Readit NewsWhenever we visited him, I would flip through the book and marvel at the creativity of nature.
These photos made me feel a little bit in the same way.
And, well, as much as I applaud the effort, I also think that I'll stick to my text editor for browsing JSON data and to jq for extracting data from it.
My text editor because it's easy to perfom free text search and to fold sections, and that's all that I need to get an overview.
Jq because it's such a brilliantly sharp knife for carving out the exact data that out want. Say I had to iterate a JSON array of company departments, each with a nested array of employees, and collect everyone's email. A navigational tool doesn't help a whole lot but it's a jq one liner. Jq scales to large data structures in a way that no navigational tool would ever do.
Also, there is the security issue of pasting potentially sensitive data into a website.
Cryptocurrencies were meant to put an end to such things. Ironic how corporations ended up reinventing it all on top of crypto. Exchanges are everything that's wrong with this space.
Yeah, well, Communism was meant to put an end to poverty and class injustice. Brexit was meant to restore glory to Britain. The Catholic Church was mean to put an end to vice. Things don't always do what they say on the tin.
As the Bible puts it: "For every tree is known by its own fruit".
Specifically, if the fruit seems consist of nothing but speculative bubbles and billion dollar frauds then that may be the true nature of the tree.
The source code is here, by the way: https://github.com/mvindahl/interword-c64
Still, a few general observations about that particular corner and that particular time of software development:
- There were multiple successful 8-bit platforms, all of which were very different from each other. Different makes of CPU, different custom chips, different memory layout. You could be an expert in one and an absolute novice in others.
- The platforms were more constrained, by magnitudes. A very limited color palette, far fewer pixels, far less RAM, and far slower CPUs. For a semi-large project, it could even become a challenge to keep the source code in memory and still have room for the compiled machine code.
- On the upside, the platforms were also far more stable and predictable. A Commodore 64 that rolled out from the factory in 1982 would behave identically to one built five years later. Every C64 (at least on the same continent) would run code in exactly the same way.
One thing that followed from the scarcity and from the stability is there was an incentive to really get close to the metal, program in assembly language, and to get to know the quirks and tricks of the hardware. Fine tuning an tight loop of assembly code was a pleasure and one could not simply fall back on Moore's law.
It was a simpler world in the sense that you didn't have to check your code on a number of machines or your UI on a number of window sizes. If it worked on your machine, it could be assumed to work everywhere else.
Another thing that I remember is that there was more friction to obtaining information. The internet wasn't a thing yet but there were text files flowing around, copied from floppy to floppy, and you could order physical books from the library. But a lot of learning was just opening up other people's code in a mchine code monitor and trying to understand it.
Some of these things started to change with the Amiga platform, and once PCs took over it was another world, with a plethora of sound cards and graphics cards and different CPU speeds that people had to deal with.
I'd argue there's a bit of false equivalence in this paragraph, but for sake of argument:
Leaded gasoline also solved an actual problem, and the industry innovated/evolved beyond that.
Facebook solved an actual problem, and created many more. I still recognize its value even if I refuse to use it myself.
I'm sure there are edge cases, but history is not generally on the side of those who have pre-emptively banned things before they come to fruition.
The problem I see with this current line of discussion is that most proponents of banning throw the baby out with the bathwater, and pretend this is all a single product called "crypto".
Banning "crypto" would be like banning insulation because of the issues with Asbestos.
And also because it’s not necessary; existing regulation will get us most of the way:
- if you are, in effect, selling a security, let this be regulated this like any other security
- if you are, in effect, running a bank, etc.
- if your coin X acts like an intermediary for transferring money to hostile jurisdiction Y, then regulate transfers to X like transfers to Y. Forbid these if necessary.
- if your manufacturing process is needlessly wasteful then forbid this manufacturing process (globally) under threat of forbidding your product
Etc
Thinking specifically about the identity space for a moment, it certainly brings a new approach to solving a set of problems that still has yet to be solved well.
Should something be banned on the grounds that it’s not ready yet, or hasn’t evolved fast enough?
Plenty of tech on the cutting edge will appear this way before it has matured.
Back in 2022, we’re now looking at a technology that has not, for all its promises of a glorious future, has not produced anything but centralized Ponzi-as-a-Service platforms, a way for organized crime to move money, and smokestacks. At least asbestos and freon had some utility.
Also just because crypto can't be spent by most local vendors doesn't mean it's not valuable. Stocks can't be spent either but if you had a traditional bearer certificate like in the old days (paper stock with no owner except by merely holding the paper) it was just fine for trade and people did just that in the Weimar Republic when they had hyperinflation.
Worst case you can just spend the crypto in foreign location, import the goods and sell them locally.
Wired: Coinbros on Fire Festival
And yeah, don't have adblock on my work PC which is probably why it's so insufferable.
Advertising the kind of industry that you'd really like to shove into a plywood submarine and set its bearings for the Titanic.