This newsletter is getting rebooted as my personal lab notebook, a place to post trail markers as I continue to navigate the idea maze around AI, malleable computing, tools for thought, and decentralized protocols. | Continue reading
Subconscious started with an idea: to amplify intelligence using a worldwide decentralized knowledge graph. In 2022, we raised a seed and started building. Today we’re sharing difficult news. Subconscious will be winding down active operations. I’m proud of what our team built on … | Continue reading
What makes software decentralizable? Immutable data, universal IDs, user-controlled keys. | Continue reading
Create good problems to have. You want to build easy things with obvious shortcomings that create problems at scale. This may seem counterintuitive, may even seem… immoral, but it works. It’s a corellary to Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolv … | Continue reading
Three ways to guarantee user-owned data | Continue reading
Max Weber says there are three ways power gets organized at scale: rizz, rulers, and rules. | Continue reading
Seven thoughts on ritual | Continue reading
LLMs are Artificial Intuition, not Artificial Intelligence. I believe this is a meaningful analogy. First, this paper suggests LLMs simulate reasoning by reaching for pre-baked reasoning-like behavior in their training data, rather than baking it from scratch: | Continue reading
Many of the foundational computing projects started with a provocation… “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960) J.C.R. Licklider’s provocation transforms our vision of computers from calculators to extensions of the self. “Augmenting human intellect” (1962) | Continue reading
I gave a talk about Noosphere Protocol at the Summer of Protocols program. Here’s a teaser. I go wide. We cover Noosphere, tools for thought, how the web centralized, the dream of collective intelligence, and how we might recover it with decentralized protocols. | Continue reading
Hierarchies evolve from the lowest level up—from the pieces to the whole, from cell to organ to organism, from individual to team, from actual production to management of production. Early farmers decided to come together and form cities for self-protection and for making trade m … | Continue reading
What genetic algorithms can tell us about tools for thought | Continue reading
Building a decentralized shared mind | Continue reading
Continued existence of complex interactive systems depend upon preventing the maximization of any variable. (Gregory Bateson quoting W. Ross Ashby) Living systems are perhaps best characterized as systems that dynamically avoid attractors. (Chris Langton) | Continue reading
You're trying too hard. Stop trying and build feedback loops instead. | Continue reading
The unreasonable effectiveness of getting oriented | Continue reading
Researchers have discovered 300,000 year old use of symbols. Homo naledi, an archaic human species, carved symbols onto the cave walls where they buried their dead, 100,000 years before the first modern humans did. | Continue reading
Own your ID, own your content, own your contacts. | Continue reading
A semi-formal way to think about software | Continue reading
...even when you layer custody on top. | Continue reading
The dead internet theory wasn't wrong, just early. Here's what to do next. | Continue reading