Nicolas

🙏

@foldandrhizome Got the sequel right here

Using my Academic excellence award money to buy this🦧

@jmrphy Honestly, I think we're all better for it because I don't want to be playing that game either. The tide has to go out.

The public internet is rapidly becoming a middlebrow ghetto. As we converge toward AGI, the only winning strategy in the next-generation attention economy is to reject all conventional signaling and audience growth tactics in favor of uncompromisingly sophisticated work that alienates 99% of viewers, just in order to mobilize a tiny circle of elite individuals in a given domain.

Yes, I've thought about this a lot and it's really been driven by the confluence of sociality towards very dense social network platforms that we have created. And this results in a lot of the factors you had highlighted namely the mod mentality of such communities, the echo chamber effects, but also the fragility of the narratives in how they are coordinated and how they are unable to adapt thereby ossifying communities or at least the factions into these sort of hardline subgroups. There's no clear answer on how we resolve this but at the core is something you've highlighted which is the aspect of skin in the game and accountability when it comes to members of the community. Perhaps in some sort of utopian timeline when we figure all this out, the sort of verification that Bitcoin purports to solve would lead to some sort of solutioning, alongside a quasi-democratic sort of network structure that facilitates such engagement in a fair and just manner.

There’s this really weird pattern I’ve noticed in tech, crypto, art, online communities, etc where a guy will create something that becomes really popular or successful and then it gets captured by a bunch of faceless nobodies who make it worse or at least don’t do any better. From that point, like scheming little court viziers, if the founder does anything other than roll over and die, they do everything possible to subvert his actions, denounce his name, and then desperately ignore his existence. If he should happen to gain any traction afterward, he gets desperately dismissed and countersignalled. There never seems to be any ambitious intent to continue, expand upon, or even try to sincerely alter the trajectory either. It’s usually just a bunch of parasites suckling off the momentum from the juggernaut originally created until it becomes an emaciated husk. Ideas get thrown out without any real volition, executed poorly, generating little to no notoriety from whatever fans, audience, or enthusiasts were left after the initial excursion. Despite their entire lives and time and energy being dedicated to orbiting around a particular thing, they have an incredible level of scorn for that thing’s creator. Left unchecked, their mindset shifts from “I could’ve done this” to “I actually did this first” while failing to do any better. These individuals often tend to be risk-averse, low agency, fearful of direct confrontation, and generally unexceptional. They default towards appeals to authority, often utilizing cancel culture, consensus astroturfing, or other disingenuous methods which emphasize the need for removal without placing emphasis on themselves. They’re often “the responsible ones just picking up the pieces” after ousting the founder or creator under pretenses of bad optics, which are often the result of the same unstable creative energy that allowed something good to be made in the first place. These kinds of court games aren’t new to history, but at least historically there’s some degree of dignity in the life-or-death consequences and stake of power that these games were played for in the past. The phenomenon of people doing this online over the past couple decades is nowhere near as sophisticated, cunning, or deliberate as, say, an ancient Chinese coup or a 19th century political usurpation. It’s often bumbling doofuses operating on pure instinct, picking up unconscious consensus tactics and riding a wave of social inertia generated by unintentional displays of weakness (like undue generosity or lack of hierarchical enforcement) from leadership. The funniest part about it is that you all think I’m subtweeting something specific but I bet each and every one of you can think of a different example of something like this happening. Maybe it was to a company, a movement, a franchise, a fandom, a forum, or even just a friend group. But all of you have either seen it happen or basked in the aftermath of it. It’s ruined something good you’ve enjoyed or something important you were a part of. As human beings learn to adapt to the next stage of evolution (the Network Hivemind), we find ourselves rediscovering the same principles and mechanisms we had to learn throughout our history as a species. The lessons of the past are harvested and recreated digitally, as we both participate and observe our own development in the great Petri dish of the Network. The sociopolitical mechanisms that online parasites have historically taken advantage of over the past twenty years are growing weaker. Fairly soon, genuine creators and contributors will have better context and weapons to equip themselves with, a proper immune system built up against the pungent thick vat of bio waste that’s encroached and corrupted everything we enjoy. Like a tragic prophecy in a Greek epic, every dire social consequence the digital cockroach has wielded as a bogeyman to cater to his interests will come true. A better, crueler world awaits them.

@levelsio Was literally just there last week and there was haze, the air quality is shite bro.

This is true, Kuala Lumpur has never been my favorite place (too religious for my tastes) But I cannot deny they somehow managed to get clean air unlike Thailand or Bali

@signulll There's an elegant beauty to having some inbuilt, organic entropy in the system of memory maintenance.

this post cuts to something i’ve been personally thinking & posting about a lot which is how the human mind’s forgetting machinery is underrated as a design primitive. in our first product we’ve built our memory model around a specific decay factor influenced by multiple variables.. each memory degrades by default unless actively reinforced. this relies on a combination of recency, retrieval frequency, & contextual reactivation. this ain’t perfect any means. but it’s annoying af that current llm memory implementations essentially treat every retrieved fact as equally alive. that’s likely not how cognition works. idk if our approach is the final answer but i’m increasingly convinced the forgetting curve is as important as the learning curve. & the right memory model may be way more about what you let go than what you store.

@mindywong268 @cookiecarver At my local supermarket, but I live in Singapore!

@waysofbeing1 @cookiecarver where do you get it?

whenever i get the chance i get the really fancy milk in the big supermarket. it's twice the price as normal milk. is it twice as nice? yes yes it is

@KMNDR_ @teodorio At this point, it feels like the value of trust in X as an infrastructure for communication and narrative supersedes that of the monetization to support it.

@teodorio They've gotta figure it out because once Americans abandon this platform it will go to zero. Trust is the most valuable currency that exists online in a world of deepfakes and nonstop slop. The whole promise of X was to cut through that not monetize it. People are jumping ship.

absolutely no one who matters on this platform cares about money from posting. simply nuke the program and leave twitter as it used to be

Until you build 'class consciousness' for high-earning W2s, they will continue to be the both proverbial and literal paypigs of the economy. This is what Milei achieved in Argentina and what Renan Santos of MBL is realizing in Brazil.

This is the natural conclusion to the globohomo liberal New World Order, but who truly has the courage to make the leap? Ironically, a young city-state like Singapore is best poised to shake off the baggage of its founding myth, especially since its national identity is already well-eroded with the influx of immigration over the past 2 decades.

There's a specific term for the profound experience and it's called the Noetic Quality. Its not objectively well defined, and the problem is that it's not a simple chemical presence like dopamine. Instead, it is the state activation of galaxy-brain-mode by suppressing the default mode network. In a crude simplification, you overclock into "100% CPU usage" by activating vast neural networks that are previously silo'd and that's how people get these true but banal insights like everything is connected because in that brain state, it quite literally is so. This distinction is key because it maps to how profundity is a byproduct of interconnectedness, rather than an intrinsic quality (at the risk of becoming a general platitude, which is where wisdom comes in). Having said that, it is also imprudent to dismiss this, because this is also literally how we deploy lateral thinking right?

I live on a low floor in my building, so I listen to a lot of funeral music from unc/monk bands performing the rites. There's a particular phase in the chanting that I love, where the monks split into this four-part harmony, with overlapping rhythmic phrasing and it morphs into this sick ass Steve Reichian minimalism.

@sporadica Asian-Americans were doing so well now these Gen Z striver mofos are speedrunning destruction of all that goodwill in like 5 years

"I've been in many trenches in my life and can say this was by far one of the most intense warzones." you're a SWE, this is why people make fun of you mfs

One of the reasons why I enjoy voice dictation over typing is that thinking out loud allows me to modulate my ideas verbally through intensity, stress and accenting, and maybe this is making up for a lack of articulation but it's why I feel so inclined to liberally use all-caps.

Used to be one of those guys that would say things like "Can't believe March is almost over already." Now I can't believe all the shit I've done and it's ONLY STILL MARCH 2026? Does high agency lead to time dilation?

Doing some maintenance on some thrifted bags and applying leather conditioner for the first time like holy shit what a remarkable, resilient GOATED material this is. Leather is fucking LINDY.

@LiquidusMex @hoeflatoor The model is also Chinese-maxxing, if you will.

@waysofbeing1 @hoeflatoor It couldnt help but dilute his field worker facial structure

Bro you have permanent underclass physiognomy In a different lifetime you would be crouched on a field farming millet and rice but the Winds of Fate brought you instead to modern America to see if your bloodline could break its curse Instead, you jump right into peasantry antics once more, angering the Heavens with your impunity

@Mach2x Same man its so dumb, such low hanging fruit I want to smack their face. When I'm feeling kind I like to pontificate on the benefits of heat/cold exposure and thermoregulation for health and wellness.

@waysofbeing1 ok the part that irks me the most is whenever i tell singaporeans im looking for a proper dry sauna they give the same programmed half-joke response: singapore already a sauna. just go outside leh literally shut up not funny you deserve to die before me

After six months of getting Bryan Johnson-pilled in response to burnout, I am now more sensitive than ever to the effects of poor air quality. Especially with the slightly hazy conditions nowadays in SG and having just returned from KL, I notice being outside for even 10 to 15 mins triggers a noticeable inflammation in the sinues, it's insane.