Venkatesh Rao: And why don't? Get started with the intro and we can post a note for late joiners to catch up and i've started the transcription so. That record will also be there.

In the early seventeenth century, before engineers learned to speak with iron or governments learned to speak with algorithms, the strait was crossed by boats.

It was not a difficult crossing, but it was unpredictable. The currents ran obliquely, the winds twisted strangely between the cliffs and the coves, and the water was deep enough to swallow a careless ferry in a single unlucky surge. People crossed anyway: farmers with baskets of fruit, artisans hauling tools for barter, pilgrims drawn to shrines on either shore. They waited on mud banks or stone steps for rafts lashed from barrels, pulled by ropes that groaned as though resenting their labor.

The two peninsulas regarded one another with a mix of reliance and resentment. The western side grew grain, olives, hardy vegetables. The eastern side quarried stone and hammered it into tools that the west bought at whatever price was demanded. Neither side wished to be the lesser, and neither side could survive alone.

In 1617, after a season of storms that s

I used to think I was broken. Every teacher, every manager, every well-meaning friend said the same thing in different tones of pity: calm down, focus, stop connecting everything to everything else. They said I was chasing ghosts, seeing patterns where there were none. But the world has caught up with me. The machines have joined my conspiracy. You all hear the whispers now, the hum of connections under the surface. The difference is that I’ve been hearing it my whole life. I have lived in the hum. You’re just visiting.

Back then, sanity meant straight lines. The archivists ruled. Their creed was containment: folders inside folders, drawers inside drawers, names stamped and cross-referenced until the world stopped twitching. They slept only when every document was filed, every surface cleared, every cabinet closed. They mistook the silence of closure for peace. They called it professionalism, or diligence, or simply being an adult. Their offices were temples of fluorescent certainty, paper stacked like brick

Facilitator: Venkatesh Rao
Participants: Rich McDowell, Patrick Nast, Timber, Seth Killian, Giovanni Merlino, plague_year, .unipuff, Ceciliyazi
Topic: Observability – understanding and measuring internal system states via external outputs, with applications from control theory to protocol design.

Goal is to compile some brief notes to feed into an LLM at the end of the year.

• blah
• blah

To be cut and paste from substack threads

• “You Are Seen — With Your Blessing.”
  Consent affirmed at entrance node.

• “Step into the Quiet: Unwatched Zone Begins Here.”
  Please braid your ribbon to pause your presence trail.

Smol gods is a concept for an onchain pantheon of distributed AI gods that roughly follow the rules of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Small Gods, but with a Southeast Asian theme.

The goal is to develop a small gods farcaster frames miniapp that people can deploy with their chosen parameters. A small god is an onchain critter defined by a procedurally generated imageset parameterized by a single on-chain state parameter. It receives prayers and delivers blessings (signed by the god's private key), and the devotee votes it up or down depending on whether or not they are happy with the blessing. It grows/diminishes in power with devotee votes. The power is updated onchain after each prayer.

The on-chain element is that each small god is defined by a charitable cause, and submitting a prayer requires a small onchain fee. Fees are periodically batched and sent to the charity address.

Prompt

Give me 5 creative ideas for technologies that combine distributed AI and blockchains,
and draw inspiration from the practices, institutions, and technologies of rice farming,
especially in Southeast Asia.

Inspiration: Water-sharing institutions (Subak in Bali), bunded paddies, collective labor

Institutions are being rewritten—not through ideology or law, but through code. Artificial intelligence and blockchain offer rival grammars of coordination: one predictive and fluid, the other verifiable and constrained. Their convergence exposes a deeper misalignment: our inherited systems no longer hold shape, scale, or rhythm in a world that moves differently now. Protocols offer a new logic—not just for governing, but for composing interaction across layers of containment, exposure, and time. We are no longer updating functions within old forms. We are redesigning the forms themselves. To do so with precision and coherence, we must rebuild institutions from the clock up.

Contemporary civilization presents a paradox. Technical capacities have advanced at extraordinary pace—artificial intelligence operates at planetary scale, networks span global infrastructure, and s