# Top of mind (Updated 2024-05-26) The intention of this page is to serve the function of [a /now page](http://nownownow.com/about) - shamelessly stealing the idea of a notes-based now page from the indomitable Andy Matuschak. Most of my time is spent running[Speculative Technologies](https://spec.tech) — an industrial lab for public goods that runs programs and FROs to unlock materials and manufacturing technologies that don’t have a home in other institutions. This entails: - Doing a vast array of things for the [Brains Program](https://spec.tech/brains) (helping people start [[Coordinated research program]]s) - Fundraising and advocating for [Spectech’s research programs](https://spec.tech/programs) - Trying to figure out our business model - A lot of other things that don’t fit into neat buckets. 🤦‍♂️ Here are some indexes into topics that I have a lot of evergreen notes on: - [[§Academia and Research]] - [[§Program Design]] - [[§Institutions and Games]] - [[§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics]] Some very top-of-mind things (most of these links won’t work because I haven’t actually finished the notes on them!): - [[How was technology research financed before government was a major funder?]] - [[What is the relationship between technology research and value capture]] - [[We need better case studies of failures in science and technology]] - [[People overindex on successes in science and technology]] - [[What does it mean for a technology to scale?]] - [[Changes to the research ecosystem are bottlenecked by where the work is done]] - [[Universities have been accumulating roles for hundreds of years]] * [[In Defense of Academia]] * [[Academia has developed a monopoly on pre- and non-commercial research]] * [[Research is not a commodity]] * [[The existence of public goods requires either nonprofits or a government monopoly on them]] Doing all of this constantly raises new questions, like: - [[How can you create good feedback loops outside of market discipline?]] * [[Is there a constant timescale that it takes someone to grok a technical idea?]] * [[When is externalized research better than internalized research and vice versa?]] * [[Could we make a system that could spin up transformer production from nothing in a day?]] * [[How much claim does a university have on technical work that someone does once they leave?]] On the physical front, I’m gunning hard to do v6s consistently. Running and lifting are in maintenance mode; I’m basically trying to maintain speed/strength/distance but not striving to hit any goals.