Centralized systems will always layer on top of decentralized systems unless you figure out how to fix the underlying economic problem of increasing returns to scale.
To actually get a permissionless decentralized system you need:
I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer, and the more I learn about both their intentions and actions the more certain I am that they are unrepentant and that their greed will never be sated. I have watched them take the things that made me human — social networking, digital communities, apps, and the other connecting fabric of our digital lives — and turned them into devices of torture, profitable mechanisms of abuse, and find it disgusting how many reporters seem to believe it's their responsibility to thank them and explain why it's good this is happening to their readers.
Last year Ed Zitron became my favorite critic of the tech industry's rot. He's incisive and angry and it's cathartic to read him.
How I’m Trying to Use BlueSky Without Getting Burned Again
I really like the principle of assuming the platform/service you are using will go away in three years. That's a long enough timeline to derive value without overcommitting.
As 2024 went on, more and more AI discourse started to come around to the idea that AI scaling was probably about to end. One things I learned from this article is that "scaling laws" have a more precise meaning than what I'd known.
I had a general understanding of "scaling laws" to mean that the bigger the model the more "capabilities" were supposed to pop out. But the original meaning in AI research is about the "decrease in perplexity" (perplexity being jargon I also learned from this article meaning a measure of word prediction uncertainty). A decrease in perplexity is not quite the same thing as new capabilities.