Distributed Infrastructure for Financing Journalism

Napkin architecture for blockchain-backed journalism model / probably other people have thought about this in more detail  

Demand for content : 

individualised, can be curated by an AI agent, like a user-interactive RSS Feed Manager that crawls and discusses content with user. Computation for this can be pushed to distributed computing infrastructure, using a cryptocurrency to allocate compute resources. Essentially users that pay more can get better crawlers/other-curative-agent-services. Of course, ad-buyers can pay to contaminate non-commercial results with commercial results. So at least two demand sources here.

Supply of content : 

various, including journalists. How to link content producers to payments? Has to be a way to declare a content source as canonical, which allows that source to lay claim to "cash-flow" stored on-chain. Can have a mechanism to assign credit to upstream content sources as a way to redistribute value upstream. Needs to be designed with flood/spam/other-similar attack protection. Staking of currency allows large parties to buy legitimacy - not sufficient - probably some sort of peer validation algorithm required for governance.

- From random chat with journo buddy

I wouldn't conflate DemandForContent with SupplyOfCash. :wink: Ad revenue is going to be the main SupplyOfCash in almost any scenario, but DemandForContent can be structurally rewired to democratise DistributionOfCash.

Congress Wants you to Blame Billionaires

"Hording cash is pathological."

It goes hand in hand with federal fiscal policy. If congress's entire strategy for the USD is to keep printing more of it, via borrowing and spending without paying it back, then the downstream oligarchs will rationally horde cash. It is everyone else who suffers because they are too weak to defend against congress. But who appoints congress and its policies? Taking aim at oligarchs is a waste of time. Fix your fiscal policy.

Malaysia's Adolescent Disregulation

Growing up in Malaysia, my understanding of local law and culture has been, you can get locked up for anything. There are strict censorship laws, which reflect the emotional disregulation of the masses for political purposes. People are sometimes disappeared. People are sometimes simply thrown into jail. It doesn't matter what the legal excuse is, because the heart of the matter is normalised emotional disregulation. I made a point to prepare myself for this in college. Anyway, if it never happens to me, that would be a nice life. But it could happen at any minute, on any day. That is the nature of Malaysia. It has not happened yet, and I am already 40. So for the moment, I will just make the most of what I can otherwise.

Running Cadence Training Hypothesis

I think about it the other way around. Cadence is a metric of reaction time. If you're stepping 180bpm, then you're moving multiple muscle groups at sub-thirds-of-a-seconds, tactically to maintain/correct the cadence. This is completely a neurological exercise, and neurology is upstream from muscle activation so it should get fixed first.

I train with a 180bpm metronome because 180 just happens to be the popular number among top athletes. When I am done training at 180bpm, I might decide that a difference cadence works better for me. 

In order to maintain cadence, I simply reduce stride length. It's easy. Think of it as a marching drill. Over training cycles, as you get less fatigued at a particular ( variable-length-per-step * constant-steps-per-minute = variable-length-per-minute = pace ) you can increase step length bit by bit, and thereby cover the distance faster.

Competitive Universes

I am always concerned that education systems don't provide a broad enough context for targeting, and hence kids generally aim too low in competitive terms. Being a top-percentile player in a population of 8.2 billion people means you're in a league of 82 million other people ...

• 1-sigma: ...
• 2-sigma : 95th %-ile : 45,400,000 per billion
• 3-sigma : 99.73th %-ile : 2,700,000 per billion
• 4-sigma : 99.9937th %-ile : 63,000 per billion
• 5-sigma : 99.999943th %-ile : 570 per billion
• 6-sigma : 99.9999998th %-ile : 2 per billion

Learning and Supervision

// A comment on current gripes about LLMs not executing proper reasoning. //

This is pretty obvious from the architecture anyway. It is the most inefficient way to implement logic. Humans are a very inefficient implementation of logic (unless we one day discover that neurons for logic are highly specialised in a uniform way across individuals, which seems rather unlikely based on science to date). This has been my whole gripe about wasting energy : why try to imitate the worst part of the old, and call it a great achievement? Lmao. 

Previously I would refer to this as an overuse of unsupervised learning, and an underuse of supervised learning. My understanding is that most humans have their reasoning capabilities as a result of highly supervised training methods. We simply have to remember which is left and which is right, there is no universal left and right. The same arbitrary rigour is needed when it comes to the meaning of the letter A, the assignment of rights to humans, and the selection of gender and national identity. It is only after the supervised learning anchors basic cultural assumptions in elementary education, that we teach students to unlearn and experimentally mess with fundamental definitions for the sake of research and epistemology about truth, culture, and economic values. 

Segue to that thread about Cook being able to change his mind, and the question of whether that is a rare or common trait among plebs, vs among leaders. In the micro-history of OpenAI, success was achieved by marketing to the popular notion that "intelligence is the ability to infer something out of nothing", that being the popular notion of what a "clever person or genius", is. Unsupervised models were banked-on whole-hog, despite their inefficiencies. That this particular concept of "cleverness or genius" is inherently incomplete, is an often discussed trope. The standard dialectical counterpart is, "all stand on the shoulders of giants". In both humans and machines, the efficient genius does not reinvent every element of his software ... one does not unnecessarily reinvent the wheel, a lingua franca, an industry, or any paradigm whatsoever. Rather, one begins first by reviewing the the commonly accepted facts as a "canon", afterwhich one engages in "research about the canon". 

This also illuminates the commonality between trolls and the early popular models from OpenAI : they basically ignore cultural anchors, and present paradigms which are locally-logical, but which may from time to time fly in the face of common assumptions. That is why both are funny. Hands up, if you know what I mean. :)

For the uninitiated : it should be noted that efficient software for reasoning has existed for decades in the less popular field of automated theorem provers - this stuff is pretty much "first nature" for turing machines, whereas it's second nature to us meaty being. 

xref : 2022,  

Segmentation of intellectuals & their happiness

Happiness is found in zones A, B1, B3, C1, C3. Avoid all other situations like plague.

( no particular order ) : 

Class A : not aware of, and/or not engaged with, public context ; enjoys the benefits of private intelligence

Class B : engaged with public context ; presents ideas which are not immediately understood, popular, and/or actionable for any number of reasons ; plagued by frustration that private intelligence is not transitive to the public ; sub-classed into 

• B1 : those who ignore the public's reaction, 
• B2 : those who are displeased with the public reaction, and 
• B3 : those who are pleased with the public reaction

Class C : engaged with public context ; presents ideas which are immediately understood, popularised, and/or actionable within a scope of any size ; sub-classed into 

• C1 : those who ignore the public's reaction, 
• C2 : those who are displeased with the public reaction, and 
• C3 : those who are pleased with the public reaction

Maintenance of Isoesthesia

Isoesthesia : this is the commonest concept in the medical vernacular which refers to the normal rate of conscious sensational data capture.

In athetics, or kinesthesia in general, the maintenance of isoesthesia is dependent on other biochemical variables. Controlling the swarth of inputs, allows some predictability about the active maintenance of isoesthesia.

Pricing, and Minimum Standards for Labour

 I know it's counter-intuitive to most people ... because we've grandfathered in the mentality of "desk work expensive, manual work cheap" ... but this is not reflective of skill levels.

Example 1  : a social media manager has to execute at roughly the same level as a waiter, and a head of social media strategy has to execute at roughly the same level as a matre d.

Example 2 : an accountant has to execute at roughly the same level as a cook, and a comptroller has to execute at roughly the same level as a chef.

Example 3 : we should be raising federal regulations to require that anyone who touches structural, electrical, plumbing, or refrigerant work ... is able to conduct themselves at the level of an accountant who makes regulatory submissions on a daily basis ... not at the level of a cook who is able to make raw food passably edible.

This is of course, nearly a troll post, but it opens a gambit for reasonable discussion about how to price labour, and what sorts of minimum standards should be imposed by regulations about labour.

Five Decades : Did I Over-Invest in Technology?

D1 : Before adolescence, I was not privileged enough to have a technical introduction to engineering - I was mostly led to focus on science and the humanities. 

D2 : As a teenager, I had a keen interest in computing, but it was not a central focus of my studies - there were a lot of more fundamental concerns in science, the arts, and history, which I had not yet grasped to my satisfaction. I was able to complete work on these fundamentals to my satisfaction around the age of 20. After that I turned to focus on commerce.

D3 : In studying commerce, I found that most roles were sundry, and that only directors held roles of general strategic value. I also confirmed that many people did not understand technology - so I made a point to spend a few years studying software development, in order to have a comprehensive grasp of how to manage technology teams. 

D4 : This proceeded until I was about 30, then I sought to spend a decade studying the non-software aspects of commerce. The bulk of the next decade was spent on governance, accounting, talent management, interaction design, and marketing.

D5 : A the beginning of my fifth decade, I am studying macroeconomics, decentralised finance, and I hope to also cover some electronics and physical conditioning concerns. As I reflect on the strategic arc of my career, I wonder if I spent too little or too much time studying software. So far it seems "just right", since whenever I read about software implementations in de-fi, I can roughly understand how the protocols and structural components work, without being able to expend energy to read every line of code.

.

Life is a gamble.

Leadership Diseases

One of the signs of a diseased organisation is a leader addressing "fear, uncertainty, doubt" as a problem, instead of as a symptom of other problems. In talent management, the functional concept of a leader is strictly to deliver sufficient emotional regulation for the consolidation of control and communications ( we have other words besides "leadership", for the delivery of other goods ). 

Therein a leader that speaks of FUD as a problem is simply burying symptoms, and therefore burying problems. This is the best thing to do in emergencies, but offers no long-term structural benefit to the leader's KPIs, or to the welfare of the leader's organisation as a whole.

Sundry Culture as Dopamine Therapy

 Music, social conversation, and other cultural sundries as dopamine therapy : deserves a whole treatment on their own.

Meanwhile, I massaged music out of my rituals after studying it thoroughly in college. Reduction of dependent factors.

Sustained Ranting

Most businesses are not designed to benefit civilisation in the long-term. We often see mandates for profit maximisation, instead of mandates for customer profit maximisation ( perpetually recursive, as money cycles through the economy ). This is what makes it difficult to find a job worth doing for its own sake, among plebs. Plebs rarely do anything for its own civilisational sake at work - they do it for short-term returns.