I don’t know which corners of the internet I’ll be drawn to next. But I know The Pattern will be there waiting for me. And it fills me with dread. Can you also feel it? That nagging sense that there’s a cancer spreading through the internet? That sense that humanity’s greatest invention has been captured by mediocrity and bad incentives and... See more
C. THI NGUYEN: Since I finished the “Games” book, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly this question, why we’re seeing this increase of points everywhere, not just inside formal games? And the answer seems to be that quantified measures are extremely good tools for large-scale bureaucracies to organize themselves.
The auditory cortex seems to perform a simple calculation: it uses the recent past to predict the future. As soon as a note or a group of notes repeats, this region concludes that it will continue to do so in the future. This is useful because it keeps us from paying too much attention to boring, predictable signals. Any sound that repeats is... See more
C. THI NGUYEN: Twitter is doing two things simultaneously. One thing it’s doing is it’s flattening all the kind of rich reactions you have into likes. So already you have not only a binary filter— like or dislike— that pushes you in the direction of aggregated numbers instead of a few deep connections, but you also get this timing filter where... See more
Social tokens can be used to represent a wide range of access rights, from a person’s time, access to an exclusive group, or partial ownership of a community treasury. Their use cases can also evolve, with more features added over time.