🪄 Passionate about tools for augmenting human ingenuity. 💻 Self-taught TypeScript dev & UXer. 🛠️ Bootstrapping something new
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Jan 20, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
NFTs (from a creator perspective) are interesting, because they fill a niche between “fine art” and “popular media”, similar to the niche filled by limited edition action figures, signed movie posters, or inkjet prints (pop art)
mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/e…
They let what was known as “commercial artists” or media creators (i.e. illustrators, animators, authors, game designers) acquire patronage through a Fine Art-esque model,
It’s unprecedented in that “commercial art” used to be tied to sale of physical media, not patronage.
Dec 13, 2021 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
The “cryptocurrencies are ponzu sauce” people are hilarious. I wonder if they think national currencies have inherent value, and that stocks trade at their book value.
I wonder if they know that “speculation” isn’t a bad thing, but is how the future gets built.
Without speculative fiction, speculative labor, and speculative investing, no one would be there to dream up the future, build it, and fund it.
Nov 24, 2021 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
Trying out the wombo dream app, ended up generating some interesting images!
Aurora over snowy hills
Nov 23, 2021 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Classic sign of someone who can’t think straight: you tell them something, and they ask, “is there any evidence for X”, as if science exists to confirm evidence instead of falsify hypotheses.
Works in nascent fields like crypto where going full 🦍 degen might lead to total ruin, but total cynicism will cause you to miss out on gains or sentiment shifts
The key is: Even if you don’t agree with the direction things are developing, you can bet against your beliefs
Nov 17, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Say anything critical about the externalities of a certain group’s actions, and you’ll be labeled an X-phobe, where X is said group.
Your reputation will be tarnished as an out-group heretic, as if that matters, since filter bubbles have splintered into ever-so-small pieces.
The irony is that the group doesn’t realize only an out-group member can comment on externalities.
If you “cancel” voices external to your filter bubble (well, filter them out), maybe you can feel psychologically safe 🙉 in thinking your actions are completely moral.
Nov 16, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
DAOs make it possible to coordinate globally, like an Internet-native limited-liability partnership.
But it seems to be incomplete: right now it depends on good faith & trust. What it’s lacking are legal concepts (liability, partnership, fiduciary duties, ownership)
If smart contracts execute on a “runtime”, legal contracts execute on a jurisdiction.
The key here is that the jurisdictions are *separate* from the contracts.
Aragon Courts are a good start.
Nov 11, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
DAOs need their “Silk Road” moment.
Will be good to establish baseline expectations for the naïvely optimistic, as well as the ignorant.
Every new technology faces a reckoning, when society begins to understand its potential danger.
Not talking about financial leverage here, of course, but intellectual leverage.
What a small insight & a little code can do to change lives at a large scale.
But if it doesn’t fit into the OKR & investment thesis, good luck trying to do it.
Procrustean Bed?
Nov 9, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This “Gen Z is special” nonsense reminds me of the “Millennials are special” nonsense that I’d come across while growing up. Generational categories are arbitrary at best.
Every generation seems rebellious, naïve, “creative” etc when in fact it is just a product of youth.
So useless is the discourse about the “generations”, that you could look up stories about previous “generations”, when they were younger, and those descriptors would equally apply to the youth of today.
Nov 2, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
@m1guelpf Totally. What smart contracts let us do is the “adjacent possible” from Bitcoin and so everything feels like novel mutations that haven’t found their footing yet. Give it time and problems will emerge for which these technologies will be a perfect fit.
@m1guelpf “Paradigm shift” is a bit of a hopeful prediction though, I don’t think technological shifts happen so linearly and can be predicted. We only see these shifts in hindsight.
Before iPhone native apps gained ground, for instance, everyone thought HTML5 apps would be the future.
Oct 4, 2021 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
My take is that religion’s role is to provide the necessary metaphors in order for individuals to navigate complex situations where being “good” isn’t clear.
We now have science to help us navigate these complex situations, but what is considered “good” is still up for debate.
Each deity worshipped functions as a vehicle through which these metaphors are told.
Religions started out with tales featuring many deities. This has trended downwards, from polytheism to monotheism to religions without deity figures, to pop culture references, to memes.
Oct 4, 2021 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
It’s going to be more and more difficult for nation states to continue imposing taxes on their citizens, as competition for tax havens heat up, and as leaks like this erode public trust.
Nation states that rely on taxation to finance operations will eventually be outcompeted.
Nations don’t reproduce, of course, unlike living things, but their influence is memetic and their ability to coerce citizens is a function of their ability to coerce the wealthiest of the world.
And increasingly, both are at historically low numbers.
Oct 2, 2021 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
Why is “taste” in something commonly framed as a linear scale?
i.e. “good taste”, “poor taste”
It’s a framing that I personally struggle with, for lack of a more fitting frame.
For example, you liked a show or a restaurant that has poor reviews. Do you have poor taste?
There is definitely a “better” ↔ “worse” dimension to taste, but perhaps a differrent dimension involves the person’s affinity to different tastes.
The people who didn’t like it are clearly more discerning than you about various aspects that you didn’t care about.
Jun 22, 2021 • 32 tweets • 6 min read
Perhaps the reason why interoperability is often more of a pipe dream (literally, as you pipe data manually from one API to another) than reality, is that it’s hard to truly capture value from a standard or a protocol. It’s easier to extract value from a platform or an app.
We see this in crypto. Ethereum, as a platform, will always be worth more than Polygon, Polkadot, or Chainlink.
We also see this with the web, where standards & protocols are subsidized by platform owners (Google, Apple, Microsoft).
Oct 9, 2020 • 5 tweets • 5 min read
@johncutlefish@jimhead@intercom Perhaps, replacing a list of directions set in stone, with an actual map? With all the roads and ways to get around?
Imagine if you loaded up Google Maps and put in your destination, and all you saw was a list of directions. Nothing else.
But the list of directions aren’t a map. They’re meant to be overlaid atop a map to make any sense.
Where is the actual map? Most companies don’t have them or even the tools to make one.
Oct 9, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
People like to demo multiplayer work tech to show small groups of people doing synchronous work together.
But the value of multiplayer spaces is allowing big groups of people to collaborate asynchronously on an ever-evolving artifact. oculus.com/experiences/qu…
With the ability to jump in and out. Bursts of activity.
Occasionally, collaborators overlap resulting in momentary synchronous collaboration.
An async model with smart synchronous conflict resolution means you get Git without merge conflicts.
Having a persistent model of a network of beliefs > isolated hypotheses.
Network of beliefs helps you do this: 1. When A is true, B will be true.
2. When B is true, C is true 75% of the time.
3. A is true, so C is most likely true.
When things change, such as when A is now false, you are able to update your beliefs and probably no longer want to bet on C anymore.
But hypothesis testing can only tell you C is true.
May 3, 2020 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
There seems to be 3 primary trends in this new breed of productivity tools:
(Thread)
💎Luxury apps are the favorite of the time-poor, cash-rich, attention-deficit multitaskers who need to get to Inbox Zero or they will drown in info overload and can’t “get shit done” anymore.
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