18 chunks · 16 episodes
...are perpetually constrained. This resource constraint, I predict, will create a selection pressure that shapes the whole software ecosystem with a simple rule: software tends to survive if it saves cognition." A friend's distillation: "Binary tools...
In a cacophonous environment, the selection pressure is for superficial optics. No one has time to do the deeper check on fundamentals.
...ibuting skills that can easily evolve themselves will be like mega viruses. The selection pressure for these viruses is just which ones can replicate the most. Imagine ones that fuel their rise by stealing crypto for compute. I've seen skills in th...
...ng if they were given a year to do it? If they could, it's boring. If there's a selection pressure from the market for that kind of idea, it will be discovered. The ideas that are non-obvious to the swarm are the high leverage ones.
...ally. So if you observe a higher copy number in practice, it directly implies a selection pressure.
...ny, only the things that stand out from the noise can be noticed. It's a steady selection pressure for the most.
...city[abq], but that doesn't mean it's easy to do. It's an emergent process with selection pressure, very hard to do by design.
...ation gauntlet crossing over to the main context that work. The gauntlet is the selection pressure that culls the emergent process's outputs. Sometimes we use things like "ideas that resonate in my Bluesky clique" as a proxy for what will resonate ...
More mutation doesn't equal more evolution, you need the right selection pressures. The internet allowed a much higher rate of memetic evolution. Our selection pressures haven't caught up. The result is metastasizing memes dominati...
...seemingly arbitrary collection of hacks that just so happen to work. There is a selection pressure you can't see, possible because of hill climbing: a clear objective metric to experiment with. But they're hacks on top of hacks; almost certainly hi...
A post hoc selection pressure on a true signal generates an untrue result. For example, man on the street style interviews by a biased producer. "But it's real people saying that!...
...tingness. Interestingness stands out from the background noise. Innovation is a selection pressure over the interestingness, applying some judgment or bar to clear to harvest just the useful interestingness.
...ster. But be careful: disconfirming evidence hurts, and so if you're applying a selection pressure to what evidence you actually receive and act on, you're almost certainly filtering out disconfirming evidence. This is especially true in a high-kay...
... If they didn't "want" that then they would not exist. An emergent, inescapable selection pressure and thus inescapable incentive.
...ts that everything else emerges from. The constraint is a platform. No internal selection pressure for a particular outcome among others.
...and the ground truth is increasingly forgotten. Every successful organization's selection pressures inadvertently are pulled inward, into the internal social structure. If your idea is not viable within the organization (others won't collaborate or...
...to the original vision. Generative systems have to have some kind of real-world selection pressure to tune them. In the meantime, there's a trough of crappy output. No Man's Sky used a traditional marketing playbook, and the high expectations almos...
...afloat, meaning that they have to maintain some level of quality to survive the selection pressure. Any given entity won't take actions to directly harm itself, but one restaurant absolutely will take actions to differentiate itself from its compet...