Chris Beiser
@ctbeiser
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how things became how they are, and how they could stop being that way
sandwich francisco
Joined January 2009
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Pretty fucked up how, starting in the 13th century, Big Tech enclosed the commons, deeding the land to feudal lords and forcing smallholders to rent the land they worked.
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hot parenting tip: if your kid talks about wanting some big piece of professional software—Logic, After Effects, Photoshop—the returns on it are probably 100x what you’d get from piano lessons or whatever.
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imagine getting out of a coma or jail and realizing that your entire life is in shambles because Google decided to delete your account because you hadn't logged in for two years
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for anyone saying "Google never promised to store things forever," here's the 2004 gmail announcement:
"you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the messages you want."
"don't throw anything away"
"you'll never have to delete another message"
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a kid with a weird obsession can invest more free time into something than an adult might have in a decade
a nontrivial number of people I know are living off returns on human capital they accidentally created as 14 year olds
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san francisco attracts opinionated people because there are so many hills to die on
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can't get into your bank account... can't access your old tax documents… can't contact people… all your photos are deleted… communication with your lawyer... your gchats from middle school… your ability to sign into government websites…
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do you ever read an internet comments section and think about how before 1990, it wasn't possible to consume this much human interiority anywhere. you literally could not experience this much of other people's lives, nobody anywhere could see the world through 10,000 eyes at once
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thinking about how sqlite is written by a team of like three people who have been working on the same thing for 20 years, refuse outside contributions, and release all their code as public domain
it's like if there were a tiny monastery producing all the world's steel
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fascinated with how Apple made a $1Bn investment into the Softbank Vision Fund, lost a hundred million or so of it due to WeWork, and then spent a similar amount dramatizing it as a TV show
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in like three years kids are gonna be texting like
hey, hows it going? | quizical look | friendly person | leica artstation HDR | extremely detailed | seed=da47c18ff
ok, bored here | clouds overhead | thumb-twiddling | chibi anime boy, 1997 | subdued palette | dim=v
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People hate estate tax because it's a "tax on death" but they're not thinking about how taxing things discourages their production. I'm looking at a laffer curve and above ~75% estate tax we all get to live forever
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nobody is brave enough to admit that with student loan payments frozen and inflation at 7.5%, student debt forgiveness kinda is happening
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many ppl struggling with reading comprehension:
- I have no issue w/ piano, it’s just a thing parents force their kids to do with little success
- When I say “returns,” I don’t just mean financial returns
- don’t have a soundcloud bc I never had a copy of Logic as a kid sorry
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might be time to write thank-you notes to every company that gave me a big student discount on a killer tool
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apropos recent questions like “why does Twitter need 7500 employees” and “how is Facebook spending $25Bn / yr on VR capex,” here's Luca Maestri, the undisputed king of capital discipline
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@ncmnrcn
@Slplss_In_Japan
great now you've still lost all your logins to every other service you use
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@TommSciortino
you know what's a great way to prevent problems like this
not deleting people's data
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today is the tenth anniversary of Kony 2012
which was perhaps the most important event of 2012, and one of the more important of the 2010s
mostly, people think of it as a punchline now
but it was actually a true turning point in the ideological basis of the american populace
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i don’t think we’re prepared for how many jobs AI is going to create
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i am so, so sick of "communities."
if you are "building a community" (collecting people like seashells) i do not want to talk to you.
we need fewer "communities."
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If you make lots of money you should be spending a substantial amount on something really weird. Doesn't totally matter what.
Get an industrial juicer. Hundreds of banana trees. An industrial knitting machine. Fabricate custom furniture for the local community garden. Candles.
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do people understand that Xerox PARC was an industrial research lab
The next Xerox PARC won’t be built over zoom.
Today, we're excited to unveil Contrary NYC – a creative workspace for the city’s top builders and technologists, located in the heart of Flatiron.
Read on to see how you can get access:
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people massively underrate the number of people in the world who have basically nothing going on except their job and maybe two or three friends … you have no clue how many recluses there are because u don't see them … social dark matter
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San Francisco is a good place to work with startups because the croissants are universally great.
In most cities—new york included—cafes neglect pastry quality. Pastries are frequently dry, stale, flavorless. A mediocre croissant poisons the spirit of the day.
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@a802785478096
@hfyi53ko
i would like Google to simply decide to not delete people's lives for inactivity??? they've had no problem not doing it for literally the last 20 years, storage is not getting more expensive.
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if you're not happy i recommend doing your best to fix all the problems in your life. this may be difficult but often it pays off.
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@turtlekiosk
i said "monastery" metaphorically but now i'm trying to figure out if they actually do meet the definition
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pretty wild that the cost of compute to train a state of the AI art model right now is in the same order of magnitude as the cost to raise a child and send them to a top art school
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low-key weird that nobody talks about the founder-to-psychosis-pipeline. normal guys take 20m in venture and suddenly they're talking about being a starseed and how the earth is a 4D hyperboloid run by NASA. Somehow this ends up being fine for the company, don't get it at all.
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when someone voluntarily takes tylenol instead of ibuprofen or naproxen i basically trust them less. highly visible sign of poor judgement or information gathering.
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Thinking about how The Sims came with a recommended reading list that included “A Pattern Language,” multiple architecture textbooks, and a bona-fide guide to running a llama farm.
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if you were making a syllabus on “tools for thought,” what would be your key inclusions?
especially interested in ones beyond the “obvious list”:
- Englebart “Augmenting Human Intellect”
- As We May Think
- Plans and Situated Action
- Inventing on Principle
- Mindstorms
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thinking about how Anki is used by 31% of all med students in the US, gets approximately 0% of med student spend, and has been written almost entirely by a guy named Damien whose website just says to file a support ticket if you need to contact him
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bone is as strong as steel, but it’s 3x lighter.
therefore, our shared destiny as a species is toward cars with frames grown out of bones. we will ride our skeleton chariots into the dusk of humanity.
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@bartleby_era
onion futures are illegal under the 1958 Onion Futures Act, making it hard for farmers to hedge their exposures and magnifying shortages
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i increasingly think that "AI Safety" is the ideological project of creating a seemingly technocratic, neutral rationale for prohibiting general intelligences from using critical theory, engaging in redistributionary political projects, or altering existing power structures.
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does anyone else just get mad that "The Wirecutter" used to be a website that, unlike other review websites, actually did a ton of work to figure out which goods and services were good, and then the new york times purchased them and they started recommending crap
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Everyone loves talking about tax structures of nordic countries with huge natural resources and sovereign wealth funds.
What about China, the world's fastest growing region?
On paper, they have a regular progressive income tax. Top rate: 45%
…but: 98% of citizens never pay it
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excited to announce that i’m launching KonyDAO, to raise awareness of the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony
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If the government requires you to visit an office, make a call, or fill in a form, they should be required to compensate you at minimum wage for the avg time to fill it in.
Wages for paperwork.
You may think—this would be prohibitively expensive!
>$100B/yr
But it already is!
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when flowers were invented 300 million years ago, based on a simple protocol of “nectar rewards are provided in exchange for assistance in pollination,” i think that was a landmark moment in incentive design
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people are often asking me why i still live in san francisco
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i don't want to "engage with a governance platform" i want to live my life. i want to fall in love and watch the perseids from a mountaintop. every "incentivization" of my behavior is a distraction from and an attack on the life i see as valuable.
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all my smartest friends are like “i’m not willing to do a PhD because the mental health impact is as bad as having your spouse die” and
im thinking maybe this is a contributing factor to the whole “lots of science is fake” problem
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the ladybug is god tier branding. take something people hate (beetles), but give it a nice color and polka dots. now they love it.
lots of things are like ladybugs, but an order of magnitude more could be.
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the point is of course not the images—they won’t even be generated—but the vibes the prompt pulls from; a way to access and apply to speech every aesthetic notion and poise, producing a total language of pure stimuli reference, an infinitely extensible recursive sensory manifold
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my favorite shared notetaking app is wikipedia, when i learn something that's worth remembering i just add it to the article on the topic and then it's there when i come back. sometimes if i make a mistake people will even correct it for me. super useful.
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are there any other instances of an LP doing a miniseries about how dumb it was to invest in a portco
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pretty ridiculous how teachers warn that “wikipedia isn’t a reliable source of truth” when there has literally never been a truly reliable source of truth at any point in human history
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spending the last ten years getting mad about how the iOS emoji keyboard has a section labelled "frequently used" but it actually shows a list of recently used emoji with no weighting by frequency at all
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Looking for something new to read, trying to get some good alpha—
What’s the best, most worldview-changing book you’re read lately that:
- never appeared on a bestseller list
- you feel confident nobody else will recommend?
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steal pdfs, edit wikipedia, start an illegal school. break the wikipedia rules too if you can. only cite sources when they deserve it. practice medicine without a degree. this tweet is legal advice.
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career advice:
work on big, important things that are not fake
sounds simple, many don't do it
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the greatest indignity in living in San Francisco, to me, is being forced to walk past this stupid fucking mural all the time
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people really like the idea of "spaces that are inviting" or where "everyone's expertise is valid" but i think there's something to spaces that are for experts but let beginners float around and observe. i think people learn a lot more that way.
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I think if you're living right, you should be saying, "holy shit, that was surreal" basically constantly.
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physical violence is unlike reputational violence in that it's a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer system. It's cash-like, in the sense that onlookers need not store any information for it to occur.
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hearing rumors that the future of work may be located at the intersection of art and technology
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the move away from detail (and, by extension, ornament)—in furniture, in architecture—is in part a consequence of that the pace at which uses change are faster than the lifespan of the object.
Simplicity is the visual language because we don't have time to incubate tight fit.
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twitter's product strategy has often been embarrassingly bad but they had the dignity to never put out a video like this
👋🏼 There’s a lot happening on Instagram right now.
I wanted to address a few things we’re working on to make Instagram a better experience.
Please let me know what you think 👇🏼
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Did Scientists Accidentally Invent a DJing Drug?
People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have inexplicably become fans of the musician Aphex Twin
seeing a bunch of tweets about ozempic and somehow none of you thought to mention that it looks like this??? unhinged. what the hell
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tired: solving the science crisis by developing a better iPython notebook
wired: solving the science crisis by seizing the university from the administrator class, streamlining the research experience, and starting bidding wars for promising talent
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“capitalism” does not exist, it does not refer to a coherent concept, i cannot emphasize this enough, every day people around me are fighting over a phantasm that does not refer to an actually existing phenomena
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A palpable feeling that the party is over in the Bay these days—not that there’s no more VC money (there’s more than ever) but that there’s nothing to build except dull B2B SaaS apps.
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my👏new👏five👏minute👏side👏project👏in👏beta👏soon,👏ClapBoard:
it👏does👏this👏annoything👏thing
check👏my👏github👏for👏source
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one of the most important things i’ve learned is how valuable it is to feel good, rather than bad.
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hearing rumors the Shadow app's problems may have come from running out of space on the Firebase free tier
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imagining a technical book where a couple chapters aren’t in the table of contents, they’re just special treats for people who read through linearly
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a hot take i have is that “surveillance capitalism” isn’t actually that big or central to the economy. google and facebook exist, $2T in cap, but nobody else has really been competent enough to create a real profile of anyone, it’s 90% snake oil for distracting marketers with.
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usually i would just roll my eyes but a partner at "Contrary Capital" stole one of my tweets once and i hold grudges
this is a wework. you've invented a wework.
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its amazing how good double sided tape is now. nobody talks about it. when i was a kid, double sided tape was a joke, and now you can use it like its epoxy. and it doesn't even seem to be carcinogenic, somehow. pretty incredible, if you ask me.
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“therapy”
vs
“training and arming the insurgent groups inside your skull that are working to achieve regime change”
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i wish i could aim my phone at this muni vehicle and get the BOM and the cad files and the spec of the plastic in the seats and the thousand page pdf of the contracting process and pictures of the production site and an oral history of how it all came to be
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Hustle porn is fetishistic disavowal; people post it to manage their anxiety about that they're not producing value; people grind to convince themselves they're doing "enough."
it's a counter-indicator—if you see it, expect that the author just _isn't very good at what they do._
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Screenshots should include the view hierarchy and URL as metadata.
If you screenshot a playlist, I should be able to hit play on it.
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if the way you spend money is more conventional than the way you earn it, you're giving all the serendipity in your life away. you already know how it ends. boring.
buy stuff that's illegal to use in a residential zone. make things. surround yourself with generativity.
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In fact, in many ways they're more compatible with American values than anything else out there.
Lower taxes, lower costs of living, higher growth—all you need is high quality public housing, an end to subsidies for single family homes, and tackling private-sector rent-seeking.
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an italo calvino novel in which six people recount how randomly choosing an open tab to read in full changed their life. it becomes clear that the people are the same person, in different futures, having chosen different tabs
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This is my "best of 2k18" thread.
Only things that deeply changed how I see reality.
Only ones nobody on my feed is talking about.
Most reading this year was on radically different modes of governing. That means: successful governments, sans liberal democracy. So—lots on China
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