Posts by StJohn Piano

Korean films say: “You endure because there’s nothing else to do.” Chinese films say: “The individual is a brief interruption in the flow of history.” Japanese films say: “Tragedy is just beauty seen from the wrong angle.” Danish films say: “Even silence has consequences.” --- ^ More ChatGPT summaries.

Bozeman, Montana is about as far away from the US urban / coastal cultures as you can get. Nonetheless, urban people displace Bozeman people, not the other way around. I find myself concluding, yet again, that owning a house is no protection against the economic currents of our time. Economic networks are the powerhouse. People hooked into an expanding network simply displace those who are not. So one’s focus must always be one’s network. (Even if you acquire a house, your neighborhood is displaced and restructured, and your kids grow up in the new environment, and themselves are obligated to leave - so you only put off the defeat for one generation.) I think we could think of the phenomenon today as “internal colonization” by different networks. The focus is now Montana instead of the Congo. A model: Networks process transactions. Skills are valuable economically if they allow you to help a network process more transactions.

In inflation-adjusted terms, the cost of a house in Bozeman has tripled in the last twenty-five years; young working-class kids who grew up there can no longer afford to buy a house in the town they grew up in. They either wait to inherit property, pay outrageous rents, live in a camper — or leave. This has had the effect of ‘cutting off’ the continuity of the culture there; the Bozeman “old-guard” now finds itself diminished, steadily replaced by the new generation of largely ex-urban newcomers who have effectively ‘colonized’ the town. Moreover, even if a young Bozemanian (Bozemanite?) can situate himself in a decent housing scenario — his town is now a sprawling, traffic-choked version of what it was when he was a kid. The construction is endless; there are hundreds, if not thousands of people now living on the streets there in RV’s, vans, and campers. https://substack.com/home/post/p-175627800

Source: https://www.motivenotes.ai/p/what-makes-5-of-ai-agents-actually Selected points: --- Most founders think they’re building AI products. They’re actually building context selection systems. 'The base models are the soil; context is the seed.' Context engineering considered as LLM-native feature engineering: - Selective context pruning = feature selection - Context validation = schema/type/recency checks - 'Context observability' = trace which inputs improved/worsened output quality - Embedding augmentation with metadata = typed features + conditions Goal: Treat context like a versioned, auditable, testable artifact, not a string blob. Important: - You must trace which inputs led to which outputs (lineage) - You must respect row level, role based access (policy gating) - If two employees ask the same question, but have different permissions, the model output should differ. AI chat conversation works when it removes a learning curve.

" These are the last days of social media as we know it. ... Social media was built on the romance of authenticity. Early platforms sold themselves as conduits for genuine connection: stuff you wanted to see, like your friend’s wedding and your cousin’s dog. Even influencer culture, for all its artifice, promised that behind the ring‑light stood an actual person. But the attention economy, and more recently, the generative AI-fueled late attention economy, have broken whatever social contract underpinned that illusion. The feed no longer feels crowded with people but crowded with content. ... The difference between human and synthetic content is becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Earlier this year, CEO Steve Huffman pledged to “keep Reddit human,” a tacit admission that floodwaters were already lapping at the last high ground. " https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media

Yes. I think this is a useful model. Particularly the word "automatically". Relatedly, excerpts from an article I read today: --- In less than two years France has gone through five prime ministers ... The cost of servicing national debt this year is estimated to be €67 billion - it now consumes more money than all government departments except education and defence. Forecasts suggest that by the end of the decade it will outstrip even them, reaching €100 billion a year. ... According to Françoise Fressoz of Le Monde newspaper, "We have all become totally addicted to public spending. It's been the method used by every government for half a century – of left and right – to put out the fires of discontent and buy social peace. "Everyone can sense now that this system has run its course. We're at the end of the old welfare state. But no one wants to pay the price or face up to the reforms which need to be made." https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg9n6vr2eyo

"In the 19th century, Britain profited immensely from smuggling opium into China. When China decided to ban the material to save its population and economy, the British launched the Opium War, which started a century of humiliation for China." [1] "China is currently the primary source of the precursor chemicals needed to manufacture fentanyl." [2] "Fentanyl is many times more powerful than heroin... between 2019 and 2021, the opioid killed 200 Americans a day. ... It seems most likely that the fentanyl crisis began without the Party's knowledge, and that China's leaders ... are simply allowing the development of a situation which happens to appeal to their sense of historical justice." [3] [1] http://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/dshd/202209/t20220930_10775097.htm [2] https://theconversation.com/what-the-opium-wars-can-tell-us-about-china-the-u-s-and-fentanyl-247170 [3] https://quillette.com/2023/06/14/the-reverse-opium-war

Protocol: - Each block creates new coins (the "block reward") in its "coinbase transaction". - The block reward was initially at 50 BTC per block. - Every 210,000 blocks (~4 years), the reward is halved. - This halving produces a geometric series that converges to a maximum of 21 million BTC. Enforcement: - Bitcoin nodes run the protocol code. - The code defines the block reward formula and enforces it. - A miner who tries to claim more than the allowed reward will simply produce an invalid block. - Other nodes reject that block, and the miner gets nothing. Note: - A subgroup of nodes can choose to set a higher limit, producing a hard fork, resulting in a new network, with the same addresses and balances. This has already happened at least twice. However, the original network offers a "harder" asset (due to its lower limit) and over time wins in terms of stored value and market interest. Holders will tend to sell the forked asset.

This is an interesting idea mentioned recently by Balaji Srinivasan. I'll expand it here. - The shapes of current countries are partially (perhaps mostly) due to the constraints of agriculture. Single contiguous areas, in which people grew similar crops and raised similar animals, were zones in which people could move easily and share useful technologies. This often led to similar customs. - Today, in modern economies, only 1% of the population works in agriculture. Marriage customs, ethnic and cultural boundaries, and political boundaries are much less constrained by the agricultural requirements. - The hot zone of a polity is its information exchange hub. This is where all other activity is organized. - This is constrained by _timezone_. Within a single timezone, potential political / economic / cultural coordination is maximized. - It may now be much easier for a powerful polity to expand _vertically_. Source: https://youtu.be/VSVOQl-vFKk

Excerpt from an email by Satoshi Nakamoto. Subject: Bitcoin v0.1 released Datetime: Fri Jan 16 11:03:14 EST 2009 It contains some ideas on initial applications of blockchain-as-money. --- I would be surprised if 10 years from now we're not using electronic currency in some way, now that we know a way to do it that won't inevitably get dumbed down when the trusted third party gets cold feet. It could get started in a narrow niche like reward points, donation tokens, currency for a game or micropayments for adult sites. Initially it can be used in proof-of-work applications for services that could almost be free but not quite. It can already be used for pay-to-send e-mail. ... Subscription sites that need some extra proof-of-work for their free trial so it doesn't cannibalize subscriptions could charge bitcoins for the trial. --- Source: https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/015014.html