|
Archive: January 8, 2023
|
 This weekend I [re]discovered a latent interest in Football. I honestly haven't watched much since the pandemic, missed the bowls and playoffs at the end of 2020, when they were moving around and being rescheduled and cancelled and everything, and didn't pay any attention last year, for ... reasons. (And to be fair, spent January sailing in Florida - a story to be told here at some point - so I was otherwise occupied.)
Anyway, yeah, my DVR has tens if not hundreds of college bowls queued up, all the way through the big ones last weekend, and now pro games too, just in time for the playoffs. It's a good combination with Zwifting; you can ride and watch at the same time, both activities only require fractional brainpower.
One big changed I haven't blogged about here yet is that during the pandemic we moved - not far, still in Westlake Village, CA - and in the process have now fully embraced AT&T DirectTV streaming as our "cable", and shed our old Tivos. So we now have a cloud-based DVR. I always loved Tivo - was a super early adopter, as you know - but I have to admit this is nice. Including being able to easily watch on my computer.
[grumpy sidenote: HEIC, WTF? - did we need a new image format? No, we did not... and why oh why did Apple decide to make it the default on their phones?]
|
|
 Hi, I'm Ole, and I'm a crypto grump. I know how it works - better than most people - and I understand blockchains and cryptography and all the tech, and I appreciate the potential for having a digital currency used as a value exchange intermediary which isn't backed by physical assets like gold.
But. The crypto fad of the last few years doesn't have anything to do with any of that. It's a distributed pyramid scheme, and as an official crypto grump I do not see any value being created. Tell me all about ICOs and NFTs and DAOs - go ahead. Extol Web3 to me. No. Value. Created. Watch the video linked at right - it's excellent - and see if you don't agree.
 So I'm watching the Rose Parade and in the middle of all the floats from big companies and cities and charities, there's a float from nouns.wtf*. Maybe you've heard of them? If not, let me tell you - it's a beautiful example of the whole scheme in action.
 You might think a noun is a part of speech, but also, it's a 32x32 pixel caricature of a little person, formed from a random combination of features like head shape, glasses, body, etc. At right is Noun #563, which was "minted" on Jan 1, 2023. Every day a new Noun is born and auctioned off, and every day someone wins the auction and buys one. This particular Noun was bought for 35.0 ethereum (ETH), which on Jan 1, 2023 was worth about $47K. Huh.
So what did that person get for their money? The rights to the image, amazing and beautiful as it is? Well no, Nouns are open and available to everyone. You could use it yourself, right now, for $0. All they got was an entry in the ethereum blockchain, which they could potentially sell to someone else. So far about 570 Nouns have been created, and 126 transactions have taken place after the initial auction, so it would be hard to say that they are in demand. But every day there's an auction for a new one, and people bid, and someone wins. No. Value. Created.
What about that parade float? Well if you auction off 570 Nouns at $47K or so each, you can pay for one. Just now the Noun treasury contains 28,580 ETH, worth $38M.
My favorite part of this "project" is that there are ten "nounders", and every tenth Noun goes to them. They are paying themselves each about $5K every ten days. And they're proud of it ... Such a deal! It's good to be living on the tip of the pyramid.
There are hundreds of such scams operating in parallel. Everyone is buying tokens for X today hoping they'll be worth more than X tomorrow. And they will be for a while. Just get out fast, because the whole thing is unsustainable. No. Value. Created.
So, what about all the VCs who are investing in crypto? Well VCs always live at the tip of the pyramid, this is perfect for them. They are smart people, they are not confused. They will get paid in tokens, they will sell their tokens, and they will get out early, before the stuff hits the fan. When the music stops it will be ordinary retail investors who end up owning those entries in the blockchain and desperately trying to find buyers.
As a final note, for some reason some people choose to compare AI to crypto, maybe because they're related in time. But don't be confused. As Miguel de Icaza notes: AI is hyped because it is useful and shows a lot of promise. Crypto was hyped because scammers and swindlers found they could make a killing. They are not the same thing.
* BTW yeah, there is a "wtf" TLD, who knew? Perfect for crypto projects!
|
|
Wow, still wet out there. All over. With more rain in the forecast. I love rain, but not all at once, please.
 So I posted about being a crypto grump, but I'm also an AI cheerleader. If you've played at all with DALL-E or ChatGPT or any of these sorts of tools, you can immediately see the incredible value being created. (BTW, I use AI as shorthand for AI/ML, hope you're okay with that.) As Steven Levi notes in Wired, Welcome to the Wet Hot AI Chatbot Summer. (He's drawing a parallel to the so-called AI Winter...) 
BTW the worst part of using the amazing OpenAI tools is having to go through their login captcha. Every time. Argh.
Ah, you got me started. Not only are captchas bad, but passwords are bad. (OpenAI requires both.) Fortunately the Internet is kind of settling in to a "text message confirmation = password" alternative. But another problem remains - the "login or create new account" dilemma. I've created accounts on hundreds if not thousands of websites and of course I can't remember. Make it easy for me, please; if I enter an email and password and you don't know me, ask me if I want to create an account. How hard is that?
Salon: An AI that can "write" is feeding delusions about how smart artificial intelligence really is. We certainly have a chorus of professional writers disclaiming AI's ability to replace them. I think we should ask ChatGPT to write an article, in the style of Salon, about how AI is not really intelligent. Oh, wait... [Later: someone did :)]
 As you know I'm a close follower of the Iditarod, and recently I got an email from them asking "who's ready for Iditarod 2023?" Great question. And, not me, yet. If you've hung around here in the past you know I traditionally post about the Iditarod, and have even created a little race tracker to help follow the action. Which I did do in 2020 - it was just before the pandemic became "the pandemic" - and did do in 2021 - a weird year with the Iditarod being one of the few sporting events still held - but which I did not do last year - I was sailing in Florida. But this year I'd like to do again ... time to get ready!
 Excellent! Boom supersonic unveils new Symphony engine for faster-than-sound Overture airliner. Having lived through the whole SST era, I can't believe we don't have these yet...
Henry Kissinger: how to avoid another war. "End the Ukraine War by trading NATO admission for Ukraine in exchange for Crimea and Donbas staying with Russia." Ah yes, diplomacy. [via David Sacks, my old PayPal colleague who has rapidly become one of my favorite Tweeters]
Along with crypto and AI, another present-day technology gathering headlines is AR/VR. Like AI it's been around for a bit, but unlike AI it hasn't found any killer apps. Yet. I think the form factor is the problem - people don't like wearing things on their head. Once we have reliable implants to inject video and audio directly into our brains, this problem will disappear :) but for the moment, it's a big hurdle. There are other problem too; Wired has a report from a metaverse skeptic: I Threw a Holiday Party in Horizon Worlds. It Didn't Go Well.
 Another new technology gains traction: My Dystopian Ride In San Francisco's Fully Driverless Cars. As a happy Tesla Model S owner with Enhanced Autopilot, I feel this is now only a matter of time. There's a big difference between the car driving for you - while you are sitting there - and having no driver at all.
John Battelle:The Next First Day. "I'm resolved to come back to this patch of land and dig around. I don't expect anyone to notice, and that’s OK. I need to till the soil, clear the rocks and roots, and find out what might grow here." Yeah, me too!
|
|
 When the neutrino was first detected, renowned physicist I.I.Rabi had the perfect reaction: "who ordered that?" It was a confusing new thing and it wasn't immediately apparent to anyone what to do with it.
Well that's sort of the way I reacted to Twitter, I'm still a rather reluctant late adopter, and (like most people) I follow way more than I react or post.
Now we have Mastodon! Yay. And my first reaction is: "who ordered that?"
It's an open-source distributed messaging system which has a lot of similarity to Twitter. Anyone can post anything, link to anything, and comment on anything. There are likes (favorites) and "retweets". Pictures and videos. And there is a content moderation protocol which is designed to keep a certain level of sanity - eliminate child pornography, for example.
People who were unhappy with Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter have searched for alternatives, and to date Mastodon has emerged as the most popular alternative. It's vastly smaller than Twitter, and there's such a huge network effect already in place that it's impossible to imagine Twitter being supplanted. But unlike some moves in the physical world - like moving to Canada - online you can be in two places at once.
The biggest difference is that with Twitter, the whole thing is operated by one company, whereas with Mastodon there is a network of servers cooperatively communicating, but each operated by separate companies or organizations. Kind of like with email, you have to choose who you want to be "your host", and then after that you can interoperate. Your host is responsible for managing your account; it could go off the air, taking you with it. And it decides what to moderate - different hosts have different policies.
I decided to see what the fuss is all about, and opened an account: ole@universeodon.com. Now I can post there, and read Mastodon messages, and follow people there. Yay. But if I want to check on flooding in Santa Barbara, Twitter is going to have way better information. Way more junk and ads too, but so it goes.
 [Update, yay, dlvr.it supports Mastodon. So now when I post here, a link is relayed and posted there, just like with Twitter.]
|
Return to the archive.
|
|
