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july

It’s fucked when you think about it,how we just show up in this life without asking, get handed a body, a name, a spot on some random ladder, and before we can even understand the rules, we’re already being pushed to climb. Compete. Prove yourself. Be someone. Accumulate clout, wealth, followers, trophies or whatever signals “status” in your particular arena. And then? you die

What is the advice you would give to someone graduating this year and the next on how to go about approaching the job market? 

My sense is, entry level positions are very hard to come by with many companies tightening budgets and obviously AI.

Do whatever the hell you want because it’s no different this time and anyone that tells you otherwise they’re either afraid or not sure so just do whatever you love anyway because it doesn’t really matter ultimately what really matters is how you feel about what you do. You shouldn’t listen to anyone who tells you exactly what to do including me

Most people have no idea what they’re truly capable of, to be in that special zone special circumstances that really truly brings the best out of you

Yeah I’m looking at you

KYC: 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
Phone number: 🚩🚩🚩🚩
Name: 🚩🚩🚩

Email: 👀👀
Username: 👀

To put it simply, Web3 social media platforms suffer from a network problem.

 You can't build a network without trust, not even with NASA engineers.

When we launched VerifiedCreators in 2021, my thesis was that a public and non-KYC verification platform is the surest way to democratize trust in a decentralized ecosystem.

Following insights from registered users, the web3 community, and my recent academic research, it's clear that I was wrong on the public part.

More to come.

Network States

@balajis.eth and @ted do raise a great point. 

What if users started to demand qDAU metrics, not just for users, but also for time spent around healthy content and unhealthy content … Quality time spent is a big missing north star metric across the board

As a dad, my mental model is PBS Kids (edutainment) > Cocomelon (mk ultra singalong crack). As a user, I see Farcaster > X, because my cup is always filled here and always feels drained there

Our global mental health is part reflection of positivity bias or negativity bias. Unfortunately, very few people actually use the Screen Time limits on their phones, touch grass, enjoy real dopamine hits, and there's a lot of perverse incentives around synthetic dopamine hits and the celebration of being terminally online. We often bow to false prophets.

A lot of traditional social media preys on negativity bias because ad models requires more page views and that sort of engagement creates this needed supply (to monetize more eyeballs). I say, fuck that shit.

How can you compete with something that has more data and is faster than you?

Socrates, as a philosopher, does not admit the existence of Absolute Time, for him Time is a Mental Abstraction, it does not exist. The Past is no more, the Future is not yet, the Present, as a separation of two things that do not exist, how can it exist?

Many people, myself included, expected AI to first take over the jobs that were “easy“ and/or “low value” when we should’ve been looking at the work that had the most readily available material to work with.

In this framing, work (and by proxy important aspects of purpose, identity, etc) is less about what is done but what material — information, tools, physical goods, etc — we have to work with.

Finding things whose time is ripe and the basic conditions are there

A question on consensus 

Outside of a few moments in human history (French Revolution, American Revolution), the direction of society has been decided by a few elites. 

We constantly debate the last mile (housing, finance, even current conflicts based on drawn boarders) based off of the first 100 miles decide by people long since dead with a fraction of the information that we now have at our finger tips. 

Consensus has never been so easy to reach, yet it seems to be largely ignored or even disposable.

Why? How do we collectively decide on more things to alleviate all this pressure from the past?

Word of the Day: 

HYPERNORMALISATION - the state of a society where people continue to live according to rules that they know are not actually working.

downshift

Much pain 🥺
some lessons only land after love is lost. Growth often leaves a quiet trail of regret behind it.

absolute BARS 🤌

"Growth often leaves a quiet trail of regret behind it."