Links and Notes for January 14th, 2022

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Video Games

COVID-19

Why Pay Less? The US Strategy for Vaccinating the World by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“Earlier this month, Dr. Peter Hotez announced that his team of researchers at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor University had developed an effective vaccine against the coronavirus. In limited clinical trials, it showed effectiveness comparable to the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna and better than the Johnson and Johnson and widely used AstraZeneca vaccines.

“What makes this development so important is that Hotez is making his vaccine freely available to the world. Anyone who has the necessary expertise to produce it is free to do so without worrying about patent monopolies or other intellectual property claims. They are also freely sharing the technology, not claiming industrial secrets like Pfizer and Moderna.”

“If further research supports their initial findings, the world will have a cheap, effective vaccine that can quickly be produced in sufficient quantities to vaccinate the world.

“That would be a huge deal and a great success for the open-source model. It would likely lead to demands for more public funding of open-source research. It may also help to pressure philanthropies—that claim to be concerned about public health—to fund research on an open-source model. Needless to say, it would also be very bad news for the profits of Pfizer and Moderna, and other drug companies that hoped to make billions off of COVID-19 vaccines.”

Hotez is going to get Epsteined, with a deathbed retraction of the open-sourcing found lying on his nightstand.

“With earlier variants, the unvaccinated are more likely to infect others. With the more contagious Omicron variant, the extent to which current vaccines reduce infection and the ability to spread the virus is less clear. But we do know that vaccination reduces the severity of the illness, and therefore the need for hospitalization.”

“But even if the policy does not persuade more people to get vaccinated, at least fewer people would die from health conditions over which they have no control because others who regard vaccination as a “personal choice,” and selfishly rejected it, are using scarce resources needed to save lives.”

Economy & Finance

Bank of Russia Seeks to Outlaw Mining and Trading of Crypto by Evgenia Pismennaya and Andrey Biryukov (Yahoo News/Bloomberg)

“Russia’s central bank proposed a blanket ban on the use and creation of all cryptocurrencies within one of the world’s biggest crypto-mining nations, citing the dangers posed to the country’s financial system and environment.

“Crypto bears the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme and undermines the sovereignty of monetary policy, the central bank said in a report Thursday. It also took aim at mining, which it said hurts the country’s green agenda, jeopardizes Russia’s energy supply and amplifies the negative effects of the spread of cryptocurrencies, creating incentives for circumventing attempts at regulation.

““Potential financial stability risks associated with cryptocurrencies are much higher for emerging markets, including in Russia,” the central bank said.”

“Russia became the world’s third biggest crypto miner last year, after the U.S. and Kazakhstan, according to Cambridge University data released in October.”

Congress Might Have to Stop Trading Stocks by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“This strikes me as more or less sensible as a general matter, both because in general I am a tiny bit suspicious of people with demanding non-financial jobs who spend a lot of time trading portfolios of individual stocks, sorry, and because in particular congresspeople make important decisions that might be influenced by their stock ownership. If you go to Congress and ask it to approve a law that is good for America but bad for the profits of health-insurance companies or defense contractors or oil companies or whatever, you do not want Congress to reject the law because too many senators own concentrated positions in the affected stocks.”

What is Ethereum Layer-2, and why should you care? by Tudor-Radu Barbu (The Crypto Journal)

“Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs: a new state is assumed to be valid unless proof to the contrary (a proof of fraud) is submitted to the Blockchain within some timeframe. ZK-Rollup relies on validity proofs: a new state will always be presented to the Blockchain with proof that it is, in fact, valid.”

This is how the current system works, except that they have a mix of validity (e.g. checking that the submission came from a trusted source via a trusted channel) and and optimism (e.g. transactions from validated sources are assumed to be legitimate until proven otherwise in a court of law). Have you noticed how the existing blockchain/crypto world is also so rife with scammers that you almost can’t see anything else? Well, they’re about to open up the “trust” part because they can’t do more than 15 transactions per second—in the world. This is ludicrous. How can anyone possibly think that this is going to scale? And now they’re going to make it scale by removing the “proof” part that formed the basis of trustless computing? Nice….👍

Or they’re going to just make another layer a la Bitcoin’s “Lightning” network. This will basically function as implicitly trusted until it can be written to the blockchain below. It’s unclear how the lightning network (or layer-2 scaling in Ethereum … I think … e2? … who knows) will be able to write quickly enough to keep up with demand, but that’s part of the hand-waving magic of it all. All of the transactions will take place in the faster, untrusted part and will be verified at some unknown point of time in the future, at which it will be too late to do anything about frauds because none of this is regulated. Yolo.

We Know the Silver Bullet to Ending Poverty and Destitution But Choose Not to Use It by Lee Camp (Scheer Post)

“[…] sure, all casinos are based on drunk people spending money they don’t have on machines they don’t know are rigged in hopes of getting money they will never get. But you can’t get mad at the Cherokee because that’s also the basic definition of capitalism. : Drunk people spending money we don’t have on machines we don’t know are rigged in hopes of getting money we’ll never get.)”

“Studies show it doesn’t make people work less and even if it did, I would say, “GOOD!” Under capitalism you are born free, but then you spend the rest of your existence trying to rent back your life from corporate rulers. So if UBI decreases that slavery by a percentage point, that’s a good thing.”

Who Can Resist the Crypto Boom? by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“I have never read a profile of someone who became a billionaire by using crypto to solve any problem other than trading more crypto but never mind!”

“Meanwhile in crypto! Meanwhile in crypto people will pay millions of dollars for a JPEG of an ape and then hand over the private key to anyone who asks nicely! Meanwhile in crypto you can make huge profits by being the robot counterparty to fat-finger trades, and no exchange will break those trades! Meanwhile in crypto the transaction fee for a $75 transaction is $75! Meanwhile in crypto the take rate for exchanges is 0.57% of their transaction volume, and Robinhood Markets Inc. collects more payment for order flow for crypto orders than it does for stock orders. The sidewalks in crypto are carpeted in a layer of $100 bills three inches deep! What kind of lunatic would run a high-tech global multi-asset automated trading firm and not get into crypto?”

Web3 Takes Trust Too by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“For instance, we could track real estate this way. I could write down a list of all the houses in my town and who owns them; to transfer ownership we could just update the entries on my list. As of yet my list in Excel does not carry any legal ownership rights; it does not sync up with, or supersede, the legal property registry. But I think that you will agree that it is a much more efficient and technologically advanced system than the old legal system of property registration on paper in dusty archives, so I think in the long run it is likely to win out.”

“The bank has a list of dollars in its accounts, the list is not kept via any sort of consensus mechanism or blockchain or whatever; the bank just keeps the list using, uh, Cobol. But you (mostly) trust the bank to maintain the list, because among other things (1) it has a good track record of maintaining the list, (2) it has good commercial incentives to maintain the list, (3) it has powerful regulatory and legal incentives to maintain the list, etc. The bank’s list is not any great shakes technologically, and 100 years ago banks kept very similar lists using pen and paper.”

“It’s very normal and standard and millions of people rely on it without thinking about it. ExcelCoin is stupid not because I keep it in Excel; it’s stupid because I keep it in Excel.”

“The technology behind OpenSea is not quite “OpenSea keeps a list, in Excel, of who owns which NFTs.” The underlying list is kept on the blockchain; it’s just that OpenSea can modify its version of the list however it wants, and its modifications are in practice pretty binding.”

“If OpenSea’s list did not conform to what its customers expected — if it arbitrarily ignored the blockchain, if it let people claim NFTs that weren’t theirs, etc. — then everyone would take their apes elsewhere. But this is pretty much why people trust banks too! The essential protections are social, not technological.”

“The power of distributed consensus and immutable blockchains is not that they are a better technology than, you know, some large trusted website keeping a list, which is kind of how Web3 works anyway. The power of distributed consensus and immutable blockchains is that they attract money, which is really how Web3 works.”

Public Policy & Politics

Kansas and California Cops Used Civil Forfeiture to Stage Armored Car Heists, Stealing Money Earned by Licensed Marijuana Businesses by Jacob Sullum (Reason)

“Five times since last May, sheriff’s deputies in Kansas and California have stopped armored cars operated by Empyreal Logistics, a Pennsylvania-based company that serves marijuana businesses and financial institutions that work with them. The cops made off with cash after three of those stops, seizing a total of $1.2 million, but did not issue any citations or file any criminal charges, which are not necessary to confiscate property through civil forfeiture. That process allows police to pad their budgets by seizing assets they allege are connected to criminal activity, even when the owner is never charged, let alone convicted.”

Welcome to the New Cold War in Asia by Michael Klare & Tom Engelhardt (Antiwar.com)

“Add all this up and here’s the new reality of the Biden years: the disputed island of Taiwan, just off the Chinese mainland and claimed as a province by the PRC, is now being converted into a de facto military ally of the United States. There could hardly be a more direct assault on China’s bottom line: that, sooner or later, the island must agree to peacefully reunite with the mainland or face military action.”

“Welcome to the new twenty-first-century Cold War on a planet desperately in need of something else.”

It’s Too Soon to Announce the Dawn of a Chinese Century by Ho-Fung Hung (Jacobin)

“The big difference between Trump and Obama was that his rhetoric was rawer and used a lot of colorful language that made an impression on people and raised their awareness of what he was doing. As a result, there is a popular perception that US-China relations only took a turn for the worse under Trump, when in fact it started under Obama. The Biden administration is basically continuing many Obama-era approaches to China.”

“If you look at the targets of this crackdown, they are all private companies in China, while these well-connected state or parastate companies have still been getting all the support they need to continue to be a monopoly. It is more about the insecurity felt by the state about its control of the economy. It is going after these private companies to ensure that the state companies can remain on top and will not be overshadowed by private enterprise.”

You say that like it’s a bad thing. That’s one way to look at it. Another is to believe that China is trying to avoid the U.S. trap where the economy/country is run by private companies. That is not better. That is arguably and obviously worse for most of the population (just look at how the U.S. and China have handled COVID). The economy should be under the control of putatively democratic institutions, not a self-nominated and -perpetuating wealthy elite. Use the engine of capitalism to benefit all, rather than letting it be an end in itself, in the hands of a few.

“On the one hand, China sees a future in the market for green technology products and is investing a lot to expand capacity in those sectors. But at the same time, China has all kinds of other sectors, from steel mills to coal plants, that still have overcapacity. There are a lot of vested interests in the state and beyond that are tied to those sectors. China’s coal capacity is still growing, and it is also exporting coal plants to many other developing countries, as a solution to this problem of overcapacity and overaccumulation, instead of letting those sectors go bust and die.”

It’s the same all over, in that regard.

Journalism & Media

Vaccine Aristocrats Strike Again by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“[…] the goonish intensity of culture war propaganda is clearly increasing as the scale of the national wealth-suck widens. This is beginning to feel like a very fortuitous coincidence, for some.”

“Making money is no crime, but in the Covid era, these folks are welfare hogs, not capitalist success stories. Many were staring at ruin two years ago, only to see fortunes reversed by the Mother of All Bailouts. The promise by Fed chair Jerome Powell that they were “not going to run out of ammunition” in propping up the financial markets formally made the economy a rigged game. From the moment the CARES Act was signed to now, the markets have been on a steep rocket-ride upward, and the calculus has remained simple ever since: if you own financial assets, you get richer, and if you don’t, you’re probably screwed.”

“[…] “anti-vaxxers” have been portrayed as a far more monolithic group than they are, and many things that seemed like clear moral issues a year ago have become a lot murkier as we’ve learned more about the limitations of masks, the shot, and most of all, the health bureaucracy running this mess.”

“Particularly for those of us with an absurdist bent, watching a generation of skeptics turn into religious fanatics whose idea of a heretic is a person insufficiently obedient to the ludicrously shifting diktats of overmatched health bureaucrats like Rochelle Walensky has been beyond bizarre.”

“Decades from now, though, I still think we’ll look back on the way these issues were so successful at keeping people divided while their pockets were picked on a mass scale again as the primary significance of vaccine freakouts.”

“Billionaire Fed-skimmers like Fink and Schwarzman should pay people like Kimmel bonuses for making sure blue-staters spend more time angsting over horse paste than corruption, and for keeping red-staters angrier at TV stars than any of them.”

Corporate Journalists are Blind to a Big COVID Lesson by Ted Rall

“One of my complaints about mainstream media is that they recruit reporters from inside the establishment—Ivy League colleges, expensive graduate journalism programs, rival outlets with similar hiring practices. Some staffs develop admirable levels of gender and racial diversity. But they all come from the same elite class. Rich kids believe in the system and they accept its basic assumptions.”

Science & Nature

Why Do We Need Sleep? A History by James Goodwin (Literary Hub)

“Sleep must, after all, confer some pretty substantial benefits to outweigh the risks entailed. As sleep science pioneer Allan Rechtschaffen put it: “If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process ever made.””

Philosophy & Sociology

Feminists on All Sides by Katha Politt (Dissent Magazine)

“[…] women’s desires (as well as men’s) are shaped by social assumptions and prejudices—about race, ethnicity, weight, height, gender presentation, disability, and so on. It isn’t some innate quality that makes Asian women desirable and Asian men not so much, or explains why Black women get fewer matches on dating apps. So what does one do about it?”

“Srinivasan even uses the word “unfuckable,” seemingly unaware that its locus classicus is Amy Schumer’s famous 2015 skit in which a group of middle-aged actresses celebrate Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s “last fuckable day.” Interestingly, women who haven’t had sex in a decade do not go around murdering strangers. As far as I know, they don’t even set up online forums devoted to raging against their lot. They just get on with life, as women tend to […]”

““Feminist porn” has been about to happen for about as long as the male birth-control pill. If it was ever possible to ban porn that caters to misogynistic or clueless men, which I doubt, the internet and the profit motive have made it impossible.”

Every Day a Dreyfus Affair by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“In Romania as in North Korea, communism had degenerated into something closer to dynastic feudalism, even if the dynasty in the Romanian case was retrieved from the Middle Ages rather than passed down from father to son.”

“A proper profile of Culianu would have to say a good deal more about his actual work, notably his 1987 Sorbonne dissertation, Recherches sur les dualismes d’Occident, his ingenious Eco-esque historical fictions, his political allegories, and his many contributions to thinking about human creativity and the astounding range of cultural inflections of the human imagination.”

“In the ‘cringier’ corners of Facebook (this kind of statement is probably too unsophisticated to be given voice on Twitter), you may well see a copypasta’d meme reminding you: “If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything.” But is there any surer sign that you’re “falling for anything” than the fact that you’ve just “stood for something” only in order to escape the vacuum of such a fall? And isn’t your stance that much more likely to be a vacuous one when you have been incited to take it by an engine that needs people to keep taking stances in order, itself, to keep running?”

“[…] for others, notably Culianu, communism and fascism really were twin menaces, which in his country’s history really did cross-pollinate in significant and trackable ways. Today, however, both-sidesism might also be the justified position of any lucid analyst of our new communication technologies, and of the way they structure political debate as an automated process of algorithmic polarization. Under these conditions, both-sidesism might well be taken up by someone who is critical of the limits of liberalism, particularly where liberalism militates in favor of unregulated markets, and who sees our techno-political conjuncture itself precisely as a product of this sort of liberalism.”

Let’s Stop Pretending to Be Original Thinkers by vernamcipher (LessWrong)

“A pressure to stand out in a situation where you are not previously known (by your parents’ reputation, if nothing else) becomes, in our epoch, a conscious imperative − you need to stand out to your interviewer to land a job, in an essay to earn high grade, and in romance to attract a mate, so it is a good thing if you are original or be perceived to be.”

Why I Hope to Die at 75 by Ezekiel J. Emanuel (The Atlantic)

“But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”

Ah, it’s about posterity. Clearly super-important to most people, I guess. Go out on top, baby!

“We accommodate our physical and mental limitations. Our expectations shrink. Aware of our diminishing capacities, we choose ever more restricted activities and projects, to ensure we can fulfill them. Indeed, this constriction happens almost imperceptibly. Over time, and without our conscious choice, we transform our lives.”

There is no room in this theory for an acquired wisdom knowing not to bother working on things that a younger person would heedlessly waste time on. He doesn’t discuss how much is wasted by youthful vigor and ignorance. Because, of course, his view of life is painfully simplistic. Is there something wrong with reducing your horizons? With being satisfied with a one-hour walk instead of four? With being happy to have cycled 30km instead of 300? With having read a book instead of stressing about all of the book that you haven’t read? If you can’t see anymore and you spent all day reading, that’s a problem, I guess. I suppose if your capacity to enjoy life has been reduced, then that’s a problem. But if the way that you enjoy life has changed, well, that’s just … life? You’re still happy. Why end it?

“We don’t notice that we are aspiring to and doing less and less. And so we remain content, but the canvas is now tiny.”

So what? The goal is contentment, not fame, you absolute douche. Small goals are good, less impactful. Or do you mean that resources are wasted on people you don’t consider to be productive? What is worthwhile? Medical research? Why bother now? Such a limited, simplistic, and blinkered philosophy.

People who strive use up a lot more resources than those who don’t. A climate-challenged world would be happy to have more people around who were just happy being rather than agitating to consume and achieve and waste energy in ten different directions. I think the author places too much value on what he’s accomplishing now and, consequently, disparages any time that he might spend not doing those things. Again, what a limited vision. Maybe this applies to him, but there are a lot of people who are quite happy post-psychotic-capitalism-induced-”productivity”.

“After all, evolution has inculcated in us a drive to live as long as possible. We are programmed to struggle to survive. Consequently, most people feel there is something vaguely wrong with saying 75 and no more. We are eternally optimistic Americans who chafe at limits, especially limits imposed on our own lives. We are sure we are exceptional.”

This is just laughably primitive reasoning. Jesus. My God, talk to someone who doesn’t live in the quasi-elite that you do. FFS.

“The deadline also forces each of us to ask whether our consumption is worth our contribution.”

This is such an American view. God, we need to leave cultures with such shallow philosophies behind. You might just as well footnote Ayn Rand right now.

Technology

Some Roku smart TVs are now showing banner ads over live TV by Samuel Axon (Ars Technica)

“Smart TV platforms offer convenience, but it’s rare for software and services that receive ongoing free support and updates to operate without showing ads, monetizing user data, or both. The profit margins on TVs can be small outside of the high-end part of the market, and supporting software and live services over time costs money, so TV and platform makers are seeking out ways to generate recurring revenue on top of what they get from initial sales.”

My Old Man Rant by Robin Hanson (Overcoming Bias)

“But today with smartphone tracking we can actually see who was close enough to whom when to have infected them. And if we have spit samples from two people infected with covid, we can compare the DNA in their viruses to see if they match. By combining these two pieces of information, one could make a sufficiently strong case that a particular person infected another particular person with the virus at a particular time and place.”

Oh my God no, of course you can’t. This is technofabulism. We can’t even do enough testing, to say nothing of sequencing. Imagining a world in which everyone is tested and each test is sequenced is a fairy tale of the highest order. Maybe in 30 years. Never in the U.S. as it is constructed right now.

“Yes, once a pandemic becomes nearly endemic, frequent infection events could clog up courts. But at such scale vouchers would streamline their processes and settle almost all cases out of court. And damages awarded might greatly fall once one could credibly argue that the victim would likely have caught it soon from someone else.”

Utter technoporn. Libertarians are so blinkered when they try to cover all of the bases with technology. The courts can’t handle the normal cases we have so far. The degree to which courts are used today in the U.S. is of highly dubious societal value. Extending this by an order of magnitude couldn’t possibly be an improvement.

Tech Startup Wants To Gamify Suing People Using Crypto Tokens by Maxwell Strachan (Vice)

“But Roche said retail investors stand to gain more than they stand to lose by entering the legal market. “These investments have been very lucrative over the course of the last five to 10 years,” Roche said, adding that some top law firms average an “astronomical” annual percentage rate of 30-to-40 percent. He expects interest will be especially high in the event of a downturn, since litigation outcomes are largely “market agnostic,” providing people with an alternative form of investment.”

This is a press release. This doesn’t even attempt to address any of the gaping holes in the plan. Litigation happens even more in a bear market! You can’t stop winning!

“He isn’t particularly concerned about the prospect of his company creating an explosion of frivolous lawsuits in a famously litigious country, not only because they plan to vet the claims, but due to the fact that Ryval will have a comments page where people can voice their concerns.”

Hahahaha. 😂

iCloud+ Private Relay explained: Don’t call it a VPN by Jason Cross (MacWorld)

“This means that Apple knows your IP address but not the name of the sites you’re visiting, and the trusted partner knows the site you’re visiting but not your IP (and therefore not who or where you are). Neither party can piece together a complete picture of both who you are and where you’re going.”

My first impressions of web3 by Moxie Marlinspike

“These client APIs are not using anything to verify blockchain state or the authenticity of responses. The results aren’t even signed. An app like Autonomous Art says “hey what’s the output of this view function on this smart contract,” Alchemy or Infura responds with a JSON blob that says “this is the output,” and the app renders it. This was surprising to me. So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification.”

“Partisans of the blockchain might say that it’s okay if these types of centralized platforms emerge, because the state itself is available on the blockchain, so if these platforms misbehave clients can simply move elsewhere. However, I would suggest that this is a very simplistic view of the dynamics that make platforms what they are.”

“A wallet like MetaMask needs to do basic things like display your balance, your recent transactions, and your NFTs, as well as more complex things like constructing transactions, interacting with smart contracts, etc. In short, MetaMask needs to interact with the blockchain, but the blockchain has been built such that clients like MetaMask can’t interact with it. So like my dApp, MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls to three companies that have consolidated in this space.”

Proxies within proxies within proxies. This is not an improvement on the current system. There is no oversight or regulation.

“There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image.”

“Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token).”

“Again, like with my dApp, these responses are not authenticated in some way. They’re not even signed so that you could later prove they were lying. It reuses the same connections, TLS session tickets, etc for all the accounts in your wallet, so if you’re managing multiple accounts in your wallet to maintain some identity separation, these companies know they’re linked.”

“All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn’t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!”

“People are excited about NFT royalties for the way that they can benefit creators, but royalties aren’t specified in ERC-721, and it’s too late to change it, so OpenSea has its own way of configuring royalties that exists in web2 space. Iterating quickly on centralized platforms is already outpacing the distributed protocols and consolidating control into platforms.”

“[…] it seems like we should take notice that from the very beginning, these technologies immediately tended towards centralization through platforms in order for them to be realized, that this has ~zero negatively felt effect on the velocity of the ecosystem, and that most participants don’t even know or care it’s happening.”

“We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust. One of the surprising things to me about web3, despite being built on “crypto,” is how little cryptography seems to be involved!”

Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet by James Muldoon (Jacobin)

“It’s unclear how any of this would result in a different distribution of resources or fundamentally alter power relations in the digital economy. Why wouldn’t a similar group of early investors and developers end up monopolizing most of the tokens, just like in current cryptocurrencies where wealth distribution remains the same as in real-world economies?”

“There is nothing necessarily progressive about decentralization; it depends entirely on the political character of the organization and the context in which it operates.”

“A big part of the narrative around Web3 claims that new technology allows us to make a break with the past. But we need to stop and consider whether these new processes actually support socially useful ends or are going to be co-opted by capitalism to develop a new generation of products. A bunch of crypto folks trying to buy a constitution is an amusing story, but it doesn’t address the real problems of how these communities would be able to deliver public goods in ways that escape new forms of commodification.”

“The main proponents of Web3 aren’t progressives committed to notions of social justice, but people trying to get rich and hang their latest innovations on a feel-good story of community power.”

Programming

CSS for internationalisation by Chen Hui Jing

Below, he’s referring to the font-feature-settings (MDN).

“There are 141 feature tags from Alternative Fractions to Justification Alternates to Ruby Notation Forms to Slashed Zero. These CSS properties are closely related to features within the font file itself, so there is that external dependency that lies upon your choice of font.”

Video Games

What Xbox will likely do with its $68B purchase of Activision Blizzard King by Sam Machkovech (Ars Technica)

“You might have heard the news: Microsoft has announced plans to acquire gaming behemoth Activision Blizzard King (ABK) and its subsidiary development studios. The deal is valued at $68.7 billion—or roughly 17 acquisitions of the Star Wars franchise—and that kind of money isn’t spent without an expectation of major moves (and revenue) going forward.”

17x the value of the whole Star Wars franchise. Man, you look away for a few minutes and suddenly just a piece of the games industry has a marketable valuation 2x as high as the value of both Ford and Chevrolet combined (I’m basing this comparison on having recently read that when Tesla gained $100B of value in one day (doing nothing; no announcements) sometime at the end of last year, it gained more value than the value of Ford and Chevrolet combined). Ford and Chevrolet make vehicles that take people from place to place (like work). Tesla does that too, but only for the well-off and makes far, far fewer cars per year. And yet, it’s worth 40x as much as both of them put together. And here’s a gaming company that’s worth more than 2x their worth put together—and it’s not even the most valuable one. Take-Two interactive, another giant gaming company with a market cap of about $13B, announced plans to buy Zynga—a mobile-app gaming company—for about $12.7B. This market is absolutely nuts. It’s a good thing we don’t have any higher priorities than entertainment.

The witch hunt machine by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“[…] how much of a bummer it is that the current Web3 push is being led by either platform monopolists like Mark Zuckerberg, who want to use VR and AR technology to hoover up every last piece of biometric and emotional data about you, and hypercapitalist crypto investors who want to turn the internet into libertarian casino.”