Great quote: “The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures”.

I would add: it’s not just data structures, but information representations that expose those data structures in an intuitive way.

Intuitive how?

In that the graphical representation and interactive controls provide a transparent interface to the underlying data structure, where:

- its graphical representation easily communicates that data structure’s current state, and

- its interactive controls allow for a wide range of operations for manipulating the data structure’s state

This idea of Excel not being widely used as a calculation tool, but a way to lay out lists and tables, seems to suggest that most people see software first as a medium, then a tool, secondarily.

A medium lets you shape information into specific representations.

Different representations help you externalize information in a different ways that facilitate certain styles of thinking:

A Kanban board lets you visualize tasks in a left to right fashion that represents the status of a task, so you can visually grok progress. The columns let you see how “full” your workload is, how congested your pipelines are.

A diagram lets you see relationships between parts of a system, or between concepts, more easily. Without which, you would struggle to think non-linearly.

A table lets you think of your data in two dimensions.

Yes, some of that data could be quantitative in nature, and so this medium lends itself well to calculation, aggregation, and charting.

But before you can manipulate data, you first need to be able to think about that data.

That’s why spreadsheets still feel more natural to use than SQL reporting tools: those tools conspicuously lack a medium for which data can be represented as useful information first and foremost.


What constitutes a medium for information, as opposed to a more prosaic data manipulation tool?

I think of it like this: a tool needs to operate on a medium.

A medium is a graphical representation of some data, which means said data needs to be able to be visualized from the get go.

The tool, then, comes later, to directly manipulate that visualization in a way that shapes that visualization into a desired state.

Early productivity software that succeeded got this basic principle: desktop publishing, DAWs, photo editing tools, and non-linear video editing tools.

A pencil operates on pieces of paper.

An eyedropper on color.

A knife on a video reel.

A design principle: When designing productivity software, conceptualize it as a medium first and foremost, and a tool secondarily.

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.

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.

Trying out the wombo dream app, ended up generating some interesting images! Aurora over snowy hills

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.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1463085177215852549

And then they will say “well since you can’t produce evidence for X, I shall believe in the inverse of X”

They’ve gone one full circle and invented the null hypothesis

Without, of course, the means or the desire to falsify said hypothesis

But with every desire to confirm it

Cynical optimism is like the barbell strategy here

Cynicism to protect short term downside (negative black swans)

Optimism to capture long term upside (positive black swans)

https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1461212481020301315

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

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.

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/astralwave/status/1458886678731534343

Before COVID, it was easy to be laissez-faire about gain of function research.

Before Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the atomic bomb.

Before Chernobyl, nuclear power.

Before Tahrir Square, social media.

Before Silk Road, Bitcoin.

Before BitConnect, ICOs.

This is definitely something I’ve observed in tech startups.

Startups have so much leverage thanks to the power of software, and the presently high familiarity & penetration of mobile computing + the Web.

But most of this leverage is heavily misapplied & constrained by Capital.

https://twitter.com/solarpunk_girl/status/1458197852501458953

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?

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.

@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.

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.

https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1444800164602933250

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/bbcnews/status/1444885774541934599

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.

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.

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).

@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.

https://twitter.com/astralwave/status/1293092163056816130

@johncutlefish @jimhead @intercom What people call roadmaps is like a list of directions. Step 1 do this. Step 2 do that.

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.

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.

This looks more like @figmadesign

“A network of questions we want to answer” – a more nuanced and transparent strategy, and a more accurate roadmap than what most people call roadmaps.

A roadmap is a diagram which shows a network of roads (and not necessarily even the path through them).

https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1292235154988003328

A literal roadmap looks like this.

(No, that’s not a screenshot of Google Calendar)

What a striking similarity between wealth management & product development:

- they’re explore/exploit problems

- practitioners divided between qual/quant, micro/macro

- both have hobbyist & professional subcultures driven by divisive cult-like personalities

- markets decide A general principle which holds true for both:

https://twitter.com/fiskantes/status/1289884180633882624?s=21

https://t.co/HvEqpViJtx

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.