streamofdigits

The Future of Investment is Not Rational - It's DAOs and Crypto Networks

is he the guy who wrote a book to explain everything?

at this point the ecological niche of open source computation / algorithmic stacks is so well occupied that even if wolfram were to open source their code (as an attempt to remain relevant?), it is unlikely it would change much in the landscape?

An oligopoly of walled gardens that control all information flow with little accountability based on opaque algorithmic operations and dubious business models is a bad, unworkable design, who could have guessed that?

A small minority of people here and elsewhere are tearing their hair at the insanity. In the meantime a tiny municipality in the Netherlands gives the go ahead for meta to build the largest datacenter in Europe.

Somehow once the giant wheels of societal regression are set in motion there is nothing to stop them.

I think it really matters whether the core of added value of your solution is on the client side or the backend processing.

For example (in a parallel but similar universe to ruby) you have python, django and vast sea of data science / machine learning "plugins" you can just pull into your project.

Add to that that the idea of creating "desktop like" experiences in the browser seems to go against the grain of what the web is and we may indeed have reached "peak javascript"

Maybe the success of vue and the emergence of htmx point to this underlying reality

The main data point from the success of reddit is that quality interactions in large scale online platforms require an interest based user interface.

Other than that it is almost guaranteed now that its buggy (feels like its held together with tape) and ad-ladden overall experience will be locked-in and get worse (like it happened with facebook)

People might want to hedge their bets and look into open source lemmy and federated versions of the reddit concept https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

there is plenty of promising tech around. VC has lost all touch with aiming to add real value (if they ever had it)

Easily the most balanced and deep review of the web3 bandwagon (maybe as you would expect from somebody who has seen it all before and from close-up).

I find this observation as the most hard-hitting:

> The failure to think through and build interfaces to existing legal and commercial mechanisms is in stark contrast to previous generations of the web

The gimmicky, "universe in a box", nature of web3 works great as a game, or maybe as a research tool but it is light years away from creating a gravity field strong enough to crush and remold millennia of trust relations, laws, paper contracts etc. all interlinked with actual (real life) economic activity.

The fact that the hype persists despite this (fairly obvious and debilitating) limitation suggests how unhinged the current environment, a result a period of extraordinarily easy money coupled with the FOMO effect attached to the trillion dollar valuations and power concentration of "big tech".

On the other hand, the palpable sense of anxiety in many industries indicates that we are certainly not done yet with digital disruption. Five years from now web3 will be joke, but there will be some new realities that will be anything but!

in the fullness of time JAX might prove to be more important than either. don't give people fish, teach them how to catch fish and all that...

the web would unfuck itself in, like, a few mouse clicks if you could unfuck its economics and its politics

the algorithm is morally bankrupt. which is worse

this is just metadata, e.g. any decentralized search would also benefit from this. the best time to add it is when you publish, just like the best time to document your code is when you write it

that is an argument I have seen before and it is generally true: the core idea is for the corporate entity to operate a riskless arbitrage where all risks are shouldered elsewhere, ideally where they are less understood and thus underpriced.

the problem with applying this concept here is the hyperscalers are not exactly a counterparty likely to underprice IT risks. in any case is there any public evidence of this "blame transfer" in action (pressumably with associated remedies)

its not exactly the same. there are probably significant efficiencies (energy, security etc) in provisioning and sharing "cloud" hardware in reasonably large chunks.

This. Turn the "cloud is somebody else's computer" on its head and own part that computer.

Why not "own" AWS, GCP, Azure etc.? Because you can't. They are part of conglomerates that come with a moral baggage that is too heavy for some.

ps. No "hyperscaling" ability required. The idea that business activity is either complete dominance or death is part of that unfit-for-purpose mentality.

Scenario 1: Condition on a future world that is somehow livable and sane, in mental and environmental equilibrium. Work backwards and find that "being good" is not a choice but an inescapable requirement

Scenario 2: Posit that the above conditioning is unattainable, we have reached "peak humanity" and its all now terminally downhill

Call me naive but I think our main problem is that people have never really been forced to make up their minds "en masse", not just on "local" problems where cynicism, free-riders, aggression, exploitation, abuse (+ name your favorite pathology here) may be "rational", but in our "global" problem.

Universal principles and rights (as those put together by the UN) start becoming the mental and emotional guides to come to grips with the important global constraints. Cynics dismiss those as ludicrous, bureaucratic, vacuities. Think again.

In other words, we can be local cynics (and that might even be a breath of fresh air) but we cannot be global cynics.

This is probably too pessimistic. If it was true we would not be writing this right now, we'd be still in some semi-wild state, ripping each others hearts out as battle trophy to dedicate to some imaginary god. If predatory behavior really had the upper hand it would not allow the kind of social structures that solved difficulty technology problems and allowed mass health, mass education etc.

But destructive, rapacious, behavior feels just one step away even now that we are supposedly "civilized" and we have excruciating records of our bloody history.

If we don't find a way to bottle this instinct up we will not see many more decades.

Time is running out because the system is not time-invariant: we had explosive population and technology growth. The same regressive traits that might have "only" annihilated isolated cultures in the past will bring our collective demise.

How can it be that the most predatory elements of society have been given so much leeway?

This is not an intrinsic pattern of our species / societies or we would have devoured ourselves literally or figuratively long time ago.

Obviously restoring forces that would push this evil genie back in its bottle exist but are somehow dormant, neutralized or otherwise missing-in-action.

This fight and push-back should not be a thing for "activists". It affects every single person. We are all "gig workers".

This is fantastic news at two levels:

* the actual code that will be made public (in particular enabling all sorts of things to be built on top of the Commissions policy / legal know-how and rules)

* the signalling, encouragement and precedent that this provides to other public sector instances that may have been sitting on the fence, unsure or even oblivious to open source

> trust-less commitments seem to be at the heart of what web3 really is and that feels much harder to dismiss than owning JPEGs or speculating on currencies

This is indeed the core feature of this whole genre but arguably makes it easier to dismiss in its entirety as concept and philosophy.

Technology should enable building trust. Simply enabling a trust-less society to limb along in a transactional way reveals the libertarian bitcoin roots of web3 that actually believes "there is no such a thing as society".

Designing institutions that are authoritative while democratically accountable is a continuous struggle against power grabbing insiders but it is not impossible.

Maybe dependency hell is a wicked problem and cannot really be solved? What is the gold standard to aspire to? npm is mentioned in the post but its not clear if that is just for lowering barrier to entry for new users.

Small social networks is the real "web3" opportunity. The contours and requirements to reach that next stage are still somewhat blurry:

* how to make them ubiquitous (easy hosting, maintenance, moderation)

* how to federate flexibly and effectively (private/public boundaries, social graph discovery, integrate different media, polymorphic clients)

* how to nudge behavior, extract people from their digital prisons and reboot them into more sane behaviors - not trivial, some real social scientist input required

* how to make them self-financing without creating distorted incentives for any stakeholder

etc. there are lots of things to work out but its clear we've been through an centralized web / walled garden aberration period that inflicted untold damage to the broader "digital transformation" enterprise and legitimized / rewarded abusive practices that can not persist as a permanent pattern

revolving doors between government / regulatory roles and private entities that stand to gain massively if they influence the legal regime to legitimize the "minted" wealth.

corruption at work, in plain sight. stark analogies with the voucher privatization [0] of the collapsing Soviet Union that created the ruling kleptocracy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voucher_privatization

I have come to appreciate hacker news because of its (broadly) critical stance on crypto. Nobody can accuse this demographic as "not understanding" the math, which is a common bullying tactic in the crypto universe. Nobody can accuse this demographic as not interested in earning a living in technology either.

But the kind of digital universe we shape, the kind of behaviors being rewarded by the systems put in place, this seems to matter to a lot of smart people and that is quite promising.

There are two logical somersaults embedded with the crypto scene in its various mutations over the last decade that undermine the whole proposition irrespective of any other value system or vision.

* That digital decentralization is somehow equivalent to the tightly coupled blockchain architecture. In fact, if people were empowered to run their own "nodes" in a display of increasingly scarce digital self-sovereignty, there are infinite possible ways to connect devices over http (or gopher or ftp any other protocol the future may spawn). NB: The web was born decentralized. Many of those ways will arguably be much more useful in solving real problems as they do not put artificial constraints on how information flow is organized.

* That one can create artificial digital scarcity and put the genie of zero marginal cost back in the bottle. In fact already the very proliferation of thousand of cryptocurrency variants shows that digital scarcity could only ever be achieved by oppressive means. This is the very social malfunction purportedly (some) adherents of crypto are fighting against.

Why are we still talking about a set of ideas that is so distorted and orthogonal to both the true nature of the digital medium and our needs? Blame it on the self-financing juggernaut of bitcoin that triggered every possible speculative instinct out there, whether a new generation of noise day-traders, widows or orphans or professional blood-suckers.

There is only room for one emperor without cloths

> Nobody is forcing people to use Facebook or any of Facebook's family of apps. I personally don't use FB or any of its apps for the last 10 years and I'm totally fine.

Sorry, this so unbeliably the wrong attitude. Compare with food producers, car manufacturers etc building toxic, addictive, dangerous products and being allowed free access to the market on the basis that "nobody is forcing consumers to buy their products".

The vast majority of people cannot judge whether the use of a digital product is safeguarding their interests and welfare, both individually and as a society. Unless and until there is recognition of this fundamental fact we must acknowledge that one industry in particular has been excempted from oversight for reasons that are not doing the political class any favor.

> the fundamental difference is they're not trying to create a world in which we don't trust anyone

This. Massive effort and talent seems to be directed towards what is intuitively a dead end: trust is something between people, not something between devices. Any protocol no matter how ingeniously crafted will be subverted when it leaves the silicon layer and hits the human layer (unless you create the ultimate dystopia where people are collared and tracked on permanent basis or something equivalent)

Nevertheless, imho the human-centric vision of computing is misfiring, losing battle after battle (from self-sovereign computing, to social media, to mobile etc) and at some point it will lose the war. Maybe the silver lining of the cryptofunded "web3" marketing onslaught for "alternatives" is to give the real-deal one more window of opportunity...

in principle, and in the long term, I agree that is the correct attitude. but in the short term the characteristics of the various tech building blocks shape what can be solved as "low hanging fruit" and that creates a dynamic of its own.

if Web2 became a dystopic Zuckerbergia and Web3 is a disguised Cryptobrosia is there maybe a chance for a Web 2.5 that doesn't suck? Like something that isn't fake techno-solutionism on steroids?

What would be its building blocks? IFPS, Activitypub, XMPP, Matrix? but more importantly what would be the governance and incentives that would prevent it from rapidly degenerating as with all other versions