Noah Thorp

Autonomous/decentralized social structures attempt to turn hierarchies with a log(number_of_people) efficiency into local autonomous action with a constant 1 person efficiency. These attempts fail to scale if they in practice adopt number_of_people squared efficiency processes.

Deep fakes can be identified by wide adoption of: 1. Watermarking technology (public/private key encryption) 2. Recording devices & editing tools that digitally sign their media 3. Hash chains to verify video integrity 4. Trusted publisher registries for watermarks

Every aspect of the future is uncertain ... allegedly.

cc @aaronzlewis twitter.com/aaronzlewis/st…

"There's a system of symbols that no one will vouch for Everyone uses and no one believes" -Amanaemonesia, Chairlift Truth. Thanks @carolineplz

@bonkydog They aren't well known yet but should/will be. I was just telling another friend about them today. Good timing :)

@noahthorp turned me on to this video and now I'm kind of obsessed with it

90s-core wirehead upload cult fantasia youtube.com/watch?v=ben9qD…

@roybahat One reason gamers in complex IRL games like D&D talk about the rules so much is because they are powering the game engine with their dialog. When rules are automated dialog is freed up for play. So the ratio of "rules" vs "play" dialog is a good proxy for platform maturity.

The Dungeons & Dragons Effect: when you are playing a game so elaborate, with a community so consumed by it, that most of the attention while playing the game goes to... talking about the game.

@roybahat Reminds me of when Douglas Adams defined a Nerd as "a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.” Recursive meta-cognition is a first order property of nerdery.

@bonkydog Yes! Mysteriously, the 1/2 step spacing of notes in the major scale is the same spacing as the standard/Ghanaian clave rhythm; it also matches the Euclidean rhythm pattern E(7,12) for evenly spacing 7 pulses across 12 steps. Good for power plants too: youtube.com/watch?v=vwigqS…

There's a rhythm to "add an extra step slipped between the groups by sleight of hand" and "skip a step by making the last note also the first in the next octave."

The major scale looks asymmetrical on the keyboard, with alternating groups of 2 and 3 black keys, but really it's symmetrical and repetitive.

@gordonbrander That's kind of a meta-joke because 7 is the number people most frequently pick when asked to pick a random number between 1 and 10. Us humans even create artificial meaning when poorly attempting to create randomness.

@gordonbrander 7

@zippy314 @GreatDismal Great point! If the iotas of all futures are present and there are polyfutures... then all iota-futures can gradually separate to become evenly distributed at the end of their timeline when no other iota-futures remain. Did we just write the next season of Loki?

@noahthorp @GreatDismal FTW and then on to polyfutures...

Some say "the future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed". However, if in all present moments iotas of many futures are present then no future will ever be evenly distributed and achieve the status of "the future".

On average, conclusions drawn from averaging are misleading.

@bonkydog Yup. I remember my first > 1 day debugging quest. It was December of 1992. I was missing a semi-colon and my lazy C compiler didn't complain. That was also when I thought writing code with no comments "looked cooler" 🙃

You always remember the first bug you stared at for more than a day before seeing it.

@robertwrighter Printing money pushes stock, real estate and asset USD price up relative to massive stimulus & quantitative easing. If you divide the S&P by the fed balance sheet you get something closer to a constant. The S&P chart shows an oversupply of USD dropping in value relative to stock.

This is the stock market (S&P 500) over the past 40 years. We seem to be in the midst of an almost unprecedentedly exuberant market. Can somebody explain to me how this is rational, given the pandemic & many other causes for uncertainty about future stability & prosperity?

@djbaskin Yesss, or one of these awesome 100MB Iomega Zip disks:

If you went to party in the Bay Area in 1994 and you expressed an interested in weird emerging technology to engineers at the party, would someone hand you a floppy disk and tell you to check out what they're working on?

@roybahat Yes and organizational kindness can only be fully realized by addressing context (e.g. market) and capability. People with good intentions sometimes build terrible orgs - especially when markets turn down or scale outpaces coordination capability.

Theory of increasing organizational kindness: Every generation of talent treats the next one better than they were treated. They remember all the ways their bosses mistreated them, and fix that when they become bosses.

@balajis At least for music, I think file sharing services declined because streaming is easier, has almost complete inventory and is basically cheaper than the cost of storing files. MP3s were a substitutes for CDs. YouTube is basically Napster now.

File sharing was once huge, and may become huge again.

@KieranSnyder @roybahat Yes it's interesting how things that "scale" commercially or socially often have a constrained component (like 280 characters) and an open component (like what you write). There is a generative interplay between sameness and variety.

@roybahat Scale has so many truly enjoyable and important enemies: Variety, change, innovation, creativity, agility, and lots more. I increasingly think the companies that win big are those that manage to retain all that stuff even through scale.

Variety is the enemy of scale.