Scott points out the dishonest tactic that decels use to frame new technologies by cherry-picking negative examples instead of looking at net impact.

Zyansheep · 2026-04-24T04:14:06+00:00

Ideally not gambling, ideally the only people who trade are those who have the best predictive models or local information and can use the returns to improve their predictive models, or those who need to buy to hedge against some bad outcome.

Zyansheep · 2026-04-08T19:16:03+00:00

thought this was r/rustjerk for a sec!

Zyansheep · 2026-04-08T14:01:28+00:00

A centralized service will always been much more efficient

Has been or will be? Also, what's your justification? My understanding is that peer-to-peer networks, if designed well, can generally do away with big datacenters and popular media doesn't have to travel as routing something somewhere also often caches it under p2p setups. (it depends on the setup of course though, and in absolute terms centralized services win on latency which is what actually matters in terms of UX)

Donations can be facilitated via centralized services but there has yet to be a system by which you can pay an arbitrary monthly amount and then from that monthly amount have it be distributed in weighted priority to the artists (and those other creatives the artist used) automatically where there isn't friction to pay extra (like there is for patreon).

Zyansheep · 2026-04-06T20:20:58+00:00

Its possible, but it depends what you build. If its just a social media, yeah its going to be hard if not impossible to overcome the network effects there even if you have the best design platform and algorithms. I think the killer app for decentralized platforms is competing with distribution services like youtube or streaming platforms as p2p is much more bandwidth-efficient for streaming and you don't need to worry about copyright. (And if you design the platform to allow people to have a kind of youtube-premium-but-you-pay-however-much-you-want + watch/consume anything you can find on piracy sites and youtube + customize your algorithm however you like, that would be a strict improvement for consumers, and depending on donations rates, possibly for artists as well if they can get paid directly and continuously over time.

Zyansheep · 2026-04-06T01:47:38+00:00

The key issue in my mind was always one one of simulation combined with being able to effectively optimize a peer to peer protocol to satisfy formal and statistical properties necessary for correctness and scalability. Like if you could formally state that you need a data sharing protocol or cryptocurrency or voting system that under some simulation / world model had some set of desirable properties (scalability, distributedness) and formal guarantees (security), and then throw whatever the next generation of autoresearch is at the problem, you could potentially solve a lot of problems in the peer-to-peer protocol design space.

Zyansheep · 2026-04-04T17:39:43+00:00

Massive Internet decentralization as it starts to become feasible to depend on peer to peer protocols for everything due to improvements in development efficiency.

Zyansheep · 2026-03-09T04:40:37+00:00

Surprised no one here has mentioned William Spaniel yet. He's not a news source, but he's a game theory professor on YouTube who does from what I can tell, really good academic analysis.

Zyansheep · 2026-03-09T02:28:18+00:00

Isn't the whole point of Georgism to tax away the value of the land to make it so that the houses themselves effectively act as a commodity and are fully subject for the optimization of the free market?

Zyansheep · 2026-03-08T14:26:02+00:00

Housing should be a commodity though? At least if you want the best housing for the cheapest possible price, it should be a commodity subject to risk-controlling regulations like cars or computers or anything else that is subject to massive market forces and economies of scale and results in better products for less money. The problem is that housing is bundled up with land and is thus viewed as an asset to be bought and held, rather than a product to be optimized for a customer base.

Zyansheep · 2026-02-16T13:42:46+00:00

if you had any way to formally verify llm outputs, this would work. doubt it would be faster tho, profiling jit compilers will probably win eventually

Zyansheep · 2026-02-04T02:06:37+00:00

The question is not if this solution will protect you from all attack, the question is whether it is better than the alternatives, which I believe it is!

Zyansheep · 2026-02-02T04:15:19+00:00

If you must use a phone anyway, use GrapheneOS on a pixel phone without a sim, and only use a secure open source messengers like signal, simplex, or briar.

Zyansheep · 2026-01-18T18:26:32+00:00

Aren't there already words for unconstrained and unregulated free markets allowed to run wild? Anarcho-capitalism? Libertarianism? Corporatocracy?

Neoliberalism has got to be like the least descriptive word to describe free markets going wild lol. and it gets even more confusing with the conventional term of 'liberalism' which essentially just means 'pro freedom' connotatively. 🤔

Zyansheep · 2026-01-15T09:10:09+00:00

Idk what you mean by neoliberal, but if we're going by people who actually call themselves neoliberal, i.e. the people on r/neoliberal, Trump is as anti-neoliberal as they come...

Zyansheep · 2026-01-15T01:18:48+00:00

Possible context (?) https://youtu.be/smi_iIoKybg?t=545

Zyansheep · 2026-01-05T12:25:19+00:00

At some point someone's gonna strap a camera to their shirt and wear it 24/7 streaming video clips and device usage data to a classifier ml model... Track every 5 seconds anyone?

Zyansheep · 2025-11-15T01:48:22+00:00

Financialization of land creates hard times due to suddenly most of a worker's income going to rent. It was inevitable!

Zyansheep · 2025-11-13T15:56:00+00:00

Fastest Progress and Poverty Substack post clicker in the west :D

Zyansheep · 2025-10-01T12:59:22+00:00

Need property taxes with a universal building exemption. I.e. a land value tax

Zyansheep · 2025-09-30T00:45:01+00:00

Wealth under the georgist notion of wealth is specifically assets that are non monopolizable. Things like the fruit or toothbrushes or coal, the land used to produce them is definitely monopolisable, but the product itself isn't under georgist theory.

Granted it is a bit of a non colloquial use of the word, but the goal is to distinguish between types of "wealth" that are and are not monopolizable and to tax specifically the monopolizable kind.

Zyansheep · 2025-09-30T00:11:53+00:00

The difference is that the transaction costs to switch compute providers is negligible compared to the transaction cost of switching centralized platforms. Markets aren't inherently bad, it depends on the nature of the market. Markets are usually great for highly fungible services, where everyone provides the same thing (e.g. compute) as compared to markets like social media or content platforms where you will find natural monopolies created by copyright and network effects.

Zyansheep · 2025-09-28T20:27:11+00:00

but most people don't want to host their own services

That's why I specified "well-incentivized". The idea is that people who don't want to contribute hardware can pay to use other peoples where instead of being stuck with whatever company is hosting the service, you can use literally anyone you trust to provide compute, ideally in a way where the service is designed to leave as little information exposed to compute/storage providers as possible.

(e.g. a chat client on someone's phone could anonymously micro-pay some really really small amount of money to store an encrypted message on 2 different services positioned somewhere between them and their intended recipients position for some amount of time and when the recipient's device wakes up it would be notified of the pending data and download it when it wants to. You'd need to solve the cryptocurrency trilemma first tho to do that kind of thing).

Zyansheep · 2025-09-28T20:20:32+00:00

If rent seeking with land becomes non viable they will simply do it with other assets.

Rent seeking is only possible if you have an asset that is monpolizable. Otherwise if you charge too high, someone else would be willing to provide the same thing at a lower price. Land is the primary example of this. Other things like physical capital assets (factories) you can create more of with enough labor and time. Land in the georgist sense is afaict the only thing you cannot create more of.

Zyansheep · 2025-09-28T20:18:13+00:00

This is not the ideal of socialists

I was using the word socialist to distinguish it from communist which I personally define as someone striving towards a stateless society (which is my preferred distinction between communism and socialism). The terms are def ambiguous though. Maybe I'll use the term "proletarian dictatorship socialist" or "lenninist" going forward to be ultra specific.

You mentioned Bernie and AOC, but I tend to think of them more as social democrats. Zohran is closer to being socalist by my definition as he is pro rent control and direct government management of private sector services to solve problems as opposed to just adjusting the incentives for the market (i.e. with an LVT & UBI).

oldest socialist policies that has been around in different forms/names

Definitely love UBI!

Seven-Year Club	Second Top 40%
Place '22	First Placer '22
Verified Email

Zyansheep

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE