JKB @jkb@octodon.social

New blog post: "The collapse of complex software" https://nolanlawson.com/2022/06/09/the-collapse-of-complex-software/

Some thoughts on how complexity creeps in to software, and whether we can learn anything from anthropology about it.

A brief history of Physics

DID YOU KNOW? Under the hood your browser refers to itself as a “user agent,” because it is a remnant from a time when we believed the point of software was to make our lives easier, rather than to trick us into buying things we don’t need and infect us with the rage virus

We need to make power efficiency sexier than raw computing performance. Don’t show me your giant GPU or your crazy Cinebench score, that stuff’s lame. Show me how you can get done everything you need to at a lower power draw than anyone else

this person says they lost 80% of their life savings to the terra collapse. some will argue over whether they "deserved" it for making such risky choices.

that doesn't fucking matter. what matters is that people are being lied to and convinced these are "investments".

One powerful thing about #cryptocurrency is that transactions are immutable and on the blockchain and can't be reversed unless of course the bank er sorry startup that manages your account er sorry wallet decides to reverse them. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/single/cryptocom-reverses-some-luna-trades-offers-10-consolation-prize

I'm surprised that this article doesn't really tackle the elephants in the room:

- The "decentralized" Web 3.0 is actually already much more centralized than the current Web. You want to buy/sell an NTF? Go to OpenSea. You want to build an app that interacts with a Blockchain? There's only Infura and Alchemy for that. Authentication over wallet? Sure, MetaMask does it. These four actors have basically a complete monopoly on the #web3. At a level that is even greater than the control exerted by Google or Facebook. Without a Blockchain, you can't do anything with a dApp. You can't even test your app - even testing and debugging needs to happen in somebody else's walled garden. In order to push anything to a Blockchain, you either run your own mining node (which either requires a lot of money, a lot of computing power, or both), or you delegate access to one of the gatekeepers. Can you imagine a world where the only way to push new records to a Postgres db is either to invest a lot into a mining node, or use a proprietary API provided by Google?

- The proof-of-work that powers Bitcoin (and most of today's Blockchains) is a criminal environmental disaster, period. Its throughput is laughable, even when compared to even the dumbest LAMP-based web application running on a Raspberry Pi, and the energy it burns to add a new block (just to solve a stupid numeric puzzle that isn't useful to anyone) should be enough to consider mining as a criminal activity against the whole planet. And its proposed alternative (proof-of-stake) has never been truly experimented on a large scale and, once it does, if it works, it will simply heavily centralize the Web 3.0. In order to get a stake on a Blockchain, you'll need to invest money. And a lot of it (Ethereum is talking about something in the order of the tens-hundreds of thousands of dollars). Do the supporters of Web3 and the proof-of-stake as the future know that they are simply laying the foundation for the next oligarchs of the web, that are likely to be much more powerful than today's because the barriers between users/developers and the actual infrastructure are even higher than today's?

If you want a #decentralized world, just pick any of the open-source projects out there that provides a way to federate with other services, run your own freaking server like it's 1999, and you're good to go.

You don't need NFT and crypto scam to build a decentralized internet. Nor you need mining algorithms that burn as much energy as the Netherlands just to push 0.001% of the transactions currently processed by Visa/Mastercard for a tiny fraction of that energy. Nor you need to have new gatekeepers. Nor you need to build a new oligarchy were only those who can afford to pay $100,000 can afford a stake on a Blockchain.

It's time for this Web 3.0 degenerated scammy bubble to burn in a ball of fire and get forever out of our sight.

https://hackernoon.com/a-decentralized-internet-is-unviable-web-3-developers-are-clowns-do-these-opinions-hold-any-salt

I just noticed "foreach" on npm is controlled by a single maintainer.

I also noticed they let their personal email domain expire, so I bought it before someone else did.

I now control "foreach" on NPM, and the 36826 projects that depend on it.

The curb cut effect: for example, media descriptions right here on Mastodon help people who use screen readers, but they are also useful for explaining the joke for people who don’t get it, for translations of text, and for copy-pasting what would otherwise be just an image of text.

https://birbcam.online

Birbcam is back! It was a problem with one of the USB cables, I think it got wet yesterday and it's shorting. ^.^

Alright, time to see if Mastodon can do the midst important part of social media: crowdsourcing answers to dumb questions

My ten year old wants a game to couch co-op with me. Something pokemonesque would be ideal, something low on boobs and blood is essential.

My boy got upset at the T&A in Digimon: cybersleuth. We're looking at probably aroace kid whose primary passions involve Minecraft. I cannot play Minecraft to save my life.

Responses/boosts appreciated!!

Why are people complaining about Elon Musk owning Twitter because he is a billionaire as if Jack Dorsey is not a billionaire.

EU citizens, remember that you have the right to be forgotten. If you’re closing your Twitter account, you can write to them and tell them to delete your data and your account permanently and they must comply. You don’t have to leave your data with Musk if you don’t want to.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rights-citizens/my-rights/can-i-ask-company-delete-my-personal-data_en

#twitter #eu #legal #rightToBeForgotten

I've been bored this afternoon, so I spent a little time digging through Netflix's annual reports to see if I can find an explanation for why a drop in subscribership cratered their stock.

Wanna see what I found? Too bad, you're gonna. (thread 🧵)