Venkatesh Rao ☀️ (vgr)

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

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

82066 Followers

Recent casts

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 intellectual confidence in its ideas. The result is a weird mix of a reasonable-toned and reassuring sounding document that appears to cover all the bases and address all obvious concerns and questions, and a document with a deep commitment to proselytizing a particular ideological-theological frame by exclusively and uncritically using its terms of reference. Smuggled in throughout are several motivated speculations. The result is a document that is uniquely and dangerously insular, unimaginative, and blind to all the uncertainties in the picture and the things nobody knows. It reads like a mashup of a 101 history of nuclear treaties and a brochure for invitees to the Council of Trent.

  • 1 reply
  • 0 recasts
  • 7 reactions

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 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly8eqyj8e2o

  • 5 replies
  • 3 recasts
  • 32 reactions

Thanks to AI, a lot of dumb and lazy people are now stuck in places only smart and hardworking people could get suck before.

  • 2 replies
  • 0 recasts
  • 10 reactions

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?

  • 101 replies
  • 30 recasts
  • 930 reactions

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.

  • 68 replies
  • 22 recasts
  • 699 reactions

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

  • 64 replies
  • 2 recasts
  • 397 reactions

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

  • 31 replies
  • 5 recasts
  • 268 reactions

Onchain profile

Ethereum addresses