Continuations

I haven't read this yet, but I want to credit Albert for his excellent posts on the basics of computer science. I found them incredibly educational! https://continuations.com/post/149364248835/tech-tuesday-index (He has a similar series on uncertainty, which I found great as well. There is no index so you have to work backwards from the start: https://continuations.com/tagged/uncertainty+wednesday/page/11)

It's great to see Idyll pop up on HN. I'm the creator of the project and have been working on it as part of my PhD research at the University of Washington. We've had a busy year, including receiving a donation from Albert Wenger [1], which is being used to hire another developer to work on the project. Feel free to ask any questions in this thread and I'll do my best to provide thoughtful responses. [1] http://continuations.com/post/166234021110/support-idyll-interactive-n…

I appreciated the President's thoughtfulness on this issue, but this post doesn't add anything beyond a "Me, too!" to what Obama said. He links to this article: http://continuations.com/post/139510663785/key-based-device-unlocking-… Which ends: "I would love to hear from folks who really understand security if such a scheme would work or not (and/or point me to people who have thought about this)." So again, very little added to the conversation. This really is one of those cases where a lot of technical expertise is required to usefully comment, and I appreciate Obama conceding as much at SXSW. But there seems to be many others just throwing out magical solutions without understanding whether or not they would actually work in practice.

One of Fred Wilson's partners, Albert Wenger, also penned a post touching on this today[0]. Both are worth reading. [0] http://continuations.com/post/124069363855/debating-the-gig-economy-go…

He's one of a tiny minority of VC partners who actually write code. His site is http://continuations.com.

We look at these problems constantly at Shapeways as we handle manufacturing and distribution for a ton of crazy 3d printed objects. I suggest reading this series of blog posts by Albert wenger on Continuous improvement: http://continuations.com/post/37634462048/continuous-improvement-revis… The best advice I can give is to avoid being afraid of manual/unscalable processes. When you attack a problem, pick the immediate solution that solves your problem. It could be using a kitchen knife to breakdown boxes. Once you've used it for a bit, improve it. All too often we see a problem and try to throw software at it, only to find that our fancy sorting algorithm reduced time to pack by 6% whereas reducing the # of box sizes reduced time by 60%. (note: I just made up that example but you get the idea).

The linked post[1], ironically, really helps to cement why I consider web3 to be interesting technologically but mostly nonsense from a product perspective. > As a first approximation all the big powerful internet companies are really database providers. Facebook is a database of people’s profiles, their friend graphs and their status updates. Paypal is a database of people’s account balances. Amazon is a database of SKUs, payment credentials and purchase histories. Google is a database of web pages and query histories. This is profoundly, naively, staggeringly wrong. The products that these companies provide to users[2] are not "the databases" - they are "the ability to do useful, meaningful, real-life impactful things". Facebook is not valuable as a service because of its database - it's valuable because I am able to interact with that database in ways that result in other people seeing the thing that I posted. PayPal is not useful to me because of those recorded balances - it is useful because merchants and financial institutions respect those balances are being equivalent to money. And so on - Amazon is useful because things actually show up at my door, Google is useful because it can use those links/queries to serve me the page that I was searching for. This is, ironically, why many claims of web3's supremacy fall flat. As this[3] long-but-very-worthwhile rant about NFTs in gaming makes clear, simply claiming "ownership" is almost meaningless for anything other than…

Why not just hook up ChatGPT up to a Zapier plugin? Sure it’s super centralized, but would work now. Albert Wenger from Union Square Ventures (who I know since 2014) wrote a book called worldaftercapital.com . And he mentioned years ago that you should have personal assistant agents book stuff for you etc. and answer queries. Well that would require a more decentralized, open source approach: https://continuations.com/post/96355016855/labor-day-right-to-an-api-k…

Here's a good article about web3 that no one here will read - https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto-why-bothe…

Saw this earlier and found this post to be a useful introduction: https://continuations.com/post/620550894200684544/meet-clarity

I haven't read the proposal but it made me think of something like: /.well-known/personal-access-token To get an access token for API access to my own data. You know, for our right to be represented by a bot[1] [1] https://continuations.com/post/172413445510/we-need-mandatory-enduser-…

"We live in a world where digital products are inherently undervalued relative to other products..." Thank you for the notification. I can't believe someone with business experience can make this really naive statement. This is an issue in almost every digital business. Last week there was a related thread about value creation here: http://continuations.com/post/156889798325/value-creation

I'm also unsure about protest banners, but on the general theme of holding your fire, "this is exactly how big companies lose against startups. They wait around to see what the startup will do, and by the time they have figured out that it’s important it is too late to catch up. This is why Andy Grove’s motto at Intel was “Only the paranoid survive.” So working with startups has taught me: don’t wait until it is too late. Protest early and often. We wouldn’t even be here if people hadn’t grossly underestimated Trump to begin with." (From Albert Wengler earlier this week, http://continuations.com/post/156262260395/what-i-learned-from-startup…

Uber could still offload maintenance, fuel, liability etc to other entities and license the self driving software to them. Those entities would still have much lower operating costs than human drivers. They could even open source the self driving software to commoditise their complements [1]. Personally I hope that regulators do a bait and switch on Uber by allowing them to build a temporary monopoly and then reintroducing competition by introducing the "right to be represented by a bot" [2]. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html [2] http://continuations.com/post/108912689660/big-and-bot-policy-proposal…

Privacy is an asset that people are willing to exchange for tangible benefits. Especially because most people don't really know how to value their privacy until it's been breached. Create a system that realizes the tangible value of privacy and people will be much less likely to give it away. What does that look like? That's the billion dollar question. For starters, here's an essay by Albert Wagner of USV that sets the stage for a solution (in a very abstract way): http://continuations.com/post/131372549150/land-capital-attention-this…

yep ...if it gets as easy to bootstrap a ride sharing company it is for chat apps with the mobile address book competition might be tough on uber. see also http://continuations.com/post/77698925932/facebook-massively-overpaid-…

http://continuations.com/post/16405180072/tech-tuesday-dns is more descriptive.

It's not per se, but I'm not sure it's so bad to include them. The author has posted some clarifications on this point precisely in a second post http://continuations.com/post/1405992624/clarifications-re-net-neutral…

I haven't read Collapse but Albert Wenger from Union Square Ventures had an idea for "black swan philantrophy", which would be "focused on funding projects aimed at preventing or coping with very low probability events that would have cataclysmic outcomes for humanity." I don't know why threats.org is down at the moment; perhaps it's due to the fact that there weren't that many people willing to actually help with the non-profit a few months ago. http://continuations.com/post/106672598/looking-for-help-in-starting-n…

I agree with you PG completely. There was another blog post by Albert(USV) http://continuations.com/post/190217323/the-web-and-education-we-need-… about missing scalability solution in education, where content is extremely expensive. It is going to change very soon.

The post this post links to a few times [1] is the more interesting one: https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto-why-bothe… Still, it's unconvincing to me. It argues web3 is about permissionless data. The problem with that is we already have permissionless data -- you can put almost any kind of data you want on a server and encourage people honor it. What they actually want is shared data, governed by rules that hard for anyone to change, and use that as scaffolding to build systems around consequential data. That's kind of interesting, but what happens when the rules conflict with reality. E.g., when the blockchain says you own the land but the law says someone else does? Now you could agree to make a blockchain database is the authority on something, even contractually, which would help it harmonize with laws to a decent degree. But that would be an individual decision and doesn't preclude scams, fraud, people acting in bad faith, etc. Ultimately blockchains about data of any consequence will have to comport with applicable laws and regulations, just like everything else. The lack of flexibility likewise makes blockchain pretty useless for softer things, like social networks. (It's kind of silly to even bring up social networks in this context, but the post brings up Facebook.)

For another view, can read the comments of Disqus user JLM at the blog https://continuations.com/post/624305968188145664/help-stop-fascism There the relevant law is quoted and explained. So, in short, the DHS has the FPS (Federal Protective Service), and their job is > "... safeguarding Federal owned and leased facilities and has been since 1790. The FPS is part of the DHS. ... The Customs and Border Protection unit is legally supporting the Federal Protective Service because the particular unit -- the Border Patrol Tactical Unit -- BORTAC -- is highly trained in riot control operations." There are lots more details by JLM there including quotes of the relevant laws, e.g., 40 USC 1315. So, the FPS was in Portland to protect Federal property as in 40 USC 1315. In simplest terms, the Federal work there in Portland was protecting Federal property. Policing Portland in general was not part of the work. The article mentioned "secret police": To set that aside, just read the JLM quotes and explanations of the laws.

I wrote a post with my predictions here https://medium.com/swlh/9-predictions-for-2020-2029-555312fc69fc?sourc… TLDR 1. Federated Learning will unlock value from previously inaccessible sensitive data. 2. Deepfakes will impact democracy and bring about a need for publisher certified content. 3. Nationalism will rise around the world, the internet will splinter. 4. eSports will take a huge chunk of attention and advertising dollars from sports. 5. Blockchain will get adoption in enterprise. Mainstream adoption will struggle until there is a key custody solutions that everyone can use. 6. Self driving cars will open up new business models. Regulations will be the main barrier to adoption. 7. Welfare systems will get strained. 8. Digital currencies and negative interest rates will open pandoras box. 9. Search will get reimagined. I also enjoyed these posts https://avc.com/2020/01/what-will-happen-in-the-2020s/ https://continuations.com/post/189997132065/an-agenda-for-the-2020s-in… https://alexdanco.com/2019/12/17/ten-predictions-for-the-2020s/

I don't know about that. There's a flurry of open protocols being built on Blockchain and maybe there's a golden age ahead . . . > "Historically many key protocols, such as TCP/IP and HTTP, have come from researchers. Subsequent iterations of these protocols were often handled by nonprofit organization that tried to wrangle with more or less success the various commercial interests that sprang up around this protocols (the companies that were making and selling software and hardware based on them). The more money was involved the harder this became. > "Now, however, we have a new way of providing incentives for the creation of protocols and for governing their evolution. I am talking about cryptographic tokens . . . > "I can’t emphasize enough how radical a change this is to the past. Historically the only way to make money from a protocol was to create software that implemented it and then try to sell this software (or more recently to host it). Since the creation of this software (e.g. web server/browser) is a separate act many of the researchers who have created some of the most successful protocols in use today have had little direct financial gain. With tokens, however, the creators of a protocol can “monetize” it directly and will in fact benefit more as others build businesses on top of that protocol. Given this new incentive I expect a lot of resources to be devoted to protocol innovation." ~…

This reminds me of a 2013 blog post by Albert Wenger where he argues that treating the problem of mass surveillance as a technical problem is futile: We cannot and should not be living in digital fortresses any more than we are living in physical fortresses at home. Our homes are safe from thieves and from government not because they couldn’t get in if they wanted to but because the law and its enforcement prevents them from doing so. All we have to do is minimal physical security (lock the doors when you are out)... Surveillance is a political and legal problem, not a technical problem. We have to all become outraged and start a big and public online and offline campaign to take back the law into the hands of the people and their representatives and away from secret organizations “overseen” by secret courts in a system that goes beyond Kafka’s worst nightmares. http://continuations.com/post/60444129080/disagreeing-with-bruce-schne…

3 Points about the the latest Piketty book: ======================== 1) Churn in Inequality: ======================== 12 percent of the population will find themselves in the top 1 percent of the income distribution for at least one year 39 percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent Although 12 percent of the population will experience a year in which they find themselves in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, a mere 0.6 percent will do so in 10 consecutive years 54 percent of Americans will experience poverty or near poverty at least once between the ages of 25 and 60 Half of those who earned over $1 million a year did so just once during this period (1999 and 2007), while only 6 percent reported millionaire status across all nine years Data analyzed by the I.R.S. showed similar findings with respect to the top 400 taxpayers between 1992 and 2009. While 73 percent of people who made the list did so once during this period, only 2 percent of them were on the list for 10 or more years. via: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/from-rags-to-riches-t… ========================================================= 2) How much is the inequality being driven by Technology? ========================================================= Sam Altman @YC:…

there was a recent blog which dealt with rationality behind such high absurd evaluations: http://continuations.com/post/19000949472/a-rational-internet-venture-… 4. The winner-take-all nature of network-effects businesses in which the dominant business can be an order of magnitude more valuable than other competitors. So it is entirely rational given the Internet environment to see a dramatic stretching of the valuations for market leaders with network effects. It does, however, not bode well for aggregate returns for the venture capital asset class: 1. In a race to pick the winners ever earlier, valuations get stretched even for companies that have not yet proven that they really have strong network effects and that they will be the leader in their respective market. 2. These stretched early stage valuations will lead to depressed returns in a large number of companies and will also make many of these companies harder to fund. There will be more of these companies and more capital invested in them (in aggregate) than in the winners.