Venkatesh Rao ☀️ (vgr)

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

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Someone needs to study actual ossification. The metaphor is used in dangerously loose ways https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19337947/

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What if sufficiently advanced sclerosis is indistinguishable from ossification? How do you tell sclerotic soft tissue from bone formation?

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Tough but necessary moves, even though it’s affected summer of protocols/protocol institute I think the part I’m not yet convinced of is lean-roadmap-and-done. I’m increasingly convinced even the simplest infrastructure doesn’t work this way and ossification is a misframe of the underlying dynamics. At best what you get is pace layer renewal cycles. Living bone is actually different from dead bone, and there’s more going on in living bone than light maintenance. Havent yet formed a proper theory of it though. My sense is that even slow-changing living systems have a kind of liveness that causes generativity around them and is more than maintenance. But this is an important/not-urgent worry, since ossification is not a catastrophically wrong theory. Unlike say enshittification, which looks like bankruptcy trajectory (”slowly, then all at once”) I think ossification strategies risk a liveness fade-out through irrelevance. But we have some time to find a better theory.

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Top casts

I’m interested in a general compute version of this proposition abstracted away from details of blockchains. Perhaps: Logic > long-term memory > …DRAM > “HBM” > register memory HBM in scare quotes because I don’t mean the specific hardware standard but anything at that level in the memory hierarchy. Feels like the scalability basically tracks memory hierarchy in proportion to latency, with memoryless logic as the cheapest thing?

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Alex Honnold randomly climbing Taipei skyscraper while world is crashing and burning is a nice boss non sequitur move. Fully narrative capture resistant but can still compete for headlines with Greenland, Davos, Minneapolis, Clawd, etc. and win. Life goes on outside the narratives that try to corner attention.

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True or false: Unrestrained rehypothetication has made Bitcoin effectively an uncapped inflationary asset.

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I see three basic narratives for Ethereum going forward 1. Shut up and transact 2. Shut up and transact with extra cypherpunk steps 3. World computer

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