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Venkatesh Rao 🔹

@vgr.bsky.social

2026 kickoff of SIGFPT (Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory) starts in 5 minutes on our discord discord.gg/qaPjFFp2H?ev...

protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/theorizing...

Join the Summer of Protocols Discord Server!

For protocol researchers, engineers, and artists. | 1254 members

discord.gg

January 9, 2026 at 5:56 PM

Venkatesh Rao 🔹

@vgr.bsky.social

Too long for a note, too casual for a post… so you get a screenshot essay on floors as workspaces

January 3, 2026 at 12:21 AM

Venkatesh Rao 🔹

@vgr.bsky.social

HNY!

This is the first year in nearly a decade where the new year arrives without the feeling all the planning and resolutioning either being in the shadow of ascendant Trumpism (even in the Biden years) or an effort to studiously and strenuously ignore it. AI has easily marginalized the Trumpist turn of the planet in the attention stakes, despite it being stronger than ever. It now merely feels like an annoying transient problem that doesn’t even really need to be solved, just outlived. It’s not an enduring existential condition to be adapted to. AI not only is that, it has so far been largely a positive turn of history as far as I’m concerned. The right things are thriving or dying because of it. It is pissing off and energizing the right people. It is creating its own new problems but they are ones that seem interesting and worthwhile to solve. I’m happy and eager to adapt to an AI world, where I merely stoically accept a climate-change world and have been implacably resistant to adapting to a Trumpist world. It’s nice to feel the worldwinds of historical change blowing roughly in favorable directions relative to where I want to go for a change.

Happy new year! Feels like the cheeriest one in a long time. May the slop be with you!

January 1, 2026 at 9:41 PM

Venkatesh Rao 🔹

@vgr.bsky.social

New art series titled Birren

Named for the Birren industrial safety color palette from the 1950s

Birren #1

December 28, 2025 at 3:41 AM

Venkatesh Rao 🔹

@vgr.bsky.social

Art 2.2.1

We’re semantic versioning here now

December 22, 2025 at 1:12 AM

Venkatesh Rao 🔹

@vgr.bsky.social

Art 2.2

December 21, 2025 at 4:51 AM

Venkatesh Rao 🔹

@vgr.bsky.social

Thought: “Human” is now a compile target rather than superseded. Like assembly or JavaScript. Some proposition in the neighborhood of that is true. Where “human” is some mix of artisanal+bespoke+idiosyncratic. Started unpacking the thought in my latest contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/revenge-of...

Revenge of the Dilettantes

Book club and AI adventures, age of bespokeness, study groups, new rules of engagement

contraptions.venkateshrao.com

December 20, 2025 at 5:54 PM

Venkatesh Rao 🔹

@vgr.bsky.social

👀

neutral 🔒 @neutral.zone · Dec 15

I think I drank too much Stafford Beer

December 15, 2025 at 5:54 AM

Venkatesh Rao 🔹

@vgr.bsky.social

Trained a model on my october/november paintings on titles.xyz and the results are absolutely astounding. Every test I ran produced better results than my own manual efforts. Essay and public access soon.

My handmade training set is here venkateshrao.com/BucketArt/in...