Mencius Moldbug’s Urbit system appears to be public! Take the time to read his introductory materials – you will not regret it. Any regular reader of this site will probably take some interest in Urbit. While I disagree with many of Moldbug’s fundamental design decisions, I believe that his is the first modern ab initio […]
Your kitchen is alive with vermin! Who is to blame? The cruel forces of nature? Or, might it be you – the fellow who scattered delicious crumbs everywhere; spilled honey a thousand times without picking up a mop once; and kept a mountain of old newspapers around for rodents to chew into nest liner? Your […]
The Bitcoin Kill Switch is quite alive, well, and waiting to be pressed: “I can’t assure with 100% certainty that the all the black dots are owned by Satoshi, but almost all are owned by a single entity, and that entity began mining right from block 1, and with the same performance as the genesis […]
“The most important thing a crook needs is an impeccable reputation.” (Attributed to Agatha Christie.) Bitcoin interests me as an obvious example of a technological jewel tossed around aimlessly by the brutal hands of cave men. I can’t help but picture a flashlight or a radio set, left behind in the wilderness by geologists, to […]
This post is of interest only to those who study Bitcoin. If you have never heard of Bitcoin, read my previous post on the subject. Shitcoin is to be a distributed network for attaching “dirt” to particular bitcoins when certain conditions are met, in a manner which allows Bitcoin users to post bonds in order […]
“The enlightened, disciplined mind is the holiest of holies, a wonder among wonders. Upon the Earth – a grain of sand in the Universe, man is on the order of one-billionth of the smallest magnitude… And yet this particle in your mind’s eye, that lives but for sixty or so trips of the Earth around […]
The great inventor John McCarthy (1927 – 2011) now has an official posthumous website: Project JMC. Don’t miss his fascinating (though little-known) political essays!
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is “an instrument whose music is ideas.” This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let’s imagine that you were a child who […]
Rumor has it that a well-known industrial giant will soon attempt to bring head-mounted displays back into fashion. One ought to remember that, for a number of reasons, they were never really “in” fashion to begin with. To my knowledge, every single one ever marketed fell into one of the following categories: Military toy, priced […]
Update: Click here if you would like to try HyperCard yourself. I was a Hypercard child – though our friendship was brief. Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas. The day’s lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might […]
