Ian Vanagas
@ianvanagas
Writing about internet communities, products, creation, and crypto.
Ian Vanagas
Travis Kalanick started Uber as a hack to split a few private cars with his friends. Thefacebook.com was just a student directory written in PHP. Even Elon Musk started SpaceX with the goal of merely increasing NASA’s budget by pulling a PR stunt.
Daniel Gross • How To Decide What To Build
2) What are the outputs to the function approximator?
Eric Jang • How to Understand ML Papers Quickly
LLMs are mid. It does a good job at getting the average and this is useful in many areas where this is tough. When you want "good", LLMs let you down. We underestimate the impact doing things to a "mid" level will have on the world.
Perhaps no other civilization, either in antiquity or today, was so fond of legible and governable social realities (than the Roman empire).
Venkatesh Rao • A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
I strongly suspect a much deeper challenge has just presented itself to humanity. It increasingly feels like there is a deep conceptual and technical connection between the two domains that calls for careful research. It feels like AI and crypto are mathematical evil twins of sorts; that each is somehow deeply incomplete without the other. The mild... See more
Venkatesh Rao • The Dawn of Mediocre Computing - by Venkatesh Rao The Dawn of Mediocre Computing
The personal computing revolution succeeded and we are all miserable. The dream of personal computing as augmentation for the intellect, and the joyful, radical counterculture that arose around the first PC’s has given way to our increasingly dismal present.
Anton Troynikov • Remixable Software - Guest Post
David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.