v_london

Hey Eltonlin, this sounds really cool and I hope you can make an impact in improving access to education. Some time ago I wrote a blog post titled "Professors as Creators" which discusses the impact the Creator Economy could have on education - how in other fields (e.g. writing and videos) creators are increasingly leaving large organisations like newspapers and film studios to create content on their own using platforms such as Substack and YouTube, and how this could impact education next. I think you might like it as your platform designed around these ideas.

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/professors-as-creators-h...

I'll be interested to see how the longevity of e-sports pans out. Most games will be woefully outdated after a decade: will the audience move to the next big game, or stay playing the old games? Or will video games eventually plateau to a point where significant technological advancements are no longer made?

This year saw a time where Chess became the top trending app on the App Store. The strength of traditional sports and games is their timelessness - can e-sports ever match that?

Hi, I'm the author of the blog post. Just wanted to say, I would be very interested in reading more about the experiments you ran on getting GPT-4 to describe its plans. GPT-3's explanations were confidently incorrect, as usual.

Hi all, today I'm launching a side-project I've been working on for a while: Web3 Readers' Club. I think the internet lacks spaces for discussion: most sites operate in the form of public posts where the goal is to get you post as much visibility and attention as possible. I think this creates a lot of toxicity as people are incentivised to write "hot takes" that capture the most attention. This is especially true for crypto and Web3, where people have a monetary incentive to shill projects they bought into.

Web3 Readers' Club tries to solve this problem by building around semi-private group chats. This makes it easy to discuss topics in small groups, without the need to perform for a large audience.

We're just starting out so for now this is just an experiment, but we'll see where it goes.

I saw lots of people criticizing PG's essay, but I really liked it. Free will and agency are interesting philosophical topics to wonder, even if they don't hold much practical value.

I think there's something to comparing education (especially when delivered remotely) to YouTube. There's a huge variance between the teaching skills of teachers, just as there is variance between how entertaining YouTubers are. The difference is, the best teachers get paid the same as average ones, while nobody knows the name of an average creator.

I wrote briefly about the topic in a blog post, titled "Professors as Creators". It explores the idea briefly, and how treating teachers as "creators" could add value not just to remote learning, but to in-person lessons as well. https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/professors-as-creators-h...

Hey crawfordcomeaux, I noticed you've shared some interesting ideas about communities in Hacker News! I wonder if you have an opinion on whether remote working will change where and how people choose to live?

Cities still have a lot going for them by providing the best access to services (especially after covid is over), but one thing I see happening in the future is the establishment of "remote working villages" in smaller towns. Price and quality of housing will be the main selling point, but they'd also have access to nature and a good sense of community (in fact the projects could be self-organised and funded by the residents if you find the right people).

This concept is important to the way I think about crypto. It feels like a war between two elites (TradFi vs Crypto insiders and VCs), if crypto wins it it will not "democratize finance" when 90% of all Bitcoins have been mined in the first decade of the project's lifespan.

(This is not an attack against crypto in general, there are ways to design a cryptocurrency so it's equal to all participants regardless of the time they buy in, it's just that they fail to gain adoption because of a lack of VC funding and support from the crypto community, as neither can make a quick buck out of it)

Thanks for the great article! I wished the section on DeFi addressed the biggest elephant in the room, overcollateralization. A DeFi borrower always needs to lock in more assets as collateral than what they are borrowing, thus defeating the whole purpose for taking a loan aside from financial speculation. And there's no real way to solve it: all mechanisms I've heard of either try to replicate some form of background checks on borrowers (not decentralised, and uses the real world), or claim to use real-world assets as NFT collateral (once again, uses the real world). Thus I can't see a way for DeFi loans to ever be used for mortgages and other loans regular people actually need.

Of course DeFi is more than just loans and borrowing, but that's an aspect that's constantly promoted by evangelists so I think it's an important point to mention.

Pretty interesting. A lot of people here are focusing on permanence, but for me the main difference on addressing by content vs by host name is the loss of authorship it opens up for the web. Since a research paper of essay is referred to by its hash, the owner effectively gives away all control of the work when it's first published. There will be no editing, no taking down unwanted work, and no real way to build an interactive website that allows dynamic linking to other materials by the author.

It's interesting how the same people promoting the "creator economy" also tend to promote the cryptocurrency space and IPFS without an ounce of self-awareness. IPFS sounds awful for creators of all kinds in the same way as BitTorrent was awful for artists. I can definitely see a use case for IPFS as a file storage for trustless systems such as smart contracts, which are designed as immutable, trustless systems.

Bizarrely, I'm seeing recruiters using this on LinkedIn.

Holding university entrance exams earlier seems like a recipe for disaster that would hurt disadvantaged students the most. This may be just my experience, but the older you get, the more time you get to catch up with students from better families. Coming from a working class background, I only started to study actively in high school (the culture I grew up in discouraged and actively mocked boys who read books or liked maths) which means that had the entrance exam be held at the beginning of high school, I would not have done as well as I did at the ned of high school.

The problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society to their expected rank. One of the jobs of the elite schools is to prop us these average kids and to make them seem smart to outsiders: anyone who has studied in an "elite" university has a story about the rich kids who spend their days partying, intending to only pass the easiest classes in the school because that's all they need - their parents have already arranged an entry-level job for them.

The main point of fragility I see with Apple that their profits mostly come from a relatively small group of people who live on the Apple ecosystem. Apple may have many product lines, but these products and services are mostly sold to the same group of people. If quality starts to degrade across the product line, or another company releases a killer product that's incompatible with the iWares, it's not inconceivable that Apple would start losing their loyal customers, thus lowering sales in all categories.

I don't see this happening in the near future since arguably Apple has never made better products than today, but you must understand that most of Apple's growth prospects come from them selling more wares to their existing customers than from Apple winning over new customers. In fact, I recently changed to an iPhone from Android, and the change was quite painful. The Apple store even called me back after sending out the order, wondering if me buying an iPhone as a new customer was a mistake (seems like that doesn't happen very often).

> Entire social graph, data store, and all relationships and actions are public-ledgered, fully transparent, and available for download, archiving, and re-homing.

This sounds like a privacy disaster. I wouldn't want data mining companies to find out about who I'm connected to. In my opinion, connections should be private to anyone but yourself (which is probably going to be hard to perform in a distributed manner).

These are some very good points. For me the biggest problem with existing social networks is how difficult it is to get to know new people through the applications. Despite us spending more time online than being present on the physical world (this is probably also a problem, but one for another time), we get remarkably little real social interaction out of these hours spent.

Good news is that the seeds of better social do exist. I'm trying to set up one of them, http://www.reason.so/ which will match people with similar interests into small (3-10 people) group chats with the intention of creating small communities where it's easy to discuss things you find interesting semi-privately (i.e. somewhere between a public Twitter thread and a private group message). By keeping the chats small you also get rid of clickbait, astroturfers and "thought leaders" who only want to build an audience instead of actually interacting with other people.

The biggest problem with setting up a social network like Reason is probably monetarisation. People just aren't ready to pay for social media when Facebook, Clubhouse and co are free.

This is literally what King Leopold II of Belgium did in Congo.

Hey, I'm currently building a website that I think would fit well with what you're looking for. It's called Reason, and it's designed to help find small (3-10 users per chat or so) group chats about the topics you're interested in. I started working on this specifically because the casual, small places to meet like-minded people on the internet have kind of disappeared. http://www.reason.so/

This is super interesting and something I've been thinking of for some time. As an engineer who can clearly do my job just as well remotely as in person, why should I pay high rent and live in cramped flat when there are rural mansions with acres of land that cost less?

The big difference is community, of course. The city has my friends, living alone away from everyone else would be lonely. But new communities can be built. I've recently started to realise how strange it is that in the West, we don't build new cities or towns any more. What's stopping a small group of engineers (perhaps backed by VCs) from buying a big plot of land a few hours of drive away from London / NYC / SF and building a small village with large houses and a community centre? Water and electricity would be difficult for sure, but I'm sure its not an unsolvable problem.

Of course, new communities like this couldn't just house engineers and other wealthy folks, but you would need health services, plumbers, delivery workers and so on. But I think it's strange that nobody is even thinking of something like this as an option. Festivals like Burning Man and the ubiquity of hiking as a hobby show that there is a need of better connection to nature amongst people who live in big cities.

Hey, since we're on the topic of better social networking, I wonder if a side project I've been working on for the past few months might be of interest to you. The website, Reason, is an app for helping people connect with others with similar interests through group chats. It's kind of like Meetups, but online and designed for people who would like to find semi-regular groups of friends and acquaintances to chat about some specific topic.

https://www.reason.so/

Stock prices are absolutely inflated, and as a small-scale investor I'm scared.

However, I'm not pulling out because realistically, there's no other asset that's safer in the long run. Interest rates are close to zero so returns in bonds are low, inflation will eat away money held in cash deposits and don't even get me started on cryptocurrency, rare sneakers or other "alternative investments". I started investing in stocks in 2017, even then people were warning that we were in a bubble that was bound to burst at some point. Not investing would have missed me several years of above-average returns.

But today, there seems to be a bubble on everything after all the money printing. So I'll keep investing in good, underhyped and stable companies and try to weather whatever storm, good or bad, will come in the next years.

Problem with government-run alcohol shops is how they reduce available selection of drinks. I'm an avid whisky drinker (though in moderation of course), and being able to buy rarer bottles from specialist shops adds a lot to the experience. It also helps small producers since they don't have to negotiate with a behemoth of a stockist (imagine if the only way to sell whisky would be to negotiate a deal with the state to stock the entire UK's alcohol shops). The ABV limit has also caused trouble in the beer industry where types of beers that require higher ABV aren't produced.

I think the minimum pricing law of Scotland is the way to go when regulating alcohol. When I was living there, the system seemed to work well and incentivised buying higher quality drinks as well. I guess the problem is populist politicians who could easily brand it as limiting poor people's drinking, instead of posh ones.

I think your observations are accurate. I've also noticed the problem, and that private-ish group conversations like WhatsApp groups and small Discord servers are so much better than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and co. The only problem is discoverability -- because groups like these are private, it's very hard to discover the ones you'd like to join.

I'm currently working on an early-stage startup on this space, and we're specifically trying to solve the discoverability problem while keeping the group chats themselves small and private (or at least private enough). Do you think you could see yourself using something like this?

Do you feel this way about all kinds of online interactions? Or are Zoom calls or group chats better than, lets say, your Twitter feed or Reddit threads?

This is very interesting and insightful. I 100% agree with the notion that small communities require an organiser to keep things going.

I personally believe social media can be a positive force in building better human connections online. Because I think none of the existing platforms are optimising for this (better connections and discussions), I've been working on it myself. I believe group chats with a small circle of friends are the rare form of social media that actually works well today, so we're trying to build something where you could be connected to group chats with people you may not know in advance. In this way, the social media app would act as the "organiser" of these micro-communities, which would hopefully grow into real friendships.

Thoughts? We're looking to launch a landing page next month, and the app itself (which will run on the web browser) in a couple months.

It's a law that's either written by media lobbyists or people unfamiliar with technology. Potentially both at the same time.

If the news organisations want people to pay for news, they can change to a subscription model and put their content behind a pay wall. Many companies already to this: I myself pay over a hundred pounds a year for the Economist for their excellent reporting. The old establishment needs to understand they're not special, and if they want people to pay for news they need to provide content that's worth paying for, just like everyone else.

I believe the biggest problem is virality. What you see is determined by what captured the attention of other users, or what algorithms think would keep you on the site so they can serve more ads to your hungry eyeballs. As it turns out, divisive and emotional content (whether it's politics, pop culture flame wars or YouTube drama) is great at capturing that attention.

It's a problem I've recognized, and we're currently working on a new kind of social network that aims to promote better discussion on the internet. One of our methods is removing the concept of "virality" and having the discussions happen in small groups instead of on public forums. After all, your group chats with friends still have good discussions, that's what we're trying to replicate on a wider scale. We don't yet have a website to show unfortunately :(