No one's yet made a workable solution for web micropayments, but one aspirational design metaphor I like is an electricity meter.
I don't think about running my dishwasher as a transaction with a price and a receipt: I just do things, and I get a bill at the end of the month.
Prices are (fortunately!) calibrated so that the monthly bill is not usually a big deal. If it seems high, I might dig in: hey, this appliance is wasteful! Or maybe I need to turn off the mining bots or whatever. But default-batched transactions really lowers friction.
It's interesting to think about monetizing web content along these lines: you just read things; small charges accumulate; you pay the bill at the end of the month and maybe change future behavior if it seems too high. You could set a cap if you wanted. Aim for effortlessness.
I was excited to discover today that there's a proposed web standard very much along these lines! webmonetization.org
I don't know if this is the right solution, but *something* like this might help us escape the awful ads model.
A great point about the trouble here: how can price negotiation happen sensibly? The spec punts to browsers, but it’s quite a hard problem for the long tails.
It’s an odd phenomenon: if I tweet anything even slightly crypto-adjacent, my inbox suddenly overflows with grifters—along with thoughtful, well-intentioned people to be sure, but the grifter quotient is quite noticeable. What produces this effect?
In general I really like the variability that comes from having a tweet amplified into different communities.
e.g. sometimes I’ll get retweeted into meditation/philosophy spaces and get lots of great responses with a wonderfully different way of seeing the world
Sometimes Weird Anonymous Twitter will notice something I’ve written, and I’ll get to bear witness to a ton of inscrutable but fascinating conversation reliant on mysterious memes!
As an adjunct to his new map/territory essay, @Meaningness wrote a great blog post introducing his readers to @withorbit and describing how it might help people build meta-rationality. His descriptions of Orbit are in many ways much better than mine! metarationality.com/now-with-orbit
I'm particularly tickled by his description of how the prompt-writing process impacted the prose during the editing process. I had a similar experience with "How to write good prompts." I don't understand this very well yet!
I also really enjoyed his observations about @_awbery_'s use of SRS as part of a program to shift the way they think, a "fundamental reorganization of their worldview and way of thinking and acting."
Sutherland’s ’63 Sketchpad thesis is a great counterpoint to my whining about troubles of doing both research & implementation. His final iteration (incl far-reaching abstraction insights) took ~1 year, including custom hardware! cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UC…
Blackwell and Rodden, who wrote the new preface for the thesis’s ’03 publication, note: "The struggles of developing custom hardware while also exploring far-reaching abstractions are also far removed from current research experiences.” Maybe that should be less frequently true!
(though as I’ve mentioned before the struggles of developing custom software while also exploring far-reaching abstractions are more than I can confidently handle!)
I forget this too often, so a catechism: praise is positive sum, and most people are not nearly as close to the point of diminishing returns as I might imagine!
When I email someone who’s written a popular book/essay/paper, I always subconsciously imagine that email’s going into a black hole, a drop in a bucket full of fan mail. But most of the time I get a reply which makes it obvious that’s not the case!
It’s a weird asymmetry in my theory of mind. For whatever reason, the amount of happiness I imagine a nice note would bring to someone else is less than what I usually feel myself in the same situation!
I view "independent researcher" as a probably transitional-title. If the work is good, it'll probably be better to institutionalize.
Why not start a startup? Doesn't make sense to optimize for growth.
Why not be an academic? Some big misalignments with my adjacent field (HCI).
Crowdfunding has been a surprisingly successful route for sustainable independent research. It's pretty clear that my experiences depend on lots of accumulated career capital, but I suspect other experienced tech people could crowdfund weird work like mine.
Omar's thinking about interfaces is consistently striking and unusual, in the best possible way. I'm delighted to have a chance to support a kindred weirdo independent researcher!
Interesting to see the tensions implied by a funder drive like this one. It's centered around a specific project, and focus/utility surely brings in extra donors… but that emphasizes maintenance and roadmaps ("funding a project") over open-ended research ("funding a person").
FWIW, Omar, if you had a research-centric funding thing up ("fund me to keep working on and writing about my weird ideas"), I'd be a happy sponsor! I'm not a heavy tab user, so TabFS isn't the draw for me—just the ideas. 🔮❤️