“He’s both a pas­sion­ate believer and in­tense critic of the service which is ex-actly what we need on @Twitter, and in the board­room, to make us stronger in the long-term. Wel­come Elon!” Mr. Agrawal tweeted.

Mr. Musk tweeted: “Looking for­ward to work­ing with Parag & Twit­ter board to make sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments to Twit­ter in com­ing months!”

(Via WSJ; by Sara E. Needleman and Meghan Bobrowsky)

I watched moviesthis weekend for my Introduction to Film Studies class. One of them was Marriage Story (2019).

It opens with each of Scarlett Johannson’s Nichole and Adam Driver’s Charlie, a wife and husband, describing what they appreciate in the other in what we learn is a divorce mediator’s homework for the irreconcilably differenced couple.

The letters each wrote about the other parallels Agarwal’s and Musk’s mutual masturb … er, appreciation society.

I use Twitter sparingly. I’m not a Musk-o-vite. Regardless, I will note how this pans out.

I’m thinking about pruning Apple-first news sources from my RSS intake. Apple’s “news” gets covered amply by the mainline news, is mostly PR announcements anyway, and the useful technical bits are often cited by others in my RSS feed.

I’m thinking about pruning news newsletters and primary news sources from my RSS intake, or setting up a separate one I can chose to view on any given day.

I’m thinking about filtering my RSS feeds to get rid of specific topics as my SO keeps me well informed, and my interest in them by myself is exceedingly low:

• Marvel movies and TV
• DC movies and TV
• Star Wars movies and TV
• Star Trek movies and TV

I’m thinking about getting rid of sources that are now cryptocurrency/NFT/web3 enthusiastic and forward.

I’m thinking about moving my Emacs and org-mode and Emacs-related news to Emacs’ elfeed. DevonThink posts will move to DevonThink 3.

Countering the Crypto Lobbyists:

Countering the Crypto Lobby

… 

Crypto skepticism is not a homogeneous school of thought, and there is no central doctrine or leaders to this movement other than a broad north star of working to minimize fraud and protect the public from undue financial harm. There are crypto skeptics who think there might be some redeeming qualities in some crypto assets, and there are those who want it all to “die in a fire” and everywhere in between. The guiding principle of this letter is to find a middle way that at least most people can agree on and phrase it in a manner such that it can be best understood by our policymakers, who are deeply confused by even minimal jargon and technical obscurantism.

Blockchain is Meaningless

Blockchain is a meaningless term. This is an enormous problem because if we aim to build policy concerning financial assets built on top of blockchains, we need to have a shared vocabulary about what we’re seeking to regulate.

There is no universal definition of blockchain. …

Permissioned Blockchains

No issue seems to draw contention amongst technologists more than the issue of so-called “permissioned blockchains.” It is a highly ambiguous term that is obfuscated by marketing jargon and where the boundaries between it and traditional relational databases are incredibly unclear. Many so-called “permissioned blockchains” are simply relational databases with perhaps some additional software or marketing layered on top. … 

Permissioned blockchains go under various names ranging from private blockchains, permissioned blockchains, enterprise blockchains, distributed ledger technology, and ledger databases. The three most prominent examples of this appear to be:

1. Amazon QLDB
2. Microsoft Azure SQL Database ledger
3. Hyperledger Fabric

…

Cryptocurrencies

The word “cryptocurrency” itself is also a misnomer because, as any economist will point out, these tokens are financial assets not currencies. Nevertheless crypto assets aren’t a homogeneous group of products, and talking about the entire space in full generality is fraught with ambiguity. Broadly speaking there two buckets of assets, speculative tokens and non-speculative tokens. … 

We Want Our Words Back

Crypto used to mean cryptography, a branch of study at the intersection of mathematics and computer science. Web 3.0 used to mean the semantic web, a version of the internet in which all the world’s knowledge was organized into a searchable graph. Now both words have been co-opted to mean highly risky speculative investments and frauds and as marketing buzzwords to obscure intent.

A great many researchers and working software engineers don’t like this abuse of computer science terms to peddle risky investments. We’re tired of this, and many of us feel this is a blight on our profession and it needs to stop.

Grassroot Lobbying

Technologists need to be involved in more grassroots lobbying on these issues. I’m certainly going to devote some of my life to this work, but I can’t do it alone. We have to work within our existing democratic institutions and with other like-minded people in the law and finreg community to tackle the problems because crypto is a problem that the software community created, and it’s one that we inevitably have to have a hand in reigning in. Although we might differ slightly on the end regulatory state, I have high faith in our democratic processes and institutions to arrive at a solution that balances the public interests with a legitimate desire for responsible financial innovation, and I think we can all agree we can do better than the hot mess we’re in right now.