Best of studio.ribbonfarm.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
20 stories from studio.ribbonfarm.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 25 June 2023, with 36 upvotes and 1 comment in total. The latest was shared on 10 August 2024. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- War Rooms and Peace Rooms
Online cozyweb enclaves range from war rooms, organized around shared battles, to peace rooms, organized around generative cultural work, and wars end only when making peace becomes more valuable than fighting. The Yak Collective and the Summer of Protocols, both helped started by the writer, are described as near-pure peace rooms open to anyone willing to suspend war-making commitments while present. Most enclaves are said to be stable at roughly 80-20 or 20-80 war-peace ratios, and peace is described as built through compounding flywheels of cultural production rather than by countering war directly.
- Massed Muddler Intelligence
The essay argues that monolithic scaling of AI, meaning ever-larger models trained on ever-larger compute and data, is technically doomed, and that agent-based systems are needed as the building blocks for scaling further. The author, who names the vision Massed Muddler Intelligence (MMI), compares current large models to brick-and-mortar construction that cannot reach skyscraper heights, with agents serving as the reinforced concrete. The author describes the agents as "muddler agents," contrasted with "godding agents," and draws on Charles E. Lindblom's paper The Science of Muddling Through. The text also points to biology, where organisms that act as autonomous agents, such as humans, scale intelligence further than insect swarms or mimetic sheep.
- Istanbul Diary
Venkatesh Rao reflects on attending Devconnect in Istanbul, describing the city as feeling historically complete, like a living museum, while the Ethereum event feels unfinished by comparison. He writes that Istanbul seems to have settled into a "end-of-history phase," with its historical fault lines dormant, even though the city still has live conflicts, including Turkey's disputes with Greece and debate over the future of the Bosphorus. He describes Devconnect as a popup city of mini-conferences, where he hosted a session on his Summer of Protocols work and spoke at Autonomous Worlds and Censorship.wtf events. He says that in technological time the event belongs in 2050, though in historical terms it might belong in classical antiquity.
- Striver, Seeker, Icon, Leader
Writing divides into instrumental work, aimed at extrinsic rewards such as esteem and money, and metamorphic work, which aims to change the writer in unpredictable ways. Combining identity, sensibility, mode and maturity yields a typology of 16 creator types, grouped into Striver, Seeker, Leader and Icon archetypes. News reports, how-to guides and business books are described as rarely metamorphic, while poetry, private journals and memoirs usually have at least some metamorphic effect on their writers. Instrumental writing is estimated to outnumber metamorphic writing roughly 10 to one, though the most successful metamorphic pieces can go viral in a lasting way.
- Nusantaraphilia
Benjamin Bratton's essay presents Nusantara, a term meaning "between islands" for the cultural consciousness of maritime Southeast Asia, as a model for a more decentralized, less anthropocentric planetary ethos. The author argues that the region, unlike the civilizational cores of America, Christendom or the Ummah, is shaped by many small fragments and an emphasis on the ocean. Singapore is described as a crossroads whose real context is Nusantara rather than the continental civilizations that border it, and the piece suggests the region offers inspiration for thinking about blockchains, AI, and climate change.
- Brains, Chains, and Vibemobiles
This essay proposes "brains, chains, and vibemobiles" as a gestalt model of emerging technology: AI foundation models, blockchain protocols, and non-tokenized decentralized protocols it calls NBDCs, which it says together could form a balance of power. It names AT Protocol (which powers Bluesky), Noosphere, and Nostr as examples of NBDC protocols. The author argues that each of the three elements is necessary and that no pair is sufficient, but says the necessity argument is left for later. The essay compares the model to the planes, trains, and automobiles transport system and presents a mediocre, minimum-viable equilibrium as the goal rather than utopia.
- In Search of Hardness
The article is a newsletter by a program director introducing the Summer of Protocols research program and the launch of the Protocol Kit, a free open publication of six modules with around 80 pieces, and it argues that "hardness," a concept from Josh Stark's essay Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains, should be central to the study of protocols. The program funded 33 researchers and was run with Tim Beiko and Josh Davis of the Ethereum Foundation, which funded it. The first module is online now, the rest will publish over the next 6-8 months, and 512 physical kits will be distributed free.
- A Camera, Not an Engine
Modern AI should be understood as a discovery rather than an invention, according to this essay, which compares it to a camera or telescope that reveals structure already present in data. The author names the Webb telescope as the model: large GPU clusters and PyTorch are instruments of discovery, and any magic in the output comes from the input data rather than the processing. The essay places modern AI alongside information theory, Turing's computability theory, fractal geometry, asymmetric cryptography and quantum computing as a series of discoveries about computational reality. It also proposes calling AI the discovery of the decade, though the author says it is not yet theorized well enough.
- Fear of Oozification - by Venkatesh Rao - Ribbonfarm Studio
Venkatesh Rao argues that progressification, the attempt to treat technological change as an orderly march of progress, is doomed, and that oozification, the process by which technology becomes ever more decentralized and unstructured, is unstoppable and a good thing. He describes oozification as replacing systems built from fewer, larger building blocks and many rules with ones built from many smaller blocks and fewer rules, which increases evolutionary possibilities and reduces certainties. Rao says fear of oozification explains many reactions to technology, especially among technologists, and uses the shoggoth meme as a clear example in AI, comparing GPU grids and matrix multiplications to Lovecraft's protoplasmic shoggoths.
- What we seek to save when we seek to save the world
The essay proposes a 2x2 typology of the "worlds" people seek to save, classified by biological scope (how many living beings count as the "we") and temporal scope (how far back and forward a world's historical consciousness extends). Its four quadrants are civilizations with ethnocentrists as saviors, technological modernity with cosmopolitans, stable nations with patriots, and wildernesses with Gaians, named after James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. The author, who says they are a cosmopolitan with Gaian tendencies, concludes that cosmopolitanism's main weakness is its blindness to aspects of nature that economic models do not capture. The piece is based on answers the author gathered from people on Farcaster and Bluesky.
- Epics vs. Lore
The essay argues that lore, meaning everyday habits and persistent small-scale knowledge, is orthogonal to epic narratives of grand missions and existential struggles, and that it is currently undervalued relative to them. It cites The Mandalorian, set between the second and third Star Wars trilogies, as a show that thrives in the quiet periods between epic drama. It contrasts Pratchett's wizards, who pursue grand magic, with witches, who exercise real agency through everyday involvement. Lore, it says, persists through epic ages and dark ages, while epics wax and wane.
- The New Systems of Survival
The author revisits Jane Jacobs' 1992 "Systems of Survival" model, arguing that its guardian and commerce syndromes stopped working as a guide to people's values after about 2014. He proposes a new "LinkedIn-Twitter test" that sorts systems, people and ideas by whether they feel more like LinkedIn or Twitter. He ties the two resulting responses to an ungoverned world, Weirdness Syndrome and Hypernormalcy Syndrome, and asks which is more adaptive. The piece also mentions Adam Curtis's documentary HyperNormalisation and an informal poll on erasing one of the platforms.
- Bullshitization and Common Indifference Problems
Joshua C. Wakeham's 2017 paper "Bullshit as a Problem of Social Epistemology" is discussed here as a survey of bullshit studies that builds toward a social epistemological model, and the author uses it to propose "Common Indifference" as a framework. The author argues that bullshit is an adaptive social process for building shared Common Indifference maps of reality, one that is accumulating negative externalities at an accelerating rate because of the internet and AI. The author calls this process "bullshitization," comparing it to financialization and enshittification, and says the core difficulty is telling sincere uncertainty from bullshit, a problem that is most pressing when someone has a real stake in the truth.
- The Flaubert Frontier
The author, a consultant who writes a newsletter, says a month of near-continuous travel from May 25 across Singapore, Coimbatore, Bangalore, Toronto and Healdsburg, CA disrupted their creative momentum and that they want to reach what they call the Flaubert frontier. They attribute the trip to three work projects across two unrelated gigs, plus a family function and a reader meetup, the first in five years. They plan to stay home for a few months and start a "Rejuvenation July" that includes quitting coffee for a couple of weeks, to prepare for another month of similar travel in November, when they turn 50 and expect travel demands to grow.
- Where Are the Elites?
The author, a PhD who struggled to change a headlight bulb in a 14-year-old Volvo, uses the experience to question where modern elites are located. He describes how the bulb change triggered a check engine light that a dealership cleared for $80 with an OBD-II scanner. He argues that computerized systems leave little leeway, making errors costly and the required knowledge hard to identify. He asks whether any elites are involved at all, and whether the knowledge needed to run such systems is what elitism actually rests on.
- Many Other Shoes Are Dropping
The author argues that 2024 is an unusually exciting year because many narrative arcs at different time scales are reaching their "other shoe drops" at once, though this is only about 30-40% of the overall narrative energy. The Trump/Biden election is cited as the other shoe dropping on the Great Weirding arc, and India's election, with its chastening message for the BJP, is cited as closing a 2014-24 span. Crypto, after 4-5 boom-bust cycles since 2009, faces tests of geopolitics, economics and product potential, while AI is moving from foundational capability gains to productization, marked by Apple's entry. The author also says the writing life of blogging, which began about 25 years ago, may be ending.
- Monolith!
Monoliths are a concept that underlies debates about monopolies, monolithic software architectures and vertical integration, defined as systems that are hard or impossible to decompose into reusable parts. The article proposes two tests: whether disassembly and reassembly can be done with little loss, and whether a system can ignore its environment and its competitors' moves, as a dominant player in a game can. Standard Oil was not very monolithic because it could be broken up and reassembled with little loss, while modern firms such as Google, Meta and Amazon are harder to take apart. The article also says x86 chip dominance and Nvidia's CUDA software show monolithic behavior, since rivals must fit around them.
- From Words to Watts
Venkatesh Rao writes that after a seven-week break he now measures his life in watts rather than words, a shift he says came to him during long walks and runs. He estimates his energy output from a Whoop strap at 1,700 to 2,400 kcal/day, and his basal metabolic rate from a Dexa scan at about 1,480 kcal/day, leaving a surplus of roughly 10 to 45 watts. He argues that words are high-leverage, low-wattage work, while exercise is high-wattage but low-leverage, and that he now finds the most value in words-based activity and less in measuring "success" through proxy metrics.
- A Map for AI Town Planners, 2024-29
The essay argues that AI has reached a "town-planning" phase in Simon Wardley's pioneers/settlers/town-planners model, and offers a map of the field's state in 2024-29. The author says AI's apparent speed comes from a slow first decade after the 2012 ImageNet moment, followed by faster progress in the last two years. He argues that the early arrival at this phase stems less from the technology than from its dependence on training data and GPU capital, which pulled it into contact with capital markets, legacy media and copyright regulation. In the map, Sam Altman is cast as a "Robert Moses" figure, Nvidia's CUDA is described as a contested "swamp" that the industry hopes to push back, and open-weight communities around Meta's leaked Llama weights are cast as a resistance movement.
- The War of Incredulous Stares
The essay argues that the OpenAI leadership saga, which it dubs "EAgate," is an early skirmish in a developing religious war over technology, one likely to last at least a decade. It cites a comment by Bill Gardner describing the discourse around the episode as "argument by incredulous stare," in which opposing camps cannot engage each other's terms and so only stare in disbelief. The author frames this mutual incomprehension as a growing reaction to AI and to one another, and says the piece will focus on how such religious warfare could spread across all of tech rather than only AI.