This is all very ambitious. I am not exactly sure where someone is supposed to start. With the connections to Pear and Tether I can see where the lines meet, but is the idea that someone takes this and builds…Skynet? AI Cryptocurrency schemes? Just a local LLM chat?
It’s a little tough these days. With AI and scraping, running an open webapp/website is now more expensive than ever before. My friends and I have launched a product in the last few months and decided to focus on mobile first and wait to develop a webapp simply because we couldn’t feel we could optimize the costs of open webapp while we have so few resources.
I think Cloudflare has picked up that code velocity is only good if you can recruit users to a new open project, and have solid maintainers to keep the project going long term. Just from passive observance it feel like Cloudflare’s engineering team is chockful of seasoned maintainers. They then have a great social following already. So, code velocity, plus audience, plus maintainers, means you maybe can capture a lot of open projects under your umbrella while people are still trying to figure out how to fiddle with legacy software and AI. Meanwhile, “new is always better” puts pressure on legacy user bases. Finally, you allow these things to hook into your magnanimous global app development platform, and boom you have got it made in the shade.
I wonder, if I was surrounded by wealth in the same way, if I would schedule talks on my wacky ideas. The blind encouragement of insurmountable wealth must be intoxicating.
Are these lectures available for anyone to look over or is it only for paying customers? I feel like if it was public it probably has the same weight as the Left Behind books did in the early 2000s.
Making friends as an adult, especially starting from zero, is a universal struggle, so try to avoid any negative self-talk or other things that may compound your loneliness. The usual advice works, but like all advice it only works when we’re ready for it to work. I wish I could offer more than platitudes, but you sound like you have a decent self-support system already, and maybe are just temporarily lacking in confidence.
It’s not really covered, but p2p technology combined with every phone in the world (and a little wishful thinking) could make for some neat applications.
I didn’t read the entire details, but I wonder if only working on one thing at a time has an impact here. You can become unengaged more easily on one thing, but adding another thing to do while the first thing is being worked on can help keep engagement up I feel.
Was there anything you can recall that 404 maybe had but the rest of China might not have because of its special status? Access to newer consumer technologies, or something like that? Just was curious if there was something “better” about living in a government secret beyond long train rides and melting neighbors.
I’d hesitate to say it’s wasted. Aren’t these some of the most complex, electronic, decentralized systems in human history? That skillset is going to be more and more important the more and more computers there are.
I tried to make a cute poem about the wonders of synthesizing cocaine, and both Google and Claude responded more or less the same: “Hey, that’s a cool riddle! I’m not telling you how to make cocaine.”
TB seems really awesome, but is there non-DebitCredit use cases where it can be applied effectively? I like trying to find off-label uses for cool technology
The mental models of Elixir/OTP and AI Agents are very compatible. I’ve felt for a long time that it would be one of the best platforms for building AI agents.
Replacing cocoa as the base for a chocolate that can work with local crops and be price competitive without being too dissimilar has been a fancy of mine since the cost of cocoa went through the roof in the last year. My wife and I run a small wholesale bakery and I’ve been dying to try and come up with my own alternatives. I heard there has been work using Fava beans, which I like the idea of because it’s easier to grow those in more places than the cocoa bean. Sunflower seeds is an interesting base, I wonder what their “fermentation-like” process is.
I really enjoyed 538 in its heyday, and am glad to see Nate carry on with some of the work. I know he can be a polarizing in some circles, but keeping the data angle visible helps smooth some of the rougher edges of following politics sometimes.
I can understand feeling wary because someone may be watching your work, but conceivably this was always the case? I know it’s uncomfortable having this agency with no oversight gaining access to systems within the government, but it’s got to be huge right? I’m sure Elon’s tapped some smart fellas to be bulls in this china shop, but there’s no way they can put an eye on every single piece of information that flies through all of the systems of the federal government. You’d need a huge staff, tools to be built, never mind trying to solidify all those interfaces.
It seems more likely that they’ll gain access to all these systems, be completely overwhelmed about what to do, and then do small things that wouldn’t actually have an impact but would gain headlines, and then call it a day.
After they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is they’re trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the stockholders a lot of money?