# 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.
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