Urbit is a new kind of networked operating system that turns your computer into a “ship” that can network and exchange data and computation with any other person or group on the network (like the current internet), but without requiring any trusted third parties like Facebook or Google to mediate
I just published a new episode of the podcast. Here I collect some of its best insights, in text for your convenience. From Other Life Episode #129, Samo Burja on Intellectual Legitimacy and His Business Model as a Private Researcher, you'll learn about: The dangers of a rebel mentalityGreat Founder
I've built a decent audience across several social media platforms, but I can't shake the feeling that something fundamental is going rotten. For people doing longer-term and more sophisticated work, such as writing serious non-fiction, participating in the "creator economy" is something like settling an unmapped foreign jungle: the irresistible
Eric Weinstein has released his highly self-aggrandized anticipated research paper on geometric unity. I read the paper. I gave it a solid hour or two. I did read the whole thing. The paper is not really a research paper, it's a collection of briefly formalized mathematical intuitions combined with some
Having unique and true ideas is, pound for pound, the most valuable human resource in the world. If you are blessed with periodically arriving flashes of insight, in the long-run it is economically worthwhile to organize everything around recording and publishing those insights. The greatest inhibitor of unique ideas is
The best way to build community and make friends on the internet is to treat all internet interlocutors as if they are real humans in a real-life, local village. If you do this, over time many people will like you and want to form an alliance with you. Because most
Right now, it’s still seen as bad taste to overly automate your personal social media — and for good reason. But taste changes, and it always follows the money. As machine learning gets better, we will soon cross the threshold where some minority fraction of the dumbest people will be
Another problem with being perceptible is easy to understand in our current digital context. It is a problem we might summarize as the motivational problem. Being perceived triggers dopamine, and dopamine hits train you to do more of whatever got you the dopamine. The more your motivation relies on dopamine
Patchwork intellectuals do not protest or endorse technological acceleration; they ride the waves of destruction wrought by disintermediation. They fall forward, sacrificing the twin pillars of security and prestige (which are now only shells) for advanced experiences of the socio-technical frontier. The comparative advantage of their new knowledge is its
Money is a trap, but how? For many years I believed that radical intellectuals and political revolutionaries (interchangeable terms, I thought) should simply eschew instrumental calculations altogether. As my understanding of intelligence developed, I eventually realized that — though there is a crucial intuition there — this position makes no sense. For
