Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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Ahead of its time
Today I learned that in 1983 I could have downloaded games into my Atari 2600 using a modem, stored them in ROM and played them off-line. In 1983. And that the company that offered that service only offered it because their original idea to allow you to download music over a modem to listen to…
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Functionally Infinite
“Functionally infinite” is an incredibly powerful way to tilt the field. IPv6 give you functionally infinite address space. Sovereign Currency gives you functionally infinite money. Functionally infinite electricity reshapes civilization as we know it. etc. Where is the source of functionally infinity in your problem space?
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Autocracy isn’t socialism
FWIW, all the people who say they are against socialism because they’ve lived under communism and their lives were hard or ruined, suffered because they lived under totalitarian autocracies. If they want to make a nuanced argument about how socialism _leads_ to totalitarian autocracies I’m receptive to unpacking that argument, just not while they are…
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Just one thing: Suffrage
If you want a single thing to use to understand the current status of the great experiment that is the United States of America, one needs only to look at who is allowed to vote. In the beginning, voting was neither and inalienable right nor a privilege bestowed from power, being instead the consequence of…
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The Web is what is wrong with the Internet
HTTP is fantastic. HTTP is also a scourge. It is fantastic in the sense that what is does well, it does exceedingly well. But when it gets used to do those things it doesn’t do well it sows the seeds of doom. Want to move hypertext between computers? Good on you. Want to move things…
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Postel’s Triangle
Postel’s Triangle is the name for the idea that Domain Names, Certificates for those Domain Names, and the IP address allocations of the servers for those Domain Names that have the Certificates are a single information object that ought to be administered, configured, and propagated as a whole because doing that is the prerequisite for…
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Change is a parasite
Change begins with a mindworm burrowing into you and whispering its running commentary over all your sensory input until you act for the betterment of the universe or you go mad, the foam at the mouth and shambolic mores pulling attention to you as the psychosocial waves radiates from you, spreading the worm like seeds…
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American immigration policy: a 75 year plan
Over the next 75 years or so, barring catastrophe, the global human population is expected to rise to around 10 billion before plateauing for a while and then, perhaps, declining through the first half of the next century. Simultaneously, the developed world will face a demographic challenge as more people age out of the workforce…
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Federation is contextual
Federation at the server instance is different from federation at the account instance. That feels like it is obvious, but still needs saying. Server federation is email. Account federation is spycraft in cold war Berlin. The reason why spam is endemic is that server federation must be default-accept to be valuable. The reason why PKI…
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Portability
Played Cyberpunk 2077 for five hours yesterday (because I’m an adult, 😛 ) and all I have to show for it is this: AAA video games that don’t let me save+clone+version+re-hydrate+share character state like skill trees, point allocations, and gear are starting to feel like a missed opportunity. We’re talking about the digital version of…