a place for wizards, fractalism, and things that make you grin

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grin.io

I make magic internet tech, currently @ cabin.city

Grin

grin

There’s an essay (a book?) to be written about how the volume of writing and the speed of production on the internet has made *all* language more imprecise. 

So much of communication today has nothing to do with the meaning of words themselves, but of the things *around* the words: emojis, caps, context, etc.

Memes

I’m a Gwern. He liked one of my tweets once, I’ll never forget it 🥺

post a picture of you from a different era

My 2025 resolution is to keep becoming even more myself

First Draft Club

This week's prompt: How have you grown as a person in the past year?

(Quote cast with your reflection by Sunday to be eligible for a 5 USDC reward!)

my growth this year:
- better at challenging directly + caring deeply
- working harder + more effectively than ever before, and loving it
- made peace with memecoins
- concretely deepened my love and commitment for my family

Pace Layers (Grin's Esoteric Truth Remix)

july

devs deal with complexity by building layers of abstraction: simple and hard at the bottom, with layered complexity/subjectivity on top as needed. our social structures should do the same.

there's a seminal legal paper on why property law keeps vacillating between clear, objective, predictable rules (crystals) and flexible, subjective, discretionary interpretations (mud): http://i.grin.io/crystals-and-mud.pdf

whats special now is that you can have both: crystalline protocols for the objective, with rich subjectivity built on top. like a credit card on crypto rails -- you can use the card if you want chargeback protection or use the blockchain directly if you want an irreversible tx. most humans want the credit card, but direct protocol access is vital for e.g. disruptive startups, novel legal structures, Canadian truckers.

this was not possible before. US law can only have one setting on the hard<->subjective spectrum.

the broader shift coming out of crypto and open source is that our social structures will be rebuilt on top of hard, open protocols.

the effects of this are deeply underrated

so many big decisions boil down to Gall's Law vs Chesterton's Fence

how to win fiends and influence sheeple

required reading for cult founders

we've opened up a whole new design space in breakfast foods (my wife bought us slightly smaller bowls)

turns out writing's easy. the hard part is clarity on what you want to say

once you've done the work of understanding your goal and how you'll get there, the writing practically writes itself