Aleena Vigoda

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on the atlas · 31

highlights · 57

The core of Canopy was a new system for content recommendation where personal data stays local to the users’ device, where the model of the content only lies on remote servers. Pushing interaction data (your clicks, likes, stars) to the users’ device had an immediate benefit not just for privacy, but for control and explainability: if you don’t like how the algorithm perceives you, you have total power to edit or delete. We never see it, anyway. Once you use this framework you can imagine all sorts of neat things you could build: immediate feedback! Swap your preferences with your friends! Exp…
The Story of Canopy · Brian Whitman
But even outside of music, as we watched personalization increase in popularity in social networks, shopping, news, and search, it was hard not to notice the discrepancy in power between such services and their audiences and creators. We expect the “oracle” of the algorithm to be objective, always showing the best thing for you at that moment chosen from the entire world of content. But that’s rarely true. Maybe a revelance feed for a search could optimize for something other than creator success? Content could be prioritized that’s sponsored, or cheaper. Maybe a social media feed optimizes so…
The Story of Canopy · Brian Whitman
The problem is not merely homogeneity of topic, but homogeneity of substance. If you have to publish a newsletter every week, you don’t have the room or incentive to take risks.
[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast
Heterogeneity works for blogs since you grow through an occasional viral hit, and gain loyal readership through the occasional post that strikes a reader just right.
[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast
Thanks to the “perfect memory” of digital media, internet subcultures are able to create their own visions of past, present, and future.
The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
Crypto is a new IP system in the same way that it’s a new financial system.
AI+
The fact that the final output of AI is valuable likely means that the other components are too.
AI+
Relevance Is Only So Relevant
A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi – Diego Basch
Data is the antithesis of narrative.
Raw eggs, pink pills, and embodied identity: Online communities create their own proof in a vacuum of truth
It is a pragmatic act, but also a philosophical one. By successfully investing in the world it sees, Hummingbird affirms reality’s integrity.
The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
Hummingbird’s greatest talent is that it sees the world as it is, not as we think it should be. It meets reality and invests in it, as it is.
The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
People forget how Climate VCs studied the ins and outs of their industry, only to miss out on Tesla,”
The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
There is such craft in Hummingbird’s approach that codifying it explicitly feels like a minor sacrilege, as if the best way to study a Monet painting were to break it into individual brushstrokes.
The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
One way to understand Hummingbird is as a symphony. A coherent storyline runs through the firm, from its earliest days to its modern iteration. Within it, there are repeated motifs, crescendos and decrescendos, points and counterpoints, and players that storm into the foreground and fade into melody.
The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
“Instead of having a strategy and people needing to fit into that strategy, why not find an excuse to be in the room with super special people and then make it work their way? Pamir was like that.”
The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
Why step in when seemingly no others would? For Van den Brande, it was a pragmatic decision. If you believe you have backed an extraordinary founder, the sensible choice in such moments is to recommit.
The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
You will hear someone who overcame hard times to arrive at this point; someone capable of building impressive things but not being sated by it; someone with a chip on their shoulder; someone who sees the world differently and will not rest until they tilt it at least one degree in the direction of their choosing.
The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
So it goes: the greatest threat that crypto faces these days, I think, is not actually regulation or hacks or insufficient tech, but the threat to our values for why we’re here.
Three quarks | David Phelps | Substack
Sometimes I wonder if you were in on this. If you knew. If you were complicit in building it. If you saved the blueprint and built the weapon only to shoot me with it.
#13 They built a lethal weapon that won't kill you
Instead of breaking up Meta or banning TikTok, the government should release a new regulation that requires all social media providers to unbundle the content posted on their platforms from their recommendation engines.
The End of the Social Graph: How the Interest Graph is Changing the Game – For Now –
memes aren’t culture—they’re templates for culture you cocreate with your friends
david phelps 🐮🏰🃏🐘 on X: "and why not? memes aren’t culture—they’re templates for culture you cocreate with your friends nothing could be a better vehicle for pooling social and financial capital to make value out of valuelessness that’s all cocreated culture is anyway" / X
This feeling, like you had to be there, seems nonsensical in a medium that is ostensibly a perfect, static record of written information. But when that data isn’t easily searchable, accounts, scenes, and aesthetics are what you follow.
Other Internet
If Googling the idioms and retrofitting them to existing textual models doesn’t explain their niche usage, you simply must follow the lore — you nudge your e-body into its current and float along its path.
Other Internet
The map you make ends up behaving like a mirror. It can only present an approximation of the living connections between contextless signifiers, cropped to your personal frame of reference. The result is an abstraction that reflects your own pre-existing knowledge (along with whatever you found on Google)
Other Internet
There is no “one path for the internet”. The trouble is, the “one path” metaphor does make sense, intuitively.
Other Internet
In my view, failure to read the internet isn’t about being “unable to grasp the meaning”. Rather, it’s about imposing singularity (”the meaning”) on a story that structurally defies definition.
Other Internet
"They don’t know how to read the internet." And if you don't know how to read the internet, you’re lost. Any arrangement of idioms that you're trying to analyze will remain "a schizophrenic mess of signifiers you’re unable to completely grasp the meaning of, in a virtual city where you’re constantly missing the train and unable to show up to anything on time."
Other Internet
What’s interesting is its form: “vibe shift” as a linguistic artifact of a community’s internal world, and its subsequent misreading in the hands of the digital public.
Other Internet
it’s not just that the journalist’s demystification ruins the fun of exclusivity; rather, the journalist’s story actually feels incorrect. It’s based on a fundamental misreading of the lore.
Other Internet
The illegibility of the idioms trickling outward from deeply online communities is a product of the density of communication enshrouding them: they encode the fleeting touch and whispered remark of masses of individuals along these interweaving networks. These text and image compositions are like small, heavy objects comprised of many many layers of very thin sheets of information. Like rich, buttery, flaky croissants.
Other Internet
Memes, also, are mnemonic devices. If we think of the internet as a kind of language, or a paradigm for communication, it’s undeniably a “densely idiomatic” one. Anyone who’s ever been in a group chat with 500+ people can tell you that new vocabulary develops there at breakneck speed.
Other Internet
The result is a puzzle piece that lends itself to reconstruction. We learn how to reverse-engineer existing stories, to read by recognizing patterns in streams of discrete content. We latch on to things that track with our own frameworks for understanding, but also to signals that only gesture or wink at them.
Other Internet
So, we find ways to write stories in compact, modular bites. We compress information into shorthand, idioms or symbols, pieces of text and image that convey the potential for meaning, despite its absence on first glance.
Other Internet
Disruptive innovations don’t compete against incumbents, they compete with nonconsumption.
Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?
Creation is always at least partly an act of generosity; creators want as many people to use and enjoy their creations as possible.
Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
A garden is something in-between a personal blog and a wiki. It’s a collection of evolving notes, essays, and ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – posts are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete – posts can be published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal “blogs” we’re used to encountering on the web.
What the heck is a digital garden? – lowercased C
Let’s think about a link. Many pages can point to a single page. Many-to-one. One-to-many. So, we could achieve tagging with links by listing all backlinks to a given page. Tags are just backlinks to pages that don’t exist.
All you need is links - by Gordon Brander - Subconscious
A scenius exists to fill a void. It has to be small, fringe, and borderline heretical because otherwise members would join reputed existing communities.
Can We Build Scenius From Scratch? - by Varun
The goal of a commons is to build up a curated library of knowledge and share it with those interested
Can We Build Scenius From Scratch? - by Varun
Looking at WhatsApp today, you could imagine that this was the plan all along: bootstrap a universal identity system and communications network, and use them to create smartphone-based payment rails that skip legacy payment systems and enable more transactions.
Your Platform Is as Strong as Its Identity Layer - by Varun
Digital databases are unparalleled memory machines that have radically transformed how information and stories flow between grandparents and children, students and teachers, politicians and voters, journalists and citizens.
The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices.
I should have loved biology
I’ve never come across a subject so fractal in its complexity. It reminds me of computing that way.
I should have loved biology
And that’s not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect.
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech | Knight First Amendment Institute
When it works, it can feel magical, like the TikTok algorithm that seems to know you better than you know yourself.
Want better online recommendations? It takes better AI, and a human touch - The Verge
public goods are relative to the values of the communities they serve.
Kev.Ξth (🍄,🟢) on Twitter: "OWOCKI WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE SHELL/GITCOIN COLLAB? i'm so glad u asked anon. @fifthworldzach challenged me to “write a nuanced thread embracing the plurality of paradoxes that will be sincerely contemplated and then responded to with equal depth and care by the good people…" / X
The real failure,” Banister told us, “would have been to try to make it work.
Cyan - by KG and Dan Scott - Cloud Valley
“You are really good at ‘I feel.’ I need you to get better at ‘I know.””
Cyan - by KG and Dan Scott - Cloud Valley
If you invest in things people use, then you have to live that way. Otherwise, you start investing in edge cases.
Cyan - by KG and Dan Scott - Cloud Valley
Ultimately, what we want to figure out is, if we are going to increase the scale of infrastructure that we’re building in the space, how do we do that in a community-first way?
Scott Moore’s Mutualist Futures – ZORA ZINE