What’s the most interesting thing/person/event in the world right now?
Generative AI confluence with chips being scarce
FTX collapse as mainstream as it is; one of the biggest financial frauds ever, with citizen reporting at the forefront of it
digital communities co-creating in irl not 1-1 following the burning man formula see fwbfest, vibecamp, to some degree hereticon
the FDA just approved lab-grown meat, this is going to be the next agricultural revolution
Normalization of group thinking is a pretty wild thing.
macro: Russian aggression in Ukraine and it's rippling effects micro/me: Learning that 1 in 3 US households (35%) grew their own food in 2021 - more than at any point in the previous decade.
AI, Elon Musk, FTX Collapse, and the woke flippening
all things decentralized. protocols for community purpose. unshackling it from purely digital domain will be big.
Colorado legalized psilocybin and un like cannabis it'll solve for opioid addiction, legalize faster, and already has a borderless market via retreats.
We are living through a shift from networks built around proximity to networks built around ideas.
Open protocols like Farcaster that help people take back ownership of the internet from centralized gatekeepers such as Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon.
Week: Watching the FTX hacker attempting to cash out while everyone in crypto and their mother tries to track and prevent it Month: New features at Twitter Year: AI tools
The same guy who owns Maxim also owns Steak ‘n Shake and cosplays as Warren Buffet
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/20/tsmc-3-nanometer-arizona
Elon. He’s the most interesting/consequential Event. He manages to have his tentacles in Twitter, Russia/Ukraine, Crypto. All as side gigs. The biggest thing Elon might change in the next year isn’t Twitter culture but the Overton window around how people run companies.
besides FTX and Twitter sagas, Xi’s recent consolidation of power around himself post 20th party congress and what that could mean for everything from Taiwan to Chinese tech self sufficiency and advancement
- person: At the risk of sounding narcissistic but seeing myself through reflection and growth never gets boring - thing: CRDTs paired with blockchain for identity and Protocol Lab‘s libp2p stack for networking
has to be the restructuring of twitter Elon clearly has a very specific vision of how the company and product should operate, and watching the evolution take place is thrilling feels like the beginning of a new era for social
Boiling frog: human existence + politics is becoming less about body in physical space and more about mind in digital networks. (Subset of this: crypto is “democracy” for digital existence)
India - becoming a cosmopolitan, mercantile, free society like the United States of the east.
Matt Hancock on the UK reality TV show “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here”. Seriously. It’s the rare sight (in modern times) of a hate figure on a redemption story arc.
the rise of citizen journalism & the network state. excited to get more involved with Cabin DAO & see where it leads next year & beyond.
China’s execution of its silent, multi-faceted and consistent growth strategy to become global leader, while the US remains distracted by domestic crisis, hot-button issues and the weekly news cycle. China’s tactics are at times subtle and subversive. And boy, do they know how to play the long game. Fascinat
War in Ukraine - Zelensky Ceo of PacBio / next gen long read sequencer + commitment to multiomic - huge implications for advancements of bio.
I would like to make the case for Fusion energy even though I don't have any investment or horse in that race, nothing comes close to the impact to humanity. Also, people right now are describing "interesting" to mean "traumatic" or "extreme" rather than focusing on non-dramatic builders adding value.
The changes brought on by higher cost of capital. The whole economy was drunk on cash, the change back to pre low rates will be violent.
The Network State and @balajis. Every major event or important innovation happening has a place in the potential future of Network States. It’s the sequential destination as we transition from an era of centralization to one of decentralization. It re-opens the Frontier.
Gonna be an outlier for this crowd but IMO the sea change in sentiment on US education policy. door is open for revolution (not just reform) for the first time in decades, maybe a century.
1. China playing the long game for world domination 2. Putin playing the messy game while hodl 3. global economic hangover from 2010-2021, Russia, Covid 3. Iranian revolutionaries 4. Elon/Twitter 5. Crypto contagion 6. AI 7. tiktok effect on youth 8. Long term impact of web3, crypto, economic sovereignty
To what degree balaji network states take off If a successful numeraire is built beyond the control of gov’s To how many domains neural nets—with excessive compute—can generalize If BTC becomes store of value for nation states Prob of nuclear fusion success / investment $ in trad nuclear
Individual investors on Reddit taking GameStop private. Like twitch plays Pokémon but with a multi-billion dollar institution. The subreddit has been a shit show but the job had been done for a while. Now it’s just watching the snowball accumulate as it rolls down the hill. Could be another year or two before the sh
I ❤️ the spirit of this question and to read the replies 🤌but maybe the most interesting thing is the dispersal of tech and talent that makes this question unanswerable. Maybe we’ll never again have consensus on a 1D interesting thing/person/event axis. 🤔 💭
Farm Art Block during the Puerto Rico Blockchain Week 👀 faben.neojibaros.com
The socio-technical evolutionary step change humanity is in the middle of, which nearly every comment in this thread is both a symptom and a catalyst of
Most interesting things are dark matter, Riemann hypothesis, and quantum gravity. The bar for what makes an interesting person is often lower.
The growing overlap between what meditators have discovered through the experience of meditation and what quantum theorists are proving with science.
religion 2.0: where a digital native population search for meaning, belonging and everything religion 1.0 offered minus the bigotry, fictitious narratives, institutions rather grounded in science/metaphysics and modern realities eg weksek, kopimism, syntheism
I haven’t seen anyone drop quantum in here…would be a huge game changer for general AI. But there a whole bunch of other areas too that quantum is making a splash. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-18/sandboxaq-wins-pentagon-contract-to-probe-quantum-threats
It's funny how no one answered ChatGPT back then. Black swans always come from nowhere.
Reading througn the casts is like going through a time machine. Follow ❤️