John Loeber

Many people on Bluesky seem to be of a differing opinion, so lest I get looped in with them, I want to be clear: Free-market capitalism is the reason why we are prosperous as a civilization. Functioning markets are the engine of wealth creation. I love it, and so should you.

“How’s your week”

New essay from me: substack.com/@loeber/note... Bitcoin has won. And the big fight with the regulators, that so many anticipated, never happened. Some things turned out very differently from what early Bitcoiners expected. Some reflections on the last thirteen years and the Strategic Reserve:

A very strange thing is happening. Everyone's talking about the latest AI products. It's exciting! But nobody's looking a few years into the future and asking what this all means. If AGI by 2030 might be possible, then we're not thinking nearly enough about it. loeber.substack.com/p/25-nobodys...

The resource curse applies just in the same way to tax revenue (California) as if does to oil deposits (Venezuela)

I find it very discomforting that bluesky appears to have no true rules, and that users can be banned arbitrarily I still think it is unjust that the user who assembled a bluesky message dataset was banned: the API is freely available and public. Bluesky needs a much more credible ruleset.

Every great engineer has a little toolbox of their own idiosyncratic but highly effective tools and tricks Every now and again, one of those tools escapes into the real world and becomes a “best practice”

Interesting growth hack… someone using their Substack email to sign up for my corporate landing page form. Now I know about one more newsletter

Average marketing email unsubscribe flow

Same. Peer review is broken

I have muted the menswear guy because (even given that he is often right, or on “my side”) his whole shtick is dunking and being mean to people. I don’t think you should expose yourself to that in perpetuity

Getting lots of questions about my lifestyle. Here’s a quick FYI for y’all who are not in the know 😤

I would like to use a custom feed: filtered down to people with their own domains Why? Domains cost money! It’s an easy verification filter. (Since there’s no financial incentive to posting, it’s also less likely for bad actors to make it through.)

I bought a nice, big painting I hung it opposite my bed When I wake up in the mornings, I now am not really scrolling on my phone. I’m just looking at — studying — the painting and letting my thoughts wander. I did not expect this, but it is quite nice

I have never understood the appeal of being a humiliation fetishist but one of these days I’m gonna ask Peter Schiff to hear what it’s like

The new meta is no longer posting image memes (too much work) but just the alt text > Posting images? Costanza.jpg

Someone pointed out that Bryan Johnson’s “Don’t Die” thing is basically reinventing all the straight-edge components of Mormonism in a secular way. (Bryan was raised Mormon.) That’s not a criticism, I just think it’s interesting how people tend to rediscover/go full-circle on their own beliefs

Bluesky is interesting bc out of all the Twitter-esque platforms, it has managed to attract both the most fun and least fun users There are great posters here, but also the most humorless scolds What a combination

Every man over the age of 30 has a box of spare screws, nails, hex keys, and other metal miscellanea from a decade of assembling flatpack furniture

Stripe Press collection keeps expanding. Excited to read the latest from Byrne Hobart

I think it is funny that Mastodon’s architecture is exceedingly abstract and confusing, and so the only community that’s totally migrated there from Twitter is mathematicians, thanks to their superior tolerance for abstruse abstractions

Type of guy who actually reads his Stripe Press books and doesn’t just have them for decoration

- Custom, shareable feeds - starter packs - domain as verification Bluesky is doing really interesting things from a tech-UX perspective imo. More so than Threads and Farcaster (sorry!)

I will never stop

New OpenAI emails from 2015-2018: www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4C... Very interesting reading

Wow! An article! Something fun to read That’s not extraordinary, but it feels like it. Because I haven’t seen an article link on Twitter in forever. External links get downranked so heavily to keep it as an echo chamber. Discovering new long form content is a joy

Making a lot of enemies on bluesky by disagreeing with people posting stuff like “fascism has arrived” “1984 is not fiction” and “print your books before they ban them” These people live in a LARP just as deranged as right wing preppers