flâneur

Alpin Yukseloglu

11 followers · 27 following · 366 views

on the atlas — 45

highlights — 139

  • so easy to see, that even a relatively uneducated observer can see it, even in the face of a hostile propaganda effort to make the mechanism seem biased and untrustworthy.
    Credible Neutrality As A Guiding Principle
  • Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.
    About - The Long Now
  • the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics
    About - The Long Now
  • We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we try to stretch out what people consider as now.
    About - The Long Now
  • Speculative markets in essence offer to pay anyone who sees a bias in current market prices to come and correct that bias.
    Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
  • Those who know they are not relevant experts shut up, and those who do not know this eventually lose their money, and then shut up.
    Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
  • Betting markets are our best known institution for aggregating information.
    Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
  • The basic rule of government would be: When a betting market clearly estimates that a proposed policy would increase expected national welfare, that proposal becomes law.
    Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
  • In futarchy, democracy would continue to say what we want, but betting markets would now say how to get it.
    Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
  • typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand
    Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
  • a completely new field cannot emerge institutionalized.
    Knowledge Production and Intellectual Legitimacy | Samo Burja
  • First, we do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance.
    The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. I Ch. 1: Atoms in Motion
  • In block 124724 the coinbase transaction is missing one Satoshi. Block 501726 is even missing the whole block reward.
    Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Bitcoin
  • Here at Bloated MVP, I specialize in pointing out when a company or investment is bad not because of its execution, but because it neglected to have a logically-valid value proposition at the idea stage.
    Chris Dixon’s Crypto Claims Are Logically Flimsy | by Liron Shapira | Bloated MVP | Medium
  • Just because 0.1% of blockchain projects and NFTs have gone viral, that doesn’t mean the blockchain has a magical marketing engine that millions of musicians can all simultaneously take advantage of.
    Chris Dixon’s Crypto Claims Are Logically Flimsy | by Liron Shapira | Bloated MVP | Medium
  • But why do artists use music labels? The music labels offer them some kind of distribution advantage
    Chris Dixon’s Crypto Claims Are Logically Flimsy | by Liron Shapira | Bloated MVP | Medium
  • Currently Spotify makes about $0/yr net income on $10B/yr revenue.
    Chris Dixon’s Crypto Claims Are Logically Flimsy | by Liron Shapira | Bloated MVP | Medium
  • The persistent are much more attached to points high in the decision tree than to minor ones lower down, while the obstinate spray "don't give up" indiscriminately over the whole tree.
    The Right Kind of Stubborn
  • The reason the persistent and the obstinate seem similar is that they're both hard to stop. But they're hard to stop in different senses. The persistent are like boats whose engines can't be throttled back. The obstinate are like boats whose rudders can't be turned.
    The Right Kind of Stubborn
  • I can't think of anyone more determined than the Collison brothers, and when you point out a problem to them, they not only listen, but listen with an almost predatory intensity. Is there a hole in the bottom of their boat? Probably not, but if there is, they want to know about it.
    The Right Kind of Stubborn
  • are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be right or not?
    The Right Kind of Stubborn
  • Individuals should grant social status to others for advancing the superorganism’s goals.
    Minimum Viable Superorganism
  • Bottom line: I know of only one minimum viable architecture for turning individuals into a superorganism [2] — for making sure it’s in everyone’s self-interest to work together. I call it the Prestige Economy,[3] and it runs on a deceptively simple rule:
    Minimum Viable Superorganism
  • The issue, of course, is the free-rider problem.
    Minimum Viable Superorganism
  • I’ll tell you what isn’t minimal: any kind of governance structure. The appeal of a government is that it can monitor and police everyone, rewarding hard workers and punishing slackers, thereby incentivizing each individual to cooperate. The problem is that it begs the question. For a government to act coherently, it needs to be a superorganism itself. And who will govern the governors? It’s an infinite regress.
    Minimum Viable Superorganism
  • The more general case, then, is that a superorganism’s goals must arise from shared incentives. When individual members of the superorganism would benefit (on net) by achieving X, then X becomes a de facto goal, regardless of whether it’s officially articulated.
    Minimum Viable Superorganism
  • Now this is important: we have to assume that these individuals are entirely self-interested — that they don’t fundamentally care about the superorganism (or any other individuals) unless it’s somehow in their own interests. If we develop an architecture that doesn’t serve its members’ self-interest, it will inevitably break down as individuals realize they’re better off not participating.
    Minimum Viable Superorganism
  • intellectual dark matter: knowledge we cannot see publicly, but whose existence we can infer because our institutions would fly apart if the knowledge we see were all there was.
    Intellectual Dark Matter | Samo Burja
  • So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.
    Putting Ideas into Words
  • The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
    Putting Ideas into Words
  • When you're so big you have to resort to focus groups, you'll wish you could go over to your users' homes and offices and watch them use your stuff like you did when there were only a handful of them.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that. For a big company it's necessarily the dominant one. But you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • I've found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding — thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. One I've already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes.
    The Top Idea in Your Mind
  • That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.
    The Top Idea in Your Mind
  • it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.
    The Top Idea in Your Mind
  • There are lots of thoughts about what to include in a pitch, but at a minimum you need to have: mission, problem, product/service, business model, team, market and market growth rate, and financials.
    Startup Playbook
  • Investors are driven by the dual fears of missing the next Google, and fear of losing money on something that in retrospect looks obviously stupid. (For the best companies, they fear both at the same time.)
    Startup Playbook
  • Watch your cash flow obsessively. Although it sounds unbelievable, we’ve seen founders run out of money without being aware it was happening
    Startup Playbook
  • If you have a paid product with less than a $500 customer lifetime value (LTV), you generally cannot afford sales. Experiment with different user acquisition methods like SEO/SEM, ads, mailings, etc., but try to repay your customer acquisition cost (CAC) in 3 months. If you have a paid product with more than a $500 LTV (net to you) you generally can afford direct sales. Try selling the product yourself first to learn what works. Hacking Sales is a useful book to read.
    Startup Playbook
  • Press releases are easier to write than code, which is easier still than making a great product.
    Startup Playbook
  • Ideally, you want to pay people just enough they don’t stress about cash flow. Equity is harder, but a good rule for the first 20 hires seems to be about double what your investors suggest. For a company on a good but not absolute breakout trajectory, some rough numbers I’ve seen are about 1.5% for the first engineer and about 0.25% for the twentieth. But the variance is huge.
    How to hire - Sam Altman
  • Most of the principles on being a good manager are well-covered, but the one that I never see discussed is “don’t go into hero mode”. Most first-time managers fall victim to this at some point and try to do everything themselves, and become unavailable to their staff. It usually ends in a meltdown. Resist all temptation to switch into this mode, and be willing to be late on projects to have a well-functioning team.
    Startup Playbook
  • Everyone says that CEOs should spend a lot of their time recruiting, but in practice, none but the best do. There’s probably something to that.
    Startup Playbook
  • the day-to-day challenges will someday be forgotten and replaced by memories of the year-to-year progress.
    Startup Playbook
  • It’s important that you distort reality for others but not yourself. You have to convince other people that your company is primed to be the most important startup of the decade, but you yourself should be paranoid about everything that could go wrong.
    Startup Playbook
  • A successful startup takes a very long time—certainly much longer than most founders think at the outset. You cannot treat it as an all-nighter. You have to eat well, sleep well, and exercise. You have to spend time with your family and friends. You also need to work in an area you’re actually passionate about—nothing else will sustain you for ten years.
    Startup Playbook
  • If you are successful, it will take over your life to a degree you cannot imagine
    Startup Playbook
  • I have never, not once, seen a slow-moving founder be really successful.
    Startup Playbook
  • It’s very hard to be both obsessed with product quality and move very quickly. But it’s one of the most obvious tells of a great founder.
    Startup Playbook
  • If I had to distill my advice about how to operate down to only two words, I’d pick focus and intensity. These words seem to really apply to the best founders I know.
    Startup Playbook