Before diving into this week’s dev blog I want to shoutout that Jinni has been accepted into Zuzalu’s Gitcoin round as core tech for Zuzalu and other popup cities to monitor community health during co-live experiences. So far Jinni has been the largest recipient of donations since day one with a week left!  Your donation of 0.01 ETH will be matched by 10-20x by Vitalik himself! Remember to DM me your transaction hash on telegram (and the tx hash for anyone you refer) to add to your $JINNI airdrop (if you’re reading this you already have a fat stack).

GDP is what people usually use to measure the success of regions but it can be gamed, misreported, or increased out of inefficiencies instead of actual productivity gains. It's explicitly not tied to the happiness or success of individuals. You can have an increasing GDP with an increase in suicide rates like the US is experiencing now. Happier and healthier cities, like those with more green space, are correlated with higher GDP.  But you can’t measure the GDP of a park, or you could but that would be missing the forest for the trees literally. 

Paraphrased from a Harvard article - “GDP measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” GDP adds the value of the sugary drinks but fails to subtract the health problems they cause. It adds the value of building new cities but does not subtract for the natural habitats they replace. An example metric that is better than GDP is Vitalia’s goal of adding 1 TRILLION life years to living humans. Of course you need a reason to want to live forever (like self-actualization 😉).

What defines the success of a society isn’t GDP, it is what they do everyday with their time. America’s work ethic is due to the Puritan pilgrims that first settled it. Mimetic learning, the social context of what those around us do and what is expected of us, is what creates our thought and action patterns. The people around you and their habits impact every form of health and capital every second of the day, not just your financial reports at the end the year. Holistic health has many categories to focus on, financial health being just one of them. Financials are the easiest to quantify and what can be tracked will be managed. GDP is also what nations care about so it’s a way for startup societies to try and get traction in conversations with them. However we have to look past $ as a metric to create societies and policies that engender new lifestyles with exponential impact.

If startup societies want to be truly innovative and capture the best talent in the world, they need to focus on the lives of their people, not just the products/services they creates. Social ecology is upstream from national economy. When we talk about “innovative societies”, we should be talking at least as much about the social and cultural layers as we are about the technological or governance layers. If you just moved to a new city, is the best strategy to make friends 1. to install an app to match you with someone nearby or 2. to say hi to someone in a local shop? Option 2 of course.

The simplest way track community health is `Time * People * Density`. Yet in the era of data as oil and surveillance capitalism we can’t even access this critical information. Currently Facebook friend suggestions are the only way  we get to see this metric and its only an approximation. We need better ways to track individual + community health, understand how our environment + policies + customs affects them, facilitate habitual changes through play, and help everyone understand the impact they have on themselves and others. A simple open source tool to track and visualize community health over time is necessary for startup societies to see how much they are actually functioning as a society rather than a financial/legal optimization. The goal of “multiplayer mode” in Jinni is to expand self-actualization past the individual into the social and environmental context that contains them.

While people are more motivated by things that benefit them personally, they often perform better when there is social pressure, social rewards, or sense of belonging associated with the action. Strava users are 83% more likely to set a personal record in a group of 2 or more vs. solo. Players in Jinni will perform better because they know they are participating with and contributing to their communities’ health dashboard. 

“A healthy lifestyle is also a technology—one which works best as a social technology—and this too improved quickly at Zuzalu…Technologies that have a heavy cultural component, where new software tools and new human habits are being developed at the same time, are likely a great fit for this approach…given that many software engineers have made enough money and now desire personal spiritual progress” Vitalik Buterin - Why I built Zuzalu

Your health is determined by your environment and through mimetic learning the habits and health of the community around you are one of the biggest environmental factors. Startup societies as intentional communities need to harness mimetics to drive specific behaviors for their residents. Part of why I came to Vitalia is because I’ve had an interest in biohacking for years but never done it, now in one month of living in this startup society I have an NFC chip embedded in my hand. The other reason I came to Vitalia was to show people how I’m self-actualizing through the Jinni game and get people to join the game too which is also working.

Zuzalu’s “pop-up playgrounds for innovators” are the perfect place to beta-test Jinni because of the perfect cross section of crypto, AI, and longevity which are the core inputs and outputs involved in playing the game providing great feedback and insights across the entire gamestack. Pop-up city residents are already in the self-actualization phase or primed to enter it. They’re financially comfy, passionate and successful, focused on health, connected to community, and have the freedom and desire to take weeks away from their normal life to experience something new. 

That’s why I believe the Jinni self-actualization game will become core infrastructure for startup societies and pop-up cities. They cover all the lower sections of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. While having community is important to an individual’s health, community health is measured by how many people are living their best lives and contributing back to the community through self-actualization and self-transcendence. With Jinni they can cover these crucial final steps. 

By gamifying life with cute tomogatchis to drive prosocial habits improving individual and community health, Jinni will pioneer social innovation in startup societies.

Jinni is a fun, social, and interactive way to stay healthy, engage people with similar interests, enjoy the real world together, and display your identity/aesthetic in privacy preserving ways. The next iteration of the game will be even more  community focused with communal jinn that people take care of together, separate from their personal jinni. The communal jinn will support community health by visualizing community health as a tamagotchi, data analysis on how community habits get adopted and shift metrics over time, reinforcing habits with IRL social activities,  giving notifications about workout classes, rewarding people for cooking potlucks, and any other goals communities program into their jinn.

Even better, with the decentralization of Zuzalu into global villages, we can gamify community health on another level with inter-commnunity competitions. What if Zuzalu could brag that they have better health metrics than Vitalia? This could be tracked across common shared metrics or we could see which aspects of health each community performs best on. For example Vitalia might be better at individual health while Zuzalu is better at communal health.

Community jinn brings a new of data science, psychology, and gameplay. They allow us to achieve collective intelligence across dimensions of community life from food choices to architecture design. Jinni creates societies where caring for your community and your community caring for you is not a forced obligation or an unfulfilled promise but an organic outcome of having fun in the game of life. Jinni will transform startup/popup cities into places where personal and community development is a daily reality. Instead of being stuck in the constant rat race of wealth and status like NYC/SF/London/Dubai, you can live in a city where people actually care about holistic wellbeing and becoming their best selves, not simply what society wants them to be. 

By gamifying life with cute tomogatchis to drive prosocial habits improving individual and community health, Jinni will pioneer social innovation in startup societies.

• Jinni was accepted into Zuzalu’s Gitcoin round as tech for popup cities to monitor their individual and community health during colive experiences. So far Jinni is the largest recipient of donations on the first day! Still 2 weeks left

• Onboarding wizard done and homepage customization with widgets 80% done (minor UX stuff Frontend mostly done

• Made a video demo of the Jinni app for beta testers

• Officially approved and listed in Android app store! Now available in 160 countries. 

• Already pushed 3minor  updates to Android store with features like onboarding and minor UI/UX bug fixes. Surprisingly fast updates given the multi-month process to get the approved.

• Got a legal entity set up! Will be making a bigger push to get grants/revenue in Q3/Q4 after buidling all Q2.

• Tentative confirmation from a GDPR lawyer that my laborious technical architecture design does in fact exempt me from GDPR compliance despite collecting massive amounts of personal data. Cypherpunks for the win again!

• Traffic on website starting to pop off. I;m not sure what the two spikes in mid January are but the last and highest spike was on the day that Zuzalu announced their Gitcoin round with Jinni whitelisted for donations

  

• I officially onboarded the first ever player to the game! Successfully approved their in app burner wallet with my jubmoji card. This revealed a tiny bug - a legacy API url variable in my Expo CI/CD which has been resolved. User Testing FTW! Also shows the issues with only testing sideloaded developer versions. 

• 5 players downloaded and onboarded to the game. Been fixing a bunch of bugs from untested CI/CD path for production like mentioned above so going to make a bigger push the last 2 weeks of Vitalia once everything is smoothed out.

• 1-hour fireside chat about Jinni at Vitalia on Monday to describe the game, process behind creating it, concepts im exploring with it, onboard users, and get donations on gitcoin round. Im still working on how to explain all the dope complexity of concepts and research that went into the app hence chat instead of a presentation. ~20 people were pretty engaged, asked great questions throughout and at the end, we had a lot of laughs together, and maybe 50% of attendees were people i hadnt directly talked to about the game before which shows latent interest from community.

• Made a profile on adimverse to get feedback about Jinni worldbuilding

• Accepted to Segment Analytics startup program receiving $50k of credit for 2024, free pro plan, unlimited analytics pipeline, and ~15,000 tracked users for free

• Started pseudocoding :Divination code for player API calls and Neo4j<>LLM integrations.

  • Decided on using Mistral API for prompting and embeddings

  • Made a vector index in Neo4j db for storing intentions and prompt embeddings

  • Started prompt templates for analyzing intentions + tamagotchi image mutations

• Write actual code for tamagotchi evolution pipeline during Vitalia AI hackathon

• Come out with testing and evaluation framework for evolution precision and quality 

• Figure out calculations for costs per player per month based on running AI pipeline daily or weekly.

• Design and build the Summoning Circle feature for remote player to get my signature and popup cities to register players for a communal jinn. Already have it partially built because its similar to the onboarding flow getting my personal signature but requires some API, database, and UI work. 

Originally posted on my substack