Venkatesh Rao ☀️

@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Wife is randomly on a 1930s-1950s movie binge. Clark Gable, Cary Grant etc. Something feels very dead about that world. Like truly dead and gone and buried and dessicated in a way it didn’t 30y ago. The movies feel like museum pieces. I think because they no longer represent living memory. All adults in those movies are dead. Born like 1900-10. And that world clearly seems pointed towards a future that strikes me as quite unappealing but clearly others are nostalgic for 🤔. You get this same sense of orientation-towards-museum-futures from 1960s movies too. The world we’re in feels like one that that was first pointed to by 1970s movies. Not surprising, given that computing, the internet, and space flight had emerged by then.

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Ballard (in Bosch-verse) with Maggie Q is very good

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

“For nearly four centuries, from 1440 to 1826, 330 hectares of land existed outside the State. No written laws. No kings, no guards, no taxes. Only tobacco, faith, and free exchange. This was the Republic of Cospaia — an anarchic glitch in Italy’s history, a forgotten fork of a proto-anarchic system from which we can learn a lot.” https://open.substack.com/pub/thecyberhermetica/p/caspariae-perpetua-et-firma-libertas?r=1cjha&utm_medium=ios

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Foundation S3 woohoo! S3E1 leaps right off the blocks

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Starting in 8 minutes, Session 3 of SIGFPT -- Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory. This session will be on notation systems for protocols. Voice chat on the SoP Discord: https://discord.com/events/1082444651946049567/1392887922960765060/1393275646771200000

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Less than a week left to send in an entry for the Ghosts in Machines contest from Protocolized Top 3 entries will share 6k in prizes. Deadline Sunday July 13. https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/ghosts-in-machines The idea of this contest is to imagine many futures full of distributed AI, connected through protocols of all sorts, including current real protocols in development such as MCP and A2A, blockchain protocols, existing mature protocols, and of course, entirely speculative new protocols. There are some non-trivial guidelines in this page.

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Really tempted to get this massive technic set, 33% off on prime day. I think it’s the most complex model currently in the catalog. $700 marked down to $467. I’ve eyed it greedily before. https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Liebherr-Rewarding-Incredible-Including/dp/B0BSRFQLD6/

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Good but ambiguous prompt. Clarification in replies specifies the presumption that every position on every issue has good and bad reasons for adopting it, so it’s really “opposed bad reason is better than my side’s bad reason.” Also if you’re a moral relativist like me you can ignore the bundled idea of a “moral character” and just do issue positions. Ironically I find people who adopt conscious and consistent “moral characters” to be generally less moral than those who just make it up as they go along. Moral muddlers who don’t aim for monolithic postures.

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Made a logo for Elon’s new America party based on the GoP and democrats logos. Wdyt?

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

If you use a phrasal template to try to subvert the original, you’ve already lost the frame war. Winning frames that make hostile usages look weak: - Make X great again - X is eating the world - X lives matter - Big X Bill You subvert with a different logic, not a different focus How? 🤔

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

I have double-decker-pilled one person so far.

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The face eating leopard is now a face eating doge

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Starting in a couple of minutes. @Arvind Narayanan on the @Protocolized town hall, talking about his AI as Normal Technology philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6SRoqp1vJQ

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Lots of action in the latest issue of Protocolized. This really is turning into a magazine now. Provocative summary of a distributed-AI future called south beast Asia Also: a talk in an hour by Arvind Narayanan and a new fiction bounty protocol. https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/a-sea-of-distributed-ai

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Clearly Zorro was involved

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Interesting eth wallet experiment over on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/piss.beauty/post/3lsutfcshek22

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

If you attack someone for the AI they use rather than the substance of what they say, it’s called an ad botinem.

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

🧐 no protein?

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Tragedy is about what you can’t undo. Horror is about what you cannot unsee. Terror is about what you cannot prevent.

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