Sarah Drinkwater
@sarahdrinkwater
Knowledge beachcomber interested in the ownership economy, flourishing communities, ecosystem building, magic, and knowledge as an end to itself.
Sarah Drinkwater
Why does it matter? Everything is falling apart. Terra collapsed largely thanks to its token design. Projects that attracted millions or billions of dollars with the promise of absurd APYs are learning the truth of the old adage, “Easy come, easy go.” The regulators are coming. Tokens that were worth a lot of fiat a couple weeks ago are worth a lot... See more
Packy McCormick • Designing Token Economies
Productizing venture means taking everything that venture capitalists do — from sourcing companies to evaluating companies to adding value to founders — and using software or networks to do it better.
Erik Torenberg • Productizing Venture
Subtitle: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution
Jonah Peretti • Negations: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
And we’re seeing the emergence of more escapist forms of media, namely VR. Over the weekend, I went with my family to the Harry Potter VR exhibit in Madison Square Park. We flew on broomsticks over Hogwarts and fought Death Eaters. Every time I experience VR, I have full conviction that it will live up to its hype—just a bit later than we all... See more
Rex Woodbury • Welcome to the Internet: Millennial & Gen Z Ennui
Open Source Software and Collective ownership, Coops, and User Owned Platforms
I would argue that this is roughly the state of "open source" today. It is the modern software developer’s marmelade, with the OSI as our Konfitürenverordnung, continuing to aggressively enforce a phrase that has since evolved in the popular vernacular.
"open source" is not the logical negation of "closed source"
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
Now that Open Source is heavily depended on by nearly every commercial company, we’re running into sustainability and maintainability problems. These are problems that really didn’t exist at scale before. A very famous recent example of this is the XZ Utils backdoor exploit, where an open source maintainer accepted a subtle but significant compromise from a bad actor, partially due to burnout and harassment of the maintainer.
However, I see this in nearly every maintainer that I talk to. It’s almost impossible to make money by writing and maintaining Open Source software, due to several factors. Everyone wants and expects free shit, and nobody feels that they need to support the people making this all possible.
The strange new truth is that most open source developers and maintainers are now patronized by large corporations.
What would be more ideal is to have not one company paying each developer, which is subject to the whims of corporate KPIs and management changes, but instead to have thousands of companies pay a very small amount to professional maintainers.
The main problem is that there is no good way to do this currently. There is little to no incentive for companies to do this and there are few ways to aggregate and disperse such funding.
The second growing problem in the Open Source ecosystem is the problem of the new generation of Commercial Open Source.
Developers have now been growing up for decades loving Open Source and open communities, and when they start companies and projects, by default they want them to be open. However, there are corporate sustainability issues with Open Source, just as there are with individual maintainer. Somewhat ironically, The Man is now using Open Source licenses to stick it to the developer!
Together, the two houses of the collective will drive a powerful flywheel, funding public goods that make Optimism blockspace more valuable, leading to more revenue for public goods, and so on.
Introducing the Optimism Collective
Bits of information provide neither meaning nor orientation. They do not congeal into a narrative. They are purely additive. From a certain point onwards, they no longer inform — they deform. They can even darken the world. This puts them in opposition to truth. Truth illuminates the world, while information lives off the attraction of surprise,... See more
NOEMA • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
2. See how they treat service workers
People reveal their true natures when they deal with others who have no power and can never return a favor.
This is one of the most reliable indicators of trustworthiness that you will find.
3. Discover what experiences formed their character in early life