Sharon

@sharonjohn

26 Following

32 Followers

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Solid primer on the Indian subcontinent https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2024/04/12/a-short-history-of-india-in-eight-maps

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Silicon Valley looks increasingly America-centric in its reactionary era. They are true believers in American exceptionalism. For everyone else, the wider dysfunction is American. For them, the dysfunction is a symptom of rotten elites that they, the Ayn Randian heroes will deliver us from.

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Something I had never consciously thought about before is how internationalized and truly global crypto is. As a non-American I appreciate this. Though trad internet is global, it is highly US centric and pushes US norms and defaults. Contrast Vitalik here with pmarca on Twitter (trollishly) pumping Fahrenheit.

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Instagram has single handedly changed my perception of ads. A Facebook PM once told me good targeting will solve people’s annoyance with ads and he was right. I don’t mind getting high quality ads relevant to my interests. I’ve converted to purchases straight from it too as have others I know.

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The central problem in software dev is that reading code is harder than writing code. This being the case, copilots and AI agents as tools that write code for you is not as useful as you might think. What we need more is actually next-gen static analysis: code interpreters that can provide context in natural language.

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Feels like builder world is deeply hedgehoggy in the Isaiah Berlin sense. People deeply convinced of one central idea or thesis. In many cases, this is engineered post-facto grand narrative to appeal to VCs who need grand narratives because they’re big enough to provide outlier portfolio winners.

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Instagram posting serves an important purpose. It is advertising for the individual to their personal social networks. When I post every half a year or so, a flurry of people who don’t talk to me suddenly message me because they were reminded that I exist

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At this point, I’m so annoyed by the general experience of being on X and it has turned into a pure tax on following and engaging with posters I enjoy. If only they all moved here. This is of course why network effects are sticky and this “if” is a big one.

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So you’re telling me whether I still have my job in 5 years will come down to whether the increased demand for software outpaces the efficiencies in producing it?

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It’s wild that our best guiding metaphor for the ML driven future might be magic

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Watching @vgr’s Devcon talk about hypercomplexity. I like the implied idea of liberalism as a protocol for enabling pluralism. Every system is kind of a TINA within itself, what we would call rule of law.

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Is the average person in 2023 more or less reflective than the average person a hundred years ago?

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X/Twitter UX has gotten trashy. It was already trending down with the variable length posts messing up TL cohesion. Now it’s subscribe to unlock, random (and often weird) ads when scrolling through an account, and generally harder to find tweets from following. Think I might just stop using it altogether now.

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Follower count has dropped dramatically. Either I wasn’t engaging enough or a bunch of follows left the platform? So much for audience on the new platform :)

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Back to casting after a hiatus! Twitter is still my main but Notes and BlueSky have shown zero promise so far. Already feel the quality of engagement is better here.

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You read Sapiens or The Beginning of Infinity while your friend reads Brothers Karamazov and Ted Chiang. Your reading lists are entirely different but you’re both interested in similar things. I try to explore the two schools of inquiry underpinning this: https://tangential.beehiiv.com/p/impressionism

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Inspired by @dcposch.eth’s thread about British values: I wonder if we unconsciously commit a category error when we compare large, federal political states with small cohesive political states. Particularly the US is at best a megafauna of competing subnations that are vaguely interoperable than one society.

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LARP until you become it?

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We all hold mental models of others, sometimes unknowingly. A simplified abstract view of who they are. It’s a fun moment when one of you reveals your mental model of the other in conversation. And even more fun when you start to notice people have different models of you.

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Social web as protocols rather than platforms harkens back to the early web, a web I'm frankly too young to know. This is often framed as web3 vs web1. Almost like a web1 protocol style unbundling of web2 platform innovations and modes of engaging. What's missing?

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