streamofdigits

I am pretty sure he understands credit money but he needs to show his work :-)

The point of my comment is that cryptobros are largely financially illiterate and when an economist undertakes the thankless task to discuss the possibility of a "cryptoeconomy" its important to make a list of all the missing parts

Remembe Fuller's quote "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete"

Big tech is the existing reality and it can only be changed by making it obsolete. The digital technology for doing so is actually available (or can be refined rapidly). What is not available is the social technology: the attitude of governments and regulators, solid, honest-to-goodness business models, the education of the populace etc

varufakis should reade graeber's Debt. the most glaring problem of bitcoin (and the whole crypto world) is that it has this naive "scarcity view" of currency whereas it is an in-your-face reality that a most important role of currency is to boostrap a credit system.

cryptobros have an obsession with inflation and rates side of government regulation and they seem to be completely oblivious to the credit system side of regulation - the two-tier private/central bank etc. maybe because they actually have no clue how the current system works)

so besides the inflation/deflation challenge I have yet to see any proposal how one could have stable decentralized unregulated credit markets and would be quite interested if people have serious relevant references.

this will vary a lot by region. some places are more densely populated than others. looking up regional statistics of average trip length and percentiles (like the length of 95% of trips) could give some objective metrics to complement what might be primarily psychological / behavioral hangups

I think what would really clinch this is not creating gargantuan batteries but simply making batteries universal plug-n-play. So if needed you just stop a battery station and replace it.

This solves also the unfortunate bottleneck of everybody charging their batteries during night-time, which (last time I checked) is when the sun is not shinning...

An idea who's time has come? SVG is an awesome concept, a superpower that has been basically demoted to create tiny vector icons.

The story of flash (the adobe / apple clash) is one of those classic tech industry stories where commercial interests randomly divert the flow, stall development for decades etc.

Its the worst of times, its the best of times. The digital revolution (or whatever this is) has degenerated into a bizarre mix of speculative frenzy, unprecedented concentration of control on a background of complete disregard for societal impact. Phoneyness and false representations abound - there are no repercussions. The "market" applauds.

Its time to go back to the roots of computing. Reinvent what the digital age means. Imbue it with soul and values in an inalienable way. 100% human-centric. Augmenting human ability, augmenting human society. There is enormous value in that. Not manufactured Ponzi value. Real value. Improving our lot. Solving the real problems of sustainability, persistent inequality, debilitating ignorance and suffering.

If you have talent now is the time to change the world. You know its not utopic because you have seen the extreme leverage of the digital toolkit.

that is in principle possible (essentially replace twitter by RSS aggregator clients) but is not exactly equivalent: for example some entities could microblog on "next-gen twitter" without having a website and there is also the question of reactions from readers to posts (whether those are seen centrally by all users)

that centralization and processing of responses is by-and-large part of the social media problem (both generating the twitterstorm dynamic and having spawned the shadowy "sentiment" industry) but I suspect a lot of addicted users are quite keen to keep it going

Maybe the global newspaper folk, who seem to be the most serious users of the platform, should form a joint venture, buy up twitter, disseminate microblogging news (ad)free and simply use the embedded links to drive traffic to their web platforms (for subscriptions and more in-depth news coverage).

So twitter becomes a sort of neutral preview / public announcement forum, like a kiosk with folded newspapers on the street: you can see the headlines, but you need to buy to read.

Alternatively, they could do the same from scratch without twitter...

The problem is not what happens to twitter. The problem is how to have healthy, representative, inquisitive journalism

consider though that if peertube just emulates the practices of existing players the result will likely be exactly the same

the high thresholds and lack of mainstream polish of most open source projects is a true fact and has to do with the economic / business models (or non-models) so its not an easy challenge to solve

somehow being able to engage creative people to contribute (whether it is UI design, visual art, engaging text etc) will be critical for FOSS to have bigger impact

This surely signals the end of an era. Not sure i) if there will be an NFT of the resignation tweet in the manner of the first tweet? [0] and ii) if the future will be "better" than the past in any meaningful way... The stock market reaction suggests it will be not.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/23/tech/jack-dorsey-nft-twee...

the thing is, mozilla and firefox is the embodiment of a valiant battle for a sane, honest, human-centric digital universe. a battle that was fought and lost in the last decade. dystopia has won and it doesn't think of itself as dystopic, it thinks that it is doing God's work

there is no point crying over spilled milk, hoping that it can reconstitute into a jug. post-mortems might useful but they need to account for the tectonic continental plate drifts that tamed even extremely well funded actors like Microsoft

what the broader open source community should focus on is where the next choke point will materialize and ensure the same mistakes do not happen again

assuming there is a second chance

whatsapp was/is a "market leader" in community watch groups, literally embedded in the city landscape. with the facebook acquisition suddenly all these local groups became a data mining and selling property, with the participating folks a captive population.

greed has overfloweth, lack of any moral compunction is the rule of the game.

fine but this usually bites back in ways not immediately obvious. so don't ask why the world is going to hell one crisis at a time.

that seems like a more tractable goal if confined to local analysis (something like lines of code in a function or file unit) but people generally try to come up also with overall complexity that seems harder

I don't know about Web4 and LaTex specifically but Web5 tech will surely be reverting to communication with mouth sprayed color pigments sketching images on cave rocks.

I believe this is just an elaborate complaint: The author simply expresses the disgust that many feel of how the utopic promise of the internet and digital technology more general (as captured, say, in the early TED sessions) has translated into a dystopia that does not seem able to find a bottom.

Maybe the promise was fake to start with, maybe mixing a pliable and ultimately "social" technology with a broken economic/political system could never have produced healthy offspring.

In any case, we are in a sort of purgatory, waiting for some miracle to absolve people and make them feel good again about their trade.

The Einstein quote is that "something should be a simple as needed but no simpler", but how to be pin down "required" in an objective / quantifiable way?

Somehow it is more important to measure "gratuitous" complexity, redundant complexity that is not justified by present or plausible future requirements...

The problem is that the code itself does not capture requirements, so code analysis can give you absolute indicators but never an "efficiency" measure (how efficient and justified the measured complexity)

It feels a risky proposition at this juncture to go short python. The arguments against/for have been rehashed a million times, the redeeming features of julia have been articulated very cogently...

What has not been accounted for is that the huge community / network effect of the python ecosystem is very far from exhausting itself. If anything, it is just starting as the exponential growth has mostly been the last few years (tautology, he he)

A major investment to eliminate python technical debt would make more sense if things were stagnant and the re-engineering would open up entirely new domains.

still some ways to reach omega (the larger sibling of omicron)

These measures are good and necessary but on their own will not solve the problem. It is not sufficient to say "no", you need to provide (=invest)in alternatives that show what "good" looks like.

For some bizarre reason the European continent has outsourced digital infrastructure. It is then no surprise that what is on offer is not congruent with the values and attitudes of its citizens.

I just hope that the new balance of power in Germany will energize Europe to take concrete next steps towards an altenative way of organizing digital life.

would it possible to have a browser ship with htmx so that it is possible to have truly "javascript optional"? (in principle this applies to any full js framework but I suppose it is natural in the htmx context)

are there any unsurmountable issues around security and the sandbox etc (not terribly familiar with browser internals)

It went as not planned

"If I don't lie through my teeth somebody else will and I will lose my plush condition for no good reason"

Having no conscience is a necessary condition to rise to the top of the human food chain

cryptocurrency fueled or cryptocurrency heated?

warming up of water with heat from all those coin mining rigs could be a very sustainable solution that could mitigate the reputation of cryptos as delusional Earth burning maniacs

just keep them GPU's dry

economies of scale are "real" until their risks vastly outweigh the benefits - which always happens at some level of concentration.

Habitually embedding attenuation in any system we develop (social, political, financial etc) is likely the only generally applicable risk management strategy. The only one that does not require detailed, correct prior knowledge about a system and timely application

Detailed knowledge and just-in-time application is great in theory - its just not a real-life strategy of any kind...

Experts tend to be specialists, focused on silos and deep dives into specific domains.

The world is instead getting radically interconnected as "everything" is represented - more or less faithfully - by fungible bits. We are going through an "anti-specialization" phase, where everything is in principle connected to everything.

This amorphous digital ocean phase will probably not last, but it might be decades before a new landscape has settled.

Its a very interesting question why (in the spectrum of community organization size) it is the nation-state scale (> 10 mln or so) that has come to become dominant. "Defeating external adversaries" is in general more of a sabre rattling game than actual warfare, so maybe that is the scale where "mutual destruction" is assured

But this precarious equilibrium is not technology independent. What works for blades and projectiles and missiles might not work for engineered viruses. If we don't find ways to quench this adversarial dynamic maybe our days are numbered...

If it wasnt obvious, the pandemic demonstrated beyond any doubt that the distribution of decision making power in society is completely broken. The nation-state in particular is way too dominant and distorting, especially when you have a bunch of self-absorbed "meta-nations"

Think about governance as a spectrum, we need it to be more flatly distributed, from the smallest unit (neighborhood dealing with local issues) to the largest (United Nations dealing with collective threats)

There is a cure that works 100%. Its called diversification of collective stupidity risk.

Never let empires grow too large. Whenever you hear / see something is "scaling" throw a spanner in the works, pull the plug, burn a fuse.

No questions asked, no justifications provided, no evaluation of good or evil, just an automatic breaker that is based on "N", the scaling unit.

Having lots of little emperunculi running around with no clothes is fun and it doesn't put us all in great, potentially existential, danger

forget web3. basically we are in a situation where lots of people, smart, tech savvy people, stupid band wagon people, well meaning people, me-too people, go-with-the-next-big-thing people, all made a wrong bet that the particular set of algorithmic technologies and protocols that bitcoin spawned are a generic blueprint for a new decentralized digital infrastructure.

it aint.

the choice is not between web3 and meta-dystopia. The choice is between people owning and running their own hardware and software versus being granted that "privilege" by some digital overlords.

Surely somewhere beyond the wall street grifters, the silicon valley data slurpers and the cryptomaniacs there is a fintech community that is actually worth being part of?