Friday 23 April 2021

Elon Musk; Simulated Universes; Moore's Curse; The Fermi Paradox; Mars colonization; and Technological Hubris

Overall, I'm a fan of Elon Musk. He is smart; articulate; a great innovator, engineer, and entrepreneur; an incredibly hard worker; and in many ways a very inspirational figure - someone willing to try bold new things and tackle difficult problems. Oftentimes controversial, to be sure, but a net force for good in the world. The world needs more people like Elon Musk. As I've commented in the past, Musk is the virtual embodiment of George Bernard Shaw's quote: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man". Musk is the paradigmatic unreasonable man.

Saturday 17 April 2021

Crypto-mania is back: Crypto vs. Fiat, and why newer isn't always better

After a multi-year hiatus, cryptocurrency has recently stormed back to the fore, with Bitcoin breaching new highs above US$60k, along with a resurgence in a multitude of other crypto currencies, whose aggregated market capitalization has now run up to some US$2tr.