Best of notboring.co on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
14 stories from notboring.co have been shared on Kiwi News since 28 April 2023, with 34 upvotes and 2 comments in total. The latest was shared on 22 March 2026. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Capitalism on chained
Crypto's ideal state is to make capitalism more effective, and the author argues that crypto is one of the dreams that can't die despite recent declines in prices and activity. The argument rests on two premises: that capitalism is good and that capitalism evolves, as shown by improved working conditions and venture capital funding. The article points to digital property rights, guaranteed by blockchains, and to decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, which let anyone list an asset and create a market without an intermediary, as ways crypto could improve capitalism. It also acknowledges that governance remains unsolved, with anemic voter turnout and whale domination.
- Varda: The Space Drug Factory. Expanding the Economic Bounds of Humankind
Varda is launching the world's first commercial space factory aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, a test flight meant to show it can build in orbit and return a payload safely to Earth. The factory will orbit Earth for a little over a month before returning to the Utah desert in mid-July. If the mission goes well, Varda will crystallize the drug ritonavir in microgravity to explore how gravity shapes its crystal structure, which affects solubility and bioavailability. Co-founder and CEO Will Bruey and co-founder and chairman Delian Asparouhov lead the company, which is 874 days old at launch.
- Sci-Fi Idea Bank - 3,567 Sci-Fi Ideas Waiting to Be Brought to Life
The author presents a Sci-Fi Idea Bank, a spreadsheet of 3,567 sci-fi ideas pulled from the Technovelgy website and updated to show whether each has been built, when, and by whom. The central claim is that sci-fi writers often anticipate technologies that later become real, so the list may serve as a roadmap for builders. Cited examples include Jonathan Swift's 1726 Gulliver's Travels, H.G. Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes, and Varda's 2023 space drug manufacturing, which Jerry Pournelle's 1976 orbital factory and William Gibson's 1988 automated space factories anticipated. The spreadsheet reports that 26% of ideas have been built.
- The Great Online Game
The Great Online Game argues that people are already playing a continuous, infinite video game across the internet, where online activity like posting, networking and collaborating earns rewards that carry into work and life. The piece states that the game has no real ceiling on upside, and that its downside is limited for people who participate well. It cites Josh Buckley's view that the best games create spaces that bring players into flow, and James Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games. It also uses Elon Musk and Blake Robbins as examples of players who translated online activity into business and career outcomes.
- World Models: Computing the Uncomputable
General Intuition argues that World Models, trained on video and actions, are a new kind of foundation model that could surpass LLMs for environments requiring deep spatial and temporal reasoning. They predict the next state from the current state and action, which turns costly simulations, such as a stadium of thousands of fans, into a fixed-cost neural network pass. Yann LeCun's AMI recently raised $1.03 billion, and Fei-Fei Li's World Labs has raised more than $1 billion to pursue World Models. NVIDIA's Jim Fan predicts 2026 will be the first year Large World Models lay real foundations for robotics.
- Status Monkeys
NFTs are starting to function as a social network that sits above other networks, and Eugene Wei's Status-as-a-Service is the best framework for evaluating them. A Zombie CryptoPunk sold for 1,201.725 ETH ($3.75 million) at auction on Friday, and 478 people pooled resources through PartyBid, a product created by Anish Agnihotri and the PartyDAO crew, to win it. Wei argues that social capital, the status people seek, drives online behavior that financial analysis alone cannot explain, and that new social networks resemble ICOs by issuing a token, requiring proof of work, and building scarcity.
- Framing the Future of the Internet
Packy McCormick argues that Farcaster, a decentralized social network built on blockchain, shows why blockchain networks might eventually compete with corporate networks like Facebook and Twitter. Farcaster released Frames, which let developers build small interactive apps inside casts, its version of tweets. In the four days after launch, developers built Frames that let users mint songs in one click, subscribe to a newsletter in one click, and play Doom, and Dan Romero said daily active users had passed 14k. The article presents Frames as an example of how experimentation at the app layer strengthens the protocol beneath it.
- Pace Layering
Packy McCormick's Not Boring essay "Pace Layering" argues that thinking in layers that move at different speeds helps people keep new developments in proper context. Drawing on Stewart Brand's 2000 book The Clock of the Long Now, the essay describes civilization as layers that range from fast fashion to slow nature, with the slower layers holding the power and the faster layers driving innovation. McCormick says that fast experiments at the top layer, including crypto, can improve the layers beneath them, and that strong institutions are important because governance is stickier than fashion.
- Small Applications, Growing Protocols
Small Apps are getting easier to build but harder to sustain, and the author proposes that they team up with durable protocols to capture value that they otherwise cannot. The argument draws on Sam Lessin's comparison of social apps to consumable fashion, and on Lensa, which fell from over $2.5 million in net revenue per day in December to $206k per day by early January. The author describes Small Apps as supernovae that burn brightly and fade, and suggests protocols such as Farcaster, Lens, and Ceramic Network could act as "Dyson Spheres" that capture their energy, updating Joel Monegro's Fat Protocols, Thin Applications framework with a time dimension.
- Meter: The Internet Utility
Meter is a company building internet infrastructure as a utility, meaning networking and Wi-Fi could be turned on in a building as easily as water or electricity. The article presents the company as having a shot at becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world, and says the author came away convinced of this after researching it for 13 months. Brothers Sunil and Anil Varanasi have been building Meter for the better part of a decade, and the article notes that today a company's network is typically assembled from separate ISPs, network designers, hardware vendors, installers and managed service providers.
- Everything is Technology
Kevin Kwok... no, the article is by Packy McCormick of Not Boring, and it argues that technology companies will displace incumbents with products so much better that the shift is inevitable, and that "everything is technology." Its supporting examples include Ford displacing the horse-and-carriage industry, Tesla competing directly with automakers, and Uber creating a new addressable market out of fragmented taxi and car-for-hire services. The piece cites Tesla's near $1 trillion market cap, more than twice the combined value of the big automakers when it entered, and says $1 billion exits are now around the 85th percentile, which it uses to defend VC megafund economics.
- Infinity missions
Infinity Missions, efforts aimed at infinite downside or infinite upside, justify spending that ordinary cost-benefit analysis would reject, and private companies are now funding one in the race to build artificial general intelligence. Historically, government-funded missions such as the Manhattan Project, which consumed roughly 1% of the government budget and 0.4% of US GDP, and the Space Race, whose NASA budget peaked at 4.4% of federal spending in 1966, produced lasting technologies. In 2023, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft spent a combined $196 billion, or 0.72% of US GDP, on R&D and infrastructure as they race to build what Gavin Baker describes as a Digital God.
- Decentralization
The author, Packy McCormick of Not Boring, argues that the world oscillates between centralization and decentralization with progress sloping upward, and that we are approaching an era of decentralization. He draws on Slate Star Codex's Vast Formless Things and Puppets framing, in which technological progress sets the stage, and on Strauss's Fourth Turning and Susan Beaumont's liminal change phases. The essay lists seedlings of decentralization in fields such as energy, AI, finance, and education, and it presents this as a working thesis open to counterarguments.
- Intelligence Superabundance
AI may act as an increase in the supply of intelligence, which the essay argues will create more demand for intelligence-intensive work rather than simply eliminating it, drawing on induced demand and Jevons Paradox. Casey Handmer estimates latent demand for road space in LA is about 30 times current capacity, and William Stanley Jevons observed in his 1856 book The Coal Question that more efficient steam engines increased coal consumption. Slow Ventures' Sam Lessin argued that cheaper legal work would increase demand for lawyers, and the essay notes that Harvey was recently valued at $150 million by Sequoia.