The entire global monetary system explained in under 15 minutes

[The monarch gives them tokens in exchange for labour, then demands it back in the form of taxes.]

Decentralized Social Media: What is it, how does it work?

In ActivityPub you get a bit more resilience in that other people's instances might go down, but once they're up again you'll resume synchronizing with them. Your main issue is that once your instance goes down, you personally can't participate anymore unless you make an account somewhere else.

AT protocol is a bit more complicated in that you have several different points of failure. If the firehose goes down none of the app views will see new posts but should have their existing ones. If an app view goes down others will still work and you'd still be able to pull from people's PDSs. If your PDS goes down you can't post but if someone else's goes down you can still see everything else.h

Nostr has the most resilient model in that you can use as many relays as you want and if some of them go down you'd be fine so long as you can find more.

Behind the AI boom, the armies of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’

More than 2 million people in the Philippines perform this type of “crowdwork”, according to informal government estimates, as part of AI’s vast underbelly. While AI is often thought of as human-free machine learning, the technology actually relies on the labour-intensive efforts of a workforce spread across much of the global south and is often subject to exploitation.

Charisse, 23, said she spent four hours on a task that was meant to earn her $2, and Remotasks paid her 30 cents.

Founded in 2016 by young college dropouts and backed by some $600m in venture capital, Scale AI has cast itself as a champion of American efforts in the race for AI supremacy. In addition to working with large technology companies, Scale AI has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to label data for the US Department of Defense

Evan You – From Art School Kid to Open Source Legend

[In the same way that "how do you monetize a startup?" is too open-ended, it's necessary to be specific and creative in how you fit an open-source "product" to potential "markets". Monetization capacity of an open-source project depends on how it's applied: frameworks have larger scope and reach many developers whereas an esoteric build tool may have a smaller audience.]

if ai-generated open-source code is incomprehensible to review, does that effectively make it closed-source?

Welcome to Gas Town

Stage 1: Zero or Near-Zero AI: maybe code completions, sometimes ask Chat questions

Stage 2: Coding agent in IDE, permissions turned on. A narrow coding agent in a sidebar asks your permission to run tools.

Stage 3: Agent in IDE, YOLO mode: Trust goes up. You turn off permissions, agent gets wider.

Stage 4: In IDE, wide agent: Your agent gradually grows to fill the screen. Code is just for diffs.

Stage 5: CLI, single agent. YOLO. Diffs scroll by. You may or may not look at them.

Stage 6: CLI, multi-agent, YOLO. You regularly use 3 to 5 parallel instances. You are very fast.

Stage 7: 10+ agents, hand-managed. You are starting to push the limits of hand-management.

Stage 8: Building your own orchestrator. You are on the frontier, automating your workflow.

The Great Entertainment

Reagan proved you could use TV aesthetics in governance. Trump is proving you cannot replace governance with TV.

[the world is not given by parents, but borrowed from children.]

Who profits from a world without cash?

[Transitioning to a cashless society implies moving away from state-issued money towards 'tokens' issued by private corporations. We currently trust their casino chips because they can be redeemed for fiat currency, but without cash this is no longer possible.]

Why I Left iNaturalist

This post is an announcement for those who were unaware, an explanation for those who are confused, and a record so I don’t forget.

Pingu voice acting

Italian voice actor Carlo Bononi was the voice of all of the characters on Pingu. A trained clown by trade, he used a theater technique called grammelot, which consists of "speaking" in a mix of babbled gibberish noises. He improvised all the voices live and unscripted.

A Social Filesystem

what we make with a tool does not belong to the tool. A manuscript doesn’t stay inside the typewriter, a photo doesn’t stay inside the camera, and a song doesn’t stay in the microphone.

I see every one's project, and purpose, to be connected to all others as a piece of a grand puzzle. And my job in the last 2 years has been looking at each person, and finding where they fit, and when it works, they thrive, and the world thrives. Because the world needed them, and they needed it

and now I'm trying to see if I can create a container where people understand this is what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, and for others to help me do it

What's happening on Jan 13th?

If you don’t have access to a dentist in your trust network, but you trust me, you can “borrow” my connection here.

if someone with resources wants to give you money, you should say no if it’s clear to you it will make your life worse, even if it’s not clear to them. Don’t let their (bad) judgement override your clarity.

LLMs are coherence engines, not truth engines

[LLMs generate coherence more than truth, with] no access to the world, no sensory grounding, no lived experience, and no intrinsic way to check correspondence between its outputs and reality.

[The same is true of humans, as we] construct narratives, causal explanations, identities, and moral frameworks that hang together, rather than ones that are objectively correct. [We tend towards] narrative consistency, social acceptability and reinforce biases based on beliefs.

science works because it builds institutional scaffolding that forces grounding through measurement, replication, falsification, and peer review. Without grounding, both humans and LLMs drift into elegant nonsense.

The risk with LLMs is not that they lie, but that they speak with fluent confidence in domains where humans already confuse coherence with truth.

I guess I was wrong about AI persuasion

“The best diplomat in history” wouldn’t just be capable of spinning particularly compelling prose; it would be everywhere all the time, spending years in patient, sensitive, non-transactional relationship-building with everyone at once. It would bump into you in whatever online subcommunity you hang out in. It would get to know people in your circle. It would be the YouTube creator who happens to cater to your exact tastes. And then it would leverage all of that.

We can be convinced of a lot. But it doesn’t happen because of snarky comments on social media or because some stranger whispers the right words in our ears. The formula seems to be:

1. repeated interactions over time
2. with a community of people
3. that we trust

You can try to like stuff

When I encountered spinach as an adult, instead of tasting a vegetable, I tasted a grueling battle of will. Spinach was dangerous—if I liked it, that would teach my parents that they were right to control my diet.

On planes, the captain will often invite you to, “sit back and enjoy the ride”. This is confusing. Enjoy the ride? Enjoy being trapped in a pressurized tube and jostled by all the passengers lining up to relieve themselves because your company decided to cram in a few more seats instead of having an adequate number of toilets? Aren’t flights supposed to be endured?