learning

I’ve always felt that classes comprise only a small part of my overall learning, but recently, in grad school, with little else to work on, I’ve pretty much exclusively been doing classes. This hasn’t really been enough to fill my time, so I’ve been really itching to spend my time on other things.

However, I haven’t really found any projects/hobbies/topics that I’ve been particularly passionate about, and it’s really hard for me personally to spend a lot of time on stuff that I don’t really care about. I think a large part of not just finding the motivation to work on stuff, but also productivity inherently is to be working on the right thing. This, along with my overall sleep/daily schedule, has been the two biggest things I’ve been struggling with this quarter.

I’ve already been making some progress on the sleep schedule department (thank you daylight savings). As for figuring out the right thing to work on, the first thing I’m going to try is just to spend a lot of time exploring/learning various things. My goal is to recap what I’ve read/learned over the past week, and set some sort of tentative plan of what I want to learn for the coming week. My thoughts are that this should keep me accountable, it’ll make it more fun/fulfilling to track my progress, and blogging/writing is fun (but I haven’t really had much to write about). There’s another added benefit that this is a somewhat productive thing that I can do to procrastinate (a lot of my current procrastination activities involve just doing nothing, which isn’t very fulfilling in both the short and long term). I also just like feeling like I’m learning a lot of new, cool things, so this should be an overall fun experience.

meta

I’m sure most of you guys have heard about Facebook rebranding to Meta. I’m pretty interested in crypto/web3 at the moment, but to be honest, I’m not much of an expert in either. So over the past couple days, I decided to dig a bit deeper and try to learn some of the basics about what Facebook is trying to achieve with Meta.

Here’s a list of some of the more interesting things I read this week.

metaverse primer

I started with this article by Matthew Ball.

Ball starts with detailing past technological revolutions, arguing that despite massive emergences of powerful technologies, it still took decades for human society to recognize those changes.

First, the proliferation of these technologies fundamentally changed human culture, from where we lived to how we worked, what we made, what we bought, how, and from who. Second, these ‘revolutions’ or ‘transformations’ really depended on a bundle of many different, secondary innovations and inventions that built upon and drove one another. Third, even the most detailed understanding of these newly-emergent technologies didn’t make clear which specific, secondary innovations and inventions they required in order to achieve mass adoption and change the world. And how they would change the world was almost entirely unknowable.

He then argues that the metaverse is in a similar situation—despite the emergence of core technologies that enable the possibility, it’ll still take many years for not just the corresponding ecosystems to develop, but also for public user adoption/familiarity.

The fixed-line internet of the 1990s and early 2000s inspired many of us to purchase our own personal computer. However, this device was largely isolated to our office, living room or bedroom. As a result, we had only occasional access to and usage of computing resources and an internet connection. The mobile internet led most humans globally to purchase their own personal computer and internet service, which meant almost everyone had continuous access to both compute and connectivity.

Metaverse iterates further by placing everyone inside an ‘embodied’, or ‘virtual’ or ‘3D’ version of the internet and on a nearly unending basis. In other words, we will constantly be ‘within’ the internet, rather than have access to it, and within the billions of interconnected computers around us, rather than occasionally reach for them, and alongside all other users and real-time.

Such an explanation of the metaverse definitely feels really dystopian on the surface (many sci-fi movies come to mind), but tbh, a lot of our modern world is already pretty dystopian so what’s to say that this transition over the course of several decades won’t feel like a natural progression of events.

Another thing that jumped out to me was that a lot of the metaverse depends on online, decentralized transactions, of which crypto is not only a natural fit, but I doubt such a metaverse could even exist without blockchain technology. All of this makes me even more bullish on crypto.

minimally extractive meta

The next article that I found really interesting was this one by Packy McCormick.

This article is particularly interesting because McCormick talks a lot about what makes web3.0 different from web2.0 specifically in the context of crypto technology. Specifically, in web2.0, once aggregators reach scale, they typically extract most of the value from both the supplier/consumer simply because there are no other alternatives (see Apple/Google’s 30% app store rate, AirBnB’s 15% fee, eBay’s 10%, etc.). With crypto, since protocols are decentralized/fair and open to being forked/replaced (as they are open-source), protocols do not take profit and the value instead goes to the suppliers/consumers, completely changing the web dynamic. The current system isn’t not necessarily evil, it’s just how incentives/market forces work, but the nice thing about decentralization is that it pushes for a fairer/more efficient environment.

There’s a lot of interesting arguments in this article, specifically regarding the inevitability of big tech’s role in the metaverse. There seems to be a ton of opportunity/exciting new ideas that come with such a massive technological regime change, which makes me pretty excited.

minimally extractive coordinators

This article elaborates more on the crypto business ecosystem, arguing that despite new challenges facing businesses (businesses must extract minimal value else risk getting undercut in this open-source, decentralized world), it ultimately benefits the end consumer. I was a bit confused because this should happen in the real world as well, but it appears that in a crypto-based, globally-accessible environment, such pressures vastly increase with the ease of copy-pasting someone else’s service.

decentralization

Another interesting article that talks about a similar idea, specifically contrasting what a decentralized web3.0 would look like compared to the current, big tech dominated, web2.0. The biggest point is that decentralization is not about resisting government censorship, but more about changing incentives such that it favors cooperation/growth rather than just competition.

web2.0 vs web3.0

All this reminded me of this Paul Graham essay that I read a few years ago, which seems especially relevant in the context of today. It’s particularly interesting to me that at the time of writing, Paul Graham’s vision for web2.0 seems remarkedly similar to today’s vision for web3.0. I wonder if web3.0 will actually achieve what it sets out to do, or if it’ll get sidetracked the way that web2.0 did.

what i’m learning this week

I’ve been saying for a while that I want to work on something in the crypto space, but I’m still pretty unproficient when it comes to crypto. Hopefully I can make some progress on that front this week—I’m going to try to learn a lot about the specific tech/theory behind popular crypto protocols.