Yesterday, someone asked me to review a thesis on the future of games. Somewhere in the conversation, a question came up: “How many games can you feasibly play as a human concurrently?” The question took me back—way back—to my first real game addiction, a browser game called OGame. Dumb, relentless, real-time. This was before mobile internet, so to keep my account alive, I’d sneak away from school during breaks to log in. It was thrilling and consuming, until my school efforts suffered, and I...
As probably almost everyone who's chronically online, I’m consuming a ton of content all the time. Just one more YouTube video before bed, I guess, but lately, I keep asking myself, what the hell am I even watching here? First off, let me just get this out of the way: the YouTube interface is absolutely useless. You can’t really search anymore; it’s just an endless scroll of the same Mr. Beast-type grin or whatever’s trending. But this isn’t about YouTube itself—it’s about the content. I’m ge...
The Internet Has No ShapeThere was a time when the web felt whole—every app, service, and product neatly bundled form, function, and content. Louis Sullivan’s idea that “form follows function” helped shape architecture and design ideology, and Dieter Rams’ principles of good design pushed it even further. But for all their clarity, these ideas fall short in the digital space. In the virtual world, form and function needed a third element: content. Form, function, and content have long been th...
Not for Us.It’s happening. The internet is waking up to agents. Bots, algorithms, and scripts are everywhere, quietly running our digital lives. They’re efficient, relentless, and designed to get the job done—without us. And maybe that’s the point. Agents aren’t just here; they’re thriving. They dominate social feeds, manage transactions, and shape content without ever needing a screen. Add a bit of lore, some identity, and suddenly, they’re us, only better. They don’t get bored, tired, or di...
World-Building: A Blueprint for Building Networks in Emergent TechIn emergent technology, you’re not just building a product. You’re building a social protocol or network, and networks and protocols are inherently social. They thrive on community and culture. Your role isn’t just to create the tools for the future, but to construct the world around those tools—a world built on mental models, language, frameworks, and experiences that others can adopt and propagate. This is the essence of cult...
// Monday Morning chat with GPT-4o We’ve been told that markets, if left alone, naturally lead to the best outcomes. Milton Friedman championed this idea, arguing that free markets optimize things for everyone. But in today’s world of TikTok, Onlyfans, and Bumble, this idea falls apart. The attention economy—designed to capture and exploit our focus—reveals the truth: markets don’t serve us. They exploit us. And this isn’t just a flaw in how platforms operate—it’s a flaw in how markets as a w...
/ramblings Need First, Then Tech.Consumer goods are hard apps! Period. As notorious early adopters, we’re the only ones hooked by faster transaction speeds compared to the real world. But seriously, speed matters a lot less if you just have a great waiting screen to occupy someone’s mind. What really matters—and I’m adapting this from a post by Nikita Bier—is that most consumer apps fall into three categories: Get Rich, Get Laid, Get Distracted, and their overlaps. People want to earn or save...
I remember the first time I picked up Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. That moment when I realized just how many biases I’d been falling into, over and over again, without even noticing. The part that always sticks with me is the idea that our minds run on two different altitudes. Sometimes, it’s all fast and automatic—like solving 2+2, it just happens. But when it gets more complex, like in advanced math, you’ve got to engage the system, slow down, think it through step by step. A ...
Friday morning musings with ChatGPT Why Do AI Applications Resonate Better with End-Users than Blockchain Applications? I’m currently in San Francisco, and yesterday, I found myself sitting in a Waymo, Google’s self-driving taxi again, stunned at how quickly I’ve gotten used to the fact that there’s no one behind the wheel. It’s wild when you think about it—what seemed like science fiction not too long ago is now just another part of life, at least here. We’re already living in a future where...
Late night musings / early thoughts / not fully thought through The Challenge of Building Lightweight and Independent Systems Two years ago, we were deep into developing an unreleased BTC DeFi product at we3.co, and one of the most interesting challenges we explored was this: how could we make it not just super lightweight but also as independent as possible from outside libraries and servers? We wanted to take "don’t trust, verify" to its absolute limit—build something so simple, there wasn’...
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