I have amassed two months of bookmarks. Casts mentioning articles, tools and even mints that deserved more attention than my current state could offer. All filed into a private feed of bookmarks. I've attempted to sort through them, but given up. Too much to go back, read, ponder and integrate. Felt FOMO creeping up and decided screw that! No FOMO for me.
I strongly believe that nothing is lost for ever. A cast that got into my bookmarks but now is drowned in them, will percolate again to the surface. Nothing is linear. Not your personal growth or the trouble that you face. Thanks wanderlots.eth for casting what I think.
But first for everyone who missed it, or forgot it already: MTV news is gone. This is mind-boggling, culture-destroying, and normal. How many texts from the ancient greeks do we still have? Fewer than you think. Admittedly, this one being gone hit home.
On search, AI and culture
There is so much data. It is a problem. Servers require space, electricity, and water to keep everything nice and cool. Want to invest in something and cash in later? Invest in clean drinking water. Fuck that, just invest in water. When you are thirsty, you're ready to drink everything.
One solution to the data problem is to delete old data. Like MTV news. Another solution is teens not taking ten thousand bathroom pictures every day. But teens will remain teens and will not listen to old farts until they become old themselves. Deleting MTV news is easier than changing behavior.
But don't fret, there is a sliver of hope. Nobody* wants to delete all the data. Without it, we can't train algorithms. Anything from the Google's search ranking to your preferred LLM model requires data. These algorithms have to be trained to get a response that is good enough for most people. This is an important distinction: We're optimizing for a global maximum, not for your specific local maximum. Everything is averaged out making sure that the average human being is happy with the experience.
Are you that average human being?
* I'm trying to stay on-point. People love to delete data that puts them in a bad light. You know that history is written by winners, aka data is produced and stored by those in power. No power, no choice over what data is stored.I bet you would not describe yourself as average. You have a couple of talents, suck in some aspects, and, yes, are average in other areas. But you are not an average human being. That being only exists in tables. Go on, and add color to whatever you create. Create context. Make it you.
Seeing Matthew continually develop the programming in a way that clearly reflects his instincts and values reminds me how special it is to create a context to show other people what you love.
from towards small scale worlding
Every time you give the middle finger to Google's search recommendation you are adding color to your life. Search is optimized for efficiency. It's about putting the restaurants, movies, books with the highest recommendation at the top of the list. We're back at the blandness of the world. A data-driven way out of this is to put the user, that's you, in control for what you want to optimize for. When I search for public transport routes I want to optimize for having a seat.
If you are bored with the world, go add some color. Sent out signals with what you resonate and stop minting everything that passes by your timeline, because just in case it goes to the moon. Go and mint stuff that isn't yet polished, that you know will never be viral because it's still being formed in the mind of the creator. Thanks LGHT for this wisdom shared during Higher Together EP01 (Go and mint that!)
When you cook without salt, it just takes meh. Bland and boring. Go and be the salt of the world, support the decentralized internet and build weird sites.
Do stuff that hasn't yet been proven to work because no one else is as crazy and unique as you:
There are far more good ideas out there we can post-rationalize than there are good ideas we can pre-rationalize[...] What university teaches you to do is reduce every problem into a two-body problem, which can be solved mathematically to a single, optimal, right answer. Pretend that the problem is that simple, solve for the pretend simplistic model, and then pat yourself on the back. [...] No, the trick here is to go and find some completely different variable that no one’s looking at and try messing around with that instead.
On building your world
Imagine you can hit three keys on your laptop and land in a different universe. Not drastically different. Just a tad bit. Nicolas Sarkozy a gangster, a nuclear summer wiping out most of Europe, or the invention of truly new energy sources (examples taken from Black Swan a short story by Bruce Sterling. A breath of fresh air after Gods of Kiranis).
Of course this isn't possible. But don't despair, you still have agency in this worl. The world you are creating is the result of the people you interact with (I'm not advocating for blindly cutting people out just because they are making your life a tad bit sour). Your decisions are influenced by the timelines you feed your brain with.
On data, ownership and incentives
There is a simmering new meta around ownership of data and rewards. None of it is that new. Remember when Rainbow introduced points? Or Linear's bounty to have wallets categorized as bots vs human for distributing rewards? It's continuing. Giving money away is harder than it seems
Blast's airdrop isn't a connect-wallet-and-cash-in experience. They know people want the money, and used that external incentive to tell them repeatedly about Blast's vision. Thanks to years of schooling, we all know that repetition helps with remembering stuff.
On one side we're discussing how to give money to people who do small, at times meaningful tasks to grow a protocol. On the other side of the data meta we're wondering what are solutions where data creators (aka users) own their data and get rewarded for it. Li is making a push for data DAOs, datalatte lets you mint your digital twin (go on, do it!), and Sohey and their team build a datagator giving everyone the opportunity to cash into the AI hype.
Enjoyed this curation? Collect before it descents into the abyss of the internet, becomes untraceable and lost for ever
