import { NoteReference } from "~/components/NoteReference";

sorta rambly thoughts but "framework" for thinking about building startups ready for a [powerful ai](https://arc.net/l/quote/xebyehid); most companies ik and founders i talk to seem to just skirt this problem, and i feel like that was fine to do last year more so but increasingly less fine

i've been finding it hard to see through the fog of war what the future looks like in terms of what are real durable business and not - this is an evolving framework to think about how to build for that

ideas/frameworks to borrow from

- bezos has this quote to the effect of everyone asks what do you think will be different in 5/10 years but the question to ask is what stays the same - this is what you can build a business around
- i love both frameworks of "[marginal returns on intelligence](https://arc.net/l/quote/usalpydw)" and "[compressed 21st century](https://arc.net/l/quote/bkqmrwdy)"

in software, outside the labs or building models to compete where the labs aren't focused, there is a knife edge to walk on where you don't get eaten by the model provider and don't get so easy to build with the existing model that the enterprise does it themselves (this is before use the model for codegen) - i find most ai agent type companies to fall of this knife's edge.

two notes

1. i'm thinking of baseline software commoditizing as a reaper that increases competition, lower prices but not necessarily death of business
2. the knife edge is thinking about how to not be collateral damage from models - i think here it is better to compete head-on and navigate an attack vector that not thinking clearly about it and being collateral damage

even my fav ai company (non lab) - cursor with insane pmf is not obvious to me that have a durable 5-10 year business; *at some point codegen is so good, the comparative advantage in writing code is gone (can be system architecture or product or design but not writing code), before this the codegen is good enough it is like reviewing a pr - ideally on the web.* <NoteReference slug="building-for-agi-future" id={2} summary="counter from friend" direction="right" distance={10}><a className="text-amethyst-300 underline" href="https://x.com/KaranVaidya6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">karan</a> raises a counterpoint that models tend to get to 80/90% on harder and harder tasks before saturating 95-100% on even simple task - this would give the comparative advantage back and need for an ideanother point is cursor could evolve into that next ux on the web or something better.</NoteReference>

i think there are some companies walking this line and sure some will make it out but feels like a very tight line to walk. maybe [composio](https://composio.dev/), [browserbase](https://www.browserbase.com/), … ?

*tangent ramble:* it doesn't as obviously feel like some traditional software companies are on such a collision course with AI. 

some obviously are, just through more competition less prices - this is mostly through commoditising the ability to write that software. that being said this doesn't feel as **acute** as being on a collision course with the lab directly or the enterprise integrating the labs work.

examples here to explain what i mean - it doesn't look like [bun](https://bun.sh/) or [astral](https://astral.sh/) business is meaningfully affected (to whatever extent they had a business) but what about vercel? i could see them being fine? but also maybe dx doesn't matter in this world so they aren't? feels like stripe is fine.

expanding on what stays the same, some ideas, some concepts, some businesses

- airbnb most probably - we still probably want vacations vs uber that seems pretty dead with waymo and tesla eating their lunch, probably still been fine for a while but will whimper and taper out
 - network effect business here are interesting as probably have low marginal returns to intelligence in breaking them
- stripe most probably - unless no income weird ubi, probably paying for things, maybe bridge or whatever is the agents way to pay for things
- sports - nike wouldn't really be in trouble, have had stockfish for years don't really like watching stockfish play chess
- music - think it is super important to be a shared meme, i think ai music tooling to making shared memes is interesting but not sold on the personalised music(vs very sold on personalised software)
- movies/tv - blockbusters probably the same, shared meme; netflix slop can probably be ai generated and personalised
- games - closer to movies some shared meme, some personalised.
- human connection stuff - wanting friends, love
 - probably decent durable business here
- … ? *should expand this list much longer*
- maybe example from conversation is underwriting insurance for AI Agents

### *tangent:* opportunity cost in a revolution

there will be many things take make $1M, $1M/year even $10M/year but in the last wave of this scale - there were the real trillion dollar market opportunities or at the very least many 100+ billion market opportunities. i think the last 10 ish years didn't have this scale of opportunities outside deep-tech go build the ai revolution

this is all to say, choosing market in a revolution is super important cause the size of the pie up for grabs in enormous - this is much where you run into the steamroller

note: i hate the stay in your lane sorta advice, find some tiny niche or crevice where the steamroller doesn't touch and beg of scraps. imo startups are about building generational iconoclast companies that disrupt industries not begging for scraps in front of a steamroller.


if you are thinking in these lines and want to chat or collaborate, find some time to [chat](https://cal.com/cryogenicplanet)

framework for thinking about agi "proof" startups

really building for an AGI future?

Scalar retro and post-mortem

import { NoteReference } from "~/components/NoteReference";

_**i**'ve made this argument before but want to write it down in one place, none of this is that ground breaking or deeply original - just when i talk to more "normie" friends they don't fully get it and this is trying to synthesize the idea clearly_

the goal of humanity should be maximizing energy use per capita, this means every human should use 1000 times or 1M or 1B more energy than they do now.

this might sounds like a strange goal at first - for many reasons. first why would you want to increase consumption of something and not just get xyz outcome?

before making the point about why increasing consumption is good, let's create some common ground first. 

i would argue money is fake - it is just a ledger for "the real currency"/raw input - energy. energy is definitionally wealth. <NoteReference slug="goal-increase-energy-consumption" id={1} direction="right" distance={20} summary="no low energy rich countries"><Img src="/writing/media/energyGDP.png" className="w-[500px] h-auto" alt="energy spend" /></NoteReference> this graph comes up a lot, as to say there are no low energy rich countries.

i think it is fairly intuitive to most how electricity spend is energy use but human labor is a type of energy spend, low efficiency high versatile energy spend. <NoteReference slug="goal-increase-energy-consumption" id={2} direction="right" distance={0} summary="note on efficiency">efficiency does matter but more energy spend is better than less even inefficiently - but yes the more leveraged energy spend you have the better</NoteReference>

so the idea of energy being real wealth is fairly intuitive and well understood. what does this look like for an individual tho? rather than a country?

i would argue that your personal wealth is essentially how much energy you can leverage to make your life better - this can be an AC or using a plane or hiring a maid or at minimum just the food you eat.

so it makes sense that the more energy you consume, the richer you are and that poorer people should go up the energy consumption ladder to reach the level of wealth of the west. but the heart of this piece is that it is **actually really hard to use energy**.

if i told you to go spend 1GW tomorrow <NoteReference slug="goal-increase-energy-consumption" id={3} direction="right" distance={20} yOffset={-500}>1 GW is equivalent to about 1.3 million horsepower, but that's still a bit abstract. Here's a more tangible way to think about it: 1 GW is roughly the power produced by 2,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with jet engines stacked on top of each other 😄 Or more practically: Imagine all the household power used by a city of about 750,000 homes running simultaneously - all their air conditioners, ovens, TVs, washing machines, and everything else running at once. That's approximately 1 GW of power consumption. Another way to visualize it: 1 GW is about the same amount of power as: Doc Brown's DeLorean time machine from "Back to the Future" needed (1.21 GW), A large nuclear reactor operating at full capacity, 3.125 million solar panels operating under ideal conditions, 431 utility-scale wind turbines running at full speed</NoteReference> it would be impossible for you to spend that, <NoteReference slug="goal-increase-energy-consumption" id={4} direction="right" distance={20} summary="average american does 200kWh/day">ChatGPT math but sounds reasonable, <a className="underline" href="https://chatgpt.com/share/67640130-85f8-8011-96b0-fe6b2078586a">source</a></NoteReference>

you would have to spend years inventing new technology to do so. one such technology might look like running your own supercomputer of power AIs to do extremely leveraged work? or using starship to commute across the globe <NoteReference slug="goal-increase-energy-consumption" id={5} direction="right" distance={20} yOffset={-100}>Apparently starship consumes something like 120 GW to lift off? ChatGPT math again tho our boy sonnet contested that so not sure. <a className="underline" href="https://chatgpt.com/share/6763ffad-01a0-8011-bd98-088c5b4477f4">source</a> </NoteReference>. this is all to say that to increase energy consumption to 1GWh/day for an average american would mean them using three orders of magnitude more energy than they do now. this would mean their lives would be unimaginably better than ours.

there is a sense in economics of chasing forever growth, and if that is possible - you are chasing growth for growth's sake as it makes your life better. i think a better way to frame this is chasing how much energy can we consume, and we know the limits to this - this is in some sense moving up the [Kardashev scale.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale)

i think the framing that is lost in the Kardashev scale convo is how it is actually about increasing energy consumption per capita - enabling each person more leveraged energy use to make their lives better.

A "good" goal for humanity to increase energy consumption

Goal: Increase Energy Consumption

import { NoteReference } from "~/components/NoteReference";

_this is a refresh of a guide i wrote a few years ago_

## Battle Tested

1. [Raycast](https://www.raycast.com/) - the best way to use your mac

raycast does so much for you, i would just play with it and see what it can do. i highly recommend the clipboard manager (i have it set to `cmd + shift + c`). raycast is also awesome to build custom extensions, would highly recommend this too.

i could go on for days on great extensions here, but would just say explore and you will find so much.

2. Window management - unfortunately macos natively sorta sucks at this

three options:

- [Rectangle](https://rectangleapp.com/) - open source pretty good!
- [Magnet](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet-window-manager/id441258766) - i use this, mostly cause i paid before i found rectangle
- use raycast itself? i do this too, but i use it differently and would recommend one of the above for dragging bounding boxes which raycast does not support

3. [Warp.dev](https://www.warp.dev/) - personally really like it as a terminal, heard great things about [ghostty](https://mitchellh.com/ghostty) haven't tried yet. personally like an `oh my zsh` config with `starship` here but anything sorta works. would recommend adding the `zsh-autosuggestions` plugin


4. for the love of god use [cursor](https://www.cursor.com/), i don't think this needs to be said! setup `c .` to open cursor in the current directory.

not the biggest `vim` user but would recommend using, and have relative lines for sure and add the following to your vscode settings, makes copy paste work
```json
{
 "vim.smartRelativeLine": true,
 "vim.handleKeys": {
		"<C-c>": false,
		"<C-x>": false,
		"<C-v>": false,
 "<C-a>": false,
 },
}
```


5. [Arc](https://arc.net/gift/961c1d38) - it is great!

6. the chatgpt app is good, claude desktop kinda sucks - haven't tried perplexity desktop.

7. cron/notion calendar is decent calendar, i like it! don't love it but does the job

8. screenshots: macos default is good, but cleanshot x is amazing <NoteReference slug="macos-guide" id={1} direction="right" distance={20} yOffset={-200} summary="would recommend through setapp">setapp is a single subscription to many pro apps. here are all my apps<Img src="/writing/media/setApp.png"/></NoteReference> but also shottr is free alternative that is decent

9. notch: please get bartender (through setapp) or [dozer](https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer) free alternative

10. stats: istat menus is good (through setapp) or [stats](https://github.com/exelban/stats) is free alternative

11. mail: superhuman is amazing, expensive but amazing. looking forward to trying notion mail.

12. **[beeper!](https://www.beeper.com/)** this app is so fucking good - it connects all your messaging apps into one and there is a new version too [beta here](https://www.beeper.com/beta)

13. search: not as much a mac app perse but still fun search tool i use is [`pplx-bangs`](https://github.com/CryogenicPlanet/pplx-bangs) which let's me route between `google`, `perplexity` and `exa`. you can customize defaults and routers for yourself!

for writing i use notion, but honestly anything works.

## Extras/Config

- please for the love of god, turn this off - it is the worst thing ever
<Img src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/aef4d520-febd-4ce6-99ee-0511ed731ae1" width="400" />

- turn this off too, this for some dumb reason takes port 5000 and keeps restarting very annoying.
<Img src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/303afd26-b26f-4dca-86bf-ebb2b3c26986" width="400" />


here is a more clear view of all my setapp apps, would really recommend mission control plus and popclip, apart from the ones mentioned.
![setapp](/writing/media/setapp.png)

- setup `sudo` to use touch id, don't remember the exact steps ask chatgpt but you can easily do this - it is great!

- drag your download folder to your dock and set it to `fan` and sorted by date modified, it is very good to drag stuff from there

_will update this guide as i remember more things_

writing

really building for an AGI future?

Scalar retro and post-mortem

Goal: Increase Energy Consumption

Rahul’s Mac Productivity Suite