Centralized systems are criticized for making unilateral decisions about what people can see and not see within their privately controlled network.

After meeting in person with my teammates for work, I realized it’s far easier to joke around and riff in person rather than on Zoom.

In anticipation of a wave of cases due to the COVID-19 omicron variant, NYC requires private employers with 100 or more employees to mandate vaccination for in-person workers.

After looking into linting prose in Emacs, I found a way to roll your own prose linter setup using vale (an extensible prose linter), efm-langserver (a generic language server), and eglot (a language server mode for Emacs).

When there is no formal structure in a group of people that interact over any significant amount of time, informal structures appear.

Emacs can be customized to create a beautiful, focused writing environment akin to Ulysses, iA Writer, Bear, or other minimalist markdown editors.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. Links to this note Continuous Organizations Don’t Make Sense for High Growth Startups

Some of the downsides of informal structures in an unstructured group are:

When rules are implicit, only those who know how decisions are made can participate.

An elite individual is an oxymoron. The nature of an elite is membership to a group that exhibits informal influence or control over a larger group.

A commonly cited reason for Web3 is that centralized systems (government, banking) are broken and decentralized systems are the way forward (blockchains, cryptocurrencies).

A problem with Twitter’s advertising business is that it’s product is used for text-based information (tied to the physical world like work or current events).

A commonly cited success story of NFTs is CryptoPunks. They were 10,000 uniquely generated pixel art avatars released on the blockchain for free.

Zettelkasten notes become more useful the better links you make between them.

I came across the idea of a hyperfine village from Lisa Hardy.

Zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK) can verify that another party is in possession of information without the other party needing to reveal that information or leak parts of it.

Epistemic status: low Translate the check function into a polynomial equation (how do you translate information into a polynomial equation?

Blockchains are transparent ledgers in that anyone with a copy of the blockchain can see every transaction.

Smart contracts are not recognized as legal contracts and don’t offer the same protections.

Smart contracts that run on a distributed ledger effectively need to work forever to be useful.

NFTs lack the legal and regulatory protection of other forms of property.

Distributed autonomous organzations (DAOs) have more in common with limited liability corporations (LLCs) than C Corporations.

The World Health Organization (WHO) classified B.1.1.529 (omicron), first detected in South Africa, as a COVID-19 variant of concern.

Read An Engineer’s Hype-Free Observations on Web3 (and its Possibilities) from PSL.