I've written about this many times before. The web is now a wasteland almost totally covered in consent forms. It's a disgrace. Users don't want to wade through this crap, and who can blame them.
Consent forms are handing the entire web, the thing many of us have spent decades contributing to, directly to AI companies on a silver platter. #
I've been thinking about browser diversity the past few days. Looks like the EU is going to force Apple to allow alternative browser rendering engines on iOS. I think this is likely great for users.
Anyway browsers are made up of various pieces, including the rendering engine. Firefox, Chrome and Safari have different variants. Meta has open sourced it's LLM Llama, Elon is apparently also open sourcing his Grok LLM. I wonder how long it will take until someone tries to integrate one of these directly into a web browser. Could be interesting to surf the web with a browser super powered by AI. #
Software is strange. You build it using your current knowledge, but things change and you realise that your software would have been better, or easier to understand had it been built another way. So people retrofit new interfaces to the old software, to modernise it. And it sort of works for many of the use cases.
But if you try to do something complicated, or you run into trouble, accidentally going down a path you didn't mean to, the new interface often gets in the way. Git, amazing as it is, sufers from this problem.
I've been reading Git from the bottom up recentally. It's been very enlightening. Git is so much simpler underneath than I thought. I'm finding it difficult though to hold both interfaces in my head.
I keep wondering whether it would have been better to learn git using the low level primitives right from the start.
Computer software doesn't always intersect well with human cultures. #
So I've been listening to loads of podcasts mentioning Tether and Tron recently. They say these are super popular in places where people just want to do smaller transactions. Very popular in developing countries because fees are low. It's aimed at the unbanked, people that have never had bank accounts.
But what's going on from a technical perspective? First of all it's totally unclear to me how these unbanked people use it because surely at some stage they need to turn these cryptos into a fiat currency in order to actually buy something. Also how do they get crypto in the first place? Don't you need a bank account to make use of crypto eventually?
Are these all just literal seperate apps for your phone? Which are the blockchain, which are the coins? How do you exchange them? Or are you just stuck in the coin that you choose, along with all the other confused souls that somehow ended up with X coin on Y chain with Z wallet...
Here's a tiny fraction of what I was presented with:
But wait there's more. There are combinations too. Tether Tron, Liquid Tether, and so many other combinations. You quickly start to wonder whether even those you are listening to talking about this stuff know what they are talking about. It's enfuriating.
It's so unbelievably complicated. Once you do some research you will quickly be lost in a sea of technologies, protocols, stable coins, chains, side chains, rollups etc. How can sending, receiving and storing money be so fucking complicated? It's literally 3 fucking features y'all. WTF crypto? #
I've become totally fascinated with the gilded age after listening to the latest Rest is History podcast series all about the Titanic. Building huge luxury ships that would sail across the Atlantic ocean was what entrepreuneurs did back then. Of course there were also huge industries in building massive road and rail networks, and many other large scale physical goods productions. I wonder if we will see a return to a similar age with the space race unfolding?
Elon just managed to put the largest craft ever into orbit. Such a ship could transport many many people. Exciting times.
I'm going to work on my facial hair just in case we do have to go all Edwardian Steam Punk in the next few years. #
Rogan made this observation on one of his latest episodes. It was either the Black Keys or James Lindsay episodes, I can't quite remember which. He's had nearly a decade now of going around doing speeches and TV interviews constantly. And he clearly loves it, he's totally in his element, and because of his stream of consciousness style of speaking, he's basically at this stage a standup comic.
I feel validated because I've been thinking the exact same thing for months. I make no commentary on whether this is good or bad for the United States, but to be honest, often he's pretty fucking hilarious. #
VMs for mobile - With all this worry about Tik Tok and what access apps have on mobile devices, doesn't it make sense to develop some form of VM for mobiles? That way you can have trusted apps on the base phone OS, and put all those 'dangerous' but fun social networking apps on a VM that you can switch to. This would be a feature I think many business executives and high net worth individuals would be very interested in.
At the very least there should be much better logging. You should be able to see exactly what data is being accessed and sent over the network. #
Computer nerd humour - "Ligging". Darn it, not again, stupid auto-correct. #
From an earlier blog post: "How can sending, receiving and storing money be so fucking complicated? It's literally 3 fucking features y'all. WTF crypto?"
I also mentioned in this week's newsletter that Bitcoin development reminded me of a collection of hodge podge ActivityPub protocols, that no longer fit the use case. Ironically email, I think we can all agree, has pretty much mastered send/receive/store.
In case you aren't aware ActivityPub uses an email style paradigm, with an inbox and outbox. I'm not sure what this all means apart from perhaps my analogy was a bit off I guess.
I'm wondering now if ActivityPub could be built on top of the AT protocol. Maybe email done right is actually quite involved. #
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