Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Looked through the AI 2040 Plan A thing. It is bad, but I don’t think it is disingenuous. So I’m willing to give them the benefit of doubt and assume sincerity. I think the badness comes from this group being immersed in a subculture that has metabolized regional subcultural success and local influence into unwarranted...
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On the one hand I’m glad Ethereum isn’t mentioned as part of this bleak scene
On the other hand, why isn’t there a different sort of article about a non-bleak scene that does?
Ethereum-vibes popup cities don’t make the news the way lurid billionaire brainrot fantasies do
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Capture resistance is upstream of censorship right?
I think capture resistance is 2d: aggregation resistance and enclosure resistance. There’s a 2x2 there.
Many decentralized protocols are aggregation resistant but not enclosure resistant.
Aggregation resistance is about plurality and multiplicity but enclosure r...
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Increasingly convinced protocolization *is* decentralization. So this actually maps to “centralize till it hurts, decentralize till it works”
It’s a radical thought, but what after all is a protocol, ontologically? You take a gestalt flow-like behavior (or zen ideal of such a behavior) and break it up into hard and so...
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This is just so extraordinarily dumb. IMO getting in bed with trump will cause more net damage long term than FTX and the excesses of the NFT wave combined.
They also messed up the good parts of prediction markets with all the insider trading. Sure the tech had exploitable vulnerabilities but in a better environment i...
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Thought: there are two ways to get to decentralization — start with a center and fragment it (eg through forking or sharding or replication), or start with an atomized set and connect it up, being careful to avoid mechanisms like preferential attachment that cause hubs to emerge. Most decentralization is of the first t...
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Enshittified ticketing [www.bbc.com/news/article...](www.bbc.com/news/article...)
Thought of a term I want to work out. Oblique Altruism, as an evil twin of Effective Altruism.
Inspired by the core idea in John Kay’s book Obliquity, as well as the Ken Stanley/Joel Lehman book The Myth of the Objective.
The first argues that for complex problems, going at it in an on-the-nose rarely works, but obl...
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Posting a lot today because lots of thoughts brewing. I just came back from foocamp, possibly the most tech-positive-but-crypto-avoidant scene on the planet. The billionaires may have mostly gone majority maga redpilled, but the mass of SV techies remain firmly left of center and sympathetic to most left agenda items. ...
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