I think my favorite thing about web3 tooling is how "what is one useful thing you can do with it today?" is treated as a gotcha question, beneath contempt, even though for binary search, asymmetric cryptography, Bloom filters or any other technology it was dirt simple to answer
This is why I keep getting drawn to the analogy to string theory. The grand intellectual edifice of the whole ensemble is supposed to be so compelling that pointing to the absence of any contact with reality is treated as either bad faith or sign of insurmountable ignorance
The fact is if you get deep into the tech, cryptocurrency is *impressively* stupid, in the same way it would be difficult but stupid to make a working slot machine entirely out of raisins. And the fact that this slot machine pays out real money with every pull is unsettling.
If you see a bunch of tech people losing it over cryptocurrency/NFTs/whatever, this is why. If you open the hood of the race car, there's no engine there, just a little clown riding a tricycle who honks his horn at you. And yet the race car peels out and does donuts in your yard
So as a tech person, either everything I know about distributed systems, human nature and society is wrong, or this is the most monumental scam I'll see in my lifetime. Neither answer is pleasant, but I'm putting my chips on the latter because I'm a bitter nocoiner who missed out
This is a good point! If you're one of the Old Ones, you remember a moment that drove home why this internet thing would be big. Your first time tracking a flight or package, first slow download of a set of boobs, first real-time chat. But web3 has nothing
Someone in a comment challenged me to point out a non-crypto asset that makes more than 0.1% interest a year, and I figured some people may not know this— you can this very moment go buy a 7.12% savings bond (in scary fiat currency) from the US treasury. treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research…
If you read tech stuff from the fifties (like the wonderful rocket fuel memoir "Ignition!"), you always find a passage about how something used to take 9 days of tedious hand calculation, and then the lab installed a huge IBM mainframe and it took only one day, and they loved it
You can find endless examples of this from the invention of the first mechanical adding machine all the way through the present, and the absence of any such stories from blockchain technologies after 12 years is what makes the current round of promises for web3 hard to credit

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More from @Pinboard

26 Nov
I can't understand why the US is imposing travel limits starting on Monday. Either impose them right away, or don't. For this entire pandemic our health system has behaved like covid takes weekends off (for example, by not updating infection statistics on Saturdays and Sundays)
Here's a Johannesburg flight 12 hours out from Newark. Is there a plan for testing passengers, quarantine, questionnaire, extra disinfecting towelette, anything? Or is the plan "our policy starts Monday"? It seems late in the pandemic for this clown car flightaware.com/live/flight/UA…
I'm also 100% down with "travel bans don't work", if that's the expert consensus. But what rustles my jimmies is that after two years of this shit we appear to be doing the useless things again rather than the effective things, driven by bureaucratic inertia.
Read 6 tweets
25 Nov
Hopefully we'll get an early Christmas present with the launch of the James Webb space telescope, which if it unfolds right will make Hubble look like a dirty coke bottle. Building Webb cost $9B, or about half the price of the relaxed-fit remake of the Apollo capsule called Orion
The challenge with the Webb is keeping the sensors really cold despite being in full sunlight. I love the solution NASA chose, because it is extremely carefully designed but looks like something you'd throw together in a panic the night before the middle school science fair Image
Two exciting things about the Webb are:

1. The mirror is YUGE
2. Unlike Hubble it sees in infrared, which means we can look at really distant stuff that is redshifted, or at nearby things in wavelengths that the Earth's atmosphere absorbs. Plus the design will attract space bees Image
Read 4 tweets
20 Nov
We need to talk more loudly, and write in bigger print, about the crisis of gerontocracy in the Democratic Party. Biden will be 82 in 2024, Pelosi will be 84, Hoyer will be 85. Is there any way for Schumer (who will be 73) to keep up? Image
You know your organization has a problem if elevating a bunch of baby boomers to leadership would bring down the average age by a lot.
Also kind of hard to talk the 83 year old on the Supreme Court into retiring when an 88 year old Democratic senator is filing for re-election in California, and the President announces he plans to be in office until he's 86.
Read 4 tweets
20 Nov
This is why I reached for the space popcorn when NASA assigned responsibility for the moon lander to Elon Musk's other company
Panel gaps are a bigger deal in hard vacuum, no matter how forgiving a fanboy you are
SpaceX's plans depend on being able to produce a magical, reusable, totally reliable next-generation rocket at pennies on the bitcoin compared to competitors, all at ludicrous scale. Musk's ability to run the same clown playbook without ever getting called out is his superpower
Read 5 tweets
14 Nov
The political messaging around Build Back Better continues to be so weird. Going into last week it was the last, best hope of mankind and the Democratic Party. Then Congress left DC and it was not mentioned again. Soon Congress will return and it will be hair-on-fire urgent again
Among the many artificial deadlines coming up there is also the deadline of January 3, 2022, when the Democrats will have been in office for a year without being able to pass their own platform.
Schumer now saying the Senate will take up a big military bill before the President's agenda. Since the Senate elects to only work one more week in November, this pushes consideration of BBB to at least December, another vacation-heavy month for Congress. politico.com/news/2021/11/1…
Read 10 tweets
29 Oct
Where does she think the profit comes from?
Ocasio-Cortez, who has one of the safest seats in Congress, has spent over $870,000 on Facebook ads in calendar 2021 while excoriating the company for destroying democracy. What ads does she run? Fundraising appeals! Her campaign is just a Facebook profit center with extra steps.
I also think Facebook is evil, which is why I don't give them money.
Read 7 tweets

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