flâneur

Cole Killian

56 followers · 40 following · 1977 views

on the atlas — 73

highlights — 33

  • The strongest conservative case against gay marriage is that it reinforces a centuries-long redefinition of marriage from a strategic partnership focused on child-rearing to a ceremonial acknowledgment of romantic infatuation, potentially leading to a deep shift in the way people think about issues like who to marry, when to have kids, when to get divorced, and how to treat their family. That argument hasn’t been rigorously evaluated by statisticians and found wanting. It’s been found annoying and left untouched. Your differences are foundational assumptions and methodological disagreements ab…
    Beware Systemic Change | Slate Star Codex
  • Also, if you start out as Rimbaud, you might end up as Lebowski
    A Founder's Farewell • Blog • urbit.org
  • And randomness is a virtue – it disrupts hidden patterns. The galaxy owners include famous VCs and total nobodies; a Zen monk and a former Orthodox nun; a blockchain industry leader and a permaculture farmer. If they do have to all agree on something, they should have little to agree on but the truth.
    A Founder's Farewell • Blog • urbit.org
  • When we say that everyone should have what they deserve, we can never expect everyone to agree – which means we have planted permanent seeds of discord.
    A Founder's Farewell • Blog • urbit.org
  • Randomness, even blatant unfairness, creates a kind of neutral, peaceful, even promising urban anonymity.
    A Founder's Farewell • Blog • urbit.org
  • Property is always and everywhere a kind of amnesty. It says: whatever happened in the past, this is now what is.
    A Founder's Farewell • Blog • urbit.org
  • Of endangered species, for example, what they prize is not really that they are natural, but some other virtues: that they are aesthetically appealing, like eagles, or potentially useful, like the flora of rainforests. For who has ever joined a demonstration with a placard deploring the near-extinction of the smallpox virus?
    How evolutionary biology makes everyone an existentialist | Aeon Essays
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky's rather deranged version
    Superrationality and DAOs | Ethereum Foundation Blog
  • This is part of the reason why scams online and in the cryptocurrency space are more common than offline, and is perhaps one of the primary arguments against moving all economic interaction to the internet a la cryptoanarchism (the other argument being that cryptoanarchism removes the ability to inflict unboundedly large punishments, weakening the strength of a large class of economic mechanisms).
    Superrationality and DAOs | Ethereum Foundation Blog
  • For example, people struggle to absorb new material when their working memory is already overloaded. More concretely: if you’ve just been introduced to a zoo of new terms, you probably won’t absorb much from a sentence which uses many of those terms at once. So maybe part of “what’s necessary to understand” something is that most of its prerequisites must be not just familiar but fluent, encoded in long-term memory.
    Why books don't work
  • Such observations will necessarily be about things that are imprecisely defined. Once you start using words with precise meanings, you're doing math.
    How to Do Philosophy
  • A great exercise to remember who you are (shoutout to Anson for this one) is to make a list of “times I feel most like myself”. Here are some of mine:
    Why I do what I do | Jocelyne Murphy
  • If we run into aliens who don't share our version of boredom—a steady trickle of mid-level novelty as a terminal preference—then perhaps every alien throughout their civilization will just be playing the most exciting level of the most exciting video game ever discovered, over and over and over again.
    In Praise of Boredom - LessWrong
  • We would much rather participate in a DAO with ten motivated 10% owners than a DAO with 10,000 lackadaisical 0.01% owners. The outcome in the former case is likely to be far more positive than the outcome in the latter.
    Reverie
  • IMDb and Wikipedia are two companies which built up entire valuable databases almost entirely by building mechanisms to harness the equal mix of status-seeking and altruism of domain experts. As with Reddit, accumulating a certain amount of reputation on these services unlocked additional abilities, and both companies built massive databases of information with very low production and editorial costs.
    Status as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the Day
  • Think of how many reviews Yelp accumulate in the early days just by throwing a few parties? It was, no doubt, well worth it, and at the point when it isn't (what's the marginal value of writing the, at last count, 9655th review of Ippudo in New York City?), it's something easily dialed back or deprecated.
    Status as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the Day
  • Because social networks often attract different audiences, and because the configuration of graphs even when there are overlapping users often differ, opportunities exist to arbitrage social capital across apps. A prominent user of this tactic was @thefatjewish, the popular Instagram account (his real name was Josh Ostrovsky). He accumulated millions of followers on Instagram in large part by taking other people's jokes from Twitter and other social networks and then posting them as his own on Instagram. Not only did he rack up followers and likes by the millions, he even got signed with CAA!
    Status as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the Day
  • It's strange to think that social networks like Twitter and Facebook once allowed users to just wholesale export their graphs to other networks since it allowed competing networks to jumpstart their social capital assets in a massive way, but that only goes to show how even some of the largest social networks at the time underestimated the massive value of their social capital assets. Facebook also, at one point, seemed to overestimate the value of inbound social capital that they'd capture by allowing third party services and apps to build on top of their graph.
    Status as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the Day
  • [Klout, a much-mocked company online, attempted to more precisely track social capital valuations of people online, but, just as the truly wealthy mock the nouveau riche as gauche, many found the explicit measurement attempts unseemly. Most of these same people, however, compete hard for social capital online, so ¯\(ツ)/¯. The designation of which status games are acceptable is itself a status game.]
    Status as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the Day
  • Google is often spoken of as a company where software engineers have the most power. Engineers, in my experience, are driven by logic, and status-centered products are distasteful or mysterious to them, often both. Google will probably always be weak at social, but as with Apple, they compensate with unique strengths.
    Status as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the Day
  • Getting Things Done author David Allen preached the freedom of forgetting as the core way GTD would help you be more productive. “There’s no real way to achieve the kind of relaxed control I’m promising if you keep things only in your head,” he advised.
    Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good. · reproof
  • oesn’t mean that many won’t be deemed securities in the future; if airdr
    Token Offerings and the SEC. Want to allow as many people as… | by Brady Neal | LexDAOism | Jan, 2022 | Medium
  • I know two people who have hired people to sit next to them or frequently contact them to keep them on-task
    Milan Cvitkovic
  • The first aspect of this diagram I want to highlight is the complexity and indirection — users are paying for all this messaging, but they're paying for it via this indirect, circuitous route. In many web2 scenarios, they couldn’t pay for messages directly even if they wanted to! This indirection is the cause of the orthogonality I highlighted in the intro to this post.
    Web3: The Rise Of The Aligned Web - by Jon Stokes
  • ’ve admitted you to m
    Reneging Prosocially - LessWrong
  • In this sick and twisted way, the FOMO person crams their life full of activities while not actually being present or appreciative of what’s happening. In their desperate obsession with quality experience, they compensate by accumulating quantity of experience.
    The Fear of Missing Out: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Instagram
  • The market is so powerful that it can arbitrage even our own morality, placing the most dirty and unsavory tasks in the hands of those individuals who are willing to absorb their conscience at lowest cost and effectively hiding it from everyone else.
    Superrationality and DAOs | Ethereum Foundation Blog
  • i and welcome to User Inyerface, a challenging exploration of user interactions and design
    User Inyerface - A worst-practice UI experiment
  • Highlight me with your cursor
    Curius / Onboarding
  • ssessed to determine which skills are and are not mastered
    Is mastery learning an effective approach? (article)
  • he Who is the foundation. Be sure you are building your dream on a strong foundation. The Who in this case, is not every person who you might live within the future. It’s just the people who are going to be involved in the initial purchase of the property.
    Co-buying property with friends
  • Finding “product/market fit” means building a product and connecting with enough customers to make your business viable. When founders talk about achieving product/market fit, they describe it in the same breathless tone as finding true love. Now, I understand why. The first two and a half years of working on my own, I’d spend hundreds of hours executing an idea and see only a few dollars of extra revenue. TinyPilot was product/market fit at first sight. As soon as I published the blog post, I knew. With TinyPilot, it feels like the product drives the business, and I’m just along for the ride.…
    My Third Year as a Solo Developer
  • Highlight me with your cursor
    Curius / Onboarding