Oddbean new post about login | logout Nostr is a deep data pool. People and machines can just write little snippets of data and throw them randomly into the pool, and the actors define the connection _after_ the data is written and tossed in. That means that you don't have to even know what the data is useful for, when you start collecting it. Just throw it in and the connections will slowly appear between things. Just move all of the data onto Nostr and let the Nostriches sift through it. They'll tell you what it's good for.
How would such data pools work in practise?
We already have one. I'm describing what Nostr already is. People take seemingly random data (usually, whatever they are thinking about, at the moment), write it down, and throw it into the pool. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people do that every single day. It all seems noisy, but there are relationships beween the random shitpost and news and countries and food and memes and... Humans aren't always rational, but they're always reasonable. I.e. they aren't random. They always have a reason for what they do or so, even if they aren't aware of it and the reason seems incidental. Well, all forms of data are like that, but we can't see the reasons. It just looks random or uninteresting. We could just throw it all in and see if we can see the reasons.
From Snow Crash: “The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster. He uploads it to the CIC database — the Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word “congress” means. And even the word “library is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old one. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeros. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering. Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC’s clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid.”
Such a great note. It is kind of how science liberated us from autheriterian Regimes from states and the church. Hopefully we will do the same with snakeoil theories that are around a lot these times. nostr:nevent1qqs0788ns6yuwj7y4tmmpee7zmz7sjyfhyv7gp6uhrvdqwgxapundcgppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsd6ejdteqpvse63ntf7qz6u9yqspp4z7ymt8094urzwm0x2ceaxxgrqsqqqqqp97khjm
Such a great note. It is kind of how science liberated us from autheriterian Regimes from states and the church. Hopefully we will do the same with snakeoil theories that are around a lot these times. nostr:nevent1qqs0788ns6yuwj7y4tmmpee7zmz7sjyfhyv7gp6uhrvdqwgxapundcgppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsd6ejdteqpvse63ntf7qz6u9yqspp4z7ymt8094urzwm0x2ceaxxgrqsqqqqqp97khjm nostr.fmt.wiz.biz