Stephen Malina

@an1lam

16 Following

14 Followers

Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Dunno why I let whoop sleep-shame me

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Bought my Goruck GR1 nearly 10 years ago. Have used almost daily and only thing that's ever broken on it is the rubber around the zipper cord. At $345, that's ~$.1 per use.

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Some naval gazey, self-indulgent reflections on 2022: https://stephenmalina.com/post/2023-01-02-reflections-on-2022/.

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Thanks, probably backread these when I started following Ribbonfarm but totally forgot about them. Will have to reread!

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Another angle on this is that I'm relatively more excited about writing and coding assistants that improve quality than I am about tools that help me write more prose or code.

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One measure of this type of writing is whether the ideas pattern match situations by association before you've fully digested them. I fear he'll hate this entire idea for failing to understand mediocrity (which I don't) but @vgr was probably the first person whose writing did this for me.

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Another way to describe this writing is that it's compressed. It gives a sense of inexpressible yet crisp ideas lingering under the surface. Unfortunately, I don't think my writing often gives off this sense that I'm seeking out. Too much of a drive towards explicit crushing density.

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On the other hand, with art I don't perceive such a clear gap. Maybe because I've spent on the order of 1000-10000x more time consuming writing vs. art?

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The obvious way to test this is to do a blind test, although constructing one is tricky.

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Maybe I'm just fooling myself but when reading this I feel like I detect an aliveness that AI writing still lacks, even with prompt wizardry applied. This isn't just carbon chauvinism either. The aliveness isn't inherent; an AI could totally achieve it. I just don't think they have yet.

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Not sure if it's a result of approaching 30 or kneejerk contrarianism against AI-generated writing (which I'm actually optimistic about) but I'm finding myself appreciating "stylized" writing more recently. Bruce Sterling's prologue to Ascendancies is a good example: https://i.imgur.com/4wKqzpG.jpg

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stephenmalina.com Hugo because it's easy to maintain and I can understand the code if I need to.

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Yeah I totally agree, especially when part of the reveal is "the villain is actually an idiot". Started agreeing before I even saw your reply: farcaster://casts/0x...32ee49b099

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(Spoiler alert...) That said, the idea that she didn't take a picture was too much suspension of disbelief for me.

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I agree, although I suspect it's an attempt to subvert the genre trope where the detective (Poirot being the example I'm most familiar with) reveals everything in front of the characters and wraps it up tidily at the end.

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Ok, I guess this is basically repl.it bounties with a sprinkling of Gitcoin...

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The hard part seems to be verification. Every product feature is more complicated than its spec so you're bound to have cases where the funders disagree whether it's actually done.

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Cool crypto use-case I haven't seen discussed (but maybe it has) is dominant assurance contracts for product features. This requires reliable oracles but the idea would be that users agree to pay some prize if a product develops some feature. Upon shipping the payment automatically goes through.

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And Silicon Valley folks are often big readers, so it's not a case of ignoring a market because it's not relevant to them.

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It's crazy to me that no one has disrupted Goodreads. Yes it's an Amazon product but I'm pretty sure they don't really care about it. The barrier isn't technological and it's clearly a case where something 5-10x better is possible, especially relative to some of the other stuff that receives a lot of investment.

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