How Jack and Bard met through Euroburner culture

Is Bucharest the next Berlin? Or…can there never be a ‘next Berlin’

Property ownership as lynchpin for scene building

The secrets of disproportionate Swedish soft power

America as theater for the rest of the world

Lessons from Urbit: too Kantian

Philosophy’s role in engineering 

Behavioral Economics and ‘Nudge Units’ 

The need for spirituality when grappling with the ramifications of AI

AI as a fundamentally truth seeking technology and therefore a threat to authoritarian governments

The devolution of the internet from Open and flat into a tribal, feudal dark forest.

Decentralization vs Centralization as the only important political axis

Navigating community building in a decentralized world (parallelize it)

The day-to-day of working in a think tank

What it means to bridge the cultural divide between Silicon Valley and DC

The real American power centers (New York (finance/media), Texas (energy), Silicon Valley (tech) and how Hollywood has always been subservient

What it means to embrace pluralism in terms of values, morals and ontological frameworks, and the benefits of such beliefs

How to apply the theory of The Second Best to ones general worldview: “when it is infeasible to remove a particular market distortion, introducing one or more additional market distortions may lead to a more efficient outcome”

The evolution of liberalism has evolved as a response to periods of extreme conflict (The 30 Years War, for instance)

Debating whether or not crisis is essential for generating new equilibria in society

Accelerationism and capitalism as a general intelligence

Path dependency and historical development

Exploring scenarios about what happens if AI scaling laws breakdown 

Predictions about AI’s impact on regime change and the rise of AI-native institutions

Can open source AI keep up? Why it’s important that they keep trying, despite the widening performance gap

Why Sam isn’t worried about children adapting to technological change

The coming return of Neo-Medieval societal structures

Completing the system of Canadian Idealism

Ruby’s new habit of buying old film home movies off eBay

The concept of ‘Mnemophagy’: “the devouring of memory” and the ephemerality of online culture

Checkpoints: Ruby’s book about an accidental community that formed in the comment section of a now-deleted YouTube video

His early internet archiving habits and how they sucked him into academia through meme page admin

What he’s learned from teaching young designers at NYU and the new generational attitudes towards technology that he sees crystallizing

How comparing the iPod to the Stem Player made him both optimistic and pessimistic about the future of hardware design

Why it’s a good thing that 64% of Gen Z call themselves ‘creators’

The rise of para-content: content about content

Why we want AI to give us malleable, interoperable, remixable tools, not to repeat forms from the past

The rise of synthetic training data and concerns about its usefulness or creativity

Why it’s important to write more non-dystopian sci-fi, so that founders are inspired to build things besides cyberpunk and ‘the Torment Nexus’

Historical context of space architecture

The concept of the ‘planetary imagination’

The roots and legacy of Russian Cosmism

The ‘Brick Moon’ vs. ‘Glass Moon’ paradigms of space colonization

J.D Bernal’s early vision for a pluralistic ‘proto-patchwork’ in space composed of numerous self-reproducing bubble space habitats

The Von Braun Paradigm, Operation Paperclip and UFOs

Comparison of Soviet and US space program culture and sci-fi influences

New Space and the quasi-cold war rivalry between Musk and Bezos

Gerard O’ Neill’s influential space habitat work for NASA in the 1970s

What makes those Don Davis and Rick Guidice Space habitat paintings so damn appealing and the Bezos commissioned ones so flat?

Why we can absolutely afford to build a Stanford Torus  

How the aesthetics of space habitats influences public perception

Fred’s work with Brick Moon, a space habitat consultancy

“Don’t Let Them Leave” movement, opposed to space colonization

Space habitats for manatees 

Fred’s incredible GoT fan theory: It takes place on a malfunctioning Truman Show-style Bernal Sphere

Absorbing the California Ideology by osmosis growing up in Petaluma

How custom car culture informs Chase’s approach to technology

Gaming as CEO Mode trainer Vs. depressive real world agency drainer 

Marketplaces as cooperation tech and the need to maximize informational flow rates

How Vaporware aims to address the complexities of social computing

Right and wrong approaches to standardization in software 

The multidimensional problem space of growing a radical software project as a startup

Taking on megacorp incumbents by doing things outside the scope of their business model

The great app-less future, (that Apple doesn’t want you to have)

The Operating Function as a new paradigm in computing and foundation for a sovereign Exocortex

Functional programming providing the basis for reliable and trustworthy distributed systems and software

Vaporware’s competition and target audience 

The political implications of our technology and legal and ethical challenges

Community sovereignty and individual sovereignty

Some differing views on the pace of AI development 

How insanely high Chase thinks your monthly software bill is going to be in 10 years

Different ways you can participate in our project if you’re interested!

Hackathon origin story of Websim’s creation 

Rob’s background as a behavioral product strategist and Sean’s experience moving from the live coding community to Google 

The Influence of Brett Victor on creative coding 

Scaling and gamification

Fostering the WebSim community as a ‘social creativity engine’

The rising importance of simulation in economics

Canvas and text as universal interfaces and tools for thought

Dreams as synthetic training data and the shortcomings of an LLM model of the brain

The Future of Websim

The need for alternative visions for computing and reasons to be dissatisfied with the current state of software. 

Some of the ways HCI research can assist in efforts to reorganize societal structures.

How left-leaning crypto-optimism went from being a central narrative to relatively niche over the last decade. 

Integration domains and the need for more cross-pollination between disparate disciplines and communities

The potential for new TfT concepts like Spatial Canvases to push us out of our current siloed, windowed app based local maxima (Check out Orion’s talk on the topic)

Cool developments in AI enabled malleable software like Websim

The differences between ‘ephemeral’ and ‘compostable’ software

Transitioning from the music industry into tech

Perils and lessons learned from scene building

What is the future (or lack thereof) for DAOS

The emerging battle lines in the AI industry

What’s next for MindPalace and other personal-data enabled agents

Trusting big tech vs startups with your data

Music-style royalty models for software

The “Age Of Canvas” and Mass Custom software/os/hardware

Enduring importance of physical artifacts

The incoming militarization of AGI labs

Speculations on our infant daughters’ relationship with technology and the future of work