Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Thereās an ACX guest post rehashing the history of Project Xanadu, an important example of historical vaporware that influenced computing primarily through opinions and memes. This particular take is focused on Great Men and isnāt really up to the task of humanizing the participants, but they do put a good spotlight on the cults that affected some of those Great Men. They link to a 1995 article in Wired that tells the same story in a better way, including the āsix monthsā joke. The orange site points out a key weakness that neither narrative quite gets around to admitting: Xanaduās micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd. My choice sneer is to examine a comment from one of the ACX regulars:
Ah yes, low enough to allow our heroic wiki-builders, wiki-citers, and wiki-correctors; and high enough to forbid their brutish wiki-pedants, wiki-lawyers, and wiki-deleters.
Disclaimer: I know Miller and Tribble from the capability-theory community. My language Monte is literally a Python-flavored version of Millerās E (WP, esolangs), which is itself a Java-flavored version of Tribbleās Joule. Iām in the minority of a community split over the concept of agoric programming, where a program can expand to use additional resources on demand. To me, an agoric program is flexible about the resources allocated to it and designed to dynamically reconfigure itself; to Miller and others, an agoric program is run on a blockchain and uses micropayments to expand. Maybe more pointedly, to me a smart contract is what a vending machine proffers (see How to interpret a vending machine: smart contracts and contract law for more words); to them, a smart contract is how a social network or augmented/virtual reality allows its inhabitants to construct non-primitive objects.
The 17 rules also seem to have abuse build in. Documents need to be stored redundantly (without any mention of how many copies that means), and it has a system where people are billed for the data they store. Combine these and storing your data anywhere runs the risk of a malicious actor emptying your accounts. In a āit costs ten bucks to store a file hereā āsorry we had to securely store ten copies of your file, 100 bucks pleaseā. Weird sort of rules. Feels a lot like it never figured out what it wants to be a centralized or distributed system, a system where writers can make money, or they need to pay to use. And a lot of technical solutions for social problems.
Itās nice to be reminded that the past was also crazy.
much of the lore of the early/earlier internet being built is also full of some extremely, extremely unhinged stuff. Iāve had some first-hand in-the-trenches accounts from people Iāve known active from the early-mid 90s to middle 00s and holy shit there are some batshit things happening in places. often think of it when I see the kinds of shit thiel/musk/etc are all up to (a lot of it boils down to ātheyāre big mad that they have to even consider other people and canāt just do whatever they likeā)
Mark Dery and Paulina Borsook nailed these fuckers square on in the '90s, but nobody reads books
What book is that?
Cyberselfish by Borsook, several books by Dery but particularly Escape Velocity
Iām down with reading books itās just hard to select them without known reference recommendations
Gonna acquire the works of both, ty :D
largely not available digitally, though someoneās putting together a Borsook reissue
it kept being funny to me that even while xanadu had already shown the problems with content control the entirety of the NFT craze just went on as if it was full greenfields novel problem
some of these people just really donāt know their history very well, do they
on a total tangent:
while xanaduās commercial-aspiration history is intimately tied up in why it never got much further, I do occasionally daydream about if we had, and if we couldāve combined it with more-modern signing and sourcing: daydream in the respect of āCA and cert chains, but for transcluded contentā, esp in the face of all the fucking content mills used to push disinfo etc. not sure this would work ootb either, mind you, itās got its own set of vulnerabilities and problems that youād need to work through (and ofc you canāt solve social problems purely in the technical domain)
has there been any meaningful advancement or neat new research in agoric computing? havenāt really looked into it in a while, and the various blockchain nonsense took so much air out of the room for so long I havenāt had to spoons to look
(separately I know thereās also been some developments in remote trusted compute, but afaict thatās also still quite early days)