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

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I make magic internet tech and social experiences

Grin

grin

Spent most of last week at PorcFest, the libertarian burning man.

Overall I had a great time. Met very cool ppl, got to see Ross Ulbricht talk about buddhism and prison, was offered exotic currencies and recreational bacteria, ate bacon produced via child labor, and heard enough outrageous theories to last all year  

My biggest takeaway is that I don’t spend enough time with ppl outside my bubble.

“The moment you think you’re screwed, you might actually have the  Crown Jewels.”

@fredwilson.eth talking to @dwr.eth about SoundCloud and founder courage in difficult moments

This interview had perfect product-audience fit

Interested in human flourishing & social infrastructure

Building MuseKat to help parents & kids make sense of the world through real-time audio stories. Teaching people how to build through Build First Academy.

Founder, CEO, and Muse of Tragedy of /alexandria

Hung out IRL with @bethanymarz @mark and @amelie at Fractal Tech today

I predict Fractal is on the verge of making a huge splash in the nyc tech scene. If you’re in Williamsburg, strongly recommend checking it out

We even FC-pilled a guy

Too much focus on fixing housing.

Not enough focus on fixing spousing.

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