South Korea and Ukraine are “enhancing cooperation” after North Korea deployed 3,000 troops to Russian training grounds, and will exchange intelligence and expertise.
The world is getting so weirdly tangled.
Any time now we’re going to run into a political multi-ball pinball situation, where you have events ricocheting from bumper to bumper in a chaotic way that gains enough momentum to just keep going by itself.
I’m sure there is some sort of country-equivalent to Dunbar’s number, that is much lower than the one for people given the much added complexity.
If so, soon we are going to run into a level where our monkey brains just can’t process the required levels of intentionality.
Things will start looking random even for those who need to make decisions at state level, even if they have an entire intelligence apparatus at their service, because it becomes harder to assign a probability value to a potential outcome (or trace it back to a cause).
It feels like everything is getting more porous.
I wrote at one point that our brains weren’t web scale, and they definitely are not going to be able to cope with whatever dynamics this engenders.
“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”
– Iain M. Banks, Excession
My last piece on where prediction markets break down made me realize I hadn’t written about outside context problems here yet.
Outside Context Problems are the most interesting situation one can encounter, when considering pure innovation.
TL;DR: if you expect an embryonic prediction market to tell you the result of a highly-politicized event when there are perverse incentives at play, and a significant disparity between amount-at-risk and expected outcome, you are going to have a bad time.
While discussing BlueSky’s custom feeds and composable moderation with a friend, he wondered:
I will need to ponder whether it is viable at scale for millions of users to put in the effort to customize their feeds in a thoughtful way […]
They don’t have to - they only need one person they trust (or are willing to take at face value for a test) to create a feed, or to add a feed to a starter pack.
But more importantly, I realized, any customization someone can do, thoughtful or not, is an improvement. It introduces some delta on the perspective, even while they are within a group, instead of putting them into the monoculture dictated by which news items are more clickbaity and likely to bring ad revenue.
It is the same way with genetics: even small mutations can help diversify the perspective gene pool.
There’s a discussion going on the Topology discord about what systems can be described as peer-to-peer.
I think the whole thing is mostly academic, and too focused on implementation details.
Sure, your particular choice of blockchain might have a peer-to-peer gossip protocol and consensus mechanism, but that’s rather irrelevant if people are mostly using tokens with a freeze authority, isn’t it?
And while Binance Smart Chain might have a P2P protocol for sharing information, that’s entirely irrelevant when it’s completely proof-of-authority and a single institution chooses who gets to validate.
If you are looking to describe a system, describe the kind of things it enables that no other approach does.
That’s something the local-first camp does right, and something other projects should strive for.
Over at BlueSky, Dell Cameron brought up that Facebook’s involvement in crypto, VR, and GenAI aren’t working out because they are only secondary to their main business purpose: surveillance. (link)
I disagreed. Cameron was right in that it failed because their main business is surveillance, but I suspect they screwed it up because it was such a great fit that they got too greedy.
Crypto would have been for them - if Libra had taken off, Meta would have gotten access to their users' transaction information, something they don't necessarily have right now.
They luckily came out the gate too hard and scared everyone off by making it too obvious it was a supranational currency.
— Ricardo J. Méndez (@ricardo.bsky.social) Jun 4, 2024 at 9:08
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Would it have been different if they’d seen it as a technology investment?
Two projects grew on the compost of Facebook’s Diem open source dump: Sui and Aptos. As of June 4, 2024, their combined fully-diluted valuation is about $10 billion. Facebook could have captured that value if they had spun it out from the start, even as a subsidiary where they control most of the token supply.
But Libra was never a tech investment. You don’t get to have an arms-length independent company and share data.
When all you have is surveillance, everything looks like a data trove.
Over breakfast in Costa Brava, back in May 2023, the CEO and founder of an AI startup I know told me that he was worried because for the first time things were progressing too quickly, and he couldn’t tell where they were going.
It made me realize that I was perfectly comfortable with it, because crypto has inoculated me against future shock. There are buses hurtling all around you, so you can’t freak out about it - you need to figure out if any of them is headed your particular way, and what’s the smallest change you can apply to get out of its way.
Anything beyond that is overcorrection, and may get you into a different bus’ path.
Markets are a series of bundling and unbundling, and whomever does the cleanest job, wins.
A clean unbundling makes it easier for others to build upon you, to integrate, to build businesses around you. It’s why people used S3 instead of other more elaborate mechanisms.
A clean bundling makes your whole stack look solid, integrated, like what Apple used to be.
In both cases, you get the advantage of reduced cognitive overhead.
Back in 1999, David Bowie spoke about how music used to be subversive, but had since become merely an information delivery mechanism - it was the Internet that was subversive.
Fast-forward, and the Internet is an information (and disinformation) delivery mechanism - it is crypto and other areas that are subversive.
The thing that is subversive now is the what will make money in a few years.
TL;DR: I don’t see any practical path forward for decentralized stuff other than abandon the pretense of cross-chain value transfer and embrace balkanization, while letting the centralized stuff handle the cross-chain value transfer.