balajis

@balajis.eth

51 Following

194312 Followers

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We are hiring for Network School, starting immediately. You should apply if you want to bootstrap startup societies and build global meritocracy. Our basic thesis is that (a) Stanford and SF were amazing in their day but (b) they're in decline now and (c) the political process isn't going to save them so (d) we're going to have to build back better ourselves, if you will. If you share this thesis, and if you're an engineer, designer, or academic lecturer — please do apply at jobs.ns.com.

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I have some ideas for AI-proof interviewing. But I’d like to hear yours.

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🙂 All right. Let’s go a few rounds. Our mutual friend @mazmhussain can adjudicate. (1) First: startup societies are based on 100% consent. No one is there who hasn’t chosen to be there. No one is in a hierarchy if they haven’t opted into that hierarchy. Signing the social contract to join a community is much like signing a contract to join a company: you view the docs, make an informed decision, and opt out if it doesn’t work. That right to exit is the fundamental right. (2) Second: not all existing laws are good laws, like the PATRIOT Act. Sunsetting *some* laws doesn’t mean you don’t believe in laws in the abstract. (3) Third: you likely have views on what your ideal community would be. Maybe it’s a vegan village. Maybe it’s modern Amish, where tech is paused at the level of flip phones and people enjoy each other’s company. If you ever decided to build such a peaceful, opt-in community, then we would support you. And that’s what startup societies are about.

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I am hiring Farcaster devs. As context, I’m the former CTO of Coinbase. While there I drove our transformation from a four asset company (BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC) to the infinite asset backend Coinbase has now. I also championed and led the USDC launch at Coinbase, taking it from $0 to $1. And worked closely with @dwr.eth, who has been a friend for 10+ years. So, if you want to build real crypto products — not gambling, not vaporware — come work with us. I think Farcaster is exceptionally underrated as a protocol and want to use it as the backbone for a new kind of crypto-first school. To motivate: imagine if every problem you solved in college doubled as a portfolio piece — as a *proof-of-learning* NFT added to your public ENS. That would build a new kind of AI-proof verifiable resume. And that is what we want to build on Farcaster. So, come work with us! https://jobs.ns.com/33467

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Btw, the Network State Podcast is back. Season 3 starts with me and Rudyard Lynch, also known as WhatIfAltHist on YouTube, who's one of the few people as obsessed with researching the past and forecasting the future as I am. Enjoy! https://youtu.be/90ghx9MXTTg

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The market is the grader. That is: AI accelerates grade inflation and makes it harder to test skills. So, we might have to replace traditional interviews with externalized paid bounties. You interview for a job by doing a micro-job.

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What does an AI-first social network look like? Some thoughts. First, you can prototype it with Farcaster. You don’t need to reinvent users, wallets, the feed, any of that. So that alone speeds you up. Second, open source models are now cheap enough to run that you can just put them behind a normal button. X’s Grok integration is a good example. Third, there is tremendous room for an AI which is prompted not just on immediate context (your post) but on social context (your past posts and those of your friends). It could autogenerate prompts it thinks you’d like. Fourth, AI improvements on seemingly simple things like image upload widgets could be profound. You could automatically search for similar images, upscale them, auto-annotate them, or do something else. Fifth, AI could enforce a certain style in a community. As heavy-handed example, every post could be rewritten in Olde English. If you opted into this kind of moderation, it could produce unique communities. Like filters, but for text.

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My strong impression is that Farcaster’s feed is much more positive than the feed of other sites. Who wants to prove that with a sentiment analysis?

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The Warpcast wallet is an important milestone. I can’t believe it took~30 years of the web and ~15 years of crypto before we got a proper wallet integrated into a social app. But we have it. Now we can finally start turning all that time spent online into gradual accumulation of NFTs and coins. Both here and on other sites, using Farcaster integration. Great work @v and @dwr.eth.

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What are the best jurisdictions for crypto in 2025?

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Internet First. Because the Internet is the first place you go each day. Because every industry is being reinvented Internet First. And because everyone is a first class citizen on the global Internet.

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The right way of doing this is to build Internet First global private regulatory systems. The key concept is to treat regulation as a binary classifier. To minimize false positive AND false negative rates. To quickly approve good projects AND correctly flag bad projects. To disclose all financial interests of regulators and put decisions onchain. To allow for appeal, by multiple independent regulators, in the advent of an incorrect project classification. And, finally, to allow users to ignore those reviews if they so choose. That is, the right answer isn’t either (a) to just be randomly hostile towards projects or (b) to just tolerate everything or (c) to rely on the SEC and similar nation state regulators but rather (d) to build our own Internet First parallel regulatory systems that live on the Internet and aggregate signals *across* borders. We know this works because it works for Amazon (book reviews), Uber (star ratings), Apple (app Reviews), and many others. It will work for us.

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Every community of sufficient scale can now set up its own decentralized AI models, its own crypto protocols, and its own social media.

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Farcaster is for builders.

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$1000 FOR NETWORK STATE VISUALS I do have one visual of how to build a network state. It starts from one human in Japan to encompass one million netizens, and is attached in gif form below[1]. But I want more visuals. So, I will be offering six prizes ($500 grand prize and $100 honorable mention prizes) for visualizing network state formation. Your visuals need not be gifs. They could be comic books, slide decks, AI videos, still images, or something else entirely. I’m open to creativity. However, all submissions must be fully open source content in the “free culture” sense [2]. Ideally they are something I could just paste into a tweet, in either 9:16 or 16:9 form. You can submit by pasting your network state formation visualization into a reply to this post. Please include a description of how you created it, including tools you used and links to the raw files. @bountybot [1]: https://thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-image [2]: https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/freeworks

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$1000 Prize for AI Conference Organizer When you’re collecting slides from many people for a conference, you need to *validate* those slides. 1) The first check is format. Is this PDF, Google Slides, Keynote, Figma, Canva? Is it a file or a URL? 2) The second check is deterministic. What is the size of each deck, the number of slides, the fonts used? Is video present, and if so is there audio? 3) The third check is probabilistic. Does the deck fit the conference format? For example, does it have a title slide? Is it all bullet points (which we don’t want) or does it have images? Each of these kinds of checks can be expressed as AI prompts. What I want: an open source AI-based slide validator, with all the code at replit.com, which sets up a form that implements these three checks. The workflow is: first paste in URL or upload file. Then determine format and run deterministic checks. Finally, run each AI check as an individual prompt. The result is a list of ❌and ✅ for every unit test. @bountybot

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Cloud Cartography: $1000 Prize We need maps of the cloud. And Farcaster can start providing those maps, because it's an open state social network. That is: Farcaster's database is public and viewable if running a hub. So here's what I'd like to see: a Python script, hosted at replit.com, that lets you paste in N usernames to generate an in-browser visualization of the social network between those N people, with a slider that visualizes their interconnections as a function of time. As you drag the slider, your code should display various metrics like the number of edges, the adjacency matrix, and the all-pairs-shortest-path matrix (https://coursys.sfu.ca/2020fa-cmpt-307-d1/pages/slides21/view) as a function of time. This will allow you to visualize a network of N people coming together, by connecting, over time. All your code should be open source, your visualizations should be pretty and mobile friendly, and you can add other features so long as you nail the main ones. @bountybot

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Welcome to the Network School. Apply online at ns.com. Doors open on Sep 23, the day after the Network State Conference in Singapore. Full announcement is below. Oh, and everything we're doing is built on Farcaster. I look forward to seeing you there! https://x.com/balajis/status/1824533037780201580

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Is technocapitalism the same thing as Western civilization? https://frame.weponder.io/api/polls/6600

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Opportunity is on the Internet.

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