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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Honestly, a minimum viable product is entirely what Pokemon Go was designed to be. It exists to extract behavioral surplus from users and convert it into valuable action by inviting users to go to certain places in a community through placement of Pokestops and Gyms. Basically a tool to drive foot traffic, which Niantic can (and does) sell to businesses that want to drive that foot traffic. It worked brilliantly for years and still is a somewhat effective method of driving advertising and sales for real world businesses.



  • Heat radiation in a vacuum is also an important aspect of space travel. If heat could not radiate in a vacuum, we would not be able to dump excess heat from space craft and, at some point, the combination of electric devices operating within the pressure vessel and human heat output would eventually roast the people inside. We need heat to radiate outwards, and, from my understanding, it’s actually a somewhat difficult problem to solve in a vacuum. We take air and evaporative cooling for granted sometimes when on Earth and in space, where air cooling isn’t going to happen, you have to practice other methods of heat transfer.





  • Another notch in the portfolio of “public companies” being made worse due to shareholder supremacy. Public companies aren’t even really public anymore given the advent of a million tools to limit the role the public has in governance.

    I wonder if it would be possible to develop a federated model for sales. You’d like still need a platform like shopify between the consumer and the manufacturer, but the point of Etsy wasn’t just the commerce side, it was also the discoverability and searching side. I wonder if a federated approach to searching for products utilizing independent websites or marketplaces, but with a unified search and sales platform would even make sense as a means to offer a decentralized marketplace. On some level that’d be just a digital swap meet/flea market, but with less oversight and commerce protection of a centralized platform like Etsy or Ebay.





  • I played a little MMO called Face of Mankind. It was hot garbage but I loved it. I played in a faction called the Law Enforcement Division (LED), the Solar System’s police force. As part of that group, I joined Internal Affairs and helped run investigations into other LED members. I loved the process of applying rules to cases and investigating situations, applying fines or punishments as needed. The game really didn’t empower much player agency in this regard, but we made it work. And it was an absolute blast.

    Two memories stick out that made the game become mythical in my mind. First, was the Tequila Yuen Incident, in which a player changed from the “army” faction to the LED and was accused of murdering another player. As IAD, we had to investigate. During the investigation we determined that the army had faked the evidence to support their claim of murder by dressing another player to look like Yuen and faking a screenshot to imply Yuen admitted to the murder. After that, we uncovered an entire hidden organization within the army and led to a cop/army war.

    Second, after a falling out with the LED leadership, I joined the underground “Brotherhood of Shadows” faction. As part of an anti-system government movement, the BoS joined forces with a number of other factions to form a counter government called the Nation of Shadows. As part of that government, we needed to draft establishing documents and I spent a few weeks working with others to draft a NoS constitution and binding agreements for military force commitments and representative government.

    I cannot stress enough how little the developers gave us to support any of this nonsense. And yet, it happened regardless.