Today is a good day for positivity. Sometimes I get so focused on the negative that I forget how good things actually are.

We are alive to see the birth of machine intelligence. Something that would have entirely displaced Google 10 years ago runs on your laptop. The best AI research is open source, constraint is the mother of creativity. The cutting edge is more open and competitive than ever.

I wanted to be a computer programmer when I grew up and think I did that. My two companies ship continual improvements to open source projects spanning many years, employ super talented people, and run sustainabilty, selling boxes for more than they cost to make. I still program a lot. I think the core missions of comma and tinygrad deeply shape our future in a decentralized post-cloud world where you actually own things, but the jury is still out. It wouldn’t be fun if it was a sure thing.

I saw an Instagram reel with a bunch of pop punk kids making fun of the TurboTax complexity creating lobbying scheme. There’s awesome new subcultures formed outside of “strivers” and philosophy is alive and well and of course it’s not what you expected but that’s always how it had to be.

We all acknowledge we live in a multipolar world today, and unlike with what I heard about the Soviet Union, both America and China are really nice places to live. Different and with their own strengths and weaknesses, and both having their nice parts and their less nice parts, but sometimes I get so caught up on criticism that you forget just how nice the water is.

And say what you will about Trump and US politics, of course everyone wishes it could be going better, but the only way out is through, and the first steps are talking honestly about the problems, not continuing to act like everything was okay. Empire isn’t easy and never was easy, but somebody has to do it. Like sure I’ll complain about the 5 hyperscalers with the huge computers but I’d be lot more upset if there were no huge computers.

Oh yea and we have awesome math YouTube channels and I finally understand what the Riemann Hypothesis means. And my new quadratic sieve is a lot better than my old one. It’s easier to fool yourself with fake education than ever, but it’s also easier to get real education. I can’t wait to see how the polynomial time factoring algorithm works.

And then a whole bunch of personal stuff I don’t really talk about. I learned very early that you have to separate your online persona from your inner person, so you don’t get to hear about this stuff. But like…life is just pretty nice, and I hope deep down you agree.