Occasional posts from Knoxville, Tennessee
I operate a real-time chat-centric community with about 500 concurrent online members, most of whom are teenagers. It has no rules. There’s no one you can even ask what the rules are. If you press the moderators, you’ll eventually get a circular answer. “If you’re thinking, ‘This will definitely get me banned’ you’ll probably be banned.” That’s as precise as it gets, and for good reason. Just ...
I’m from an earlier era of the internet. In the 2000s, if your desired username was anything other than one of the top few thousand dictionary words, you could acquire it on every service, every time. We got used to this, to the point that it became, at least for me, viscerally unpleasant to be denied your desired username. It’s as though each service was a country and your username was your r...
Whether for chickens or startups, all incubators do the same thing. They provide ideal conditions to maximize the growth of whatever is desired. How would one design an incubator specifically for con artists? What would bring forth the most devious, ruthless, manipulative hucksters with the greatest skill at taking the most wealth from the greatest number of people? How would you motivate them ...
Many people, particularly those which may be in a dangerous situation, are familiar with the Morse code for SOS. I’m not, but it’d probably be on my reading list before taking a three-hour tour. And it’s not even that useful for signaling distress, requiring a functioning emitter and a nearby eavesdropping receiver. Instead, we need a pattern that is easily learned and reproduced, most likely ...
Imagine a slightly different world with a different economic system. In this world, no shops you browse advertise their prices. You simply buy things and they deduct the item’s cost from your bank account. They charged you the actual production cost of the item, so no one was particularly appalled. You always got value equivalent to what you paid. It worked fine for a while, but then a lot of p...