73 chunks · 53 episodes
...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...
...tly different conventions. This led to less interoperability than was ideal. No schelling point could emerge; there was a sea of subtly incompatible options. If you used an object from another framework it might have a subtly different lifecycle...
...rve in media: as distribution friction declines, the hyper-niches and the hyper-schelling points thrive, and everything in between withers.
Email is the schelling point where all of our cross-origin use cases meet. When you visit a site or an app, you have to go to it. Email is where that service comes to you. If you...
...ht not even care to be interoperable, but if the community wants to use it as a schelling point, a pirate testing suite can help create and maintain alignment emergently.
...t of the challenge going off road is there are no roads. So you have no default schelling point to cohere around as a team. Everyone pulls by default in a random direction, averaging to mush. That means that as a team going off-road together, yo...
The schelling point for an ecosystem is often just as important as the protocol. Git is the protocol; GitHub is the schelling point. The schelling point is where people ...