Right Thing, Wrong Time

Cryptocurrency, quantum supremacy, imminent death of the Internet.

So, Google recently announced that they’d achieved quantum supremacy. One of the things that quantum computers are supposed to be really good at is cracking crypto really fast.

The past couple of years have seen an explosion of cryptocurrencies, which are one application of blockchain, which relies heavily on crypto.

I have a Keybase account, because of lots of reasons, but mostly nowadays I use it for backing up my private git repos. But, as a consequence of having a Keybase account, I am being given Stellar Lumens (XLM), which is a cryptocurrency. I wondered what good these things are, and did a little bit of poking around. It seems to be the case that this is principally for moving other currencies around. I have dollars, I want to give you euros, I can turn the dollars into lumens, send you lumens, and then you turn the lumens into euros. So, remittances with better (maybe?) exchange rates, and with less (maybe?) government oversight.

But now, here’s the thing: you and I don’t have quantum computers. But nations and companies with budgets the size of nations’ do. So, how secure is cryptocurrency, really? And what good is blockchain when Google or Amazon or China or whoever can diddle the crypto? I dunno. Maybe someone smarter than I am can explain it to me.

Well, duh

So, Iran has reconnected to the Internet, and there’s this quote way down in the Washington Post article about it:

“Why did (the Americans) get angry after we cut off the internet? Because the internet is the channel through which Americans wanted to perform their evil and vicious acts,” Fadavi said.

I’d say that this, right here, is an excellent example of a thing politicians do all the time. It is absolutely true, to the point of being bleeding obvious, that of course the Americans want to perform their evil and vicious acts through the Internet. It’s cheaper that way. And yet, it is also not necessarily true that the protests were instigated by Americans, and I find it extremely implausible that nefarious Internet posters could get the whole population out on the streets in protest, getting shot, beaten, and arrested.

Regression

I’ve been ignoring Facebook for a few months, now, and my engagement with Twitter has mostly been retweets and likes. Yesterday, a friend who takes what other people say more seriously than I do decided he needed to back way off and go back to writing blog posts instead of tweets. Frankly, I would way rather read his essays, as I think his analyses are interesting and insightful and I’m really a fan of the long form. I’ve always felt that if a position is short enough to fit on a bumper sticker, it’s far too simplistic to be useful.

So then I thought, “Man, I sure don’t want to miss his writing, but I also sure do want to miss these 18 screens of ignorant hot takes and performative dunks; I wonder if there’s a decent RSS reader…”

There is.

And then I thought, “You know, I like being able to work offline and then occasionally connect to the world to send and receive. I wonder if there’s a decent^[1] client app for my blog.”

There is.

Also, a few days ago I finally went ahead and updated my laptop to run Mac OS Catalina, which means that the GPG plugin for Apple Mail no longer works for me. I’d read that Thunderbird with Enigmail works okay, and hey, it sure does!

So now, here I am, with an up-to-date operating system and a blogging and email experience that feels like the late nineties. And that’s not bad, actually. I kinda like it.

Endnotes

1 – I do not consider a native app that simply wraps a web view and delegates all the logic and storage to the browser and/or remote host to be “decent”. If I wanted a web page, I’d just use a browser, not install a whole new application.

Why Monoculture

At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, I told my family that since I didn’t use Windows in a professional capacity and I didn’t use it personally, there was no way I was going to go to the effort of becoming and staying smart about Windows, and if they wanted me to do tech support, well, that was just too bad. I may even have been that much of a jerk in saying it, too. To my surprise, that was pretty well received. As a result, we mostly have Macintosh computers in the house.