iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

(this is also why I've been basically 2005-Amish (ie. froze most of my tech at 2005, when airgapped/offline/pull flows were normal, not always-online push culture)

100

Political systems and parties are also technologies and can be aided or crashed by new technologies. 2nd order problems matter far more than 1st order problems, since they tend to be invisible (though some attention to 1st order is also good). Good leadership is really the only solution here.

000

(also cf our friendly Kelvin waves)

100

High-level, as you develop technologies, you should expect them to affect the game theory of many other games in the world in unexpected ways, and if they create new orders projected onto powerful manifolds, they can act like tsunamis (massive amount of water over a long time, not a high wave).

100

And perception tech that projects the wrong ideas about order onto a powerful manifold, invisibly, fits into the lower right quadrant of things to worry about - both powerful AND invisible (the other example being climate change).

There are ways to fix it but no strong groups to push it. Ranked choice voting or regularizing election campaign resources ($ and time) is a start, but if perception technology is a big underlying and invisible cause, those can only do so much.

100

But in reality, the operating system of US democracy 1.0 (selecting a transitive order from a non-transitive environment) was broken by social media (along with the complexity of abstraction layers) and it happened 10 years ago. Misdirected outrage is part of that problem, not a solution.

100

Smaller players will appeal to moral orders (I may be smaller than you but I'm more ethical), part of which requires that "talk = action" (it doesn't), these are easy to convey in SM.

100

Even some in VC (which are supposed to be curious) lock into "best of Twitter". Order in that case ~= funding order, and if they can turn investment $ into ARR, it works. Still, many of my most consistent returns came from highly technical founders with minimal SM clout.

100

Systems that spend too much time on ranked systems become bizarre projections of the false order. US political parties, MSM, social media are completely gone (replace with SCMP or BBC).

200

And yet, "the current thing" mechanics of social media select for ideas that reinforce the social media projection surface (AI is better or not than humans, for example).

101

AI is far more relentless than me at coding, but it can't make executive decisions well. It's a tool on a non-transitive value surface, not a replacement for me. OpenAI is a much bigger company than me, but I still own several of the openai.* TLDs (openai.healthcare and openai.health).

openai.health

Non-transitivity is especially true in high-dimensional spaces. Plenty of places for non-transitivity to hide. In those environments with a lot of corners on the gradient, shorter step lengths coupled with close observation often is better rewarded.

100

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 18/09/2026

The fallacy of (transitive) order: The finite action space of contrastive decision-making (a vs. b) requires an agent to impose an order on the world (1,2,3). Yet we know from watching nature that games observed honestly are often non-transitive (rock-paper-scissors).

100

Cloudflare hasn't adopted at scale (yet), and a number of SV companies sprang up to "solve the challenge" (and got funded because it's often more profitable to fund a solution with equity that you own than admit that a public protocol actually works just fine).

000

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 18/09/2026

Kinda crazy that solutions to CAPTCHA (and proof of personhood problems with AI) have been possible with security keys and clearly identified as such since 2021, but with little adoption: blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-... and the product: developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals...

blog.cloudflare.com

100

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 16/09/2026

Bumped public key fyi: www.chrislengerich.com/verified.html Part of a migration to hardware-backed E2E encryption.

chrislengerich.com

Verified Accounts

000

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 15/09/2026

It's kinda wild that few historians have explored the different generations of workers in tech. A lot of change over the decades in the industry. (aside: it turned out "The End of History" actually meant that social media would unemploy the historians).

010

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 15/09/2026

"How do we make scientists and engineers 100x more productive to solve problems that matter?" Wrote this about 4 years ago as a personal mission statement, I think we've more or less done it. Still, much more to come.

000

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 23/06/2026

Silicon Valley is a mixed distribution in this regard - a lot of mercenaries who sell at -10% (but can be successful in trading up on the ever-changing tides), mixed in with some die-hard "true founders". Both patterns make money, but you rarely get the 100x with the first.

000

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 23/06/2026

One of the more uncomfortable things with investing is that to make 100x, you have to be comfortable with some investments being down 50% a couple times (or worse, no updates).

100

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 17/06/2026

5-minute meetings, and take a lot of them.

000

It has rarely been the case when the startup vs. bigco was comparable (for talented people traditionally, always startup), but atm, there is an unlikely covergence.

120

The dollars are not the same - companies need to shovel in VC money every year, 4-year contracts are, well, contracts.

100

For those considering leaving a bigco offer and starting your own, many of you will be successful and wildly wealthy on your own, but do consider preference overhang and winner-take-all dynamics in open markets.

100

6. Some AI startups have healthy revenues, but not as many as you'd expect given valuations. For now, the music plays on, but how much of fast growth is just a fast business cycle (up and down) due to interconnected networks in 2026, not an indicator of long-term value?

5. Hard to short anyway in private markets, easy to short in the publics.

100

AI bubble tracker (echoes of 2022): 1. Friends are getting $100M offers to stay at bigcos. 2. Landlords raising rent 20% or more. 3. No one - investor, researcher, founder - is incentivized to short it. 4. ~9 months of runway before many startups need to raise billions, or become walking dead.

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 23/05/2026

Recs for @bsky.app : 1. SEO, SEO, SEO - discoverability via search still is quite poor, even for accounts that should have domain authority for a search term. 2. Much better in-app search. 3. If using plugins for something like this, default plugins.

010

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 23/05/2026

For any task that's in-distribution, you can now: 1. Compile a repo (episodic memory) into a wiki (semantic memory) of technical processes. 2. Write terminal UIs (essentially, little decision trees) for any important analysis that could be a doc. 3. Write commit hooks for any type of state change.

010

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 23/05/2026

It's not just NLP-based coding and writing more READMEs/verification documentation for your agents, what the software goal is itself is changing based on 10x faster coding.

101

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 21/05/2026

The law of verification: "As you scale up generation, you have to scale up verification proportionately" And distribute this well between the executive function and the leaf nodes of the agent to keep the agent in convergent flow.

000

Chris Lengerich @chrislengerich.com · 21/05/2026

The abundance problem isn't really a new thing, it's actually quite old (cf. asabiyyah cycle). Just that it's happening in intelligence now vs. other products in the past. And almost as a rule, societies have not managed it well.

100

In human investment problems, sometimes the best choice is just...relax and do nothing.

000

Similar curiosity problems for investment prioritization tasks - while it's great for coding and pristine environments like the walled castles of group chats/Slack, and theoretically could crunch the numbers on ROI, it's also misled by the noisy environments online, and overeager.

100

2. But, RSS of human-edited pubs have replaced the newsfeed (esp. SCMP, BBC, the right Reddit subs, conferences and journals). Different model - readers can cache content to read offline. No infinite scroll, no FOMO. Feels close to reading a Kindle. No dark ranking, no SEO slop.

100