Had a wild discussion with ChatPDF about this book: From the Rule of Law to the Law of Rule: Dismantling the Rule of Law in Hungary, 2010-2024

Need to write up a blog post about BlueSky vs Twitter, and the difference between the affordances of autocracies and egalitarianism.

• The similarity between “Early Twitter” and BlueSky.
• Something about Hierarchies (From out chimp/human ancestor – Alpha Males, etc) and Egalitarian communities (Paleolithic groups of early humans in marginal environments). The “Rule of Law” vs. “The Law of the Ruler”. Each of these structures work, and most humans can “code switch” between them. But each have their own specific rules for dealing with internal threats
  • Egalitarianism: Expulsion vs. Gossip/Criticism, Ridicule, Intervention, Shunning, Execution by Relative
  • Authoritarianism: Surveillance, Propaganda, Bribery, Threats, Prison/Exile, Execution
• The neutral nature of the timeline feed vs a recommender
• The “Nuclear Block” as a form of shunning, vs. being kicked off the platform.
• The ability to include hyperlinks
• No advertising, which I simply do not understand. The only advertising I see is items self-flagged as #Ad. I mean I would happily support an ad-free BlySky in the same way I support my friendly neighborhood Mastodon server (shoutout to fediscience.org/)
• Deliberate virality being a form of dominance display (“look at me!”) as something that is easier to do in an autocratic technology, where a “king” can pull the strings.
• The relative newness of BlueSky. Early adopters tend to be on the explore end of the explore-exploit spectrum. This type of person does not organize into a hierarchy well. As technologies mature, they tend to be taken over by those in power and the affordances become aligned with autocracy.

SBIRs

• 9:00 USNA meeting
• More demo development. Talk to Aaron about a model that can predict the next step(s) of a trajectory. Probably too slow to train at the tradeshow, but a really neat thing to A/B with.