If creators get a new way to earn money from their creations without having to control all copying methods — than this is a good thing. The ambiguity of owning an NFT [1] is a feature not a bug — because obvious games are boring and nfts are about status games. That said I still hate NFTs — maybe I am not very good at status games and fashions. I could write many more theses about how NFTs are bad, but I won’t, because it is already well covered. I wanted to save two things that are good about NFTs that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere.

What is fascinating is that the two companies are polar opposites of each other: Apple is extremely centralized and focused, befitting its obsession with being the best, while Amazon is extremely decentralized and independent, befitting its obsession with experimentation. It’s why Apple is known for multiple groundbreaking products, while Amazon is known for multiple groundbreaking businesses. from “An Interview with Eric Seufert About Apple, Facebook, and Mobile” by Ben Thompson (https://stratechery.com/)

Yudkowsky is celebrating GME shortsqueze as an example of a new way of forging cooperation — but I don’t know if there is so much to celebrate. It is kind of funny, but in essence it is just a flashmob in capital markets. It is as funny and as disruptive…

If the government fails with its response to Sars-Cov-2 and our fellow-citizens don’t believe in the pandemic— what can we do? There are some well known measures: face masks staying put at home disinfecting hands etc They reduce the probability of infection, but over time the risks add up. When…

How to get promoted — another Moloch post (Meditations on Moloch, Moloch hasn’t won, …) Another note taking discussion at HackerNews — I used to have a PersonalWiki (https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/*) running off my desktop in my living room, but it was too cumbersome to keep my own server especially when I…

Disclaimer: I am not an epidemiologist — I just read stuff on the Internet and use common sense and some basic math, and I am surprised that I cannot find similar analyses online. I have started writing this as a kind of comprehensive framework for all of the testing cases…

On the surface this is such an obviously good idea. Nobel laureate Paul Romer has made some calculations already in March. The math is clear — even with imperfect tests, even with imported cases, with frequent mass testing we could have the pandemic under control in a month. The cost…

Notes from a programmer learning macro-economy Deflation is bad. When deflation happens people don’t spend money now — because they expect to buy more with the same money if they spend it later. …

Update: this is based on data available at the time of writing which is probably outdated now. We have two testing methods — genetic and serologic. The genetic method detects the virus RNA, the serologic tests detect the antibodies that our body produces to fight the virus. Some countries (for…