µblog - archive for 2021-11

not gonna lie, “omicron” is one of the more obscure Greek letters. Kinda glad it has its time in the limelight

(actually not glad)

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“Delta Omicron” is the name of my next band

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𝜈-metal

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Latest #freenode f*ckery is that the servers that are called .freenode (not .joseon) now don’t require SASL to logon. Luser count has jumped 3x to ~6k as idle bouncers can connect again

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Reading 2 books in parallel, book-ending the British Empire in India: The Last Mughal by @DalrympleWill and The Burma Campaign by Frank McLynn. Both are great, I read one on the phone and the other on the iPad as the feeling takes me

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You know what’s really based? Lye

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🤬 ennefftee

(Note: this was originally a draft document for a twitter thread but twitter sucks so I figured I’d post it here instead. Hence the rewordings of terms like ‘NFT’ to avoid getting noticed by pixelated monkey avatars.)

Who benefits from boosting this crap?

I find it fascinating that Ennefftee boosters have taken so many shits in so many punchbowls at so many parties it is now a net benefit to state your company will never use them.

The N\FT sales pitch is: we will ruin your community to the detriment of the environment and to the benefit of a wealthy few. Capitalism in its purest form.

The question is why so many internet firms (Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Patreon) are enthusiastically jumping in, to the horror of their users.

There are big companies like Disney, Burger King etc. that are minting tiffins. This is more understandable. They have giant marketing departments that are attuned to new trends in marketing. And ironically, they have pro IT departments that will ensure that the assets will actually stay up in the future, unlike the fly-by-night operations that just dump them on IPFS. At least if they get deleted from there they are still available in a giant torrent.

• The NFT Bay

But when it comes to internet first companies, I believe it’s a concerted effort from crapto boosters to get them onboard. Either by direct pitches to the bros in charge, or astroturfing social media campaigns.

In a weird way I’m looking forward to Twitter, at considerable expense to themselves, integrating digital trading cards into people’s profiles. Approximately 1 minute after launch there will be blacklists available where people with pixelmonkey avatars can be … BLOCKchained.

A great summary of the fundamental absurdity of this space:

• Stephen Diehl: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

Here’s a very long read about NFTs and crapto in general:

• Why NFTs are bad: the long version (warning: Medium link)

The “art” (sometimes) sucks

Look, I have a pretty liberal view on “art” in general. As far as I’m concerned, someone taking a pic of their kid, or singing karaoke, or writing this blog post, is engaged in creating art. “Art is dead”, after all. So I’m not gonna go all gatekeeping in saying that Leonardo da Vinci was an artist, while the creator of Cryptopunks is not.

Of course, that means that the vast majority of art is economically worthless. Related, just because it’s hard to do doesn’t mean the product is worth anything. Just ask someone who has problem passing stools.

And the fact remains that most of the art “protected” by NFTs is objectively bad. The ideal NFT target is:

• recognizable in a Twitter profile pic
• easily varied to produce 10,000 “unique” pictures
• referencing the ideals of the target: people who aspire to be idle rich assholes

So creating an NFT concept is akin to being a copyrighter. Worthy occupation, but hardly on the scale of Michelangelo.

Another view:

• 🚀 left_adjoint on the (ab)use of procedurally generated art for commodity tokens gemini://inconsistentuniverse.space/gemlog/2021-11-21-nftprocgen.gmi

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Två ålderstecken idag:

• yngre kollegor hör höga pipande ljud som inte jag uppfattar
• nya säsongen av “Bonusfamiljen” är faktiskt riktigt bra

När börjar “På spåret”?!

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Struggling through Asimov’s “Second Foundation”. It’s dire

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🤬 Incorrect Quotation

RMS would like you to know that the infamous “GNU/Linux” copy-pasta attributed to him is incorrect.

• RMS

Here it is, in its incorrect entirety:

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux,” and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.

Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

So what parts are incorrect?

Here they are:

unto itself

another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX

Incidentally I am glad for this because I wrote a previous rant which implied that GNU was not POSIX, then I saw this copy-pasta and was briefly worried I was incorrect. Turns out I wasn’t!

• previous rant

What I find fascinating about this quote is that RMS takes full credit for the infamous opening sentences, which are generally all that most copy-pasters bother with. Impressive.

Also this backhanded compliment:

The main error is that Linux is not strictly speaking part of the GNU system—whose kernel is GNU Hurd. The version with Linux, we call “GNU/Linux.” It is OK to call it “GNU” when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it “GNU/Linux” so as to give Torvalds some credit.

“so as to give Torvalds some credit”, smdh.

I’d just like to interject for a moment: GNU/Hurd is never gonna be finished. Linux won. Get over it.

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🤬 Humanity cannot be free until…

the last billionaire is hung from a lampost in the entrails of the last techbro

(this would probably get me booted from twitter, because techbros are terrible)

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Protip: Hacker News has terrible opinions about a lot of things, but they have uniquely terrible opinions about SF

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Hegel. Antihegel. Synthegel.

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