Drafts

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/04/14/privacy.html privacy https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-know-what-you-really-want-and-be-free-from-mimetic-desire mimetic desire Facebook banned pseudonymous identities after all. Immediately unbridling the power of mimesis. what is good about transparency scientific progress I think our civilizational flourishing was unlocked when we provided proper incentives for people to share their discoveries of new theories and inventions. Patents, academic publishing of papers. TODO TK: is this true? did our industrial age explosion result from systems providing social credit to shared knowledge? Money is social credit (or can overlap with it at least) by the way. ...

did the credit assigned to new knowledge lead to civilizational abundance? Have a blockchain layer between human and ai so that Anthropic can buy my prompt history. But right now they get it by asking for it as the price of model access. The open source models aren’t learning directly on their users problems…. But they could through blockchain. New ideas must come from humans (a necessary but insufficient source of new knowledge) ...

Why are the fastest-growing industries the worst investments? ...

As the USA is about to turn 250 years old, we face a spate of accelerating changes. Technological, climatic… Will our next age be more of the same, a dark age of subjugation and loss, or an age of miracles taking us to heights unimagined? No one can predict what exactly will happen, but if history rhymes, we can look to another period of rapid change that befell a peaceful, growing society on their 250th birthday. Spoiler alert: their handling of the new period kicked off the fastest period of human enrichment in history. Economists still use the word “miracle” to describe it. ...

crystalline/tight/lean/dense games Virtua Tennis Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Demo Disc I DO say the demo disc is way better than the full game(s) Shadow of the Colossus Tetris Demon’s Souls does having to restart count as filler? or is this a case where the filler becomes the content (and the context) Braid is pretty tight (I mean technically tight; not much slack) Bangai-O Spirits (I hear is tight) Minecraft Fortnite ...

I don’t understand redemption because I don’t understand economics. 等価交換: conservation of energy Economics involves dropping a net down on some aspects of society. That net never encompasses all of reality (that’s why there are externalities). The daimyo-gashi never got their money back from the poor daimyo, but they were “paid” with monopoly privileges for other activities. We make games with rules and we play them. But we can always make more games (the new games may incorporate previous externalities) Even our most fundamental physical theories require a constraint on their scope to convey or even consider (imagine a spherical cow) ...

I Dreamt I had to Die I understood I would be dead in 30 minutes. Don’t ask how or when I found this out. Because I didn’t find it out. I just knew that I would not be alive after 30 minutes, just as I knew I was alive at that moment, and that I was sitting on a bench in some place, a place that was or wasn’t a real place. ...

people should not associate on the basis of “their” ideas. Ideas are powerful and they can only come from humans, but they aren’t humans. Friends share aims, journeys. ideas need to be processed together by friends as by any person, but they do not need to take over for the people. “hey are you a republican? can we be friends” “thats a stupid question. " Lewis pointed out friends just make us more of what we’re aiming at. Friends can encourage glory to god as well as chasing after evil. ...

Let’s predict the future! of what? I like Lindy Effect and Bezos’s “What won’t change in the next 5 years?” SO many people think medical industry is broken, so seems there could be a big froth of uncertainty

Outline How did the architects of the Meiji Restoration get buy-in from elites? One would think that without such buy-in, Meiji restoration would not have happened. But what did any of the relevant elites think were the possible alternatives? By 18XX, they had the results of the handy natural experiments of China, India, Indonesia, and Thailand as examples of what resulted from different strategic responses to western imperialism. architects and elites. ...