I love books, even tried to write a few, but I'm pretty committed to the idea that we aren't going to be reading on paper for very long.

And once we aren't reading on paper, we don't have to deliver books in the same formats.

So farewell indeed to the age of the book.

Howdy!

I sometimes wonder if every alphabetic language is destined to become an ideogramic (don't know if this is a word) language.

But i'm curious what made you feel like this was the real answer while the first thing you got was not the real answer?

I do think people will migrate to where other interesting people are, however a big question I have is: how much of the world will be ai-content content?

What if Instagram does become a pure AI drivel flow and a large number of people are happy with that?

So, in your ideal world where writers wrote concisely without extra words, would you still find the Claude summary step useful?

Right, but does the person reading such responses need you to send them? or are they still conveying enough info that they need to e said?

I'm sure Google email suggested replies are a pretty good representation of the most useful of such replies, but I'm wondering if we get to a point where they find certain standing wave functions that can be crystallized into a single click: the thumbs up emoji is probably the best example of this.

Or do you feel that short email replies still rely on a lot of nuance, which would make me think that suggested responses aren't helpful in those cases.

Yeah, I thought getting the insiders to trade was the whole point of prediction markets...

I wonder if even the pro forma replies will just go away though.

Take for example email signatures. Pretty much everybody has an auto signature at the bottom of their emails. And basically none of us want to read them. So why not jus skip that part? Email addresses are already usually our name. I think that this is already happening: many email clients put the signature in a lighter color of text or collapse it for you.

And maybe the pro forma reply should go the same way. But then there are those pro forma replies that don't feel like they should matter, because there is very little information carried in them, and yet they do matter: eg Thanks!

This may be a good way of putting it.

We never left the "age of barter" -- we just started bartering different things (mostly monies).

Maybe the problem of prices is that they pretend that one half of the trade is exempt from the effects of the trade. But the reality is that both the thing being priced and what it is being priced in are dynamic.

I spent some time in China in my late teens. Coincided with my discovery of zhaungzi and the dao. It's true that it kind of sticks with you.

I was living in the South (Kunming), but traveled around a bit. Would love to go back. Have you been back recently?

I haven't read the Dao of Bitcoin, but I have a soft spot for the Dao de jing, what caught you about Daoism?

That's pretty exciting!

What do you think the decentralized "good" path to publishing a novel could look like now?

Ah, my woes with supply and demand are deep and abiding -- just ask @Undisciplined.

I think where I'm at now is that supply and demand are both terms that describe how much people value something.

What is supply but an expression of someone's demand for a thing?

I think labor theory of value is generally associated with Marxism. It's been so long since I've seen the movie, I don't remember much of it, so my comment was responding to the quote rather than the plot.