Posts by Sam Gödel-Conway

Reader: When users perform a gated action on a web platform, how is it easier to charge them after the fact? Surely this still requires a ledger. - It's easier because you can treat each gated action as a simple counter increment. At the end of a period (e.g. monthly), you bill for the total. Instead of a financial transaction per action, you have one transaction per period. Over time you may log counter increments in more detail, perhaps approaching ledger-like tracking. But you don't have to start with it. It's also psychologically easier for a user to click now and pay later. This is fine for utilities like hosting: you buy a service, get an invoice later. On current social platforms, posts are free, so no tracking needed, but - endless noise. If you want a real pro-human social platform, this doesn't work. Users and bots can create throwaway accounts, post junk, and never pay. But their content stays on the system and consumes the attention of current and future users.

Chat Excerpt: --- 20th century - mass media, mass gov fiat currency, advantage hard-left. The Nazis count as surprisingly hard-left, economically speaking. 21st century - post drones & blockchain, looking like it will be advantage hard-right. these days, large mass of “the people” == big easy target for deniable remote weapons average man is no longer a threat (as he was in 20th century). Both nazi and marxist rely on gathering together average man to achieve power. Therefore in 21st century neither strategy will work. The flavour might be used for rhetorical purposes. Major issue is: relatively few people will have power, and popular discontent won't have much effect except for stochastic terrorism. So more like blade runner 2049. I mention drones because they would seem in future to be an advantage for the few as opposed to the many. I'm basically betting on a trend line of "average man will matter even less in future than he does now". ---

"Today, if you don’t want to build your own ledger, you do have a few options. For example, there are hosted services like Modern Treasury and ledger-specific databases like TigerBeetle. Both of these are impressive and probably a good fit for many. But by using a ledger outside of the main application database, you lose transactionality and atomicity. Namely, you have to worry about orchestrating two systems that can fail independently. What happens if you write your main data, but the ledger update fails? Or the ledger operation succeeds but your app hits an error and fails to write the surrounding data. Integrating with these often requires two-phase commits and other strategies to ensure they stay in sync. And when they fall out of sync, it can be very hard to debug." https://www.pgrs.net/2025/03/24/pgledger-ledger-implementation-in-postgresql

Reader: How difficult is it to build an internal ledger system? My impression is that you are discounting that as an option, but I have no feel for how hard it might be to do. - Fairly difficult. A double-entry ledger system is a complex piece of equipment. Building one requires knowledge of both bookkeeping and software. Maintaining software is costly, and the costs increase with time. Code grows to support many user actions, data pathways, dependency versions, and external APIs. Future changes must attempt to add new capability without breaking an ever-larger number of existing features. The goal of an experienced software developer is to write relatively little code, and for that code be as meaningful as possible. So: When faced with the prospect of learning how to build and maintain a complex component, the experienced developer hesitates, and looks for existing solutions first. I'll keep looking for a while. However, atm, it does seem that I will have to build it myself.

Goal: Gate user actions (e.g. make a post) based on payment of a token. This is a much larger problem than it seems. Naive idea: User buys credits, check user balance, subtract a token before allowing a post. But: You have to track payments in and credits out in order to keep balances correct. So you need a ledger. A single-entry ledger will break when you encounter double-spending, retries, refunds, and audits. So you need a double-entry ledger. I have looked at outsourcing this. But offering complex custom bookkeeping software to non-enterprise customers is a structurally bad business. Also, your app must make an external API call on every gated user action. This indicates that you need to build and maintain an internal double-entry ledger system. This is why most apps: 1) Charge a subscription or 2) Charge for usage afterwards (no real-time gate) But neither of these models produce the user experience incentives that I think are required for a good version of the future.

" This truth is only available to the most advanced atheists and the most advanced Christians. The advanced atheist has purged himself of all traces of folk religion, and understands the world as it is - an infinitely cold universe of protons and electrons, whose fundamental rules are a few lines of mathematics with no concept of humanity. Our galaxy is not even special, let alone our planet. To the advanced Christian, God’s will is just as cold and his justice is just as inexorable, and evil is sent to punish evil. Maistre read the French Revolution as God’s punishment of the decadent liberals who brought it about, and the weak conservatives who failed in their duty to oppose it. Was he wrong? I love my protons and electrons, but I can’t see how he was wrong. " https://graymirror.substack.com/p/you-cant-handle-the-truth

Parsons, who was from Pasadena, California, was an engineering genius who played a central role in the invention of space rockets. He co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ... Parsons didn't get to see [the Moon landing]: he blew himself up at home in an accident with rocket fuel in 1952, aged 37 (a crater on the moon is named after him). He was a great innovator; he was also an epic crank. During his early work with rockets he was taking a lot of drugs and participating in a polyamorous devil-worshipping cult. He later became a devotee of the English occultist Aleister Crowley, and a key member of Crowley’s group in the US. After the war he became close to a former naval officer called L. Ron Hubbard, with whom he took part in a series of magical rituals aimed at manifesting the goddess Babalon. (Hubbard borrowed all his money, and his wife, and ran off with both, before founding Scientology.) [1] https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/rationalist-cults-of-silicon-valley

The current meta for social platforms selects for platforms that optimize for emotional engagement. The core mechanic is "reaction", as reified in likes, shares, comments. Posts are simply the raw material. Reaction is what keeps people coming back. Humans have a powerful anxiety-driven need to perceive the social currents - "what are other people saying about X ?" (what should my opinion be ?) Reaction maintains regular engagement, which allows the business of adverts to exist. I propose a new core mechanic: Validation. A person's social profile would showcase the posts that they have validated - verifiable record of what they judged to be true / insightful / useful. The value proposition: That this profile would increase the user's professional reputation. The overall result: The platform produces few posts, but each post supports a cloud of confirmations. Highly-validated posts are then republished on existing platforms, with the validators featured alongside the author.

MVC (Model-View-Controller) is a pattern in software design for building user interfaces. Key benefit: It keeps code modular - models don't deal with presentation, and views don't contain business rules. 1. The model defines what data the app should contain. 2. The view defines how the app's data should be displayed. 3. The controller contains logic that updates the model and/or view in response to input from the users of the app. Scenario: A user writes a new post on an online forum. - Model: Receives and validates the post data. Handles saving to and loading from the database. - View: Builds the page shown to the user. Either the "New Post" form with validation errors, or the "Post Details" page showing the freshly created post. - Controller: Handles the "create post" request. Flow: - User makes post - Controller receives post data - Model saves to database - Controller chooses a View - User sees result

Podcast summary: Dr. Dani Sulikowski argues that "wokeness" can be understood as _manipulative reproductive suppression_. Key points: - Once societies become wealthy and infant mortality falls, elite women lose their normal reproductive advantage. - To restore it, they promote cultural norms - e.g. career-first feminism, abortion rights, body positivity, gender ideology, toxic masculinity - that will lower the reproduction rate of other women. - This behavior is not necessarily conscious. - These movements are framed as progressive or compassionate but effectively make other women less fertile. - This pattern is cyclical across civilizations. Male competition is dominant until an inflection point of high wealth and success is reached. Female competition then becomes the dominant force in mating outcomes, and birth rates decline, setting the stage for societal decline and replacement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRY_1JRRcNU

[excerpt from private chat] None of this is going to work. It's simply impossible to maintain individual freedom to not reproduce and modern economies. The only options are social collapse or social change. But: For the citizens to reproduce, the state must offer a genuine long-term deal. The only real strategy is: A small state declares a network citizenship and allows men under 40 in other states to join and claim sole tax residency (i.e. they owe no taxes to any other state - and this is backed up with force - other states, heavy with old people, won’t be able to fight back easily). Taxes payable in crypto. You can bring a woman with you if she’s under 30. That sort of thing. But you can't leave - you owe allegiance for life. You also owe the state the production of 3-5 kids. The legacy welfare states then collapse under their own weight, with the concomitant effects. You'll need automated gun turrets on the border etc etc.

I enjoyed this post. I particularly like "Superman is a modern myth" and "Art reveals". Yes, the fear is correct. Any future with resurgent masculinity is one in which the women are just captured / acquired / attracted, often quite willingly, and the average man today, with no spirit / thumos / strength / network, gets - nothing. Actually nothing. The fact that this harem fear was expressed indicates that we (correctly) see ourselves as weak. When watching the film: - I noted that the only way Superman makes sense as a character is if he has rural American Christian parents, and that this film accepted that. A small change in the zeitgeist regarding Christianity ? - I highly enjoyed the new message from his birth parents. It's a striking twist on Krypton's culture that I don't think has been done before. - I appreciated Lex Luthor's recognition and acceptance of his envy, and his use of it as a source of strength.

" a man’s life, especially in the beginning, is often built around one question: How do I become worthy? You don’t need to be told you’re not enough. The world says it in a thousand little ways. You just kind of know. Somewhere between being a boy and becoming a man, you look around and realise everything you want - respect, love, attention, peace - has to be earned. That’s the deal. " Source: https://goranshbharal.substack.com/p/what-women-dont-understand-about

Conditions for a choosing a pseudonym for a Tela Network account: 1) It has to be a name under which that you could plausibly and seriously be introduced to an audience. (For example, the writer known as N S Lyons began to appear on stage recently.) 2) It should have a double-barreled surname, for fun and gravitas, but this should not be too ridiculous. 3) It should be enjoyably meaningful in some way. Example: "Sam Gödel-Conway" - It contains three references: a) Sam, from Lord of Light: "One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding." b) Gödel, whose Incompleteness Theorems proved the hard limits of formal systems. c) Conway, whose Game of Life demonstrated the remarkable constructive power of formal systems. So the double surname is symbolic: It's the boundary between the two faces of formal systems: Limits and Emergence. (And of course: a blockchain is a formal system.)

" We are now living through the end of another narrative, the one that has dominated all of our lives. The WW2 consensus is ending. ... This consensus has decided not only the answers to the world’s questions but even the questions that we are allowed to ask. This consensus is everything from our political theory to the presuppositions that we carry to the thoughts we are capable of thinking. The WW2 consensus is a meta-narrative through which all westerners have viewed the world and human history for the last 70 years. It is sometimes called the “Boomer truth regime”. Among this meta-narrative’s sacred cows are democracy, the holocaust, the state of Israel’s right to exist, universal suffrage, and equality. Until now, you could be ostracized for questioning any of these. But things are changing. " https://thesaxoncross.substack.com/p/the-axe-is-laid-at-the-foot-of-the

" We are a lot more religious than we look - we just have a religion without a named god, and a theology disguised as an ideology. The state religion of the American Empire (and the British Empire before it) is shared by the bulk of the developed world: Progress. Every sacrifice, atrocity, and grand achievement we create is done in its name. Every major ideology - conservative, liberal, fascist, communist, socialist, or traditionalist - is but a denomination of this grand church. " https://substack.com/home/post/p-160043743

""" Every civilization is built upon a myth. Not a fiction, but a frame - a sacred narrative that defines the borders of good and evil, maps the structure of the world, and carves meaning into the chaos of time. For the modern West, that myth is the Second World War. We do not merely study that war; we worship it. It is the holy text of the present order, the last moral certainty in an otherwise relativistic age. The world we inhabit was birthed in its ashes, and our institutions, both supranational and domestic, trace their legitimacy to its outcome. """ https://substack.com/home/post/p-164131361

An exploration of how to make a new, productive online forum that improves the professional lives of its members. https://chatgpt.com/share/683c0e22-e854-800b-ae9d-c89b2784b4ac Selected points: - Let users build recognizable profiles with credibility signals. - Auto-generate a public user portfolio from high-quality posts. - Stronger credibility signals come from traceable, structured, exportable proof of value, not just social likes. Make every user look like an author worth citing. - Require public sponsorship by an existing user for a new user to join. - Treat reputation as a slow-earned, high-stakes currency, not a social freebie. Make it traceable, limit its issuance, and watch the graph. - Meta-Point: You’re not building a “forum.” You’re building a reputation graph with social context and visible lineage. - Data Science is a good target field. Content-rich, collaborative, shareable, professionally helpful.

[1] 1) b: a public meeting place for open discussion [2] The forum was a meeting place in the cities of ancient Rome. ... There were forums spread throughout the Roman world, including in what is now Israel and Lebanon. ... The most important forum was the one in the city of Rome. The Roman Forum was the center of Roman life and the site of meetings, law courts, and battles between gladiators. [3] The forum was a very busy place, used for markets, shopping, political gatherings and as a general meeting place. It was oblong and was surrounded by public buildings such as law courts and temples, which often had tall pillars and imposing entrances which made it a place of great dignity. ... As Rome grew bigger one forum was not enough and several others were made. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forum [2] https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/forum/627206 [3] Children's Britannica 1973

"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."