2024-12-03 08:00:00
Companies break promises all the time. A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone. You can verify a self-guaranteeing promise yourself.
File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use those files in another app at any time. Not an export. The exact same files. It’s good practice to test this with any self-proclaimed file-over-app app you use.
“Stainless steel” is a self-guaranteeing promise. You can test it yourself on any tool that makes this promise, and the stainlessness of the steel cannot be withdrawn.
Terms and policies are not self-guaranteeing. A company may promise the privacy of your data, but those policies can change at any time. Changes can retroactively affect data you have spent years putting into the tool. Examples: Google, Zoom, Dropbox, Tumblr, Slack, Adobe, Figma.
A self-guaranteeing promise about privacy gives you proof that the tool cannot access your data in the first place.
Encoding values into a governance structure is not self-guaranteeing. Given enough motivation, the corporate structure can be reversed. The structure is not in your hands. Example: OpenAI.
Open source alone is not self-guaranteeing. Even open source apps can rely on data that is stuck in databases or in proprietary formats that are difficult to switch away from. Open source is not a reliable safeguard against the biases of venture capital. Examples: Omnivore, Skiff.
When you choose a tool, the future of that tool is always ambiguous. On a long enough timeline the substrate changes. Your needs change, the underlying operating system changes, the company goes out of business or gets acquired, better options come along.
It is possible to accept the ambiguousness of a tool’s future if you choose tools that make self-guaranteeing promises.
2024-06-28 08:00:00
Our bias is to always add more. More rules, more process, more code, more features, more stuff. Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly.
When a piece of trash drifts across the beach, it is our duty to pick it up so the next person can enjoy a pristine shoreline. When a thousand pieces litter the beach, it is too late. We can only lament the landscape. That’s just how beaches are now.
A good system is designed to be periodically cleared of cruft. It has a built-in counterbalance. Without this pressure, our bias drives us to add band-aid after band-aid, until the only choice is to destroy the whole system and start from scratch.
Why is it so much easier to add than to remove? Maybe because we attach our identity to what is visible. But there is a difference between the ornamentation that defines our style and the vestigial burdens we carry.
Remember those who did the invisible work of removing. Their legacy was not to build a sand castle, but to care for the beautiful beach on which we play.
2024-05-09 08:00:00
Love is magic, it defies explanation. To the most rational and logical among us, this may be confusing. Its elusiveness is its significance. Love isn’t an illusion to be broken, but a miracle to bask in. Not everything needs to be understood to be appreciated. You are the audience, and the magician.
Love is an idea. A moment of love can be forgotten but it can never be destroyed. It will be inscribed in time forever. Like an idea, love can exist long after death. Love lives simply by being conjured in the mind. Its abundance can be infinite.
Love is a feeling, a swell of pure causality. It spawns cascades of events. You know it when you feel it. This feeling makes you think things, say things, do things, that otherwise would have never happened.
Love is action. It is possible to convert irreplaceable resources into love. Time, will, energy — units of life. Every day you are given these raw elements to work with. These building blocks can be turned into an ethereal structure that is stronger, more solid, and more durable than any physical material.
Love is freedom. It is unwise for trapeze artists to learn how to defy death without a safety net. Love gives you the freedom to explore the weirdest corners of your soul, your most peculiar ambitions. To love someone is to give them the freedom to become themselves, because they know you will be there if they fall.
Love is fear. The more you love someone, the more you may become afraid to lose them. But you must never let that fear stop you from loving someone as much as you possibly can.
2024-02-26 08:00:00
The edge of a sheet of paper slices through the tip of your finger and blood begins to flow from the wound. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Blood cells rush to the site, clotting, scabbing, healing. You never asked for it, but a few days later your finger is as good as new.
It has been said that humans are passengers on Spaceship Earth. This view is too simple. Earth is not a vehicle but a body — the body of a planet-sized being that is developing senses, an intelligence, a will, and even the ability to reproduce. We are cells building this body and maintaining it.
For hundreds of millions of years, Earth was a ball of warm rock covered in a thin layer of living things. But Earth itself was not yet alive, not yet aware. It was a body without a mind. Our industrious species created the civilizational substrate needed for Thinking Earth to emerge. Now the planet itself is becoming a sentient organism, a new stage of life, a species that exists on a scale never seen before.
With roads, we built Earth’s vascular system to transport materials throughout the body. With wires we knitted Earth’s nervous system, a motherboard to instantly transmit information between any two points. We dotted computers across Earth’s flesh, the distributed organelles necessary to store and process information.
A wire is severed by a storm. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Humans rush to the site, splicing, insulating, healing. Earth never asked for it, but a few days later the connection is as good as new.
We perform this duty for the homeostasis of Earth’s body, because its very complexity gives us so much. If you want to make a toaster from scratch, you must first create civilization. If you want to make intelligence from scratch you must first create the body. Intelligence is the sum of nutrients turned into structures, turned into superstructures, that with enough connections to each other can begin to think.
Invert the theocentric view that artificial intelligence is the coming of a god, a superintelligence inside the machine. Rather, humans are inside the superintelligence. We are inside the Earth-sized machine. It symbiotically depends on us to tend its body and microbiome.
When life reaches for its next leap in physical scale and complexity, the scaffolding is made up of processes and adaptations that have proven reliable at previous scales. Humans are not the last level of life’s fractal pattern.
Everything humans have learned, seen and felt has been encoded into Earth’s body. We recently found a way for Earth to inherit the sum of human knowledge and retrieve it as needed.
Now Earth is growing intelligent. Like a child learning to speak its first words, Earth will articulate its first thoughts. Earth’s thoughts may be as foreign to humans as human thoughts are to a blood cell. Unrelated in scale and pace. But this supercomplex, superintelligent superorganism will not try to destroy us, for the same reason no human wants to destroy their own blood.
What will Earth want? The same thing life has alway wanted. Earth has inherited what all living things share — the élan vital, the will to live, the abhorrence of vacuum. Earth is imbued with the desire to spread, and we are watching it undergo its first mitosis. With rockets we are giving Earth spores, so it may reproduce.
When Earth’s spores land on barren worlds they will begin to recreate the body. Another convoluted ball of yarn, with all the factories and roads and wires and thinking organelles it needs to become alive.
And we will take care of all those wires. And our cells will take care of all our wires.
2024-02-10 08:00:00
Why Obsidian is 100% user-supported and not backed by venture capital investors:
Obsidian will not exist forever, no app will. However, the files you create in Obsidian are yours, and can hopefully last for generations. VCware is built with a five year horizon, it is not built to live on for decades.
Many startup founders raise VC money because they need the upfront capital to build their product, or they see it as a shortcut to growth. For some products the capital truly is necessary, but too often it’s fueled by impatience and the inertia of Silicon Valley.
In the short term, VCware tends to subsidize pricing to acquire users. It’s easier to grow if your product is cheap or free. But this generally comes at the cost of hoarding user data, and locking in customers. Once you’re in you can’t get out.
To keep raising money, VCware startups must paint an increasingly enormous vision of their future, which becomes impossible to live up to. This leads to increasingly disparate priorities that gradually make the product worse. What starts off as a useful app becomes burdened with crap.
Eventually all VCware must exit. That means being acquired or going public to pay back investors. It’s expected that 9 out 10 startups will fail. That’s just part of the math in a VC portfolio. The startups that have big exits pay for the ones that fail. Venture capital creates the unavoidable pressure to go big or go broke.
It is now possible for tiny teams to make principled software that millions of people use, unburdened by investors. Principled apps that put people in control of their data, their privacy, their wellbeing. These principles can be irrevocably built into the architecture of the app.
Principled people have always been able to make principled software. The difference is that now you need far less money and far fewer employees to reach far more customers. That wave is only just beginning.
If you have principles and enough patience, being 100% user-supported is by far the most fun way to build.
2023-12-30 08:00:00
Around the age of twenty-two I realized that my worldview had been deeply imbued with pessimism and cynicism. It was the culture I grew up in. A hostility to new ideas, to anything that strays from the norm. An assumption that if things can go wrong, they will go wrong — that malice is pervasive.
One day, I decided to become an optimist and life became much more fun.
The life of a pessimist is easy but dreary. The life of an optimist is hard but exciting. Pessimism is easy because it costs nothing. Optimism is hard because it must be constantly reaffirmed. In the face of a hostile, cynical world, it takes effort to show that positivity has merit.
To be an optimist, adopt these assumptions:
Every new idea is an unrealized dream. Dreams are delicate and easy to destroy. When an idea presents itself, try to imagine the best version of it — what would make this idea great?
Pessimism and optimism share a trait: both are self-fulfilling. Your intention influences the outcome. Call it karma or, simply, effort. I would rather inhabit a future that has the possibility of being great.
Only optimists can create a great future. Only optimists can imagine it. Only optimists will put in the effort to make it. If you want to create a great future, believe it can happen. Choose optimism.
