Today, 15 years ago #OTD the person or group with the fictive name of “Satoshi Nakamoto” created the first cryptocurrency named Bitcoin with the thought of it becoming a secure and fast alternative to fiat currency.
Now it's known as the most wasteful use of electricity, inefficient and limiting capability/functionality, as well as being among the most insecure and de-anonymizing ways to transfer money.
However, what Satoshi Nakamoto probably hasn't expected is how many scam-currencies would come after theirs, and how their invention would create a new breed of the most annoying people known to our species: crypto-bros.
Please can someone teach game streamers that screaming into their microphone just makes it clip horribly. Don’t do that please, I cringe every single time, and then my son gets annoyed at me.
Kicking off 2024 as I mean to continue, with cursed network configuration.
Well well well if it isn't the consequences of your own actions....
I’ve spent most of this afternoon trying to understand how Web Push works, particularly under Safari on iOS. As with all things web this involves reading the documentation for 15 vaguely overlapping standards, and then divining the remaining bits via random blog posts.
My evening has been made by Siri responding to “remind me to buy AAA batteries tomorrow” with “ok, I’ve added buy triple-uh batteries for tomorrow”, somehow pronouncing it more as tripleuh.
Today in apps that should be websites news, I’ve received an email to let me know my coffee machine has an after sales support app now. I specifically bought it because it’s notoriously reliable and needs minimal maintenance.
I see Call the Midwife is still going with Christmas specials. Presumably they’ve now overtaken the present day and it’s a heart warming period drama from the post-apocalyptic hellscape of 2049.
Jusant is really quite a game. Captures the essence of climbing a cliff face, judging whether you can make a hand hold or a jump, without ever really having hard fail states so far. A very meditative experience.
For the last week I’ve been saying I’ll get an early night, and yet here I am, at 11pm, vaguely thinking about going to bed and reading for an hour or so.
“The signal is repeating! We’ve got the whole thing.”
“How many bits?”
“Almost 500k. 454,957 bits”
“I got a hunch, factorize that number”
“Bingo, seven fifty seven times six oh one. Think it could be a rectangular bitmap?”.
“It’s what we used to do back before those assholes let Arecibo fall down. Try bm2png.pl in my bin dir.”
“That worked. Holy shit I know that image. It’s the Pioneer plaque. That diagram from Pioneer 11 of human figures, and a map to Earth.”
“What, thats impossible, it’s only been, what, 70 odd years. That probe would still be in our own Kuiper Belt.”
“Outside it, actually, it’d be about one sixty AU out. They lost contact in the mid 90s. Still basically in our backyard but.”
“It’s too soon! If someone’s found it now, that would mean. Shit. They’re. Already. Here. Inside the Solar system.”
“And all they’ve got to say, is ‘Hi, we liked ur meme’.?”
“Maybe not, can you bring up an image of the original plaque? Are the images identical?”
“I’ll do a layer subtraction. Hey, there /is/ a difference. In the map of the planets. They’ve omitted Pluto from their copy.”
“Fucking hell. Little green reply guys.”
Is there a document somewhere that explains why Debian insist on referring to releases by the names of Toy Story characters rather that the corresponding release number, because every time I have to look up whether Buster is more recent than Bullseye or not I age another year.
I am disproportionately sad that when using an Apple TV for music it shows an endlessly looping animation that's kind of like an EQ, rather than it being an actual EQ.
One day people will look back on "net zero by 2050" as one of the dumbest things ever.
How on Earth do Github still not have ARM runners for Actions three years after Apple made ARM processors common place on developer's laptops?
If your ActivityPub server is offline for long enough then other instances give up sending notifications to it. Entirely coincidentally I’ll be spending some of this evening refollowing everyone.
If GPT and other LLMs are trained on the Internet, and an increasing chunk of the internet is generated by GPT and other LLMs, does that mean we’ve created an AI that’s going to get gradually stupider as time goes on? Is this in fact not the beginning of AI, but the best it’s ever going to be?
I’d love to see the wall of my next door neighbour’s living room. Judging by the hour or so of drilling every weekend I can only assume it’s entirely covered in pictures.
I really need to find a way to effectively back off social media use for a while. I just spent 90 minutes doing nothing but rotating between apps, when I’d been about to go to bed and read instead. Recommendations would be very welcome, I’ll be starting with some decent screen time restrictions, which currently only apply to Twitter.
@theverge.spaceNearly 800,000 Maryland license plates now advertise an online casino.
Back in 2012, the state of Maryland decided to commemorate the War of 1812 with a license plate that displayed a URL. (Once upon a time, I had one of these on my own car.)
Motherboard reports that Maryland no longer controls the URL, and all of those license plates are now linking to an online casino in the Philippines. Oops!
I saw a lot of awesome things today, but the most metal by far was a Kenyan community group describing how they protected their forest by destroying the equipment of charcoal producers.
The forest is still standing today.
I demand to know why we live in the boring cyberpunk future, rather than the fun one where we're all running around with these bad-boys on our wrists. ://vi.aliexpress.com/item/1005003
Me: `mkdir -p /path/to/directory`
Computer: `/path/to/directory: No such file or directory`
I think I might just give up on today and skip straight to the week off.
Zelda has achieved the impossible by presenting me with two boss fights in a row which I not only didn’t hate with a passion, but even quite enjoyed. 10/10.