🧵 Let's try threat modeling a social platform, shall we?
I'll try to keep this as generic/neutral as possible. My goal is not to make normative statements here, but to lay out some challenges facing any entrant
I'll inevitably miss things, so feel free to chime in if I do
𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀
Using opaque mechanisms to manipulate the information environment from behind the scenes to serve another agenda - "algos", bans on dubious grounds, "deboosting", etc
May be hard, even inside, to know it's happening
Apr 8, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Gnarly stuff. @biancoresearch is much smarter than me, so I assume I'm missing something rather than knowing something he doesn't know, but here's my hypothesis that doesn't involve Fed fear of growth slowdown
The Fed will stop hiking when they've destroyed enough collateral that it starts precipitating embarrassing fire sales (again)
They'll stop tapering when they've realized SRF isn't working - stigmatizing+cumbersome - and they're choking banks with UST supply (again)
Mar 10, 2022 • 40 tweets • 8 min read
It took me a while to come around on AI art. The actual mechanics were and are so alien to me, I had no sense of what improvement would look like, or how long it would take to walk the gradient
Turns out, the answer is "crazy, and in like 5 minutes in the grand scheme of things"
"Atlas carrying the weight of the atom on his shoulders, in the style of art deco" yields these in ~5 minutes
Zoltan Poszar predicting a "Bretton Woods III" based on commodities, driven by need to arb Russian commodities by the only player who can, in his view - China
Echoes thoughts re: USTs potentially being sold for gold from his recent Odd Lots appearance
A while back I drafted a general list of financial risks, heavily borrowing from @georgemagnus1' Red Flags, among other sources
See if you spot any that might apply to our current moment
• what is newly-money-like
• what is off-balance-sheet
• where are there implicit guarantees, or guarantees that aren't well understood
• where is YoY credit growth highest
• what is pledged (and possibly re-pledged/re-hypothecated) as collateral
Feb 13, 2022 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
Been a while since I talked about @RoamResearch. I'm not constantly discovering as many cool new things about as I once was, I'm just _using_ it now. Every day, almost without fail
I just read a blog post about how it's supposedly not easy to know where to put things in Roam, or to find them later. I agree to this extent: the search bar could use some love. But otherwise I don't really understand the complaint
Jan 25, 2022 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
I just want to share some fun stories with you for a second
Come along for a ride with me
Fertilizer is so expensive at the moment due to natgas shortage that people are using human 💩
> However, Butler said that it’s increasingly difficult to source human excrement as “there is more demand than supply for biosolid materials.”
Some things I'm chewing on
Do not fully trust a narrative unless you can see the assumptions underlying it and decide whether you agree with them, or at least detect points where you have uncertainty about the claims being made
Aug 26, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Imagine if people from the 1300s were here on Twitter with the rest of us, talking exactly like present-day Twitter users
"smh 🙄 I'm literally exhausted by all these people who don't understand bad humors"
Consider that the apex of any present-day field of study is likely the top of a ladder that spans from hundreds of years ago to today, and that naïve assumptions about said field might not differ greatly from our medieval poaster's
Aug 6, 2021 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
It might seem like security/privacy people wail and complain at every little thing tech companies do to surveil their users
Be glad they do. Once it starts, software-based surveillance only ever ratchets up
One software update away from global, opaque, unaccountable tyranny
"Oh, but we SUPER pinky-promise to only use it for good"
Okay cool, give me the source code and let me decide if I want to run it then
Jan 2, 2021 • 24 tweets • 10 min read
I was looking forward to this episode with @profplum99 on @ErikSTownsend's new Smarter Markets podcast, and they delivered big time!
The story many are familiar with goes like this: because BlackRock and Vanguard are so dominant in the asset "management" space, they can charge low fees but make it up on volume
This is true, and leads to further consolidation as investors focus more and more on fees
The ideal social media network for me would eliminate or significantly reduce the game of positioning yourself above others as if you were at the pinnacle of knowledge/skill in something
It would be built in - by virtue of you being here, you're on my level & we eschew the game
An illustration using first impressions of COVID:
Level 0: COVID is just the flu because that's the only mental box I have for it
Level 1: Experts told me COVID is bad
Level 2: eXpOnEnTiAL GrOwTh
Level 3: We know ~nothing, maximal caution until we know something, then reevaluate
1st
