TrevorAustin

I’ve been in the same boat for a long time, and still haven’t seen an application that’s compelling. But I think I’m starting to warm to the ecosystem, despite all the obvious silliness, so let me run my thinking by you to see if it’s crazy:

Blockchains don’t really let you do anything useful that you couldn’t do before. But they make some things much easier and more accessible, by a big enough margin that they unlock some kinds of broad experimentation that weren’t really feasible before.

Take what I assume will eventually be a category-defining use case, “Facebook, but owned and governed by its users.” With some imaginative lawyering, you could build that in a durable way today. But it would take capital and know-how most kids in dorm rooms don’t have access to. It’s like how the launch of AWS didn’t let you do anything that was _impossible_ to build with on-premise hardware, but it unlocked a lot of innovation anyway.

Right now Ethereum is a very shitty version of Lambda plus DynamoDB, but with some interesting primitives around payment, ownership, and governance baked in. I actually have very little faith in the Ethereum roadmap given some dabbling I did in it a few years ago, but there are competing protocols with much much better performance and developer ergonomics, so they’ll either catch up or get replaced like a bad operating system.

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You'll see that sometimes too with Greek organizations at colleges.

I argued at the time the the "corporate death penalty" was the only appropriate remedy for the Equifax breach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_dissolution

"Dissolve the organization and start over from scratch" is an under-used solution in American life, even in the private sector.

Apparently Camden, NJ did a version of this in 2013 with a fair amount of success: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/how-camde...

Some very smart friends of mine do this with airplanes to find leaks in natural gas plants and pipelines: http://kairosaerospace.com/

It became in-game purchases. Shareware was v1 of the model, and a very blunt instrument. It's evolved into free-to-play with paid upgrades, which is very much alive.

It's very useful to read Girard, not least to steel yourself against the influences of directly Girard-inspired social networks. But I'm increasingly seeing this idea that any time someone powerful or influential is held accountable for something they're being made a Girardian scapegoat, and it's ridiculous. It's becoming a myth people tell themselves when they don't want to take ownership of the ways they've messed up. "Oh I haven't really done anything wrong, I'm just being made a scapegoat to resolve the mimetic violence of an unthinking mob. Really, I'm the victim here."

A data science consultancy I used to work at did box office predictions for a major movie studio, and the fanciest techniques you could dream up gave only a slight lift over the https://www.hsx.com/ prediction market, which provided the overwhelming majority of the model's predictive power.

Probably not, given that he abandoned the app and works at Stripe now.

I really liked the added wrinkle in Blade Runner 2049 where replicants have to periodically prove that they're sufficiently robotic.

There are a number of structural things you can do to push back on the long-run capture of parties and therefore the political process. None of them play super well with party-list proportional representation, but here's what people should be thinking about, especially in places with party primaries:

- Require party primaries to be as open and competitive as general elections. This is the traditional American approach, and for all of its own the failure modes that we've seen since 2013, you can't say that the problem has been beigeness enforced by party elites. Ask Eric Cantor, Jeb Bush, and Joe Crowley about that.

- Replace party primaries for single-member districts altogether, with open primaries with STV or approval voting. That gives even more room for policy entrepreneurs whose appeal may cut across existing party power bases.

- Make heavier use of Sortition and/or policy juries, delegating decisions to randomly-selected deliberative bodies. That gives you lots of democratic legitimacy in a way that's very hard to capture. Tellingly, this approach is already used for the State's most dangerous powers around criminal punishment.

Policy juries are an under-used decision procedure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_jury

You could also have one body of the legislature (the US Senate? The House of Lords?) selected by Sortition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

My bad, I totally misread something and posted too quickly

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Tim Wu makes the case for breaking up tech giants, and FB specifically, at book length

More than a quarter of Americans, and half of young people, report having deleted the flagship Facebook app from their phones in the wake of these scandals. (https://www.recode.net/2018/9/5/17824116/delete-facebook-mar...) The losses are offset in their topline numbers by growth in the developing world, but that's a lagging indicator, and those are much less lucrative user eyeballs.

It's mitigated to the extent those users migrate to other FB-owned properties like Instagram and WhatsApp, but there the negative media narrative increases the chance that antitrust regulators will break up FB and force it to divest those properties.

More than anything I've read recently, this article makes me bullish on Microsoft, who are successfully executing the playbook IBM ran to right the ship in the '90s:

> The problem for IBM is that they are not building solutions for clueless IT departments bewildered by a dizzying array of open technologies: instead they are building on top of three cloud providers, one of which (Microsoft) is specializing in precisely the sort of hybrid solutions that IBM is targeting. The difference is that because Microsoft has actually spent the money on infrastructure their ability to extract money from the value chain is correspondingly higher; IBM has to pay rent

Violating Betteridge's Law of Headlines! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Seems unlikely there will be tenth amendment problems. It's pretty hard to do over a billion dollars in revenue without operating across state lines.

Section 230 coverage made (and still makes) a ton of sense for passive hosting of content—it really would be unduly burdensome to require neutral hosts or search indexers to review every piece of content.

What wasn't foreseeable 20 years ago is that protection shouldn't really apply to recommended content that the platforms' algorithms push forward onto users, especially in the case of something like YouTube where they auto-play. Those are editorial decisions made in the company's own voice, and you shouldn't be allowed to disclaim all responsibility for what your platform actively recommends.

Lol that the hero quote is just by the founder

As an engineering manager, what I want most from a project management app is something that does a good job helping engineers on my teams collaborate effectively with non-technical departments. We use Asana for this right now and it works well, and at a previous employer we used Jira which also worked well. Done well, it means the team always has shared state about what the latest designs are, how far along various pieces of work are, and what to-dos we need to keep track of. The goal is to offload onto the tool a bunch of status communication that otherwise happens in meetings.

If someone was starting from no system today I’d recommend Asana. Jira gives you way too much rope to make a custom workflow to enforce business rules, but as long as you have a light touch and use it mostly stock it’s fine. I have trouble organizing medium to large projects with many small sub-tasks in Trello. When I’ve used a more engineering-focused tool like GitHub Issues or Phabricator, I have too much trouble getting non-technical stakeholders to follow along there. I despised PivotalTracker trying to put me in a process straightjacket, and found BugZilla unusably ugly.

Speaking as a longtime skeptic, A16Z has actually produced the single clearest answer I've seen to that question: blockchains may be good for bootstrapping new network effects by giving early participants in a network (in a Metcalfe's Law sense of network) an incentive to participate. Pure utility tokens can be like call options on the eventual value of the network if it gets off the ground. It's a novel way of solving a collective action problem.

https://a16z.com/2017/12/08/summit-crypto-alex-rampell/

Kind of like Kickstarter or Groupon, at least in their original incarnations?

I hope for all of our sakes that it's more profitable for a16z to invest in real blockchain startups and leverage their experience to uncover exciting, legitimate applications of the technology than it is to just day-trade cypto assets.

There aren't any regulatory issues with taking investment from the a16z crypto fund, where a public ICO can bring attention from the SEC and other bodies. It lets founders and developers focus on getting their token network off the ground instead of figuring out how to do a legally kosher token sale.

Yes! We use juries for criminal trials not because they're especially good fact-finders but because they're very resistant to regulatory capture. Similarly, Sortition is the real answer to money in politics problems, because there's no such thing as running for re-election to raise money for. You get nice side effects in representation too - 50% of your legislators will be women, for example, but more significantly 50% of them will come from below-average incomes.

In the US at least, we already have a representative body laying around with super-majoritarian rules and long, overlapping terms where citizen-legislators could build institutional knowledge. Conveniently it has both the most anti-democratic setup right now and one that's already been subject to revision via constitutional amendment. Selecting Senators at random is the simplest fix with the biggest potential impact on our democracy.

And that's just first-order effects, not counting the potential civil society benefits of encouraging every citizen to think of themselves as a future Senator, or having that structure mirrored in micro in smaller jurisdictions.

In 2017 FB made $40B in revenue on 2B users.

I’m sure I’m just missing something obvious, but what are the threes? The article has five headings, and it doesn’t look like each is a list of three things.

Well, Cyan Bannister went on from founding Zivity to be a partner at Founders Fund.

Paul Ford has a great riff on that: https://medium.com/message/how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c

> Here’s a polite person’s trick, one that has never failed me. I will share it with you because I like and respect you, and it is clear to me that you’ll know how to apply it wisely: When you are at a party and are thrust into conversation with someone, see how long you can hold off before talking about what they do for a living. And when that painful lull arrives, be the master of it. I have come to revel in that agonizing first pause, because I know that I can push a conversation through. Just ask the other person what they do, and right after they tell you, say: “Wow. That sounds hard.”

> Because nearly everyone in the world believes their job to be difficult. I once went to a party and met a very beautiful woman whose job was to help celebrities wear Harry Winston jewelry. I could tell that she was disappointed to be introduced to this rumpled giant in an off-brand shirt, but when I told her that her job sounded difficult to me she brightened and spoke for 30 straight minutes about sapphires and Jessica Simpson. She kept touching me as she talked. I forgave her for that. I didn’t reveal a single detail about myself, including my name. Eventually someone pulled me back into the party. The celebrity jewelry coordinator smiled and grabbed my hand and said, “I like you!” She seemed so relieved to have unburdened herself. I counted it as a great accomplishment. Maybe a hundred times since I’ve said, “wow, that sounds hard” to a stranger, always to great effect. I stay home with my kids and have no life left to me, so take this party trick, my gift to you.