Interesting Links for 25-07-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Anyone I know want to be a Data Scientist for Full Fact

(tags:FactCheck data job viaDanielDWilliam )

2. Hungarian PM is a racist

(tags:Hungary racism OhForFucksSake )

3. Whenever I see the web3 people get involved in a medium it makes me feel like they've never actually enjoyed it for itself

(tags:books Blockchain OhForFucksSake )

4. When did children's songs start sounding like the kind of thing I danced to in the 00s?

(tags:music children video wtf )

5. Neil Gaiman Breaks Down 'The Sandman' Official Trailer

(tags:trailer neilgaiman sandman TV )

6. The "nice" option for the Conservative Leadership election is referencing Nigel Farage on immigration

(tags:immigration conservatives OhForFucksSake asylum )

7. British teachers give lower marks to children perceived to be working class, British doctors deny them pain relief.

(tags:uk Education class psychology OhForFucksSake healthcare )

Comments

[wildeabandon]

1 - I'm neither looking for a job nor remotely qualified for that one, but if I were, the effort they've made to make the selection process clear and to reduce bias would make me a lot more enthusiastic about applying. More of this sort of thing!

[danieldwilliam]

I'm honestly not sure that Orban being a racist is the worst thing about him.

[andrewducker]

Oh no, he's a full on nationalist, with everything that tends to mean about the rule of law, democracy, etc. And a supporter of Putin, of course.

[dewline]

It's motivating a lot of his criminal conduct. He's signalling that he's not just fascist-curious here.

[rhythmaning]

I see #OhForFucksSake is coming to the fore. I mean, not before its time, but still, 4/7 an excellent achievement!

[danieldwilliam]

Generally I think web3.0 has a problem with what is called the Economists' Fiver.

Two economists are walking down Threadneedle Street and one of them spots a fiver lying on the ground. She steps over it and her friend asks her, "aren't you going to pick that up?" "No, if it were worth doing, someone would have done it already."

That owning a share of specific works seems much much much more trouble that it could ever be worth.

Specifically when there already exist several ways to "invest" in works of art - buying shares in a publishing company or a film company for example.

[andrewducker]

Yup, it doesn't add anything at all to, well, anything. The only actual use I've seen for Blockchain is in acting as a currency, and it's too variable to be much use for that a lot of the time!

[danieldwilliam]

For a currency I'm not sure I'd trust technology that appears not to stop some idiots having pictures of apes stolen from them.

[andrewducker]

Oh yeah. The irreversability of transactions and lack of central control is in there by design, and makes things *very* tricky from a mass market point of view. If someone gets control of your wallet and transfers things elsewhere then your only recourse is legal. Which might be tricky if you don't know who or where they are, and the legal frameworks you're both operating under aren't the same!

[simont]

The thing that boils my piss about the word 'blockchain' is the way that its proponents use a classic motte-and-bailey tactic to equivocate between two definitions of it, one of which specifically refers to the kind of blockchain used to run Bitcoin (including in particular the energy-wasteful mining, and the decentralised consensus system it creates which nobody can police), and the other is a much more general notion that even applies to uncontroversial applications such as Git, which share the notion of a sequence of blocks each validating their entire ancestry by a hash, but lack any of the bad features that Bitcoin and its ilk layer on top of that much simpler notion. Then, once you've agreed that Git is a jolly good thing¹, they imply by use of the same word that you must have thereby accepted Bitcoin too, because they're the same thing, which in every important way they are not.

¹ (or rather, that the fundamental data representation of Git is a jolly good thing, without prejudice to any unprintable opinions you might reasonably hold about its command line syntax)

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. Git is clearly a chain of blocks.

The three biggest complaints against Ethereum/Bitcoin are:
1) Ecological. Proof of Work is clearly now not a good thing. Ethereum looks like it might actually transition to Proof of Stake in September, but Bitcoin is showing no signs of moving in that direction.
2) Decentralisation. Nobody is in charge to reverse issues that happen when there is either direct theft or bugs in contracts. Both of which happen regularly. I don't see this one going away.
3) It doesn't actually gain us anything over a database.

Once (1) goes away then rather than people complaining about "blockchain" they can instead complain about "decentralised systems/currencies", which would presumably cheer you up :-)

[simont]

To those I'd add

4) As a notional currency it seems so prone to huge value fluctuations that it's mostly useful as a vehicle for speculators to fleece each other, and mostly useless as a means of actually buying normal things with any degree of certainty (even from the few sellers – are there any left? – who'll accept it). One would be forgiven for imagining that that might have been its purpose in the first place.

diziet once described Bitcoin as something along the lines of 'a pyramid scheme, a hive of scum and villainy, and an ecological disaster all rolled into one", which I think is (4), (2) and (1) out of this combined list. The only thing missing from that was the word "pointless" to cover (3) as well :-)

I fear that the word "blockchain" will stay around and continue to be annoying, though, because it's become a Marketing Buzzword that people recognise. So I expect to remain uncheered, alas.

[andrewducker]

I believe the marketing term is generally either "Crypto" or "Web3". I switched away from "Crypto" because Paul Crowley/Ciphergoth was disappointed whenever he saw it and then discovered it wasn't about actual cryptography :-)

[simont]

Yes! Now you mention it, the repurposing of "crypto" is also very annoying. Especially to someone like me who spends a lot of time trying to do useful things with what I think "crypto" has meant all along.

I must admit "Web3" is new to me in this links post, and I was completely baffled by it because I thought surely it must refer to some kind of evolution in either the WWW protocols (HTTP and/or HTML) or in site design philosophy (similar to "Web 2.0"). How did the name get attached to something so unrelated to the web as cryptocurrencies?!

[hilarita]

It's meant to be an advance in philosophy, but the alleged philosophy and the actual don't even slightly match up, and really it's there as a marketing tool to draw the suckers in.

[andrewducker]

"Web 2.0 has become too centralised and controlled by a few companies. Web3 will decentralise by *something something crypto Blockchain something*"

[simont]

But the confusion over "crypto" is less bad than the one over "blockchain" because at least nobody is hoping you'll conflate the two kinds of crypto. Cryptocurrency marketers don't care about us cryptography nerds who were already using the abbreviation, but at least they're not trying to weaponise us.

(That I've noticed.)

[andrewducker]

Oh, and yes - Git data structures are good, and I use a GUI to work with it as much as I possibly can.

Blockchain uses

[anna_wing]

I've seen a proposed use to (a) track cattle using a tamper-proof electronic ear-tag that also (b) lets them be insured and (c) allows them to be security for loans. It's apparently a way of keeping the various databases involved (bank, insurance company, vet authorities, agriculture ministry, trade ministry etc) secure and separate, and also to reduce fraud (substituting a sick cow for a healthy one etc). The last I heard it was being implemented in Rwanda.

Re: Blockchain uses

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure that this is better than a database - but good luck to them in getting it up and running and dealing with it when erroneous data gets onto the system!