Links and short notes, 2025-03-18

The 150-year history of d/acc, a $120M progress fund, fertility on demand, 19th-century kids' sci-fi, the real lesson of Cassandra’s curse, giving the Devil the benefit of law, and more

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Contents

• The 150-year history of d/acc

• We’re hiring a Developmental Editor

• Open Philanthropy Abundance & Growth Fund

• Jobs

• Events

• Announcements

For paid subscribers:

• “I didn’t think it was that unlikely”

• Oldie but goodie

• Bio links

• Short notes

• You’d give the Devil benefit of law!

• Architecture

The 150-year history of d/acc

I spoke at “d/acc Day” alongside Vitalik Buterin, Juan Benet, Mary Lou Jepsen, Allison Duettmann, and others.

If you haven’t heard of d/acc, I recommend reading Vitalik’s post “My Techno-Optimism” where he coined the term, and his followup “d/acc: One Year Later.” In short: d/acc embraces progress; it recognizes that progress has risks and we need to address them; and it advocates doing so in decentralized ways that don’t lead to authoritarian control and loss of freedom.

My talk was “d/acc: The first 150 years”: a whirlwind tour of how society has thought about progress, decentralization and defense over the last century and a half. You can watch it here (runs about 7 minutes). But here's the punchline: how each ~generation of the 20th century stacked up against the three core principles of d/acc (in this context, for “defense” think “health and safety,” i.e. defense against the risks of progress):

We’re hiring a Developmental Editor

We are looking for a gifted developmental editor who is passionate about helping 20–25 writers hone their writing skills to craft compelling essays about human progress during our summer/fall fellowship program.

Our fellows, selected from several hundred applicants, are super-smart, interesting, and thoughtful people writing on fascinating topics. As the developmental editor, you’ll work directly with our fellows, helping them to grow and improve their writing skills.

Our Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship program, which runs between July and October every year, is part of the larger mission of The Roots of Progress Institute to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century.

Read more and apply here.

Open Philanthropy Abundance & Growth Fund

Open Phil launches a $120M Abundance & Growth Fund “to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific & technological progress” (@albrgr). See also Matt Clancy’s list of his favorite wins in their land use reform and innovation policy grants.

The announcement mentions:

We supported Roots of Progress in its early days and are looking forward to its second annual conference for the Progress Studies community later this year. We think the breadth of this community (see this dispatch from last year’s inaugural conference for example), united around a common purpose of identifying and accelerating the drivers of progress, makes it an important resource to draw on and invest in.

I'm grateful to Open Phil for that early support and look forward to working with them to grow the progress movement.

Jobs

• Open Phil is hiring a Senior Program Officer for the Abundance and Growth Fund (see above)

• Casey Handmer is hiring a Technical Chief of Staff at Terraform Industries: “Up to this point, Terraform has focused on our beach head product - synthetic natural gas. Now, it's time to take our unique process to knowledge to every other industrial vertical…. My Technical CoS will help share the (joyful) burden of modeling the global economy and then setting out to rebuild it from the ground up. … The Technical CoS is not a glorified triager of emails. They will assist me and the rest of the executive team on deep technical analysis, fundamental industrial chemistry research, market analysis, technical writing, and every other aspect of building a successful hardware company from scratch.” (@CJHandmer)

• Boom Supersonic is hiring 2D and 3D designers and videographers for their Product Marketing team. “Want to design the future of flight? … Send resume and the work you're most proud of to design-talent@boomsupersonic.com” (@bscholl)

• The American Dynamism 50: Companies shaping the fight of the future. “If you want to work on something that matters, every company on this list is hiring” (@espricewright)

Events

• San Francisco Freedom Club 3, Mar 28, SF. “This quarterly event is now clearly the home of the most vibrant and interesting community in tech. And we have some special guests coming to number 3” (@eoghan)

Announcements

• Works in Progress Issue 18: “Prehistoric psychopaths; The steam networks of NYC; Urbanism with Chinese characteristics; How we may conquer menopause; The Hanseatic League's rise and fall; The pineapple: the king of fruits; And more!” (@s8mb)

• Manus is a new AI agent from a Chinese startup who calls it “the first general AI agent” and claims that “it doesn't just think, it delivers results.” (@ManusAI_HQ). Caused quite a stir; see commentary from Dean, Zvi, Tyler