What does living the "good life" mean to you?

Welcome!

The unfortunate reality too, is the cynicism this cycle breeds, in terms of rising political extremism of all sorts, is not immune to these dynamics. Although extremists tend to convince themselves that they are pure of heart, intentions and justified in their maximalist goals. Even though, they may serve as hapless aids in the objectives of far more powerful forces than themselves.

Oil companies, too, perniciously support a lot of environmentalism with the goal of creating regulatory capture. Similar to how rich NIMBYs trick housing rights activists into opposing new housing, by demonizing developers.

People are very gullible.

If Greenpeace drops their opposition to nuclear power, I would at least be open to the faint possibility of taking them seriously.

I do not want the anyone to be ahead of the curve in creating a surveillance state. Fuck that noise.

To many of our arguments fall into this trap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause

That we don't even understand the nature of our own creations, here.

I don’t think the internet is as anitfragile as people think, and abandoning all other institutions in favor of internet-based ones is something I think is extremely naive. Because the plugs exist in the real world. The protection of the open internet stems from the protection of open society in the physical world. I find it strange that so many in these conversations dismiss the importances of the latter, hanging their hopes on the former.

It’s really hard to stay at the forefront of innovation when you live in a closed society, where information cannot flow freely, yes.

One thing that occurs to me, given the rapid progress in AI in the United States these days, with a new breakthrough being announced in which seems like almost hourly at this point, is worries about China pulling far ahead in AI seem like they were overblown.

This paper from Microsoft Research on GPT-4 is kinda ... horrifying. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712

Team demoed some amazing stuff today. Really excited for next few months.

Privacy and anonymity aren't the same thing. You're conflating what I'm saying.

We are pursuing a self-custody-first strategy at TBD across the board. Nothing we are doing is geared towards enabling custodial solutions. Outside of TBD, we are currently in early beta testing of our self-custody Bitkey hardware wallet, for which Lightning support is a priority.

The world would literally be so much better if everyone did psychedelics at least a few times in their life.

Generally agree with this.

We tend to distrust people's intentions more by default, as a matter of course.

I also realize, this could be true for some people and not others.