79 chunks · 58 episodes
...mick like bringing a baby picture. For example, the cigarette break is a social schelling point for a short discussion. Cigarette breaks force subsets of people into an interaction that wasn't transactional and not curated.
...imes the right conventions can unlock explosive latent potential. They act as a schelling point. "Just do it this way and everything will mostly just work." Ruby on Rails was a convention for using Ruby. Skills.md is a convention for organizing ...
In a time of despair, the beacons of hope become schelling points. Schelling points allow coordinated action. In a time of darkness, even a dim light can be a beacon of hope.
...t strategy for an extended period of time. Which implies someone who can make a schelling point that would stick.
...of interdependent beliefs and expectations about what others believe. Rules are schelling points, they help set the default of how people think a given situation will evolve. But they are just a default.
... far outweighs their cost when LLMs are the ones programming. Is TypeScript the schelling point language? It's ubiquitous and flexible.
...e connection. A protocol is a pre-computed negotiation, a fixed, pre-determined schelling point. That's what makes them useful, but that's also what makes them hard to change.
Discontinuities create schelling points. Moments when everyone can agree that something has happened, and coordinate some kind of action. Coordinated action is significantly more likely to...
...hen the window manager created the potential for GUI apps. Suddenly there was a schelling point for getting started that less savvy users could understand. We're missing the GUI for LLM native software. Chatbots are the command line to get LLMs ...
...e right answer if you can't show the answer and get people to agree it's right. Schelling points are often way more important than your own 'genius' idea. We have a bias to think our own ideas are great.
Finding schelling points can unlock convergence. They pop into existence naturally all the time. They are hard to find, like truffles in the forest. Often they require a cal...
...o act as one thing bigger than the sum of its parts. That's easier if there's a schelling point, a thing that everyone takes for granted at the center. Either a long-term ideal that is bigger than anyone and has been true for a hundred years. Or...
...y to have at least some desire for the product that's sold, making it a natural schelling point to meet up, a focal point of a community.
...ce. Open-ended systems diffuse by default. Convex. Folksonomies create emergent schelling points so they can cohere by default. Concave. This allows useful ontologies to accrete, emergently. A similar dynamic from Dan Bricklin: "Prototypes are t...
Schelling points help counteract the natural diffusion of open ended systems. They give a point for high-quality things to congeal and emerge. Folksonomies work beca...
...t stuck with any of them. But it's unclear which of those offerings will be the schelling point that starts getting compounding momentum. Probably some existing company with a brand that is well respected (i.e. not one of the major engagement-ma...
...isual landmarks to sight off:" In a big undifferentiated desert, having a clear schelling point is valuable to not drift.
A schelling point requires a certain sharpness. It needs to be sharp, not dull. That point is a nucleation site where the energy can attract and condense.
...t need to use go.dev at all--it has no special behaviors, it's just the obvious schelling point for the community to cohere around and it's great so why would you bother creating another one?
...ve innovation. Formative innovation must start small, as a little demon seed. A schelling point of a tiny viable thing that can grow at a compounding rate. If it has to be large to be viable, then it will diffuse or die before it ever becomes al...