rook

Somehow I missed the fact that yesterday paypal’s blockchain operator fucked up and accidentally minted 300 trillion itchy and scratchy coins.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=paxos-accidental-mint

And now apparently it turns out that it was just a sequence of stupid whereby they accidentally deleted 300 million, which would have been impressive all by itself, then tried to recreate it (🎶 but at least it isn’t fiat currency🎶) and got the order of magnitude catastrophically wrong and had to delete that before finally undoing their original mistake. Future of finance right here, folks.

Anyone else know the grisly details? The place I heard it from is a mostly-private account on mastodon which isn’t really shareable here, and they didn’t say where they’d heard it.

Interesting developments reported by ars technica: Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews

I don’t think any of this is actually good news for the people who’re actually suffering the effects of ai scraping and bullshit generation, but I do think it is a good idea that someone with sufficient clout is standing up to google et al and suggesting that they can’t just scrape al the things, all the time, and then screw the source of all their training data.

I’m somewhat unhappy that it is cloudflare doing this, a company who have deeply shitty politics and an unpleasantly strong grasp on the internet already. I very much do not want the internet to be divided into cloudflare customers, and the slop bucket.

Aside from the name being stupid and annoying (and their justifications and comparisons being additionally stupid and annoying) I’m… not entirely against this license? As a less shitty (AFAICT) version of the BUSL, I’d rather companies used this than the BUSL or just going closed-source (which is an option a bunch of firms have chosen, after all).

I’m attempting to get my employer to open-source some of our stuff, and there are several people at the top who are proprietary software folk at heart and this seems like a reasonable way to trick them into relaxing a their grip a little.

Fosstodon does not have a good history in this regard. It took some effort to get them to drop a far-right mod earlier this year, and even with a shuffle of leadership they’re clearly all about the centrist acceptance of the right wing and the repeated assertion that tech isn’t political and that all this is just so much drama.

“If you cannot quit everything you may as well not quit anything” is not a great rallying cry, because there’s a strong risk that people will take you up on your suggestion.

Doing something imperfect is better than doing nothing. Let’s not purity test.

I appreciate that licenses are not magic shields, and that you’re exposed to significant risks that I am not, so apologies if I came across a bit “have you tried googling”, which I was trying to avoid.

Still, even without getting involved yourself it might be worth finding some local radio folk (if there are any) if only to see what they do, and what equipment they use, and whether they’ve got into any trouble over it.

But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here

Is that the standard state attitude to amateur radio there, too? I mean, obviously getting an amateur radio license involves actively putting your name on a government list and paying money for the privilege, and I can understand you not wanting to do that, but it looks like the 430 band is available to amateur radio licensees there, and you can get lora devices in that range. Amateur radio folk seem to be mostly viewed as peculiar last century fossils (and to be fair, many of them are) because everyone else (legal and otherwise) has vastly better equipment, which might give you some leeway to experiment with mesh networking?

I suspect we all knew it already, but Bruno Dias offers some receipts: the bluesky crackdown on people suggesting that charlie kirk should rest in piss came several days before the government leaned on social media firms.

September 12th: bluesky mourns kirk: https://aftermath.site/bluesky-charlie-kirk-dead-rest-in-piss

September 15th: whitehouse nastygram : https://bsky.app/profile/chipnick.com/post/3m2k6va63222m

(also, bitter lol at “gentlemen”, because running a tech company is a mans job, don’t you know)

They complied well in advance, because it’s what they wanted to do anyway.

Polyphasic sleep was a thing for a while. Was that it?

Techbros learn anything from history, even recent history… difficulty level: impossible.

That’s impressively awful.

Was it economically rational to discover America?

I ain’t gonna buy this crap, and I don’t think I can be bothered to steal it, but… I hear that the triangle trade was quite lucrative back in the day. I wonder how they characterise the slave trade in their book, and whether they consider its ending a good thing or not.

I mean, maybe even pause briefly to think about why the west indies were called that. Or think about what empires value. Or to think at all, really.

from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to Moore’s law and Bitcoin

No vaccines or antibiotics, but bitcoin is a world-changing invention? Someone’s been insulated from consequences all their life. Here’s hoping they lose everything in the Great Depression 2: Greater and More Depressing, whilst loudly proclaiming that a the invention of ai waifus was worth the destruction of civilisation.