A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.
shazow.net
Currently: WhatsABI
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Eventually we'll graduate from not looking at the code we generate to not looking at the byproducts at all.
Dark factories piping into dark recyclers piping back into the dark factories, back and forth forever.
No customers, no downtime, no bugs. Finally, nirvana.
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My fav take on this: Smart contracts fix this.
https://x.com/sreeramkannan/status/2048241007280759131
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@farcaster bug: attaching image to a reply on Android is borken, "Failed to pick media"
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Predicting what will happen is easy, predicting when it will happen is hard, predicting precisely how it will happen is even harder.
Consider weather: We can be fairly confident that it will rain. When exactly will it rain? Okay that's the real game now. What will the preceding contributing conditions be that will result in rainy climate? Good luck.
Consider finance: I predict there will be another Ethereum bull run. When? I don't know. How will it happen? Not sure I'll even know *after* it happens!
I suspect a lot of people lose money on open prediction markets because they draw confidence from knowing what will happen but don't temper it with inconfidence of when it will happen *and* with what will happen along the way (contributing volatility along the way).
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there is something beautiful about how crypto endursed a decade of "these aren't real users, it's just bots wash trading" criticisms, only to end up here: a platform for bots
pmf was there all along
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When I was writing "How can open social protocols fail us in 2025", I did not account for the centralizing force Snapchain would add onto the Farcaster protocol.
Before Snapchain, the properties of the protocol were quite similar to ATProto: Anyone could participate, as long as your messages were well-formed and cryptographically verified, you can toss it into any hub and it would make its way into the network. (This is exactly how ATP works btw.)
The main difference was that Farcaster had self-sovereign onchain identity roots, and ATP did not. For this, I gave Farcaster a higher score.
Snapchain adds a consensus "bottleneck", it forces the network to have a consistent global view of all valid messages. Partly to make fast sync easier (can deliver a static snapshot of the global view at some moment), partly to make timestamping more robust (many ways to do this), and partly for other stated/revealed reasons (more control of who gets to participate??).
How is this consensus managed? It's a JSON file in a Github repo that controls who is allowed to be a Snapchain consensus validator and who is not. This is at the center of the recent drama with @cassie's upcoming fork.
IMO Snapchain resulted net-negative change which makes Farcaster less decentralized than ATProto, despite not having onchain identity.
If I were going to update my post, I would give Snapchain/Farcaster today a slightly lower score than ATProto/Bluesky. This can change, and my thinking around this continues to evolve. Curious how others are thinking about this today (vs a year ago)? (cc @vrypan.eth)