society

Incorruptible Organizations AMA with Eric Ries. Wednesday 2/4 at 3:00 PM CT

Lean Startup author who now focuses on legal structures to protect mission-driven organizations from corruption. incorruptible.co

Free book giveaway! Register here.

AMA with Nate Soares. Wednesday 2/4 at 10am CT

Author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies answers questions about why superhuman AI would kill us all.

The concept of this app sounds promising. Do you think the internet can be a place for deep and meaningful conversations in this day and age?

I didn't book an accommodation because of AI generated images. I love AI because it has helped me save hours by automating systems, analyzing SEO, and creating website content.

But today, while researching places to stay in Buenos Aires, I realized that we need to be mindful of when to use AI so that trust is not eroded.

My wife sent me the link to an apartment listed on Booking dot com. This listing had tons of great reviews but several of the images were clearly AI generated. They were generic. Fake looking. This made me question the reviews too, especially since I saw one name repeatedly pop up under different reviews. 

I searched for this property on Tripadvisor and saw customer submitted photos. Here I could see that several of the Booking dot com photos were generated based off the customer submitted ones. And the Tripadvisor reviews were fewer and not as favorable.

We didn't book this place. It may still be a great place to stay. But the use of AI generated images threw me off. 

I feel like I should have a clearer point to make. But I'm also feeling lazy to come up with one.

American Military Bases are basically socialist woke dream . I was talking to a former military brat just yesterday about her life growing up in US military bases around the world with a Colonel father.

She mentioned that food, housing, health care and education is all provided and equal. The 4 star general's kid goes to the same school as the private's kid. So the school has to be damm good to make sure they can get into the Ivy Leagues. She never knew anything about health insurance, when anyone was sick, they just went to the clinic and got care. Everything was equal and fair without money involved. She was surprised to learn what health insurance even was when she came to the US as a teenager. "You mean you don't just get taken care of when you're sick?"

Given the recent Prez/SecWar gathering the US military generals to say we're ending the "woke" era. Maybe they should also stop this socialist wet dream happening in hundreds of military bases worldwide.

Of course, there're downsides to the military and growing up in that system. Not to mention the difference of volunteering to risk sacrificing your life and getting benefits in return. Nonetheless, it does seem to validate that if you're doing a great social good then you deserve a strong social safety net.

We're putting software in places it doesn't belong. Two short rants about software making things worse.

Making things less thingy

A little while back BMW tried to charge people to use the seat heaters that were already installed in their cars. They reneged after some bad press, but the trend continues. Here's Audi's page on features you can pay to unlock.

This is possible because software is used to artificially hamstring the car. Imagine if you bought a car with a sun roof that was bolted in place because you didn't pay to "unlock" it upfront. Enthusiasts would figure out how to cheaply remove those bolts, and the car company would eventually give up on the idea. Unfortunately, software is notoriously difficult to alter in place, and circumvention of "digital locks" is generally considered illegal.

Businesses can use software to hold their product's essence for ransom.

In 2019 Nike released some high-tech shoes that you could control with an app, and last year they discontinued the app. Some of the features of the shoes don't work without the app. Until someone reverse engineers the setup, fans of the shoes will have to keep the app around on an old phone and make sure nothing gets automatically updated and removed.

The product is less useful because the business got sick of maintaining the software interface.

It's convenient but it's less good

Many restaurants around here (Brisbane, Australia) have adoped online ordering. Instead of talking to staff, you tap on your phone. It can break in silly ways when compare to talking with a person; it's extremely unlikely that the colour of your t-shirt is going to give the waitress a seizure, but it's not uncommon for the "order" button on the menu app to freeze because of some quirk in your phone's web browser.

It's certainly more convenient, in some respect, but I've been starting to think that not every convenience is worth it. I've been struggling with feelings of isolation for a little while, and I've been noticing the way that convenience can be at odds with connection. In 2025 it's extremely convenient to not engage with other people.

It's also convenient to type out a big rant while sitting at my desk in my house. It would be much less convenient to commiserate with friends over dinner or beers. I worry that "social media" (including UpTrust) will become the dominant social substrate out of convience, even though there are much better non-software alternatives.

Trump is doing his part to make money great again (by embracing Bitcoin). Preamble:

At this point I've spent a few thousand hours studying Bitcoin. It's a fascinating rabbit hole and a subject I've become passionate about. Here are some of the conclusions I've reached:  

1. Bitcoin is by far the best form of money that humanity has come up with so far. It’s accessible to anyone with an internet connection (truly global and egalitarian), its supply is finite (something we’ve never had before) and it separates money from state, which is really good for a number of reasons. To name just a couple: it curtails governments' ability to wage endless wars (that are, at least in part, funded with the creation of new money/debt) and it prevents them from constantly inflating the money supply and devaluing the value of each unit of the currency (the scourge that we all know as ""inflation"").  
2. Since it's still in the early days of its valuation, Bitcoin's "price" (exchange rate might be more accurate) in the short-term is very unpredicatable and volatile. But in the medium to long-term, it's becoming more and more valuable by orders or magnitude (hundreds of dollars, to thousands, to tens of thousands and soon hundreds of thousands per bitcoin). This makes it an excellent savings vehicle for the long-term. It's also a form of money that is unconfiscatable which can be extremely useful to people living under totalitarian governments, fleeing war zones, etc.
3. Everything else in ""crypto"" besides Bitcoin is at best, a startup with a yet-to-be-proven use case and in most cases more like a scam. This can be quite infuriating to those of us who understand Bitcoin because every single crypto scam only serves to further confuse the mainstream and to make people assume that Bitcoin must also be a scam.

Deep Take:

Trump has just announced that the US government will create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, meaning they will be holding (and likely buying) bitcoin as a strategic asset, similar to how they hold gold, oil, etc. As much as I might dislike Trump and many of his policies, I think this is something that can have incredibly good long-term consequences for the world.  

I do think it’s a shame that since it's Trump doing this, progressives and people on the Left are probably even less likely to adopt Bitcoin. I imagine for most people who don't like Trump it will just seem like another of his crazy/dangerous schemes. I think that's a shame because when used as long-term savings technology, adopting Bitcoin can be enormously empowering financially and in terms of enhancing personal responsibility. I've lived this in my own experience and it's something that I wish for others. 

Nonetheless, I’ve always considered myself more of a progressive and I still took the time to look into Bitcoin, so it's definitely possible. I hope others on the Left can manage to be independently-minded enough to not miss the boat. I also think that only someone as “out there” as Trump could have allowed something as revolutionary and "against the grain" as a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to happen in the US government. Evolution, as they say, works in mysterious ways.

Trump is being advised by Wall Street veterans like Howard Lutnick (Commerce Secretary) and Scott Bessent (Treasury Secretary) who understand Bitcoin and its potential future value. And yeah, they're probably mostly in it to make money. Lutnick, by his own admission, owns hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of Bitcoin. But that's not the point. The point is that Bitcoin is like a Trojan Horse. I'm pretty sure people in the US government and Wall Street (and subsequent governments around the world who adopt a similar strategy) will do their very best to co-opt Bitcoin. They'll try to take it over and neutralize it as a threat to their monetary monopolies. But Bitcoin has proven its anti-fragility time and again. Not only does it ""refuse to die"" but every time it's been attacked, it comes back stronger and even more resilient. I fully expect that to continue.

And so by taking the first steps towards the US government adopting Bitcoin (and thereby legitimizing it in the eyes of the world), Trump and co. are accelerating the transition from government-backed inflationary currencies to a form of money that can’t be inflated or manipulated by anyone and can be used by everyone. It's going to be a long and messy transition, but I think it's a very, very good thing for humanity's future. As the saying goes: ""even a broken clock is right twice a day." : )

#DeepTakes

Meta is ending its fact-checking program in favor of a 'community notes' system similar to X. Maybe this is good for this platform making this kind of platform even more needed? 

"We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Zuckerberg said in a video. "More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."

"The reality is that this is a trade off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down."

What do y'all think? 

Monogamy v polyamory. Is monogamy better? Is poly better? Is there an overall norm for people, with exceptions? Is it totally pluralistic? Here are some points for monogamy, with some counter points, to convey some of my uncertainty but nevertheless leaning into what I’ve chosen:

• Point: I don’t know a single polyamorous couple that’s lasted more than a decade, whereas I know a ton of lifelong monogamous couples.
  • Counterpoint: many of the lifelong monogamous couples are not healthy relationships
    • Counter-counter-point: perhaps being in a lifelong commitment, even if the relationship isn’t ideal, is more healthy than being hyper-independent, especially as you get older. This runs right up against boundaries, how to know what to tolerate/love as is, when to leave, etc
• Point: The poly focus of attention tends to be the relationships themselves, often a kind of relational narcissism, rather than the relationship being a foundation for engaging the world in love (ironically). This is my version of the poly is impractical argument. Most of the people I meet practicing polyamory are constantly putting tons and tons and tons of life energy into their relational problems, and it seems like their relationships are often built around addressing these problems rather than enjoying life together. The fact that it takes so much time and energy points to something being a little off. Monogamous relating also takes energy but it usually seems less self-referential; they’re more often helping each other face and engage the world, rather than face and engage each other and their relationship.
  • potential counterpoint: You’re making a developmental point Jordan, not a mono/poly point. Most people practice poly from a Red ego-centric POV; most people practice sex from Red as well. If you practice from a genuine Green+ polyamory, this doesn’t happen.
• Point: Humans are largely monogamous; it’s instinctual
  • Counterpoint: How would we know if its cultural versus biological versus systemic versus psychological per person/family? it only takes a couple of generations of evolution to make massive physical changes, so even if it is biological, how could we know what’s possible for the future?
  • Counterpoint: people wanna fuck, especially dudes
  • Cheating, mistresses, polygamy, Sex at Dawn etc…
• Point: Many poly people avoid endings, boundaries, standards, and facing their own karma by just jumping from relationships to relationship. Sure monogamous people do too, but many of them end up getting married and that crucible forces them to face their stuff. Far fewer poly people get married, and when they do they can still use other relationships to avoid their shit
  • Counterpoint: we can use absolutely everything to avoid our shit.

there’s tons more, just want to get the convo started…

Your parents are massively successful if you are more evolved/mature than they are. I hope Jack and Cecilia surpass me in emotional intelligence, wellness, rationality.

I hope I’m humble enough to recognize it, but I hope they’re more developed even if I can’t and it feels painful to me.

COVID Vaccines: is the cure is worse than the disease (these days)? I don’t get COVID vaccines anymore. I did the first round while we were still in lockdown.

I stand by the choice to get vaccinated then. We didn’t know what was happening, lots of people were dying, good statistics were hard to come by (good interpretations even harder), and the virus hadn’t mutated yet.

It wasn’t great for me: two shots separated by a month; 5.5 days after the first I got shingles (apparently thousands of other people also got at that exact time) and then after the 2nd I was sicker than I’ve almost ever been. It lasted about 2.5 days and then was VOOM instantly cleared up. It was weird and felt unnatural. But perhaps when I later got COVID, it would have been WAY worse, without having gotten the vaccine.

Now, I don’t believe it’s worth it. The experience of having COVID is way less. It’s less deadly. There’s not a chance of herd immunity. And I’ve got friends who have awful long COVID from the vaccine. I haven’t done all the research, and anyone who’s tried to tell me about the research has seemed stilted to one side or another that had me take their interpretations with a huge grain of salt.