"let me AI that for you"

Moontower #269

May 04, 2025

Friends,

I’m driving to Costco Friday morning with mom. She’s telling me that she’s waiting on a friend who is going to help her sell some of her dresses on FB Marketplace. I offered to help but wrapped it in “let me show you how I do it”.

Of course, I was just going to have ChatGPT write the copy, format it for whatever sites she wants to put it, etc. I’ve shown her LLMs before but it’s not part of her routine so I have to remind her that there’s this useful thing out there.

[Aside: This week — I gave it a video of my son’s bike not switching gears to have it help us troubleshoot. And it worked. I feel like I give it 50 screenshots a day but I’m behind on the video thing.]

Anyway, she said something that was both sad — and totally predictable:

A defeated: “If I can have this GPT thing do everything for me what’s the point of talking to people?”

Let me say something before I continue — acceleration might be so destabilizing that we regret it. But the regret will be empty because regret implies you could have chosen differently. AI safetyism suggests we can. But as long as innovation is distributed enough (nebulous word but it’ll do) coordination is fighting a formidable anniversary — the “Guinness book impulse”. Me — I’m long resigned to locally optimizing til the end of humanity, I’m just gonna use the useful stuff.

Back to my mom. I disagreed as agreeably as I could.

In 1990, you could have a discussion about how many wives Henry VIII had. Today, someone goes “why are we arguing about facts?” when Siri is listening. A whole style of conversation went away. Only someone who longs for Crystal Pepsi misses arguing about facts.

AIs are going to make things as complex as drafting and posting an ad as simple as Googling the definition of “ad”. I mean this is the seat of the whole LMGTFY joke. But as AI improves it will encompass so much — including some people’s entire job description.

If we dash into the future as we have with prior transformative GPTs (general purpose technologies not “generative pre-trained transformer”), automation will free us to move up the task complexity ladder. But when intelligence itself, in all its recursive acceleration, is the technology — how human-speed needs adapt to sci-fi capability is anyone’s guess (and if you’re into that sort of thing, there’s plenty of guesses out there).

But yea, if most of your questions start with “How do you…”, before the words hit another’s ears your phone will interrupt — let me AI that for you, until you are trained to only talk about — whatever else there is to talk about.

My mom is still wondering about that one but the answer is obvious even if she isn’t aware.

🔗Further reading

Terms of Centaur Service (9 min read)
Venkatesh Rao

Venkat is one of my favorite writers. He has been co-writing with LLMs in a series called Contraptions under his main substack. He’s also documenting his prompting strategy and techniques. It’s like watching a child discover how to use an unfamiliar toy except the child is a genius and nobody else knows how to use the toy either. You are watching someone tinker on a frontier. This post lays out his case for this and it’s absolutely worth reading.

But, the piece I enjoyed more is an example of this tinkering called The Poverty of Abundance. The article is a critique of the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson but it’s voiced via a 3rd person device — the setup is:

a Venkat' subscriber response to the question ‘Should I read Abundance?’

The writing is strong, the argument resonates, and I just found it enjoyable (although I’ll admit it was a bit repetitive when I read it again, controlling for the fact that I read it, well, again).

Some quotes I snipped:

For the better part of two decades, they have constructed and defended a style of procedural liberalism that demoted imagination, displaced conflict, and outsourced moral complexity to the aesthetics of clarity and competence.
But the wound cannot be closed by the hand that inflicted it. What follows is not a conventional review. It is an accounting.
Before we can understand the shape of Abundance, we must first study its echo. The reception of this book is not merely a collection of opinions—it is a map of allegiances, a soft launch of an ideological bloc. The chorus of voices praising it are not simply impressed readers; they are participants in a long-running effort to refurbish the liberal project through the idioms of competence, optimism, and post-ideological pragmatism.
Its very reception reveals its function—not as a proposal for change, but as an aesthetic rebranding of a liberalism in retreat.
there is no real vision of the good. Abundance offers motion, not destination. It presents politics as tempo, not telos. It cannot say what we are building for, only that we must build faster…It takes the tempo, but not the stakes. It lifts the vocabulary—builders, abundance, speed—but re-instruments it for procedural liberalism. The result is a rhetorical uncanny valley: liberalism in cosplay, moving fast and healing things, in theory.
This is mimicry, not convergence. The authors do not join the techno-right’s program. They do not defend wealth, capital, or founding myths. But neither do they clearly break with them. Instead, they aestheticize their urgency—appropriating momentum while disavowing ideology.
Abundance cannot imagine a world. It can only imagine more throughput. More houses, more energy, more bandwidth. But more is not a theory of the good…The liberal imagination, as represented here, has decayed into optimistic logistics—a moodboard of acceleration absent any cosmology.
And the political imagination this produces is impoverished. Democracy becomes performance. State capacity becomes project management. The future is rendered not as possibility but as a better-run present. This is the endgame of procedural liberalism: aesthetic pacing instead of moral theory. A tone of competence in place of public morality. Abundance does not rebuild the foundations of liberal belief—it rebrands the ruins.
Abundance is not worth your time—not because it lacks intelligence, but because it lacks courage…It is a strategy, not a vision. A memo dressed in urgency. And you, I suspect, are not in the market for memos…ou are looking for what Abundance cannot offer: a theory of change that begins with conflict and ends with meaning.

Insofar as this is Venkat behind a curtain and I know he is a fan of James C. Scott whose Anarchism essays I finished recently, the critique tracks :-P

Money Angle

Good time to re-surface Harel’s gem:

The Realized Volatility Puzzle (9 min read)
Harel Jacobson

This one is a bookmarkable dictionary of various realized volatility measures.

Realized vol computations are on my mind because as we’ve been upgrading our data pipelines in the moontower app we are discussing enhancements to our realized vol infra to leverage the upgrades.

I won’t go into our details here but the recent rally holds a clue as to why many classic measures of realized vol struggle — they are too slow to reflect the present.

This is my custom list in the app as of Friday’s close. I point you to the 30d VRP (“volatility risk premium”) column…all those negative numbers mean the 1-month implied vols are trading at a large discount to the 1-month realized vol. In other words, the options market expects the next month to be much calmer than the Vitamix-on-max-speed market Liberation market of April 2025.

It’s a bit like looking at VRP after earnings — it’s “low” because they divide a large price move into a volatility that anticipates a more normal environment.

A manual adjustment to our VRP calcs in the app is to look at our vol cone chart. This is TSLA. You can see that the current 30d realized vol (green line is current daily RV readings of various lookback) is way above the 30d IV…but the 1 week IV has vol premium to the 1-week realized vol…in other words, realized vol has crashed (also obvious from the green line):

Traditional VRP measures struggle both ahead of known events (that’s why pro’s “extract”) and after a period of insanity that the market feels is at least partially resolved. We are working on enhancements to automate the adjustments you should make coming out of high vol periods.

SD from 200d MA column

In the screenshot above I drew a box around the SD from 200d MA column. We added it recently to the Cockpit view.

The definition:

ln(price/200d MA) divided by 6m IV to normalize

It's not a signal just a useful way to get your bearings after a lot of movement with a meaningful comparison. The ln() is basically the same as “the % difference from the current price to the 200d MA”

We divide by 6m IV which is a stable enough ruler to compare across names. If TSLA and SPY are both 5% lower than their 200d MA, TSLA is much “closer” once you adjust for its volatility.

Money Angle for Masochists

I saw this on Kalshi back on 4/25:

Do you interpret that as bullish?

Simmer on it a bit.

I’ll come back to it in a sec but before that I want to point out that it reminds me of this tweet:

In both the Kalshi market and the tweet a normal person sees a delta bid.

In both cases, I (and most option traders probably) see a vol bid.

For the tweet, it’s all explained in one-touch.

Why does the Kalshi market look like a vol bid to me?

Look at my gut reflex to the Kalshi quote in this tweet. The answer lies is in the first thing I asked Grok.

I’m exhaustingly repetitive in trying to advocate for seeing the world with a vol lens because at its core it’s a prompt to think about risk and its price.

But ya know, maybe also just ignore it — BTFD and carry on is an American birthright. Anything that keeps you from interpreting information as bullish should be burned for warmth so feel free to print a stack of moontowers like this one and light a match. Don’t worry, I am pathologically unable to take offense anyway.

From My Actual Life

My reason for my mom’s visit, as she does every year at this time, is for my little guy’s birthday.

Of the kids in our wider family he’s known for long phases. My wife misses his Avengers phase which lasted 2 years, which handed off to a car phase where he would check if every Dodge Challenger on the road was a Hellcat or Demon, but his longest phase has been otters which is going on 2.5 years.

I’m doing my best to influence the next phase — I’m taking him to see Jack White in 2 weeks to follow up on our recent pilgrimage to see Angus.

He’s pretty stoked in light of his first performance last week (that outfit was picked out of his closet at 11pm the night before as he wanted to have a White Stripes look. I feel uncomfortable in front of an audience — he’s made of a different substance than me):

And if you’re wondering…the gift wrapped on the table in the pic above is a Bambu Lab A1 3D Printer recommended by my avid hobbyist friend

Dave Nadig

. My first request is some 1mm guitar pics.

I’ll report back on how 3D printing projects work out.

Stay Groovy

☮️

Moontower Weekly Recap

Posts:

Refer a friend

Need help analyzing a business, investment or career decision?

Book a call with me.

It's $500 for 60 minutes. Let's work through your problem together. If you're not satisfied, you get a refund.

Let me know what you want to discuss and I’ll give you a straight answer on whether I can be helpful before we chat.

I started doing these in early 2022 by accident via inbound inquiries from readers. So I hung out a shingle through the Substack Meetings beta. You can see how I’ve helped others:

📲Book A Meeting