There’s lots of amazing and important work happening in the world! Some of it is below. Jobs and music are at the bottom. Enjoy!
FUN LINKS
TikTok:
Did you know MJ played 20 seasons of basketball to prepare for his role in SpaceJam? 😂
Behold, I have taken from the dragon…an NFT! and Antiques Roadshow NFT edition 😂
The Onion:
CDC Announces Plan To Send Every U.S. Household Pamphlet On Probabilistic Thinking (See microCOVID)
BREAKING: This Is A Reminder That Your Appointment To Read ‘The Onion’ Is Scheduled For Today
Babylon Bee:
Socialists Condemn Workers Of The World For Uniting (trucker protests)
Facebook Replaces All Text Fields With Dropdown Menu Of Approved Things You Can Say
TOTALLY UNFUN, SERIOUS LINKS
Dan Wang’s 2021 Letter. Great overview of Chinese capitalist dynamism vs. authoritarian control.
News cycle has shifted from Omicron (which is losing eyeballs) to what’s next. Ukraine is doing well in this memetic environment. Metaculus predicts a 50% chance of Russia invading Ukraine by the end of 2023.
(Reminder to consume fortified essays—those that add Metaculus predictions for what they’re reporting on!)
Good feed of the negative impacts of Web3. Web3IsGoingGreat.
Related: Good overview of the Web3 debate (Moxie et al) from @PackyM
Holden Karnofsky’s excellent: Has Life Gotten Better? Agricultural Revolution made it worse, but the post-Industrial Era has been a net good.
Cana is the tip of synthetic biology and personal bioprinters. We spend 600L watering grapes to get 1L of wine. But wine is less than 5% flavor compounds. Still, we ship that wine (mostly water) around the world. Instead of shipping beverages, let’s ship the 1% of flavor and “print” the beverage at home.
Hyperstructures are a new kind of institutional design. For-public infrastructure protocol with expansive fees.
Solving Wordle using information theory. If you’re into Wordle, check this out! Amazing intro to information theory.
Tons of cage-free wins. Cage-free is now close to 50% of all eggs in US and Europe.
Birds Aren’t Real is excellent conspiracy theory satire.
QAnon is not. Great story on a QAnon de-pilling: Escape from QAnon. QAnon keeps people in with meaning and community. It shuts down doubt because those that leave are ashamed to share their story.
Electric Capital’s Web3 Developer Report.
Key graph tracking devs over time is below.
CouchSurfing evolved into AirBnb is now being taken back by third-wave Couchers.org. Community‑led. Non‑profit. Modern.
The Year in Ethereum 2021. ETH fees are 10x BTC, 1.25x Stripe, and 0.4x Visa. Creator earnings are roughly the same across Spotify, Youtube, Etsy, and ETH.
Pre-K programs don’t have much of an effect on educational outcomes. Initial programs that looked promising (in the 1960s, left side of the graph) were hard to scale.
Related: Denmark has generous social programs such as free pre-K education and free college. Why is it similar to the US in key measures of inequality, such as educational outcomes and cognitive test scores?
Melodysheep finished their series on alien life, three years in the making. LIFE BEYOND 3: In Search of Giants. The Hunt for Intelligent Alien Life.
One reason we might not have found life: we’re late to the Galactic Golden Age:
On Yankee Candle smells, amazing.
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Apply to be SFI’s Diversity and Complexity Fellow by April 5.
Work as a Full-Stack Developer or Data Analyst for OurWorldInData.
Capital B is a great new Newsroom for Black Journalists. They’re hiring for many reporting positions.
Enroll in the Center for Humane Technology’s new Foundations of
Humane Technology course.Lead development of Lightcone Infrastructure’s S-Process.
California Yimby. Openings include: Research Director, Policy Director, Director of Digital Strategy.
Patch is a great new summer program for young ambitious high schoolers.
MUSIC
2021 was another good year for music.
I continue to be surprised that I haven’t felt diminishing returns on finding new songs and artists. Music is delightfully antifragile. The search tree is wide and deep. Plus, I’m changing too, searching for new things.
No person ever finds the same great songs twice, for it's not the same music and they’re not the same person.
— Heraclitus-ish
Here are My Top Songs of 2021 from Spotify. Let’s break down those 100 songs!
21 of those songs are from my three Albums of the Year:
Bo Burnham’s Inside (experimental humor)
Self Esteem’s Prioritize Pleasure (grade A, organic pop)
Rhiannon Giddens’s They’re Calling Me Home (expertly covered folk songs)
24 of those songs are from these two “Erratic Dance” events I hosted in SF. I play cajon to weird music and the people dance. It’s fun. To practice for these events, I play the songs a bunch of times, so they get into my top 100 most played.
Lots of weird stuff here: video game music, Native American Cree dance, live looping, Carmen Sandiego, hentai EDM, and more.
15 of the 100 songs are what I call Vocal-Forward Sad Songs.
Many of these are from last summer when I was searching for amazing covers. Linger, Waterfalls, Everything is Free.
10 of the remaining songs were found either directly through Aella’s For Acid playlist, or are weird enough to live there. Bjork, Philip Glass’s Powaqqatsi, and Nico Muhly’s Mothertongue.
7 of the songs I’d categorize as Afrobeat. Amazing jazz and African Burna Boy-esque influences. All red album covers!
The remaining 20 songs could be bucketed more, but I’ll save you the pain and just provide them here for your viewing pleasure. Gospel, hyperpop, ranchera, and more.
What was your favorite music in 2021? Always game to listen.
Hope you have a great week!
Warmth, Rhys
❤️ Thanks to my generous patrons ❤️
Laurel Petterson, Eric Tang, Chris Densmore, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Ben Wilcox, Audra Jacobi, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Zoe Harris, David Ernst, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Collin Brown, Ref Lindmark, James Waugh, Mark Moore, Matt Daley, Peter Rogers, Darrell Duane, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, and Katie Powell.