Link tags: tco

Bitcoin is Commoditized Waste - by Rusty Foster

It’s a popular myth that a Bitcoin’s value is based on nothing, just pulled out of thin air by math. But that’s not true—Bitcoin is a way to commoditize energy consumption without accidentally producing anything useful. Other energy-intensive industries tend to convert energy into useful materials like aluminum or cement. Bitcoin converts electricity into waste heat and records its destruction in the form of numbers, which can then be traded for other numbers but not used to make anything people need or converted back into energy.

This Is What I Want To Do – Trailer 3 - YouTube

I can’t wait to see this documentary about Marc and Beyond Tellerrand!

Verevolf

Glenn Davis of Project Cool’s Cool Site Of The Day from waaaay back in the day is writing his online memoirs.

Depending on when you got online, this will either bring back a lot of memories or sound like something from a different century (which technically it is).

The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger

Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

This resonates:

I’m not alone in believing in the fundamental technical uselessness of blockchains. There are tens of thousands of other people in the largest tech companies in the world that thanklessly push their organizations away from crypto adoption every day. The crypto asset bubble is perhaps the most divisive topic in tech of our era and possibly ever to exist in our field. It’s a scary but essential truth to realise that normal software engineers like us are an integral part of society’s immune system against the enormous moral hazard of technology-hyped asset bubbles metastasizing into systemic risk.

The Non-Innovation of Cryptocurrency

There is zero evidence that crypto is creating any technical innovation connected to the larger economy, and a strong preponderance of evidence it is a net drain on society by circumventing the rule of law, facilitating tax evasion, environmental devastation, enabling widespread extortion through ransomware and incentivizing an increasingly frothy ecosystem of scams to defraud the public. Nothing of value would be lost by a blanket cryptocurrency ban.

Sci-Fi & Me – Jeremy Keith – Stay Curious Café by beyond tellerrand - YouTube

Here’s the video of the talk I gave on Wednesday evening all about my relationship with reading science fiction. There are handy chapter markers if you want to jump around.

Stay Curious “Sci-Fi” with Jeremy Keith and Steph Troeth – 16 Jun 2021

I’m excited to do this event with Steph! We’ll be talking about science fiction on the evening of Wednesday, June 16th.

Tickets are from just €10 so grab yours now!

Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing - The Correspondent

A devastating deep dive into the hype of blockchain, written by Jesse Frederik and translated by Hannah Kousbroek:

I’ve never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little. I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection. And I’ve never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution.

2019-11-17 – florian.photo

These are great photos of the speakers at Beyond Tellerrand—great captures of Sharon, Cassie, and Charlotte.

The Layers Of The Web

Here are the slides from my opening keynote at Beyond Tellarrand on Thursday. They don’t make much sense out of context.

Web Layers Of Pace

How cool is this!!?

Tom took one of the core ideas from my talk at Beyond Tellerrand and turned it into this animated CodePen!

The Layers Of The Web - Jeremy Keith on Vimeo

Thanks to the quick work of Marc and his team, the talk I gave at Beyond Tellerrand on Thursday was online within hours!

I’m really pleased with how this turned out. I wasn’t sure if anybody was going to be interested in the deep dive into history that I took for the first 15 or 20 minutes, but lots of people told me that they really enjoyed that part, so that makes me happy.

Take Back Your Web - Tantek Çelik on Vimeo

Tantek’s barnstorming closing talk from Beyond Tellerrand. This is well worth 30 minutes of your time.

Own your domain. Own your content. Own your social connections. Own your reading experience. IndieWeb services, tools, and standards enable you to take back your web.

Eintrag “Take back your web – Tantek Çelik @ Beyond Tellerrand Conference, Düsseldorf 2019” beim Webrocker

Tom shares his thoughts on Tantek’s excellent closing talk at Beyond Tellerrand this week:

Yes, the message of this rather sombre closing talk of this year’s Beyond Tellerrand Conference Düsseldorf is important. Watch it. And then go out, take care of yourself and others, away from the screen. And then come back and publish your own stuff on your own site. Still not convinced? ok, then, please read Matthias Ott’s great article (published on his own site btw), and then start using your own site.

Blockchain and Trust - Schneier on Security

Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They’re only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don’t like government-backed currencies, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money.

Bruce Schneier on the blockchain:

What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

Making single color SVG icons work in dark mode

Another good reason to use the currentColor value in SVGs.

Difference between currentColor & Custom Properties | Mike Riethmuller

I had to read through this twice, but I think I get it now (I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer). Very useful if you’re doing theming in CSS.

What History’s Female Internet Pioneers can Teach us about Tomorrow on Vimeo

The terrific talk from Beyond Tellerrand by Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band.

As we face issues of privacy, identity, and society in a networked world, we have much to learn from these women, who anticipated the Internet’s greatest problems, faced them, and discovered solutions we can still use today.

Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous: Paul Ford - Bloomberg

An astoundingly great piece of writing from Paul Ford, comparing the dot-com bubble and the current blockchain bubble. This resonates so hard:

I knew I was supposed to have an opinion on how the web and the capital markets interacted, but I just wanted to write stuff and put it online. Or to talk about web standards—those documents, crafted by committees at the World Wide Web consortium, that defined the contract between a web browser and a web server, outlining how HTML would work. These standards didn’t define just software, but also culture; this was the raw material of human interaction.

And, damn, if this isn’t the best description the post-bubble web:

Heat and light returned. And bit by bit, the software industry insinuated itself into every aspect of global enterprise. Mobile happened, social networks exploded, jobs returned, and coding schools popped up to convert humans into programmers and feed them to the champing maw of commerce. The abstractions I loved became industries.

Oof! That isn’t even the final gut punch. This is:

Here’s what I finally figured out, 25 years in: What Silicon Valley loves most isn’t the products, or the platforms underneath them, but markets.

Off the Beaten Track · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

I love the way Matthias sums up his experience of the Beyond Tellerrand conference. He focuses on three themes:

• Rediscovering originality,
• Storytelling with code, and
• Adopting new technologies.

I heartily agree with his reasons for attending the conference:

There are many ways to broaden your horizons if you are looking for inspiration: You could do some research, read a book or an article, or visit a new city. But one of the best ways surely is the experience of a conference, because it provides you with many new concepts and ideas. Moreover, ideas that were floating around in your head for a while are affirmed.