
The incentives align. Firms that can create durable, useful jobs cheaply will underbid and expand. Firms that can only produce announcements will wash out. The public stops lighting money on fire through deadweight credits that reward firms for what they planned to do anyway. We learn, quarter by quarter, what it actually costs, in this county, in this sector, for this skill, to translate capital expenditure into paychecks.
Critically, the instrument pays for outcomes rather than inputs. We do not fund training seats that never convert. We do not glorify ribbon cuttings. We settle only on employment-months delivered at the promised quality. If a worker churns out, the payment stops until a replacement is hired and the clock restarts. If the firm misses job-quality covenants, benefits lapse, wages dip below the benchmark, clawbacks apply automatically. Like in power markets, cleverness shifts from lobbying to execution.
The next step after thesis-driven philanthropy is not better selection; it is better settlement. If donors want Green-Revolution-scale outcomes in an AI age, they must fund not only field leaders and theses, but protocols that make impact falsifiable, reversible, and compounding across institutions and time.
The VC metaphor flatters philanthropy, and traps it. Great funds don’t merely pick well; they bind choices to procedures that survive daylight, regret, and succession. In an era where “trying” is cheap and judgment is scarce, catalytic giving must operationalize judgment: explicit hypotheses, annealing schedules, reversal covenants, and public ledgers that show not only what was attempted, but exactly how we would unwind it if it harms.
In the 20th century, currency was the unit of power. In the 21st, it may be model weights.
This essay explores how AI infrastructure is becoming the new substrate of foreign policy — from NVIDIA-enforced export controls and Chinese inference-layer censorship, to Western soft-power SDKs and the rise of a Non-Aligned AI Movement led by India, UAE, and others.
Core thesis:
Model weights aren't just software artifacts — they encode values, access, and control. Inference is becoming governance. Alignment is becoming diplomacy.
We examine:
• The AI supply chain as chokepoint warfare (compute, cooling, and control)
• Inference policy as foreign policy: what a model says is what a state allows
• China's "middle-stack strategy" vs. the West's modular API empire
• The emergence of a multipolar AI order: open weights, local fine-tunes, sovereign SDKs
• Why the next hegemon may not print money — it may export weights
Would love thoughts from HN readers working on AI infra, geopolitics, open-source models, or alignment policy.
We just launched IRD, an open-source interactive debugger that lets you execute programs forward and backward. Instead of restarting your whole session to track down a bug, you can now reverse step through execution and inspect state changes at any point.
What makes it special:
Fully bidirectional stepping through code
Live program state visualization (variables, memory, execution context)
Reversible breakpoints and checkpoints
Specialized features for quantum algorithms
Experimental AI-assisted debugging
Lightweight diff-based state capture (efficient memory use)
Originally designed for quantum computing and education, but incredibly useful for any developer tired of rerunning their programs 10x to trace bugs.
"The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment."