sari

“If something looks irrational – and has been so for a long time – odds are you have a wrong definition of rationality.” – Taleb

Interface design for creative, thinking work is particularly important for software, which is a medium that has few true constraints. The medium of canvas or photography constrains output to two dimensions of shape and color. Recorded audio is a stream of sounds, writing is a stream of words. But software itself? It can take any perceptual form we ... See more

And yet if there’s a lesson of the past four years, it’s that thoughtfulness and craftsmanship only got the company about 10 percent as far as Microsoft did by copy-pasting Slack’s basic design. In its open letter, Slack famously told Microsoft: “You’ve got to do this with love.” In 2020, looking at Slack’s size, the idea seems laughable. What’s lo... See more

token emission + reputation + learning + impact = f(time, materials, skills, output, other signals)

By harnessing creative surplus, multiplayer media projects benefit from free or lower-cost labor at scale (think Wikipedia).

Here we see a rift that will appear in virtually every information industry, the fault line between the virtues of centralized and of decentralized decision making, between the imperative to produce at scales that justify production costs and the desire for variety.