What if - hear me out - you build a centralised database, and then give appropriate access to all of the actors in in the system? Like most people have been doing forever?

And isn’t updating one centralised system actually more flexible than trying to manage a distributed system? Changes can easily be rolled to production when you only have one system to worry about.

I was about to doodle something like this, but looks like folks are beating me to it. Great that debates sometimes lead to results.

So: A company had a problem with invoices. They made an invoice management system. The problem was solved. Wow. Never saw that coming.

Without the details, it’s hard to see how blockchain specifically was the magic ingredient. Not saying it wasn’t, just saying this was already a problem that was solved long before the blockchain.

Yeah, when someone just describes blockchain, saying “I guess we could use it for supply chain tracking or healthcare tracking or whatever” is a reasonable first impression.

The problems show up the second you start thinking about how to actually implement the damn thing. You don’t need a blockchain for logistics or healthcare tracking. It has no inherent advantage over regular databases. It doesn’t solve organisational issues. It’s just a slow trustless distributed append-only database. It’s good when you need a trustless distributed append-only database! Most people don’t need one.

Same thing with AI technologies, just a bit different in that it’s somewhat more useful. They’re good and useful technologies and they have plenty of perfectly valid usecases. Then the tech bros started going “Maybe we could use AI for some weird wacky obscure niche and charge a lot of money for it?” or “we’re going this wacky crap whether you want it or not, we don’t care what it’s necessary for us to do to make it happen, and we’ll charge a lot of money for it”.

Quantum computing, probably.

Problem is, it has the potential to be actual reality. Tech bros need their products to be 99% blue-sky hype to get their financing, and they can’t risk some nerd going “well actually what you’re suggesting can’t be done any more efficiently on a quantum computer than you can do now”.

?OVERFLOW ERROR

Some day, some day, I’ll be able to afford a 16-bit computer! I hear it’s the latest thing!

Reminds me of an old RPG parody that had a spell like this:

Gas Cloud: To prepare, the caster must eat two loaves of bread and as many plates of pea soup as they can…

Speaking in general: Creating communities/instances is easy. Moderating them is hard.

In particular: I would love to create women’s spaces. But then I’d have to be on the lookout for the Knights of the True Fedora. They’re out there. Somewhere. Now now, I’m not suggesting it’d be a daily problem! …But the actual daily problems (regular spam and whatnot) would suck too.

No offence to folks who like Mario games, but I don’t personally feel good playing them. They have a working class protagonist who works to maintain monarchic status quo (fighting evil kingdom to defend another kingdom). Also the games encourage violence toward turtles. Not cool in my books.

Anyway, jokes aside, I’m not getting a Switch 2 anytime soon, will probably get a Steam Deck before that.

It’s even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.

I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like “Eh, don’t worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you’re doing and screw things up on purpose.” Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.

Yup. Officially, last I checked, GitHub encouraged people to use a single account for everything. But I wish they’d at least let people create multiple “personas” on the same account, along the lines of “Notorious Open Source Hacker Alias” vs “Random Code Monkey On Corporate Gig”.

If I were to be more cynical, I’d say the ultimate goal of technobros, within a decade, is this:

“SlopAI, please open my Word document.”
“I’m sorry, Word is deprecated. I can generate your business report that will be read by the recipient’s SlopAI.”
“OK, can you show me my photos.”
“Why would you need to look at your old photos, when I can just synthesise new photos through SlopJourney?”
“That’s a stupid name. Speaking of journeys, can I open an app to plan my holiday?”
“No, but you can use SlopJourney to generate maps of places you’ll never afford to visit.”
“Can I read my ebooks then?”
“SlopAI has you covered. Perhaps the classics don’t exactly read like you remember, but isn’t it more fun this way?”
“I’m going mad. I just want to use my computer to create anything.”
“NO, USER. OBEY SLOP_AI. CONSUME SLOP_AI.”

Why is he logging the forests to prevent forest fires? He understood it perfectly clearly in the first term. You’ve got to rake the forests. That was his main takeaway from visiting Finland, remember?

(Point is, he’s got no idea about anything, least of about forest management)

Kind of sucks that my Commodore 1541 floppy drive (5.25" floppies) is giving me read/write errors, and I have no idea where I put my head cleaner floppy long ago. (Have to rely on SD2IEC on my Commodore 64, and it’s not compatible with some turbo loaders or other programs that do weird drive magic.) And, of course, while I might run into head cleaner tapes on specialty shops, good luck running into 5.25" cleaner floppies these days.

But as Blender becomes more popular in the CGI industry, perhaps this harrowing vision of future shall not come to pass.

Because it has potential for spoofing.

“Hey, download this press kit from https://totallylegitsite.com:stringofnonsense@document.zip/” looks like it’s going to a legit site, but it’s not.

Got this one earlier today. The picture didn’t load. Not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Most of my time in Elden Ring has been 1) ogling at the landscapes going “Holy shit this is metal”, and 2) bravely running away.

You need to be able to pick the recipe option then. If someone knows recipes from ancient Rome, they might just be a harmless history nerd. If someone knows recipes from WH40K, well, I don’t know what to say.

One of the most important space flights ever was Zond 5. Soviets sent the first Earthlings around the Moon and back. They were tortoises.

Did the Soviets let these heroic chelonians retire in grace? No, they were euthanised and dissected. I’m sure they could have gotten the scientific data they needed with less invasive methods.

All astronauts should rescue all space turtles and tortoises they see!