2024W23: the calm before the storm

...and a long tangent about a video game.

The new café in Nyland is a great place to start your day.

In short

In Week 23, two “shifts” happened within me:

• the house turned into an exciting project (it used to be expensive insurance),

• an intense sense of urgency returned – whatever you want to do, now is the best time.

Nyland is Stardew Valley

For those of you who are not familiar with it: Stardew Valley is an indie video game, developed by a single person, that achieved tremendous financial success (as of this year: over 30 million copies sold).

Two things stand out about this game.

First, it’s a work of art – it was not created for profit, but to bring its creator’s vision to life.

Its developer, Eric Barone, poured his entire life into this:

To complete the game, Barone worked 10 hours a day, seven days a week, for four and a half years. – Source

learning all the necessary skills essentially from scratch, and ultimately creating a world with character, and attention to detail.

Second, the game is about village life, with the player/protagonist having inherited a farm, and trying to breathe life back into it while building relationships with the townspeople.

After having spent more than a week in Nyland, I can’t help but see lots of parallels:

Instead of building a farm, this particular adventure is about getting a house into good shape – the idea remains the same: take something old, make it new.

Just like in the game, there are lots of townspeople - each with an interesting life story, and many of them with entrepreneurial ambition, and just like in the game, there is “one of everything”.

Institutions aren’t faceless brand names, copy-pasted shops you could place anywhere on a map, but rather someone’s project.

You speak about “The Café”, because it’s the one that’s there – and you know the owner by name, what their ambitions are and you can directly see the impact this project has on the local community.

Simple day-to-day things turn into little adventures: you need to talk to people to get information, and crucially, it’s about managing the relationships with the people around you.

So why draw a parallel to a popular video game/work of art?

Because Stardew Valley evokes a certain feeling in the player:

This is a place where the world is whole, and safe, relationships matter, and small things are meaningful.

and Nyland evokes the same feeling once you spend time there in earnest.

By comparing these two things, people who have played the game get to experience a similar feeling that I felt this week.

And just like creating Stardew Valley was essentially an intense learning experience for Eric Barone, renovating my house is going to be an intense learning experience for me.

Hopefully with a similar payoff: creating a special feeling in people who choose to visit.

In contrast to the stereotype of small villages being full of close-minded simpletons who can hardly think in terms and ideas that go beyond the scope of their particular village, Nyland is full of people who have chosen this particular place in the world as their home.

A small selection includes:

• a Swiss event photographer,

• a Venezuelan ship engineer,

• an entrepreneur from Stockholm, who saw so much opportunity in one building that he had to open a café.

All of the above actually made me feel excited about the house in Nyland, for the first time.

It took:

• 17 months of just paying for the upkeep and some renovations,

• trying to convince people to stay there,

• and figuring out how to manage a property remotely,

before I got an emotional payoff.

But now it’s here, and Nyland feels like a second home.

Situational Awareness

This was a year ago.

Last week I read Leopold Aschenbrenner’s series of essays titled Situational Awareness.

What I read was unsettling because it sounded far-fetched and plausible at the same time.

If you have an hour to spare: go read this. It’s well-written prose, and you can skim through the part you find boring.

What was striking to me: the essays make a reasonable case for developments in AI reaching a point where you get a drop-in remote software engineer, who is instantly onboarded onto the entirety of your company, in three to four years.

And before we get into the whole “but LLMs are just inference machines that generate a text based on internal probabilities” counterargument - yes, but there is more to AI than LLMs, and according to Aschenbrenner, we’ve just reached the point when research results aren’t published anymore to get advantages over the competition – so without insider information (like from this former OpenAI employee), it’s hard to say where we’re at.

Regardless of how his predictions play out, what is real right now is anything related to AI receiving massive amounts of investment all over the world, and AI-based technology having made amazing progress in the last 2-3 years (just check the ChatGPT 4o demo and compare it to the first version of ChatGPT).

So why are fancy chatbots so unsettling?

Because it’s not about fancy chatbots or real-time audio translation.

It’s about rapid progress on what looks like an exponential curve.

Or in other words: the boat is about to get rocked, hard.

Not only because of this but also due to everything else that’s going on:

• China preparing for an invasion of Taiwan,

• the US preparing for China invading Taiwan,

• a new virus brewing (bird flu jumping to cows, and from cows to humans in the US),

• the US presidential election in November threatening continued support for Ukraine.

Oh, and climate change in the background.

Everybody in Estonia being happy about it finally being summer is also a reminder of how we’ve collectively forgotten (🇬🇷🔥) the (🇮🇹🌊) suffering (💀) of the summer of 2023.

There is little reason to believe that the summer of 2024 is going to be different.

In May 2024 there were 170 reported wildfires in Estonia alone – yes they were small, quickly detected, and efficiently dealt with, but…the trend is not exactly positive.

The point is: everything will become more difficult.

And that is difficult to imagine for people aged 40 or younger, because we’ve lived during a period of great prosperity and peace, where every passing year made life better for everyone.

Just because we haven’t experienced drought, famine, wildfires, hyperinflation, and other catastrophes personally during our lifetime doesn’t mean that they cannot happen again.

So whatever you want to do in life – now is the time to try it.

The boat is about to get rocked really hard.

Don’t be surprised when you feel it.