Saturday 25th November, 2023 - Passing the Baton of Chaos (Issue #142)
A sampling of the cool things happening this week. Obviously some OpenAI stuff but also a bunch of other interesting things that are chugging away even if they aren’t being all crazy about it.
Another season 2 instalment…
There was only really 1 story this week: the baton of chaos which has been held by Elon Musk and social media for the past few years, was passed to the folks at OpenAI who ran and ran and ran with it like their lives depended on it. They then had a game of hot potato with it, all while still running, often in totally different directions, only to all emerge from a huge bundle, as an enormous mob of angry developers definitely all running in the exact same direction.
This pattern was broadly replicated throughout societies all over the world as literally every single media outlet on planet Earth set their hair on fire, while writing blog posts, recording podcasts, tweeting, tooting, threading, and blueskying furiously. All while eating turkey and cranberry sauce.
If you weren’t looking carefully it was easy to miss that there were in fact other interesting things going on too. The banking industry was being overhauled and modernised, the state was being deconstructed and reconstructed, the social media renaissance was being analysed, and reality itself was being simulated and digitised. I was able to get a piece of each in the form of some of the greatest podcasts ever created. They are all included in this week’s issue.
I haven’t been able to do much in the way of work on my static site generator but I’ve been posting links and writing notes on the website all week. There’s some great stuff there. Check it out :)
Podcasts
Bitcoin for Banking Failures with Parker Lewis (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Payment rails, resilient setups and fallbacks, single points of failure, business bank accounts inefficiencies, preparedness, legacy system fragility and redundancy, melting ice cube problem, volatility and psychology, business de-risking, hedge to inflation vs solution to inflation, money printing, the future of state currencies, bitcoiner Nostr infatuation https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-for-banking-failures
AI and Regulatory Capture (Techmeme Podcast / Securities Podcast) - A deep dive into the eventful waters of the AI space, focusing on the macro, business strategy, and how companies are approaching regulation, sometimes to their own advantage https://www.ridehome.info/show/techmeme-ride-home/bonus-me-on-the-securities-podcast-talking-ai-and-regulatory-capture
Software Eating the State Ep#197 (Bankless Podcast) - Where crypto is at as a technology, where the US is at with crypto, effective accelerationism and technology optimism, how AI will affect the future of government and the state https://www.bankless.com/early-access-software-eating-the-state-with-sammuel-hammond
Emergency podcast: chaos at OpenAI (Vergecast Podcast) - The best roundup of the OpenAI blowup craziness from the past week, with high quality analysis, theorising and humour. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdmVyZ2VjYXN0/episode/ZDk5OWJiMTYtODdiYi0xMWVlLTlhMjctNDNkN2Q4NjQwZDMy?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwi4_OiH89uCAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQGA
“Two-Legged Stool” with Gabe Rivera Ep#389 (Talk Show Podcast) - John talks with Gabe Rivera who built and runs Techmeme, which has been probably the most influential tech news aggregator site for the past 15 years. In this age of AI wizardry maybe social media seems a bit dull and boring, but I found the conversation to be very interesting. There's a lot of movement in social media and online news at the minute, and Techmeme has been at the centre of it all for over a decade. Loads of interesting topics including the story of Techmeme, early web, technorati, advertising, how the web has changed, RSS and Google Reader, HTML and web crawling, the rise of paywalls and hostile sites, the decline of blogs, the rise of Twitter, reducing friction in UIs, linkblogging / linkposting, Twitter killing blog comments, Threads/Mastodon/Bluesky, selling out vs being an indie publisher, Twitter’s character constraint, social media variety and fragmentation fatigue, federation and ActivityPub, Threads and APIs, Elon Musk breaking Twitter, the rename to X, and our AI future. https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2023/11/22/ep-389
David Chalmers: The Matrix is REAL! (Into the Impossible Podcast) - Physicists and philosophers, human brains, the hard problem of consciousness, AI, virtual worlds, artificial realities, and simulation theory, computability, quantum gravity computers, simulated universes, far flung future of computing, 10 petaflop human brain, it from bit, religion, digital physics, pan psychism, predictions using simulations and infinite regress, infinity mathematics. They had some delay technical difficulties towards the end of the call, but it’s still worth listening. David really reminds me of fellow aussie Clive James. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vaW50b3RoZWltcG9zc2libGU/episode/OTUwYmM3NTQtODkxZi0xMWVlLWEzZTQtYzc1NWQ5YjZhNTVh?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwi4_OiH89uCAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQJA
Last minute addition: Bitcoin on the Ballot with Vivek Ramaswaney (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Just listened to this episode this morning (Saturday). It would be really interesting to get Vivek at least into the live debates against Trump, he’s got some very progressive ideas, especially around crypto and bitcoin, and he’s young, at 37 years old. Perhaps he has the energy and vision to unite a divided people around their shared core national values. I will say I’m not a fan of his extremist zero based budgeting. Saving money is needed for sure but pure zero-based budgeting has some very unpleasant failure modes. When you remove the wiggle room, control is massively leveraged. https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-on-the-ballot
Links
Lots of links on the daily linkblog, and they often include extra context links which there isn’t an easy way to include in substack. Please check them out:
https://markjgsmith.com/links
Notes
There’s a lot of cool stuff in the notes this week.
Destructuring for the win
Better than physics
Automattic Combinator?
All-In Dirty Sanchez
Zero-based budgeting oppression
Localism vs centralism vs globalism
The end of police and thieves
The AI elephant gets bigger
Fix the AB problem
Your own personal AI of yourself
Gruber and Rivera
Notes appear to be the new blog. For whatever reason I’m writing notes every day. That’s not the case with blog posts. Please check them out:
https://markjgsmith.com/notes
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!