🍁

In Part 1, we established what motives a potential thing running our simulation could have from a universe-sized perspective. We mentioned a thing could be running many simulations, like jars on a shelf. Assuming there was a purpose of running multiple simulations, what could the thing be solving for? I would assume the thing had initially run simulations that resulted in fancy arrangements of planetary matter, and was awed at the results, but one thing-day a specific simulation developed something more interesting than it had ever seen before: arrangements of conscious matter. This…

It’s bleak and rainy outside. I woke up earlier than usual this morning, and even before I saw what it looked like outside, my insides matched. So it’s the perfect day to write a rage piece against the bewildering behavior of what I can only describe as techno-conservatism, whose followers seem to absolutely loathe any sort of movement or innovation in the space. Have you seen the comment threads in Hacker News on articles about Signal’s new crypto payments feature? Every single one of them a lambast. Common phrases include scam, pump and dump, no one asked for this, why not use Stripe, why,…

Listed is a platform where writers and non-writers alike share what we call a “public journal.” Here, authors don’t market-test their posts. They don’t attempt to cater to the maximal audience. They don’t write to go viral. They write for its own sake. And this, to us, is the greatest and truest form of writing. We’ve been working hard on a new vision for Listed. It’s everything you’ve come to love and know, but with an elegant aesthetic overhaul worthy of every word you write. We hope you'll fall in love with it the way we have, and that you’ll enjoy writing and publishing to Listed now…

Have you ever heard Naval speak? He’s been on various podcasts, like Joe Rogan’s and Tim Ferris’. He oozes eloquence. Every sentence he speaks is brand new. Every analogy and metaphor a drop of revelation. I’m not sure if prophets are still made today in the post-Information Age, but he’s one for the ages. It’s not that he’ll just drop one-off quotables during the course of an interview. No—every sentence he speaks is something that twists your mind. Wow, you think—I didn’t know you could do that with the English language, with such few words. How does he do it? This topic intrigues me…

With all the perpetual hype around cryptocurrencies and recent hype around non-fungible tokens, it can be easy to forget just how uncommon rarity is. Try this exercise: Look around you, or outside your window, and point to any object and ask, “is this rare?” The answer will almost certainly 100% be “No.” The tree outside my house — not rare. The bushes by the trees — unique, but not rare. The brick my house is made of — not rare. The gravel on the road — not rare. The ceramic my coffee cup is made of — not rare. The lightbulbs embedded into my ceiling — not rare. The chair I’m sitting on —…

If you haven’t been following lately, there’s a newly relevant form of digital scarcity called NFTs that are selling for thousands of dollars, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars. NFTs are rare collectibles, whether they be digital artworks, music, memes, or domains. In most cases NFTs are just a smart contract application built on top of Ethereum, where each collectible series is its own smart contract. Hashmasks are one example. There are a total of 16,384 unique digital items, and each item is represented as an address on the Ethereum blockchain. Onlookers are incredulous at…

According to Hacker News, Bitcoin has many problems, and therefore, is not merit-worthy: “Transactions are slow and expensive" "It lacks a lot of the controls that traditional banks have for good reasons, so fraud becomes harder to tackle” “I just wanted internet money, not a speculative financial instrument.” "This volatility is why it will never be a useful currency.” By this same logic, email should also not have succeeded: Email is slow, heavy, and uses largely outdated technologies It’s nearly impossible to make email private/encrypted Email, as software, is largely impossible to…

Imagine a natural road spontaneously forms between point A and point B, and that as a consequence of this road, individuals suddenly wake up to the importance of point B, and of traveling there. Companies had first ignored point B altogether, but because the overwhelming majority of individuals now travel this road, these companies must now begin meeting individuals where they are: at point B. If they don’t, they will perish. But then comes along a wonderful invention: a road between point A and point B, but built on Conveyer Belt technology by the iCompany. Anyone traveling on the iRoad…

A friend of mine, whose intellectual opinion I admire, recently told me that he believes the coronavirus is a hoax. Completely fictional. Doesn’t even exist. I said, lolwut? That this virus could be completely fabricated had never remotely crossed my mind to be in the realm of possibility. But, this friend of mine had been right about other complex topics in the past. So I lent him my ear. The idea is that the virus, and the subsequent lockdown, is cementing power into the hands of a few organizations and screwing over poor people and small businesses (which, objectively, I suppose it is).…

If a friend describes to you some weird random physical pain they’re experiencing, probably the best thing you can say to them is, “you’ll be fine.” It’ll pass. In most cases this ends up being true. But imagine making a “spiritual” symptom checker website where the result for every input is “you’ll be fine” (rather than the present “you have cancer” minefield). You’d get harassed and bullied mercilessly for reckless endangerment. The difference between the friend and the internet is that on the internet, everyone thinks you’re talking to them. I’m not. I think a valid response to…

Quantum is the proof that we’re in a simulation. That there is a dimension beyond our own, by which our own physical rules and laws do not operate. Entangled particles bypass the light speed limitation because their state is reconciled externally. We only see the resulting particle flips. Not the computation, like what other particles to affect in the global counter. If a hundred-trillion light year wide simulation existed on a hard drive, the simulated particles are very far apart, but only inches apart on the physical drive. Far when simulated, flat when stored. Why would a thing want to…

2019 has been a strange year. In April, I underwent a retrospectively unnecessary surgery that caused me to suffer a level of physical and emotional pain, lasting more than six months, than I had ever experienced before. I went from being unrelentingly focused and productive, to not being able to summon the will to write a single line of code. I don’t want to give this excruciating experience any credit for where I have ended up today, so I will treat the resulting occurrences as purely incidental: Productivity, coding, and burnout For almost a three month period, Standard Notes sat…

An idea is a story. A story about how the world could be. Great ideas are often described as having an almost ethereal source. Beyond the mind—as if the mind were a receiver, and not a generator. Some people think, I’m not an ideas person. They just don’t come to me. But, and apparently like every other damned thing in this world, ideas appear to be nothing more than stories. They fictionalize the present, and imagine what an alternative could look like. You don’t have an idea for an app, or a website, or a service—you imagine a world in which that service existed. You create a story about…

At one point, lack of freedom feels like a lack of air. It's total suffocation. But at another point, freedom becomes like air. It's something you notice only in its absence. I've become wealthy recently—a gazillionaire of time. I wake and sleep as I please, and roam space with no one to appease. Employed me, a few years ago, would fantasize almost erotically about the freedom to do one's own thing and build one's own product and answer to no one but one's own self. But like a suffocating human who at a point wishes for nothing more than air, and would be eternally grateful to receive it,…

I read some time ago from a recently accomplished author that the best way to write interesting things is to do interesting things. A writer trapped in a white box for several months will, after having gone completely insane, have absolutely nothing more to write about. If you don't do interesting things, you won't have interesting things to say. While not a white box, trapping yourself in the same confines day-to-day will not yield much in the way of creativity. If you want to have interesting writing, you need to have interesting thoughts. And I've found that my brain's churning runs at…