Recruited early, and shown what wealth looked like
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
A USC program to recruit the best high school students, which had begun working on Jonathan Hare years before he graduated. The students lived in the mostly-empty summer dorms in South Central Los Angeles and had all-access run of the campus.
The only other people there were faculty, graduate students, football players, cheerleaders and the marching band, all practicing through the summer. The students were brought to rallies in courtyards, where the band's sound was amplified by the walls.
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He used to sit and read in the cinema Lucas had donated — all red, heavy curtains to kill the echo, expensive seating, a giant screen and excellent air conditioning. It reminded him of the Kennedy Center's main theater. He never once saw a film in it, and would still like to.
A boat trip to Avalon on Santa Catalina, thirty miles off Long Beach — a Mediterranean-style town built as a resort in the 1920s, when wealthy people traveled by train and boat rather than by jet. Walking, bicycles, and small resort cars somewhere between a golf cart and a car.
His previous exposure to wealth was Agatha Christie novels, James Bond films and Richie Rich comics, read as a child on a clothing-optional Marxist-Leninist commune. He concluded that being rich looked better, and decided he would like an island, a yacht, speedboats and a seaplane.
Another trip went to a pumped-storage hydro plant near Tehachapi Pass — water pumped uphill to a reservoir when power was cheap and released through turbines at peak demand. They toured the generation plant and the substations and studied how a grid is actually managed.
It became directly useful at Impell, and it is directly relevant now: the constraint on AI is power rather than silicon, and Moore's law is far weaker in energy than in transistors.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
The first real experiment — and it was Einstein's
Open →where the grid knowledge became usefulNuclear safety systems — and a position outside orthodoxy
Open →why Catalina meant somethingYoungest member ever, at twelve. The cabin boy.
Open →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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