sdiacom

I have never worked in a company directly funded through advertising dollars, either. But I have worked in companies that make software for the marketing people to bother their advertising-found customers with, companies that make software that ensures the uptime of the attention-grabbing platform...

These are first-derivative bullshit jobs. My job provides an useful service in that it enables other people to do their bullshit jobs. Those jobs do not need to exist, and if they didn't, my job would not need to exist, either.

Is it really surprising? Our primary role in society is to distort the internet, a platform who could be used for the most outstanding purposes of cooperation and advancement of the collective human condition, into an increasingly restrictive and mundane collection of computerised schemes to translate our attention into advertisement revenue.

I don't really like CSS either, but I suspect that, like I did, OP has half-learned "enough CSS to be dangerous" from the era before flexbox and grid.

I think it's worth pointing out to someone with this knee-jerk reaction that, today, a subset of CSS exists that allows you to make layouts that look decent without going cuckoo bananas in the process. I still don't like it, but I don't hate it, either.

I see no obvious reason why software cannot be both reliable and changeable.

Whether software that is reliable but not changeable (or software that is not reliable but changeable) is good software will depend on what the requirements are for that software. Does it need to be reliable, or does it need to be changeable?

This is a good thing. The more outwardly toxic the reaction against cryptocurrency grifts becomes, the less outreach these ideas will have, and the less people will be affected by them.

At its core, it's a form of herd immunity. You don't drink bleach, not because you know personally what drinking bleach does to your body, but because society has told you what the consequences of drinking bleach are, immunizing you against the idea of drinking bleach.

Distributed programmable Turing machines are indeed very powerful. We're talking through a network of distributed programmable Turing machines right now. It does not involve a blockchain.

I agree with you completely, the "blockchain" term is confusing, and by the definition I'm using, Git would also be a sort of blockchain. The more that blockchain (the grift) expands, the more that the meaning of blockchain (the technology) is diluted.

A key difference to me between Git and Scuttlebutt, which in my (most likely flawed) view makes Scuttlebutt "blockchain-er", is the distributed nature of it. You add a friend on Scuttlebutt, and this will fetch their content from any node, and all their friends' contents. It has an "automatic replication across nodes" aspect which Git does not have.

[Disclaimer: I haven't used Scuttlebutt in a long while, so I may be getting the technical details of the friends-of-friends-replication thing wrong.]

Thankfully, no. I don't think that's a requirement for a blockchain, though.

Most of us were very interested in cryptocurrencies at some point in our lives. At some point, we have to accept that things are not what we think they could or should be. They're just what they are.

If I build weapons for freedom fighters, but they're used to massacre civilians, I'm not bravely aiding the people's revolution, I'm just an arms dealer for a terrorist group.

If I build a decentralised cryptographically verified ledger to provide trustable alternatives to traditional banking, but it's used to trick people into spending millions on digital receipts for ugly monkeys, I'm not disrupting the corrupt banking oligarchies, I'm just running an elaborate technological grift.

So do you believe they opened talks with the people working on a word processor in order to "[deepen] their understanding of cryptographic primitives"? Is that what the LibreOffice blog post is about? Cryptographic primitives?

It seems more likely to me that they were looking into "growing the [grifter] ecosystem through [...] community development" instead.

Per the Wikipedia article:

> User content in SSB is organized as an append-only sequence of immutable messages, where messages cryptographically sign adjacent messages for the purpose of guaranteeing unforgeabilitity of the sequences as they are replicated to other peers.

That's pretty much a blockchain. Of course, they don't call it a blockchain themselves, because the Scuttlebutt people are not running a grift, they're creating a communication protocol that happens to use cryptographic primitives similarly to how blockchains use them.

They are talking about crypto, though. What do you think the Ethereum foundation does? Wax poetry about Merkle trees?

Correct, but the word "blockchain" has two meanings. You're talking about the technology known as blockchain. The blogpost is not about the technology known as blockchain, it's about the grift known as blockchain. Here's how you tell the difference:

When a project has a problem that needs solving, and they look for a solution to that problem, and the right solution happens to be a blockchain-like system, then we're talking about the technology known as blockchain.

If the problem these projects are trying to solve isn't how to scam people, the project will usually intentionally avoid using the word "blockchain", like Scuttlebutt and Jami do, and instead refer to their solution with terms such as "cryptographically-verified append-only ledger"

They do this because, when other people hear "blockchain", they usually either hear "this will be used to scam me" or "I can use this to scam others". Because they're thinking about the grift known as blockchain, not about the (relatively obscure by comparison) technology known as blockchain.

When a project says they're looking into how a combination of blockchain and their project could be useful, they're not trying to solve any problem. They've decided they want to transform their existing project into a scam, using the grift known as blockchain.

If they are interested in solving a problem, they'll talk about the problem, and how they solve it using something similar to the technology known as blockchain. If they're interested in scamming you, they'll talk about the grift known as blockchain, and ask you to use your imagination to envision for them how the technology known as blockchain will help the project, while they stick their hands in your pockets.

Good. The mere mention of "combining existing successful open-source product with blockchain" should get about the same reaction as "combining fruit bowls with metal spikes". This is a good thing, it means that people are waking up to what crypto actually is. There is no successful or interesting combination of "useful thing" and "blockchain", unless your definition of success is siphoning money from technologically illiterate people to grifters' pockets.

It's evident that the person who wrote the blog post does not understand that they're being approached by grifters, who want to use their existing brand goodwill to expand their grift's outreach. Being approached by the Ethereum foundation should be treated like cold emails asking if you'd like to put a link to a casino in your website. I'm glad that the community was able to clarify this for them.

It's easy to be "less wrong", or "wrong less often", by not predicting a recession in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007/2008, 2011 and 2013. Yet it is not any more useful.

Ah, that would be interesting to see. I wonder, where would the money coming from for this fund? Would it be real money, or magic beans money? What does it mean for a financial product to be "otherwise strong" when it is "in a liquidity crisis"?

Because letting the fake crypto economy go to zero has no tangible effects on the real world, while letting stocks and housing go to zero has very real, very negative effects on people's lives.

Ideally, yes. But if we haven't figured out a way around the whole "too big to fail" thing, let's not bail out the fake economy along with the real economy.

My understanding is that banks have invested directly to some extent in the safer end of crypto (Bitcoin) and indirectly on more risky stuff, through funding crypto hedge funds and the like.

I don't have any sources that I trust at hand, but a quick Google search shows aggregated data about investment banks and the assets they hold on the crypto economy: https://www.blockdata.tech/blog/general/top-banks-investing-...

For better or for worse, it doesn't seem big enough of an investment to actually bring down traditional banking.

> Earlier at the same event, CZ [said] the crypto industry “will be fine,” and there was “significant interest” in his proposal for a crypto recovery fund.

Oh hell no. I'd rather let crypto collapse, take the banks down with them, and bail out the banks again, than enable the creation of a second parallel class of wealth-extracting, economy-manipulating parasites.

Is the difficulty of running a company proportional to the technical difficulty of the problems it attempts to solve? I believe there's a lot more to running a company than finding a solution to a technical problem without killing anyone in the process.

I think it's fair to assume that Paul Graham, who runs a startup incubator, already knows that it takes more than that to run a company successfully. So what's the point of broadcasting this simplistic, condescending viewpoint to his followers?

If I was one, I would feel that he's looking down on me. "We smart, you dumb. We do thing good, so we also do other thing good. Shut up and clap for creator."

I'm not so sure about this. I don't have a college degree, but I don't think the issue with crypto/defi/web3 is a lack of understanding of distributed systems or cryptography. I'd say they're doing alright in the purely technical aspects, although I'm nowhere near an expert.

Rather, I think the fault lies in their understanding of economic and societal concepts: money, debt, what it means to own something. I think that their vision of the future, where every human interaction is mediated by a pseudo-economy, is fundamentally flawed, and that trust is a societal issue which cannot be solved by technology alone.

I would be wary of groups that rely in a strong in-group/out-group separation, where the outsiders can't understand the truthfulness and inherent value of an ideology relying on a complex web of interrelated concepts, while the insiders, who are deeply invested in both time and money into this ideology, treat it as self-evident.

I hang out in spaces for people entering tech, and I see the crypto advocates and grifters creeping in and around these spaces. It's extremely successful. Lately, I'm even seeing crypto grifts specifically aimed at people entering tech from non-traditional backgrounds, weaponising the language and discourse of diversity and empowerment to trick them into not just buying into the grift, but code the grift for them.

For someone entering tech, everything they see is new and exciting and mystical and hard to understand. Without prior context, it's hard to see why overengineered crypto nonsense is different from all the other overengineered nonsense they're learning about at break-neck speed. For many of them, the only reason to enter tech to begin with is to earn a decent living. They lack the technical background to understand if what they're being paid to build is a grift or a legitimate business, and in the current market, it's increasingly in their best interest to not understand the difference.

I believe we lost when we collectively accepted "software is eating the world" as an inevitable positive maxim of our reality. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that the end stage of this ideology-slash-self-fulfilling-prophecy is a socially-legitimized software-based "value" chain that ingests raw wealth and produces absolutely nothing of value.

This blog post already puts way more thought into whatever "web3" is than web3 advocates do. Everything must be web3 because web3 is cool, it's the future, it's got electrolytes, it's what plants crave. It's a meaningless cargo cult.

Isn't buying political influence with money what most people with absurd amounts of money do? I don't like it one bit either, but it's hardly unique to SBF.

With SBF, there seems to be this attempt at drawing guilt-by-association because of his donations to the Democratic Party. I don't think this makes a lot of sense.

For an example on the other end of the parliamentary spectrum, say, if Musk's future Twitter profits (good luck with that) were to come from the savings from firing half of the company's employees, and he then donated those to the Republican Party, it would be absurd to blame the Republican Party for the loss of jobs that it indirectly benefited from.

Obviously firing employees is not equivalent to fraud, and donating illicit profits could be part of a scheme to launder them. But unless a causal link can be proven, it all looks like speculation to me.

Not to subtract from your point at all, but newer versions of Git allow you to use `--staged` as a synonym for `--cached`. That this is the default behaviour still makes no sense, but at least the name does.

A country like the economic and industrial powerhouse of the European Union?

Yes, I think they're doing fine without business owners who are not interested in being business literate in the market they intend to participate in.

The only currently existing purpose of those things is to trade scam tokens for other scam tokens, which makes them effectively meta-scams. What I mean is that, like Ethereum, they're not scams in itself, but their only real-world use-case is to provide a decentralised platform on which to run scams.

As someone with a similar-ish position to yours, I think by the time someone figures out how to build something useful with this technology, the terminology of cryptocurrencies (blockchain, "defi", NFTs and whatever a "web3" is) will be so tightly associated with scams, that this new useful thing will use completely different terms to describe itself.