1,176 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2022
    1. When I began researching the publisher-library e-lending relationship, I expected it to be straightforward. However, as I dug into the data from dozens of sources, I realized the literature on this topic is largely disjointed. I also found myself asking question after question about the supposed facts I was uncovering. I noticed conflicting information, and opinions inserted into publications that should have been reporting the facts. Data was cherrypicked, and articles were not reporting the whole truth.Whether it has been intentional or not, the library community and general media have portrayed the libraries’ side of the story as indisputable fact instead of what it really is—opinion. It became clear as I researched that, historically, libraries seem to have much more of an issue with the Big Five publishers than most of those publishers have with libraries.I have attempted to correct the error in the current literature by objectively analyzing the publisher-library e-lending events, news, policies, and research from the 2010s, in the hope that readers will gain a comprehensive overview of all sides of the story—not just one side—and see the full, complex picture of what e-lending was like during the decade.

      Conclusion

      The author attempts to reframe the relationship between publishers and libraries over ebooks as antagonism misunderstood. There are a number of crucial areas that she does not take into account or, I think, misinterprets.

    2. They both publicly stated how much they valued libraries, and were merely trying to protect the value of ebooks (not only for themselves, but for their authors) as they became mainstream.

      (Need a citation here about the the rise or fall of profit and profit margins from the Big publishers here.)

    3. In March 2011, after the Vernor v. Autodesk verdict, HarperCollins made a historic change to their library contracts: rather than sell ebooks to libraries on perpetual terms, they would license their ebooks for a maximum of 26 loans, after which libraries could choose to repurchase a license to that ebook at a discounted price.Footnote 24 This applied only to new ebooks.

      Neither the cited Publishers Weekly article nor the New York Times article state that Vernor v. Autodesk was the cause of the historic change, as this sentence seems to imply.

    4. The 2010 court case Vernor v. Autodesk disrupted this business model by challenging the “you bought it, you own it” notion that had long been the standard for physical books.Footnote 23 Resulting from this case, ebooks were deemed computer software that only needed to be licensed, rather than physical products owned by the purchaser. This verdict meant publishers did not need to sell ebooks to libraries with the same freedoms and rights as print books.

      Vernor v. Autodesk

      I've read a little about this case, and I don't think it says that licensing is the only way to sell ebooks. The case does affirm that the licensing provisions trump copyright rights, but it is still possible to "sell" copies of an ebook and be covered by first-sale rights.

    5. MacmillanFootnote 21 did not start e-lending until 2013.

      Trying to reconcile this with what the author stated earlier:

      This leaves Macmillan as the only publisher placed solely in the resister category, as they were the only publisher in the late 2010s to take an aggressive step away from e-lending.

    6. This leaves Macmillan as the only publisher placed solely in the resister category, as they were the only publisher in the late 2010s to take an aggressive step away from e-lending.

      The meaning of this sentence is unclear. Macmillan is the only publisher in the "resister" category and they were the only publisher to "step away" from e-ending? See comment below.

    7. But over the years, the technology and process have significantly improved, reaffirming the validity that there is not enough friction in the e-lending process.

      "Not enough friction" according to who?

    8. Sisto, M.C. Publishing and Library E-Lending: An Analysis of the Decade Before Covid-19. Pub Res Q 38, 405–422 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09880-7

    9. Ebooks are a software product; they never deteriorate, so libraries theoretically never need to buy a new copy.

      "Ebooks never deteriorate"

      The author states that there is a theoretically endless supply of ebooks. She does not take into account the implementation and maintenance costs of systems needed to serve ebooks to patrons.

    1. And what what I like to do in the show and in the book is have people notice those things so that they are aware of all the design decisions that are made around them to make their life a little bit better because it is really easy to not see these things and really think that you're on your own in the world, but you're not, you know, there's a bunch of people that thought about a problem that you've never even thought about and solved it before. You even had to encounter it. And it makes the world more clearly reflect that we are like interconnected group of people that are trying to create a place where we can all live and thrive. And those breakaway bolts are a great example of this.

      Unnoticed design

      The intention of design can go unnoticed, and people may not think of the factors and the expertise that went into making that conscious design choice.

    2. sidewalks became, you know, places for us to sit and congregate when they used to just be the domain or you know, even into the roads that used to just be the domain of roads, like no one took away a road from anybody. But, but like all of a sudden you could form a cafe and people accepted that. And the thing that I love about thinking about cities is that when you're in them, there's a habit of thinking these this thing is the way it is, it was this way when I was born into this world and noticed it and it's very hard to change. But they've always been these evolving entities that reflected our values.

      Design in cities as a reflection of values

      At a time when space to meet outdoors was valued more than as a venue for cars to pass through, streets were given over to cafes to put outdoor seating. The intended use of a space can change over time.

    3. Tony Schwartz. He had this theory that if done well, radio would be more compelling than television because it had more power over the imagination

      Radio more compelling than television

    4. this story of the Montgomery ward complex, that's that's along the river. And Montgomery Ward is, you know, kind of long gone as a company. But there's this one, the headquarters building was this kind of generic, um, rectangular, modernist building. But they had these four concrete post on the corner and I passed this building all the time. I'd never cared much for it. And then the architecture of the curator on the boat, the docent said that, Well, the reason why that building is the way it is, is that the Montgomery Ward Company sort of prided itself on its egalitarian hierarchy. And they wanted to build their headquarters so that there were no um, VPs fighting over who got the corner office. And so they made a building with no possibility of a corner office at all.

      Montgomery Ward complex built with no corner offices

      In a reflection of the company's values, its headquarters was built without the possibility of corner offices. The design of the building eliminated them as possibilities.

    5. From the smallest details to the large scale infrastructure, every piece of the city was thought about designed and built by someone to make one large living thing we could all inhabit together when it all works well. It enables our society to work well too.

      The City as complexity-built-on-complexity

    1. N.T.P. works by telling computers to send tiny, time-stamped messages to time-checking devices superior to them in a hierarchy. The hierarchy’s uppermost layer consists of servers that are closely connected to highly accurate clocks kept in tight synchronization with Coördinated Universal Time. The time then trickles, from strata to strata, to the machines at the bottom of the hierarchy, such as ordinary laptops. The protocol tracks the instants that elapse as a time-checking message is sent, received, returned, and received again by its original sender. All the while, a collection of algorithms—the “popcorn spike suppressor,” the “huff-n’-puff filter”—sifts through the data, singling out falsetickers and truechimers and instructing the clocks on how to adjust their times based on what the time-stamped messages tell them.

      NTP description

    2. He started work at COMSAT, where he had access to funding from the Department of Defense, some of which was earmarked for the ARPANET. “It was a sandbox,” he later told an interviewer. “We just were told, ‘Do good deeds.’ But the good deeds were things like develop electronic mail, and protocols.”

      Early ARPANET: Do Good Deeds

    3. Vital systems—power grids, financial markets, telecommunications networks—rely on it to keep records and sort cause from effect. N.T.P. works in partnership with satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System (G.P.S.), and other technologies to synchronize time on our many online devices. The time kept by precise and closely aligned atomic clocks, for instance, can be broadcast via G.P.S. to numerous receivers, including those in cell towers; those receivers can be attached to N.T.P. servers that then distribute the time across devices linked together by the Internet, almost all of which run N.T.P. (Atomic clocks can also directly feed the time to N.T.P. servers.) The protocol operates on billions of devices, coördinating the time on every continent. Society has never been more synchronized.

      “Society has never been more synchronized”

    4. “I always thought that was sort of black magic,” Vint Cerf, a pioneer of Internet infrastructure, told me.

      Vint Cerf on NTP

      If Vint Cerf thinks it is black magic, you know it is going to be deeply complex code. The rest of the article bears this out.

  2. Sep 2022
    1. On the part of the searcher one move that a lot of people now use is they will use google with the keywords that they have to search for but tell it to only search Reddit increasingly people are turning to Reddit to search for information but they're using google to do it because read its own search function is supposedly not very good.

      Google site search Reddit for higher quality results

      Use the site:reddit.com phrase to search just Reddit.

    2. Search engines like google so often missed their mark is because unlike say a librarian's approach, which might be more like here are 10 books you could read to try to figure out on your own, Google tries to give you the most popular quote, unquote best search results. In other words, a direct answer, it can sort of understand what's on a web page. Find the information that it thinks you're looking for based on its statistical analysis of all of the billions and billions of searches that it sees all the time and feed you an answer and we now have come to think, oh well that must be the answer then.

      Google Search is not like a reference interview

      Google Search tries to give you the answer. A reference interview guides you to sources where you learn your own answer.

    3. It felt like we had finally made it to the very top of human knowledge and it felt like not a constrained experience. It felt like, oh that's done, that's fixed. It works. In fact the google search bar with all of its millions of data points is so good. It changed our expectations of what search is and today that's part of the problem. We were all trained very well to think well now search bars are just like the google search bar everywhere and everywhere. I see a search bar, it's going to be just as good as a google search bar is and then you try that on amazon. For many of us when we type a query into an e commerce website, we expect that the results will be ranked for us by relevance to our search but that is not how it works. So a place that's trying to sell something is trying to sell. Like if it has more of one thing in its warehouses than another, it'll try to push that onto you. If it has something that's on sale, it might show you that first. If it has a product where the people who make it have a pay for play deal with the e commerce site, it'll show you that stuff first. The result is that the thing you search for that you're trying to buy will be buried by results for stuff that the company wants you to buy.

      Applying the Google search experience to other services

      Google's Page Rank algorithm might be good for searching information, but Amazon's search service has different priorities: selling you something that it wants to sell you. This is just one example of how translating the Google search experience to other domains is problematic. Another example is when there is lack of relevance context, like searching email; emails are not inter-linked with each other.

    4. they get billions and billions and billions of searches every day and only about 15% of the searches that they've seen a given day. Our new that they've never seen before. So 85% of the searches that the world does on Google every day are things they've already seen.

      15% of daily searches are unique

      Or, put another way 85% of searches are something that Google has seen before. There is no citation for this, and I think it is more complex than this because Google uses signals other than the keyed search to rank results. Still, an interesting tid-bit if the source could be tracked down.

    5. The same way that ants tell each other there's food over there, but not over there. If an ant walks over the trail and leaves pheromones on it again and again and again, that trail becomes more important to the colony pretty soon with the help of page rank google became a verb.

      Google Page Rank compared to ant pheromone trails

    6. Whereas searching by topic like you would in a library is similar to looking through the table of contents of a book. Keyword search is like using the index. It is much more precise and searching by keyword worked well for a time when you type in a word and get only a couple of dozen results.

      Topical subject (table of contents) versus Index (search)

    7. So in 1945, van ever took to the page and dreamed up an imaginary futuristic solution to the problem of search. A machine called mimics. The mimics would make search easier. It would look like a desk. There'd be a keyboard, viewing screens and storage space for all of human knowledge as long as it was on microfilm and could fit into a dust drawer on the left side there would be all the information in the universe and it would all have links. And then on the right side you would follow those links for the information you wanted. So the search became about connections within the what you were looking for theoretically the user could teach the mimics which words were relevant to each other. So if the word vulture and one document makes me think of death, I could tell the mimics to connect those two words. Then when I search for the word vulture, all the documents featuring death that I previously linked would show up, I could scroll through all the results by turning a crank. In essence, the mimics user could build their own little analog algorithm for search.

      Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex machine

      Memex - Wikipedia for more details. Including creating "trails" of items and linking entries together.

    8. Google was essentially a person, a reference librarian. If you wanted to find something on say growing vegetables, you could go to the gardening or farming sections of the library. But in the thousands of books in that huge section you'd quickly get overwhelmed. That's where reference librarians and archivists come in. They take your topic and help you narrow it down even further, applying their own nuanced knowledge and specialized training to help you search better and find exactly what you're looking for. That's how search operated for centuries by topic mediated by human to human interaction and it works pretty well.

      Reference librarians compared to Google

      Oh, yes, the classic reference interview...asking open-ended questions, probing for more details about what is being sought, then directing the user to the most appropriate resources.

    9. She was a librarian. They were really well organized. The books held all the knowledge that Adam's grandmother wanted to access. It was arranged by topic and author, complete with important search tools, notes and tabs stuck into all the various volumes that she could reference when looking to pull up some tidbit of information.

      Librarian's old-school Zettelkasten

      This has hints of a printed-on-cards Zettelkasten index. And [[Roman Mars]] is comparing the forgetting of the structure to how leaning on digital search systems has decreased our ability to find stuff.

    1. Some children could adapt better without them than others. Throughout his career in education, Pederson has never heard a single parent complain about data protection. But after the Google ban, he did receive complaints—mostly from parents of dyslexic students, who rely on Chromebook tools such as AppWriter.

      Children miss the Chromebook capabilities

      Students that were using accommodations on the Chromebook were now without them.

    2. The Google ban was partly imposed because the data protection regulator discovered Helsingør never carried out a full risk assessment for Google’s school products before using them, as required under Europe’s GDPR privacy law, according to Allan Frank,

      School district did not conduct a risk assessment

      School districts did not have the resources to conduct the assessment. There was a go-with-the-flow attitude, but since we’re concerned about the extent that personal data was being shared with an American company. Done of those we’re concerned about the US government’s ability to access that data.

    3. Denmark’s data protection regulator found that local schools did not really understand what Google was doing with students’ data and as a result blocked around 8,000 students from using the Chromebooks that had become a central part of their daily education.

      Danish data regulator puts a temporary ban on Google education products

    1. That hypothetical "interoperable Facebook" is the subject of a new white paper and narrated slideshow I've just launched with EFF, called "How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Friends."

      "How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Friends"

      New effort by [[Cory Doctorow]] and EFF.

    2. Now, digital technology has intrinsically low switching-costs, because the only digital computer we know how to build – a Turing-complete Von Neumann machine – can run every program we know how to write. Someone can always figure out how to plug something new into something old.

      Digital technology has intrinsically low switching costs

      I usually say this as "it's all ones-and-zeros, it just matters how we slosh the ones and zeros around the 'net". But invoking Turing-complete is a much more academic way of saying this.

    3. Facebook users claim to hate the service, but they keep using it, leading many to describe Facebook as "addictive." But there's a simpler explanation: people keep using Facebook though they hate it because they don't want to lose their connections to the people they love.

      Facebook isn't addictive; people don't want to face the switching cost

    1. They found out that there are truths evident on maps which distances do not full capture which influence customer behavior. One, extremely relevant in Chicagoland and having no rational explanation, is that users prefer not to drive through forest preserves on the way to their bank branch; they’ll go substantially out of their way to avoid mixing greenery with their money.

      People won't drive through forest preserves to a bank (?)

      The author describes the work of John Melaniphy in locating bank branches and states that "users prefer not to drive through forest preserves on the way to their bank branch." A cursory Google search didn't bring up anything relevant, but this would seem to be a fascinating thing to research.

    2. A curb cut is authority granted to you by the owner of the road (often the state government) to make a physical change to your property and the road to allow customers access. Curb cuts alter the properties of traffic management at a block-by-block engineering level.

      Definition of "Curb Cut"

    3. The branch network is an extension of advertising, sometimes extremely literally; there are branches which exist for no purpose other than “had a city-approved large billboard adjacent to a thoroughfare with hundreds of thousands of desirable commuters daily.” The bank built the branch and staffed it with about half a dozen professionals as the cost of being able to put their logo on the billboard for half a century.

      Branch banks as foci for advertising

      The author describes a situation where a branch was situated so it had control over a prominent billboard; the story is unattributed, but seems plausible.

    4. Bank branches are not destinations. Like Starbucks and cell phone shops, they rely on capturing your day-to-day custom when you’re out and about. In the U.S., that mostly means being maximally accessible by cars. (In Japan, and other places with different transit behavior, bank branches are among the most likely user for large parcels directly adjacent to hub train stations, with smaller light branches and ATM-only locations being deployed close to far-from-station workplaces.)

      Bank branches are not destinations

      Banks situate themselves along the paths that people travel...they are not destinations in and of themselves. So placement of branches are guided by modes of transportation: easy car access when cars at the main mode of transport; near transit stops when public transportation is the main mode.

    5. banks are privately funded public infrastructure.

      Banks as privately-funded public infrastructure

      Earlier the author described banks as an institution that "touches most people, particularly in the middle class and above." This has me wondering about the testing program to have post offices in the U.S. offer banking functions for lower income people. That would be quasi-public infrastructure filling a gap in the privately funded offerings.

    1. When contracting with vendors that support open source, ensure that they commit to support future development of the underlying system and contribute their developments back to the community.

      Use contracting to align vendor values with library values

      Put in place agreements with open source support vendors that ensures a long-term commitment to the project by contributing spec development back to the community.

    2. We recommend a three-pronged approach that combines both local and larger-scale actions.

      Recommendations:

      • STRATEGY ONE – Radically Rethink Our Operations to Build the Future We Need
      • STRATEGY TWO – Reframe Contracts for Proprietary Services
      • STRATEGY THREE – Design, Support, and Fund Alternative Solutions Now (“Alternative solutions” include open source, collaborative, and community-driven initiatives.)
    3. libraries of all types must be able to select the services, platforms, and technology providers that match organizational values and meet both long and short-term needs. To that end, we argue that libraries must empower themselves by reestablishing agency and reasserting control over the technical infrastructure critical to libraries' success.

      Importance of organization values

      The first paragraph of the [[ICOLC]] call-to-action has libraries taking control of their destiny (my words). That libraries must be active participants in their technical infrastructure and not passive consumers.

    4. The “Library First Principles” identified by BTAA call for libraries to become the “long-term guardian and preservers of research products” and support “egalitarian access to the tools of knowledge creation.” BTAA’s call for the effective in-housing of library systems through collaboratively owned and supported infrastructure is pivotal in building a sustainable future for libraries.

      Library First Principles

      As described by the Big Ten Academic Alliance, libraries have a "guardian" and "preserver" role for "research products". This includes not only the content itself, but the systems that store and provide access.

    1. SONIA BEN OUAGRHAM-GORMLEY: Yeah, that's—that's the impression it gives. And my point is that the thought experiment is just a thought experiment. It just shows that it is possible to identify new molecules, but there's a long way between the idea and the production of an actual drug or an actual weapon.

      Creating compounds is not as simple as knowing their components

      The producers interview Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley in the bio-defense program at George Mason University. ("I study weapons of mass destruction, particularly biological weapons.") She notes that there is more to creating a compound than knowing its ingredients. There is a science and an art to it as well. So although the source code and the data sets are open access, it still takes chemistry know-how to create the compounds.

    2. FABIO URBINA: Just did a couple of copy-and-paste changes. Typed a '1' where there was a '0' and a '0' where there was a '1.' SEAN EKINS: It was that simple. It was literally that simple. LATIF: He hit 'Run' on Mega-Syn.

      Selecting for harmfulness rather than eliminating it

      As was noted in the paper, they reversed the filter for selecting compounds — selecting for harmfulness rather than eliminating harmful compounds. As the interview goes on, the paper authors reveal that Mega-Syn "discovered" VX and other similarly harmful compounds.

    3. paper

      Urbina, F., Lentzos, F., Invernizzi, C. et al. Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery. Nat Mach Intell (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9

    1. For example, it explains why Web3 – notionally a project to remake the web without Big Tech choke­points – is so closely associated with cryptocurrency. It’s not just the ideological notion that if we paid for things, companies would abandon surveillance and sensationalism (a dubious proposition!); it’s the idea that the internet could be remade as something that can only be used by people who have cryptocur­rency tokens. The internet is not a luxury. It’s a necessity, as the pandemic and the lockdown proved. Without the internet, you are cut off from family life, healthcare, employment, leisure, access to government services, political discourse, civic life, and romance. Those are all things you need, not just things you want. If you need cryptocurrency to access these services on a replacement, transactional internet built on the blockchain, then you will do work and sell goods in exchange for cryptocurrency tokens. They will become the new hut-tax, and the fact that everyone who wants the things the internet provides has to trade work or goods for cryptos will make cryptos very moneylike.

      Web3 creates a need for cryptocurrencies

      If cryptocurrencies become required to do any transaction on the internet, then "everyone who wants the things the internet provides has to trade work or good for crypto".

    2. Money, then, is intrinsically linked to liabilities: something is moneylike if you need it to settle some kind of obligation.

      Money is tied to liabilities: the need to settle an obligation

    3. thought experiment devised by economist Warren Mosler, one of the foremost proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, the theory built upon this understanding of money): Sometimes when Mosler is explaining money to an audience, he’ll hold up a handful of his business-cards and ask, “Who will stay after the lecture and help stack the chairs and mop the floor in exchange for one of my cards?” When no hands go up, Mosler adds, “What if I told you that there were gun-toting security guards at the all the exits, and they will only let you leave in exchange for one of my cards?” Every hand shoots up. Mosler has just turned his cards into money, through the creation of a non-discretionary door-tax. Now, Mosler didn’t need to get his business-cards from the audience before he could levy this tax. He is the sole supplier of his cards, and while the audience will treat them as money, Mosler won’t. Mosler doesn’t need business-cards – he needs people to help clean the lecture hall and stack the chairs. At the end of the night, when the security guards turn over all the collected cards to him, he doesn’t need them – he can’t pay for his airfare to the next lecture using his cards, or pay for his hotel room with them. Indeed, given how cheap business cards are to produce, he can just dump all those used cards in a shredder. When people say, “Government budgets aren’t like household budgets,” this is what they mean. Mosler isn’t a currency user in this thought-exper­iment, he’s a currency issuer. Mosler needs your work, not your “money.” He has all the money (Mosler’s business cards). You can’t get money (Mosler’s business cards), except from Mosler. When you pay your door-tax to Mosler’s armed agents, you aren’t giving him your money – you’re giving him his own money back.

      Mosler's payment-in-business-cards explanation

      Mosler issues the business cards and his students find them valuable. They aren't valuable to Mosler—he can just print more. But it becomes Mosler's job to keep the economy of business cards in check—too many and no one will help stack the chairs; too few and there will be students left in the room who can't leave.

    4. Debt describes our best, most evidence-supported historical understand­ing of the origin of money in the needs of the empires of the Axial Age (800 BCE to 600 CE). As imperial armies went a-conquering, they needed some way to provision the soldiers garrisoned in their far-flung territories. The solution was elegant – and terrible. Soldiers were paid in coin, minted and controlled by the state, which punished counterfeiters with the most terrible torments. Conquered farmers were taxed in coin, on penalty of violence and expropriation. Thus: the soldiers had coin and the farmers needed it. This meant that farmers would be willing to trade their produce for coin, which meant that soldiers would be provisioned. Tax-bills were nondiscretionary liabilities: failure to pay your tax would lead to violence and ruin. The value of money, then, came from taxation – from the fact that farmers needed coins. This need rippled out through society: Even if you didn’t farm, you would accept coins in exchange for your own labor and goods, because the farmers would accept coins in exchange for food (which everyone needs), because farmers needed coin to settle their tax-debts. Coins became money because there was a nondiscretionary, terrible obligation that you could only fulfill with coins.

      Doctorow summarizes the origin of money as imperial debt

      Cory Doctorow is summarizing the research of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. A government needed to pay its soldiers, so they were paid in coins. Conquered farmers needed to pay taxes in coins, so they would exchange with the soldiers for food. Others in the village saw that coins were valuable (in exchange for food), so they exchanged their labor for coins too.

      There is also a story about the British Empire imposing a "hut tax" in Africa.

    1. so I save web archive links too as an annotation

      I do a similar thing—everything I annotate in Hypothesis (or simply bookmark with Pinboard) is saved in Wayback. I've considered adding a perma.cc subscription, but $170/year seems a little steep for 100 links/month.

      Grabbing a local Markdown copy of articles to store locally is an interesting idea...one worth considering; thanks!

    2. If you use h., I’d be interested to hear about it.

      I do! 525 annotations since 2012, but I took a long break and only started re-using it late last year. The social part of annotations has been useful for me in a few cases, but for the most part I annotate to get quotes and my thoughts about them into my own Obsidian vault. (I don't use an Obsidian plugin...instead I side-load the Markdown files with a Python script.) I haven't yet added Hypothesis to my blog, but it is on my list of things to do.

      I'll second what Colby said in an earlier comment: Peter Hagen's work on annotations.lindylearn.io has been invaluable in expanding the quality content that crosses my screen.

    1. thought to be a potential approach to create a better consensus in a world where multiple truths sometimes seem to co-exist. Today, each side argues only their “truth” is true, and the other is a lie, which has made it difficult to find agreement. The bridging algorithm looks for areas where both sides agree. Ideally, platforms would then reward behavior that “bridges divides” rather than reward posts that create further division.

      Bridging-based Ranking definition

      Ranking higher comments in which multiple groups can agree.

    1. These records were not created for the purpose of corporate gain or fiscal sustainability, though corporations may develop enhanced services that rely on this data.

      Conflicting values of libraries versus the co-op

      This is the inherent conflict, I think—libraries are expressing their values through the open sharing of bibliographic data to improve services to their own patrons and to patrons of other libraries. The cooperative has similar values, but its actions appear to prioritize its own enrichment over the benefit of the whole.

    2. While libraries pay substantial fees to OCLC and other providers for services including deduplication, discovery, and enhancement, they do not do so with the intent that their records should then be siloed or restricted from re-use. Regardless of who has contributed to descriptive records, individual records are generally not copyrightable, nor is it in the public interest for their use to be restricted.

      Libraries are not contributing records to the intent that access can be restricted

      This is the heart of the matter, and gets to the record use policy debate from the last decade. Is the aggregation of catalog records a public good or a public good? The second sentence—"nor is it in the public interest for their use to be restricted"—is the big question in my mind.

    1. Squint Hard Enough: Evaluating Perceptual Hashing with Machine Learning

      Jonathan Prokos, Tushar M. Jois, Neil Fendley, Roei Schuster, Matthew Green, Eran Tromer, and Yinzhi Cao

      Preprint: Cryptology ePrint Archive

      Abstract

      Many online communications systems use perceptual hash matching systems to detect illicit files in user content. These systems employ specialized perceptual hash functions such as Microsoft's PhotoDNA or Facebook's PDQ to produce a compact digest of an image file that can be approximately compared to a database of known illicit-content digests. Recently, several proposals have suggested that hash-based matching systems be incorporated into client-side and end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) systems: in these designs, files that register as illicit content will be reported to the provider, while the remaining content will be sent confidentially. By using perceptual hashing to determine confidentiality guarantees, this new setting significantly changes the function of existing perceptual hashing -- thus motivating the need to evaluate these functions from an adversarial perspective, using their perceptual capabilities against them. For example, an attacker may attempt to trigger a match on innocuous, but politically-charged, content in an attempt to stifle speech.

      In this work we develop threat models for perceptual hashing algorithms in an adversarial setting, and present attacks against the two most widely deployed algorithms: PhotoDNA and PDQ. Our results show that it is possible to efficiently generate targeted second-preimage attacks in which an attacker creates a variant of some source image that matches some target digest. As a complement to this main result, we also further investigate the production of images that facilitate detection avoidance attacks, continuing a recent investigation of Jain et al. Our work shows that existing perceptual hash functions are likely insufficiently robust to survive attacks on this new setting.

    1. This research suggests that the greatest challenges faced by library systems maintainers are ageneral ignorance about the nature of this work and an unpredictable swing from invisibility tohypervisibility within the library. When the hypervisibility results from stress-inducing bugs whichare outside their control, this hypervisibility leads to negative affective experiences, apparentlyat a higher-level among women. In some cases, the affective strain results from harshcommunications from stressed coworkers. It can also be caused by the maintainer'sdissatisfaction with their inability to help others and questioning their own competence.

      The personal toll of wild, unpredictable swings from invisibility to hyper-visibility

    2. Vendor support, or the lack thereof, was a consistent pain point in the network. Participants feltthey could not rely on the vendor to solve bugs in the ILS in a timely manner. Most expressed alevel of dissatisfaction with the support they received. A particular theme was that of a ticketlanguishing for weeks in the tier-one support queue before escalation to someone who would fixit.

      Importance of competent tier-1 support from the vendor

    3. Participants identified a lack of understanding of what it is that they do as a key contributor tothe invisibility of their work. Communicating about technology can be time-consuming work andcut into one's time to accomplish other things. Nor are such communications requested. Thesense that only technology workers can or should be familiar with technology can be damagingat all levels of the library.

      Relationship between invisible work and necessity of communication

      If there is not an understanding in the non-technical library staff about what it is that the technical staff do, the work is effectively "invisible". Making non-technical staff aware of the work takes communication, which is an added duty. Non-technical staff may also actively avoid becoming familiar with the technical activities…perhaps a "somebody else's problem" blinder.

    4. Five themes emerged from the coding: unpredictability, invisibility/time, collaboration,communication, and affective impact. Just as few jobs can be broken into truly discrete tasks,none of these themes stands by itself. The fifth theme, affective impact emerged in discussionsof the four other themes.

      Themes from the library system maintainers interviews

    5. A legacy ILS is one which is still used by many libraries but is no longer the focus of the vendor's activedevelopment work. In this study, that includes Aleph, Symphony, and Voyager and, with Ex Libris'spurchase of III, may soon include Sierra.

      Defining "Legacy ILS" based on a company's development actions

      I've found that "legacy" is often viewed from the perspective of the user/operator. This definition relies on the development activities of the creator, which is a more universal attribute (instead of the perceptions of the software status in each library).

    6. In this article, maintenance is defined to include regular system upgrades, updating systemsettings, addressing bugs and issues, upkeep of integrations with other institutional systems,and minor tasks to improve user experience or support existing functions. The latter type ofwork spans maintenance and innovation,5 but when it consists of bringing existing systems intoalignment with expectations and work already being performed, it aligns closely with other areasof maintenance included here.

      Working definition of ILS maintenance

    7. Tillman, Ruth Kitchin. Indispensable, Interdependent, and Invisible: A Qualitative Inquiry into Library Systems Maintenance. College and Research Libraries Journal. January 2023

      Author's accepted manuscript copy

    1. Modbus is a different protocol - you'll notice  that it says request, reply, request, reply.   You have to ask for data from the  other end before it will be sent back.   What this means is you can't cut one of those  wires. You've got to have the ability to transmit   data from one end to the other.

      Modbus requires transmit and receive

      In this jump box, the controller sends a request for a specific piece of data and the system returns it: transmit and receive. This uses the modbus protocol.

    2. it turns out it was using conventional  serial: you've got a receive and a transmit pair.   The thing is with a lot of serial systems  like this, what you can do, is you can  

      Security by only allowing transmit over serial; no receiving

      just cut one of the lines, so the data's being transmitted from the bridge systems through to the monitoring system. There is literally no way for me to get data back in the other direction. So in this case the system was secure.

      There is a stream of serial data going down the wire to the jump box, but the receive line was cut so no commands could possibly go back.

    3. The thing is that people add these   jump boxes - pivots between different networks -  they want to get data out from the control system   to the business network. They want to be able to  monitor things.

      Jump boxes

      Devices that are intentionally added to the industrial control system network to allow access from the business network. These cross the security "air gap" set up between the networks. This is useful, though, for getting performance data from the industrial control system to the monitors and resource trackers on the business network.

    4. much of hacking  is about understanding systems better than those   who built them and using that knowledge  to do what is supposed to be "impossible"

      Knowing the system you are attacking better than the builders

    5. So they're vertical divisions and this has an  impact on how you design the networks on them.   You have what are called "RDPs" - remote  distribution points - massive network   switches in each one of those fire zones. And to  get all of these different signals into the cabins   you have what are called "cabin switches"  - so every pair of cabins will have a cabin   switch that does the TV, the VoIP, the water,  the lighting - all of those different things.

      Cruise ships are divided into vertical "fire zones"

      So they go vertically down the ship, so you don't have to make holes going across to carry those cables.

      Vertically down these zones are a series of cabin switches, and the cabin switch does the job of handling the VLAN trunking for access to services.

    1. "Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won't give you the key, that lock is not for your benefit."

      Doctorow's First Law

      In this case, that Audible is selling audio books and requiring producers to use its DRM. This, of course, makes it impossible to take your purchased/licensed content to another audio book provider.

    1. The real central control point in Ethereum is Infura — an interface to the Ethereum blockchain owned by ConsenSys. Almost 100% of useful Ethereum transactions go through Infura, because coding to Infura is vastly easier than coding directly to the blockchain. Infura has been Ethereum’s central point of control for many years.

      Centralized Ethereum interface layer

      Because Infura's level of abstraction is easier to code then directly on the blockchain.

    2. Staking is already as centralised as mining. The Lido staking pool plus the Coinbase exchange plus the Kraken exchange add up to over 54% of total stake. Thems what has, gets.

      Proof-of-stake is already centralized

      Public records of the staked Ether shows that three entities have over 54% of the total stakes. These entities will reap the ongoing benefit of proof-of-stake with every block that is verified.

    3. You throw away computing power as fast as possible to show you deserve the bitcoins. Your chance of winning the bitcoin lottery is in direct proportion to how much you waste. Bitcoin mining now uses over 0.5% of all the electricity in the world — for the same seven transactions per second it managed to do in 2009. Bitcoin is the most inefficient payment system in human history.

      Proof-of-work effects

    1. The processing systems fee is generally fairly low, around one 10th of a percent of the total purchase. There's a large market the merchant can choose from, which can keep this cost down. Then there's the credit card's network fee, around a quarter of a percent. And the largest fee of the system also happens here. The interchange fee, it's usually around two to 3%.

      Credit card fees

      The interchange fee is variable, and is paid to the bank. If a merchant wants to accept a network's cards, it must accept all of the variable interchange fees.

    1. George Erasmus

      Community requires common memory

      Georges Erasmus, an Aboriginal leader from Canada, said, "Where common memory is lacking, where people do not share in the same past, there can be no real community. Where community is to be formed, common memory must be created." Mark Charles: Our common memory from our traumatized past. I can't find an original source for this quote.

    2. they both agreed our past our history which included the enslavement of African people and the genocide of native peoples and our foundations which are based on the

      Can America be great when its foundation includes the Doctrine of Discovery

      doctrine of discovery and the lie of white supremacy they both agreed those things were great they disagreed if we were great in 2016 Donald said no and Hillary said yes

      Make-America-Great-Again versus America-is-already-great...is this an acceptance of the fundamental unfairness of everything that hinges on the Doctrine of Discovery? From the speaker's eyes, it can't be. He goes on to say: "but the truth is we are white supremacist, racist, and sexist as a nation because of our foundations and we don't know what to do with that."

    3. we only have what's called the right of occupancy to the land like a fish would occupy water our bird would occupy the air and Europeans have the right of discovery to the land the fee title to the land

      "Right of Occupancy" versus "Right of Discovery"

      In the 1823 Supreme Court decision of Johnson vs. M'Intosh, the court determined that the "Right of Discovery"—where title to the land flowed from the government's discovery action—trumped the "Right of Occupancy"—where the native tribe transferred title to the land. This created the legal precedent for [[land titles]].

    4. a few years later our founding fathers wrote another document they started this one with words we the people of the United States this of course is the preamble to the Constitution

      Inequity in the U.S. Constitution

      The speaker goes on to describe the inherent inequities in the U.S. Constitution, which also says "we the people". Notably, the lack of rights for women (pointing out "51 gender specific male pronouns"), no mention of natives, and counting Africans as three-fifths.

    5. this of course makes our Declaration of Independence a systemically white supremacist document that assumes the dehumanization of indigenous peoples

      Declaration of Independence as a systemically white supremacist document

      Whereas the Declaration calls the native people "savages" and the drafters of the Declaration wanted to maintain the ability to colonize additional lands, "All men are created equal" is only true for the "all men" that looked like the drafters.

    6. few years later they wrote a letter of protest in their letter they accused the king of raising the conditions of new appropriations of land

      Declaration of Independence pushes back on the right to take indigenous lands

      One of the complaints in the Declaration of Independence is that the King of England changed the conditions under which settlers were taking lands from native inhabitants. The settlers wanted to keep taking land and were upset that the king no longer allowed it.

      In the talk, the speaker is juxtaposing this with the "All men are created equal" statement at the beginning of the Declaration.

    7. you cannot discover lands already inhabited

      Fatal flaw in the Doctrine of Discovery

      Papal Bulls written from 1450 to 1493 that gave permission to European Christian explorers to claim land that was not already claimed and ruled over by European explorers. It assumes the dehumanization of the existing inhabitants.

    8. wherever I go around the country first just to honor them and to thank them for the years they've steward hid these lands and second to remind myself to remind us to be more humble as we walk

      A Native American's view of land acknowledgement statements

      on these lands acknowledging that there is a story that though that goes beyond the history that we've read and that we were taught in our schools

    9. the Navajo culture when you introduce yourself you always name your four clans or a maitre lineal people and our identities come from our mother's mother

      Names in Navajo Culture

    1. Bank branches are no longer self-contained entities. They are feeders into a lather conglomeration of services intended to draw in new customers and sell new services to existing customers.

    2. In the past, branch managers were far more akin to CEO of their branch, with substantial authority to influence underwriting decisions on loans or make accommodations for customers; this is largely on the wane. At most banks they are sales player-coaches with some vestigial customer service and regulatory functions.

      Bank personnel are now primarily salespeople

    3. Bank branches exist to sell new accounts. They are sited to maximize new accounts and the value of those accounts. They are staffed to maximize new accounts and cross-sells to existing customers (which will often be called “relationships” at a bank). Everything down to the physical layout of branches and sometimes even the relative paucity of non-branch options ("channels" in the lingo, li

      Bank branches exist to sell new accounts

    1. Wonder why everyone under the sun wants you to have an account on their site? One major reason is that it gives customers a history that allows a business to direct more of its anti-fraud attention to (more risky) first-time users than (less risky) multi-year regular customers. Allowing guest checkouts is a business decision to accept more fraud (and less ability to market to the customer) in return for marginal sales.

      E-commerce site accounts factor into anti-fraud algorithms

    2. Trust, though, is an immensely socially useful technology. Human civilization has a fundamental limitation in that all humans can be trivially killed while sleeping. Huge portions of society’s efforts go toward establishing conditions where this trivial vulnerability virtually never gets exploited.

      Trust is a valuable societal concept

      Civilizations spend enormous effort ensuring that trust exists.

    3. That $10 to $20 billion number we threw around earlier? This is what happens to it, in the ordinary course of business. This allocation of loss is mostly automatic, virtually never involves a court or lawyer, and only sometimes takes human effort at the margin at all.

      Companies accept consumer fraud as a cost of doing business

      Fraud is built into the business model as an expense.

    4. Fraud is a unique subset of crime which occurs, to a major degree, subject to the enforcement efforts of non-state actors. A commanding majority of all fraud which is stopped, detected, adjudicated, and even punished (!) gets those done to it by one or more private sector actors. And the private sector has, in this case, policy decisions to make, which, like the public sector’s decisions, balance the undesirability of fraud against the desirability of social goods such as an open society, easy access to services, and (not least!) making money.

      Fraud in modern society is handled by non-state actors

    5. Fraud is an unavoidable part of commerce in a society that values any sort of lower friction transactions. Companies accept differing amounts of fraud depending on the nature of the business. Fraud prevention and punishment is more external to government than other types of crime.

  3. Aug 2022
    1. "A lot of the [future] applications get tied via marketing to 5G or 6G, but in reality, they may run mostly over Wi-Fi, because with Wi-Fi 6, the [technology] went from OFDM to OFDMA, which is more like 6G," says Phil Solis, research director for IDC's Enabling Technologies team for wireless and mobile connectivity technologies and semiconductors. OFDMA (orthogonal frequency-division multiple access) is a technology in Wi-Fi 6 enabling concurrent uplink and downlink communication with multiple clients by assigning subsets of subcarriers called Resource Units (RUs) to the individual clients, supporting larger data transmission channels and greater security. "So the point is that Wi-Fi is getting better and better, too," Solis adds.

      Convergence of mobile and Wi-Fi technologies

      WiFi 6 introduced some technologies under consideration for 6G, so there may be a natural convergence.

    2. In addition to needing to support higher data rates, sending data via air interfaces generally requires higher frequencies than are used for 4G or 5G networks. Whereas today's 5G signals tend to operate in the 3.4Ghz to 3.8Ghz range, with future 5G implementations operating up to about 5Ghz, wireless 6G networks likely will use frequencies located in the terahertz or sub-terahertz range, roughly 95Ghz to 3Thz.

      Proposed frequency ranges of 95Ghz to 3Thz

      At this high frequency level, propagation will become an issue, and there are experiments involving passive and active reflective surfaces in combination with higher density electronics.

    3. A key challenge with the development of 6G technology is identifying the technological approach to transmitting faster data rates. Several approaches are under consideration, but it is likely signal multiplexing techniques that support improved spectral efficiency within the area they are deployed will be used, including techniques such as Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) and Massive Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (mMIMO).

      Technical approaches building in Wi-Fi standards

    4. "I think the key thing with 6G is, and I think this is quite refreshing, is that it's going to be a network of networks, an amalgam of complementary technologies," says Stephen Douglas, head of market strategy for Spirent, a U.K.-based provider of automated testing and assurance solutions. "In addition to having a macro terrestrial network, you're potentially going to have these body area networks where humans are part of it as well." Douglas adds it is likely 6G will allow the interlinking of wireless networks with satellite, drone, maritime, and fiber-linked networks, resulting in a fully connected ecosystem.

      From body-area-networks to satellite connections

      What seems to be coming in the next evolution of mobile networks is an alignment and seamless handoff between low-power or high data rate close-in networks to broad area networks. It will be a combination of standards that drive this capability.

      Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into the mess that USB-C seems to be turning into.

    5. Citation: Kirkpatrick, Keith. The Road to 6G. Communications of the ACM, September 2022, Vol. 65 No. 9, Pages 14-16 10.1145/3546959

      Although it is early in the commercial rollout of 5G mobile networks, countries, companies and standards bodies are gearing up for what will be in the next version—so called “6G” mobile network. There are already experimental allocation of high frequency radio bands and testing that has occurred at about 100m distances. The high frequency will mean higher bandwidth, but over shorter distances. There are experiments to make passive graphene reflectors on common surfaces to help with propagation. What may come is a convergence of 6G with WiFi 6 to support connectivity from body-area networks to low earth orbit satellites.

    1. we calculate that when you turn on the engine and  step on the gas and go for every inch of highway   you are crunching 20 billion ancient plants  through your car engine

      Number of phytoplankton-turned-oil to move an inch

    2. How Many Fossils to Go an Inch? (ft. Robert Krulwich). Minute Physics. 18-Aug-2022. 6:25.

      Guest video by Robert Krulwich and Nate Milton

    3. how many of those ancient trees are in effect  being harvested to power this home for one month   well it turns out that a thousand kilowatt hours  that's the electricity bill comes from burning   about a half ton of coal which is the energy  equivalent of two ancient trees

      Number of ancient trees of coal used in a month's electricity bill

      For 1,000 kWh—the average electricity usage for a home—the half-ton of coal is equivalent to two 60-foot trees.

    1. we could find a new attack vectors in RCS the fact is that some RCS course can't recognize their users only based on the public IP address and the

      Some RCS core services use weak identity

      If an attacker is on the same local network as a victim, that attacker can spoof messages to a third party without the victim knowing. The RCS core service uses username and IP address to authenticate user—both of which can be read in the open over the network. The victim would not know the spoofed message was sent.

    2. coming back to the attacker would include the user's IP address device model and different information based on that IP address attacker will be able to

      SIP OPTIONS response from the network can be used to roughly locate device

      roughly locate the location of victim based on the IP geolocation databases especially if that IP address is ipv6

    3. let's start giving a bit of a recap of all these vulnerabilities that I talked about and be basically aligned to what we defined as intercept for example

      5 areas of vulnerabilities

      1. Intercept calls and texts
      2. Impersonate user identity
      3. Track users
      4. Conduct fraud
      5. DoS users or network

      For each of these types of attacks, vulnerabilities were found in RCS to exploit them.

    4. so when you make a call over 4G that call goes over IP or has to go over 3G

      Dedicated voice channels disappeared in 4G

    5. Mobile Network Hacking, IP Edition. by Karsten Nohl, Luca Melette & Sina Yazdanmehr. Black Hat. London. December 2-5, 2019. 47 minute video. https://www.blackhat.com/eu-19/briefings/schedule/index.html#mobile-network-hacking-ip-edition-17617

      Mobile networks have gone through a decade of security improvements ranging from better GSM encryption to stronger SIM card and SS7 configurations. These improvements were driven by research at this and other hacking conferences.

      Meanwhile, the networks have also mushroomed in complexity by integrating an ever-growing number of IT technologies from SIP to WiFi, IPSec, and most notably web technologies.

      This talk illustrates the security shortcomings when merging IT protocols into mobile networks. We bring back hacking gadgets long thought to be mitigated, including intercepting IMSI catchers, remote SMS intercept, and universal caller ID spoofing.

      We explore which protection measures are missing from the mobile network and discuss how to best bring them over from the IT security domain into mobile networks.

    1. If this fits your style and you don’t get any value out of having cards with locators like 3a4b/65m1, then don’t do that (for you) useless make-work. Make sure your system is working for you and you’re not working for your system.

      Risks of replicating physical attributes in digital systems

      This article makes so much sense, but this sentence more than any other. As librarians will will know, a physical book can only be put in one place on a shelf...you can't realistically replicate a book and put it in groupings with all like-minded books. The call number was invented to bring organization to the physical space and the card catalog was invented to have a way for representations of the books—cards!—interfiled in many places to help with finding the book. Luhmann's card numbering sequence was the first thing I dropped when reading about Zettelkasten, and those that insist on that mechanism for their digital slip boxes are artificially constraining their electronic systems with a physical world limitation.

    1. Writing about anything – a novel, a historical primary source, an exam question – is at least a three-way dialogue. In the case of this handbook the conversation is between me, the writer; you, the reader; and the material. Similarly, writing about something you have read or researched should serve at least three purposes: to explore the material; to describe your reactions to it; and to communicate with your reader.

      Writing is a three-way dialog

      First, it is a conversation between an author, a reader, and the material. It is also an exploration of your research, your reaction to the material, and what you—as the author—is trying to communicate to the reader. Keeping each component of these triplets in mind as the writing (and likely reviewing of the writing) happens makes for engaging reading.

    2. The way you begin writing notes, observations, and ideas may not resemble the final form of the output you want to create. And the ideas, interpretations, and themes on which you end up concentrating may also not be what you had originally anticipated. Don’t worry about that. Stay open to discovery.

      Note-making is not perfection

      Keep in mind that the notes are not the final output…they are a means to the final output. Polishing will come later.

      This makes me wonder about the email conversation I had with Dan Whaley about my use of Hypothesis. He notes that my annotations were like personal notemaking rather than conversational between community members (as I presume others are using Hypothesis to do). These annotations are feeding into my PKM tool, but I said I wasn’t opposed to conversations springing up from them. (In fact, when that has happened, that has been quite useful.) But I wonder if that is putting pressure on me to make these notes more perfect than if I made them private to only feed into my PKM.

    1. For example, teen boys are more likely than teen girls to say they use YouTube, Twitch and Reddit, whereas teen girls are more likely than teen boys to use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. In addition, higher shares of Black and Hispanic teens report using TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp compared with White teens

      Gender and race difference in the Pew data

      Later: black and Hispanic teen usage of the near-constant use of the internet is significantly higher than for whites.

    2. Since 2014-15, there has been a 22 percentage point rise in the share of teens who report having access to a smartphone (95% now and 73% then). While teens’ access to smartphones has increased over roughly the past eight years, their access to other digital technologies, such as desktop or laptop computers or gaming consoles, has remained statistically unchanged.

      Now near ubiquity in Smartphone usage; desktop and gaming console usage are near identical

    3. The landscape of social media is ever-changing, especially among teens who often are on the leading edge of this space. A new Pew Research Center survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17 finds TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey. Some 67% of teens say they ever use TikTok, with 16% of all teens saying they use it almost constantly. Meanwhile, the share of teens who say they use Facebook, a dominant social media platform among teens in the Center’s 2014-15 survey, has plummeted from 71% then to 32% today.

      Instagram up, Facebook down, TikTok and Snapchat are big

      This echos Meta’s concerns that Facebook was losing ground in this age demographic, and likely also the reasoning to make Instagram more TikTok-like. This may also dovetail with the recently announced change to the Facebook algorithm to be even more sticky and TikTok-like.

    1. I think it leaves social networking, or what will replace it, in a much better place. What about this time around we build products whose primary focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)! Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue! What a concept!

      Is the next social network focused on sharing rather than advertising?

      This sounds like what Ethan Zuckerman proposes: re-imagined social media spaces...communities of people owning the rules for the space they are in, and then having loosely connected spaces interact.

    2. "Facebook is fundamentally an advertising machine"—it hasn't been about bringing people closer together in a long time (if that was ever its real mission). And as a better advertising machine comes along—TikTok—Facebook is forced to redesign its user interaction to be more addictive just to stand still. Will a a more human-scale social network...or series of social networks...replace it?

    1. A new idea can simply receive a new number in sequence, allowing notes to easily break free from a strict, preconceived hierarchical organization.

      Fluid, not pre-defined, organization

      This is related to the "Loose Filing and Interconnectedness" concept from Christian at Zettelkasten.de.

      I think about how my own interests have evolved over time, and how I couldn't have come up with a topical organization or ontology beforehand.

    2. Luhmann’s system uses index cards (German=zettel) in a slip box (German=kasten).

      German origin of "Zettelkasten"

    1. Loose Filing and Interconnectedness are Key

      "Communicating" with your Zettelkasten

      This is reminiscent of Google's Gmail "search not sort" philosophy. Use the links between notes as a way of encoding relationships rather putting related notes iin one document.

    1. what we mean by zettelkasten. The word itself is German and means “slip box.” It is literally a box with notes written on slips of paper or index cards. So, a zettelkasten is a thing, a storage device.

      Zettelkasten is German for "slip box"

      Could also be called a card index. Meant to be a portable method for storing knowledge. Representative concepts from sources are written on paper to be stored in the slip box. Each slip is one main idea or fact, and it can be linked to other slips.

    2. “tag briefs” or “topic briefs” and “memos”

      This is an aggregation/map of all notes on a given concept or combination of concepts. Also called maps of content and structure notes.

    3. “memos,â€

      These contain your own thoughts on concepts or combinations of concepts. Also called evergreen notes and permanent notes. This can be a narrative form summary or a description of connections you are observing. The key is that this is your pass at generating new knowledge.

    4. First is to take notes as you read. Whether you take a quote or not, always write a short summary in your own words of the source overall and of any key passages that are of particular interest to you or relevant to your ongoing research.

      How To Implement Zettelkasten Method

      In taking notes, write a summary or summaries of key passages of interest. Include a full citation back to the original so you can get back to it. Include thoughts and reactions to the piece. Link to related notes, concepts, people, organizations, etc.

    5. The goal should be to make a contribution by creating something new.

      A Zettelkasten is a means to an end

      The idea is not to just collect knowledge. The idea is to organize knowledge in a way that generates new knowledge and ideas.

    1. The academic research that was footnoted in the Wikipedia articles was found to be cited more often in subsequent academic publications, as well.

      Academic research used in Wikipedia articles drives more citations

    2. Now comes a new paper from MIT and Maynooth University in Ireland offering yet more evidence of Wikipedia’s elevated status, finding that judges routinely rely on its articles not just for background information but for core legal reasoning and specific language they use in their decisions.

      Thompson, Neil and Flanagan, Brian and Richardson, Edana and McKenzie, Brian and Luo, Xueyun, Trial by Internet: A Randomized Field Experiment on Wikipedia’s Influence on Judges’ Legal Reasoning (July 27, 2022). Forthcoming in Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence, editor Kevin Tobia, Cambridge University Press, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4174200 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4174200

    1. Monasteries and convents served as models for the dorm and for the campus itself. Walled off from a threatening medieval world, they provided security for contemplation and worship while also serving as a place where learning, the arts, music, horticulture, and other cultural activities might flourish.

      College dormitories rooted in monastery and convent styles

    1. actors in the motion capture suits, referred to as zhongzhiren in Chinese and naka no hito in Japanese

      “Person in the Middle” name for virtual environment actors

      It refers to the person at the center of the technology fulfilling the physical aspects of the virtual world — the person in the motion capture suit.

    1. Conservationists opposed to new copper or lithium mines may point to recycling as a solution. It’s not. While a recycling and reuse industry for EV batteries will be needed, it won’t come anywhere close to supplying the necessary metals. If the number of EVs on the road today remained static for the next 20 years, recycling the metals in them might be able to make up the bulk of the demand. But EV sales are growing exponentially. There were 3 million electric cars sold globally in 2020, according to the IEA. That more than doubled in 2021 to 6.6 million. By 2030, S&P Global forecasts there will be nearly 27 million sold annually.

      Recycling won’t be enough

      The availability of recycled components won’t match the demand for new components. Also remember that the industry has reached almost 100% recycling of automotive lead acid batteries.

    2. A battery electric vehicle requires 2.5 times more copper than a standard internal combustion engine vehicle. Much of that is in the electric motor, some in the battery. There simply aren’t enough copper mines being built or expanded to provide all the copper needed to produce the 27 million EVs that S&P Global has forecast to be sold annually by 2030.

      Requirements for batteries

    3. There was enough lithium mined in 2021 to supply 11.4 million EVs, according to the World Economic Forum. If EV sales double again over the next couple of years, the EV market will already exceed the current global supply of lithium, unless new mines and refiners come into production by then. Llithium prices are up 380% from a year ago, according to Kitco.

      Requirements for lithium

  4. Jul 2022
    1. Oil, by the way, is a key ingredient in food. This is something a lot of people don't understand. There's this thing called the haber bosh process, which basically creates all of the nitrogen and all of the fertilizer that is used to grow food.

      Oil is a component of fertilizer

      The effect is that the oil price become a component of the price of food.

    2. A recession is just a lot of people feeling bad vibes at the same time.

      Economic recessions as a popular notion

    3. NBER, the National Bureau of Economic Research. They have this timing committee that looks at the economy as a whole and all of the data about the economy and looks back at where it was. And then after the fact will come out and say, you know what, we had a recession back then. It's not very useful because at that point we're normally pretty sure that there had been a recession in the past. There's no good indicator of whether there's a recession in the present. But there are some okay indicators like, for instance, has the unemployment rate shot up by half a percentage point and no, it hasn't.

      National Bureau of Economic Research determines recessions

      They do this after-the fact by looking at recent historic data. But this is the official U.S. Government statement on when resessions are.

    4. So convenience stores is the active word here, right? What they are is they're convenience store owners. The way they make their money is by getting people into the convenience store and getting them to buy things in the store. The gas is really a loss leader in order to get people in the door of the convenience store.

      Gas stations make money off of convenience store items

      Selling fuel can be a loss-leader to get people into the convenience store.

    5. So the last two recessions this doesn't apply to, but just set them aside for a minute. The rest and almost all the other recessions in Second World War have been caused by the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to bring down inflation or because of other financial concerns.

      Federal Reserve raising interest rates causes recessions

    1. Valerie Peter recalled that, after she followed a bunch of astrology-focussed accounts on Twitter, her feed began recommending a deluge of astrological content. Her interest in the subject quickly faded—“I began fearing for my life every time Mercury was in retrograde,” she said—but Twitter kept pushing related content. The site has a button that users can hit to signal that they are “Not interested in this Tweet,” appended with a sad-face emoji, but when Peter tried it she found that Twitter’s suggested alternatives were astrology-related, too.

      Algorithmic cruelty

      This has echos of Eric Meyers’ inadvertent algorithmic cruelty.

    2. When we talk about “the algorithm,” we might be conflating recommender systems with online surveillance, monopolization, and the digital platforms’ takeover of all of our leisure time—in other words, with the entire extractive technology industry of the twenty-first century.

      The algorithm’s role in surveillance capitalism

    3. Jhaver came to see the Airbnb hosts as workers being overseen by a computer overlord instead of human managers. In order to make a living, they had to guess what their capricious boss wanted, and the anxious guesswork may have made the system less efficient over all.

      working for the algorithm rather than the algorithm working for you

    4. Peter’s dilemma brought to my mind a term that has been used, in recent years, to describe the modern Internet user’s feeling that she must constantly contend with machine estimations of her desires: algorithmic anxiety. Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision. At times, the computer sometimes seems more in control of our choices than we are.

      Definition of “algorithmic anxiety”

    5. In her confusion, Peter wrote an e-mail seeking advice from Rachel Tashjian, a fashion critic who writes a popular newsletter called “Opulent Tips.” “I’ve been on the internet for the last 10 years and I don’t know if I like what I like or what an algorithm wants me to like,” Peter wrote. She’d come to see social networks’ algorithmic recommendations as a kind of psychic intrusion, surreptitiously reshaping what she’s shown online and, thus, her understanding of her own inclinations and tastes. “I want things I truly like not what is being lowkey marketed to me,” her letter continued.

      Recommendations based on your actions or on what the algorithm wants you to see

    1. You can tap the sign as much as you want, that battle was lost a long time ago. REST is just the common term people use for HTTP+JSON RPC.

      HTTP+JSON RPC becomes known as REST

    2. From there, an API could be considered more "mature" as a REST API as it adopted the following ideas: Level 1: Resources (e.g. a resource-aware URL layout, contrasted with an opaque URL layout as in XML-RPC) Level 2: HTTP Verbs (using GET, POST, DELETE, etc. properly) Level 3: Hypermedia Controls (e.g. links) Level 3 is where the uniform interface comes in, which is why this level is considered the most mature and truly "The Glory of REST"

      Model for determining RESTful-ness

    1. the creator economy had grown into a matured, diversified, $100 billion business.

      Creator economy worth $100 billion

      What goes into defining "creator economy"?

    2. The well-known core of any YouTuber’s income is Adsense—the system that serves the ads before, during, or after videos. This hypothetical channel could expect to earn about $4,000 in Adsense revenue for their million views, based on a typical revenue per mille rate, or RPM, of $4—meaning they earn $4 per thousand views. However, there is wild inconsistency on Adsense RPM’s from creator to creator.

      Example creator income of $4 per thousand views

    1. I think actually the most critical component is going to be leveraging existing security mechanisms that have been built for resilience and incorporating those into these devices, which is actually what I'm building right now. That's what Thistle Technologies is doing, we're trying to help companies get to that place where they've got modern security mechanisms in their devices without having to build all the infrastructure that's required in order to deliver that. 

      Third-party tool for IoT device updates

      Trying to make them as regular and predictable as what we have for desktop devices now.

    1. Compare this amount of compute to a Raspberry Pi 4, a $45 single-board computer which has four processors running at 1.5 GHz.  Each core has 2 ALUs and it will take 4 instructions to perform a 256 bit addition, as the basic unit for the Raspberry Pi (and most other modern computers) is 64 bits.  So each core has a peak performance of 750,000,000 adds per second for a total peak of 3,000,000,000 adds per second.  Put bluntly, the Ethereum “world computer” has roughly 1/5,000 of the compute power of a Raspberry Pi 4!

      A comparison of the compute power of Ethereum versus a Raspberry Pi 4

    2. A distributed system is composed of multiple, identified, and nameable entities.  DNS is an example of such a distributed system, as there is a hierarchy of responsibilities and business relationships to create a specialized database with a corresponding cryptographic PKI.  Similarly the web is a distributed system, where computation is not only spread amongst various servers but the duty of computation is shared between the browser and the server within a single web page.A decentralized system, on the other hand, dispenses with the notion of identified entities.  Instead everyone can participate and the participants are assumed to be mutually antagonistic, or at least maximizing their profit.  Since decentralized systems depend on some form of voting, the potential for an attacker stuffing the ballot box is always at the forefront.  After all, an attacker could just create a bunch of sock-puppets, called “sibyls”, and get all the votes they want.

      Distinction between Distributed System and Decentralized System

      Distributed systems have gatekeepers that can react to bad actors. Decentralized systems rely on consensus voting.

    3. Of course letting arbitrary code potentially run forever wouldn’t work.  So instead any program is run for only a limited number of instructions until it either completes or is terminated. The measure of the amount of compute is called “gas”, with various instructions and operations costing a different amount of gas to process.  The total cost of a transaction is the amount of gas consumed times the gas price.

      Definition of "gas" on the blockchain

    4. So what does the supposed “web3” add to this vision?

      What is different with "web3" technology

      Still need everything associated with "current web" plus added infrastructure.

    5. Currently it will cost me roughly $20 a month to participate in this distributed computing system.

      Description of "current web" technology

      Domain name and DNS operator, hosting provider, server-side program and the reader's web browser.

    1. As such, to ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods. We will also be paying close attention to how blockchain technology evolves over time to ensure that the above principles are withheld and determine whether it will allow for more secure experiences or other practical and inclusive applications in gaming. However, we have no plans of implementing blockchain technology into Minecraft right now.

      Blockchain technologies cannot be integrated into Minecraft client and server applications

      In this statement, Microsoft is holding out the possibility that blockchain technology might evolve into something that is "practical and inclusive".

    2. NFTs are not inclusive of all our community and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots. The speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.

      A game long known for creative building, Minecraft explicitly rejects exclusionary tactics...and calls out the speculative pricing and investment mentality surrounding NFTs.

    3. We have these rules to ensure that Minecraft remains a community where everyone has access to the same content. NFTs, however, can create models of scarcity and exclusion that conflict with our Guidelines and the spirit of Minecraft.

      Artificial scarcity is counter to the Minecraft spirit

    4. While we are in the process of updating our Minecraft Usage Guidelines to offer more precise guidance on new technologies, we wanted to take the opportunity to share our view that integrations of NFTs with Minecraft are generally not something we will support or allow. Let’s have a closer look!

      Above-the-fold statement on NFTs in Minecraft

    1. the company is announcing the release of a three-part open source toolkit to quickly get the technology into developers’ hands and out in the wild. Adobe’s new open source tools include a JavaScript SDK for building ways to display the content credentials in browsers, a command line utility and a Rust SDK for creating desktop apps, mobile apps and other experiences to create, view and verify embedded content credentials.

      Implementation of the C2PA specification

    1. If we can rightly identify the seeds (or spores) we will know what type of conditions they will thrive in. In similar ways, some people need different care, handling and environment to thrive. Perhaps with the right conditions, they too can make contributions to the world in small but meaningful ways – and who can truly judge the true magnitude of something?

      Conditions of care are individual

      There will be a range of environmental and supportive measures…perhaps even smoothing like a bell curve distribution with people that thrive in conditions on the long tails on the long tails (or need long tails of support to thrive).

    1. State-level lobbying by Scientific Games in the 1980s was critical to the expansion of the lottery from one state, New Hampshire in 1964, to nearly every state. Scientific Games just sold its lottery business to Toronto-based private equity firm Brookfield Business Partners LP for nearly $6 billion. Future profits will benefit Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt, who is worth $4.5 billion, according to Forbes.

      Private equity comes to state lotteries

    2. Standifer — and millions of players like her — lose about 35 cents for every dollar they spend."Yesterday I spent like $130 and I won like $85," Standifer said, meaning she lost $45.Those losses — $29 billion a year nationally — are why lotteries exist. The losses fund government programs and enrich others, including a Canadian private equity billionaire and a Japanese convenience-store conglomerate.

      Individual losses become part of the state budget

    3. Driven by more than a half-billion dollars in annual ad spending, lottery ticket sales have grown from $47 billion to $82 billion since 2005, according to La Fleur's 2022 World Lottery Almanac. In 10 states, lotteries generate more revenue than corporate income taxes.

      Lottery sales statistics

    1. Many of these services in the West started on PCs. In China, most people’s first experience of the internet was on a mobile device, and users had no expectations about how it should work, says Feifei Liu, a researcher with user-experience consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group. The simultaneous rise of WeChat and the boom in smartphone adoption in China created a different set of expectations for what a single app should be able to do, she adds.

      Affect of first internet experience on mobile versus desktop

      The article quotes a Nielsen Normal Group researcher about how China users have different expectations for the internet because their first use was on mobile apps. I wonder if this holds true for other countries where the internet was introduced later than the US?

    2. Today, WeChat occupies a niche similar to Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store in the rest of the world. More than one million apps are accessible within WeChat. But unlike western app stores, WeChat tries to only make them available when a user needs them, rather than making them easily accessible via a single search interface, says Mr. Shimota.

      WeChat becomes equivalent to Apple App Store and Google Play

      The interesting [[user experience]] note here, though, is that WeChat suggests apps "when the user needs them" rather than making the user search for them. Later, the article suggests that these app stores have characteristics of the "Super App" like WeChat.

    3. The definition of “super app” is fuzzy, but companies and their leaders most often use it to describe a state of cramming ever more features and functions into their apps—often ones adjacent to, but distinct from, their core functionality. So, for example, a financial-tech super app might start with payments and bolt on buy-now-pay-later, cryptocurrency and in-app storefronts. For social media, it could mean incorporating things like shopping. And for a delivery and ride-hailing company, it might mean adding new modes of transportation or other categories of goods for drivers to convey.

      Definition of "super-app"

      Not yet common in the U.S., but exemplified by WeChat in China. This is a response to the decline in mobile app user tracking and the corresponding ad-tech. It is about capturing more time and attention from mobile computing uers.

    1. So Terra Labs concocted the existence of an interesting valuable thing. They wrote a program using their slow database called Anchor. Anchor was an automated program to allow moneylending. There are many of these in DeFi land.

      Terra Labs’ Anchor

    2. In principle, you could use stablecoins as money, like how you use deposits as money. Stablecoins are not used like money; rather than facilitating almost the entire diversity of transactions in the economy, they are overwhelmingly used for a few niche use cases.

      Uses of stablecoins

    1. From society’s perspective, the wide availability of cheap credit is generally considered a good thing, as it allows for productive investment, consumption smoothing over consumers’ lifetimes, and a form of risk-pooling not entire dissimilar to public support or insurance programs. (It is underappreciated that consumer credit is, effectively, one of the largest welfare programs in the United States. Chargeoffs of e.g. credit card debt effectively transfer a private benefit to the defaulting consumer in return for a diffuse cost to the rest of the public, mediated by the financial industry; the net amount of them is almost as much as food stamps.)

      Consumer credit as a form of societal risk pooling

    2. Crypto is a good example, to avoid stigmatizing developing nations. There is an exchange rate, constantly changing, between the stablecoins USDC and USDT, between both of those coins (independently) and the dollars they theoretically represent. Different rates prevail in different places and different transaction sizes. This makes stablecoin-settled commerce very rare relative to money-settled commerce.

      Cryprocurrencies, even those said to represent dollars, have a constantly evolving exchange rate

    3. anything is money if substantially everyone looking at the money both agrees that it is money and agrees at the exchange rate for it

      Definition of money

    4. You don’t deposit a $20 bill. You purchase a $20 deposit, coincidentally using a piece of paper with the same number on it. The deposit is a liability (a debt) of the bank to you. The bill which you gave the bank in return for the deposit is now theirs, the same as if you had bought a cup of coffee from Starbucks. On their balance sheet, it is now an asset.

      How banks view money deposits

    5. Schelling point

      Definition of Schelling Point (in game theory)

      “A solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication. The concept was introduced by the American economist Thomas Schelling in his book The Strategy of Conflict (1960).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

    1. On a conference call, the company reiterated that spam accounts were well under 5% of users who are served advertising, a figure that has been unchanged in its public filings since 2013.Human reviewers manually examine thousands of Twitter accounts at random and use a combination of public and private data in order to calculate and report to shareholders the proportion of spam and bot accounts on the service, Twitter said.

      Twitter claims they use manual and automated review processes to detect inauthentic accounts. They came claimed for a while that less than 5% of accounts are fake.

    2. Twitter (TWTR.N) removes more than 1 million spam accounts each day, executives told reporters in a briefing on Thursday

      inauthentic spam accounts removed from Twitter

      This is the number of accounts removed per day!

    1. One of the arguments that we hear is, oh, well, physical books wear out. And and so that's really a different situation than digital books or scans. And I find that pretty laughable when you look at the costs involved with maintaining digital files. In fact, they're extremely expensive and extremely complicated to maintain the integrity of those files.

      Argument Opposing CDL

      Physical books wear out and it costs money to maintain the digital lending infrastructure

    2. National Emergency Library

      Internet Archive's National Emergency Library

      Also not CDL: no limit on simultaneous use, author opt-out, book must have been published more than 5 years prior.

    3. emergency temporary access service

      HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service

      Not defined as controlled digital lending.

    4. The Copyright Act sets up this balance of rights as between rights holders and users. And one of the things that users get is the ability to control use of particular copies that they buy. So this is where the doctrine for sale comes in.

      First Sale doctrine

    5. some characteristics of how to make CDL as close to that physical, legal and economic situation as possible

      CDL mimicking the status quo

    6. the text of Section 106, those exclusive rights that copyright holders get

      Specified Rights of Copyright Holder

    7. Controlled digital lending is a system that enables a library to circulate a digitized title in place of a physical one in a controlled manner.

      Controlled Digital Lending definition

      From Dave Hansen, the Associate University Librarian for Research Collections and Scholarly Communications, and Lead Copyright and Information Policy Officer at Duke University.

    1. never open the browser without knowing where it's going and i never get caught up in that stupid trick where you know you start going to so you don't need to and you forget why you're on the internet

      Deep inter-app linking to combat unfocused app activation

    1. Who's responsible if the link between the NFT and the reference material breaks? Who's responsible if the blockchain forks and your revenue stream is then cut off? These are bedrock ideas of product liability, on top of which it's not at all clear, from the blockchain itself, that the thing isn't functioning.

      Issues with Product Liability for NFTs

    2. Under this test, a transaction is deemed an investment contract if a person,

      Howey Test for determining if something is a security

      "Invest his money in a common enterprise "and is led to expect profits solely from the efforts "of the promoter or a third party."

    3. Only humans can create art that is copyrightable. So by extension, if a machine is deemed to be the author of a work, no one can exercise a copyright in that particular artwork. And in the context of NFTs, there's untold numbers of works that are touted as being created by computers that's deemed to be a feature, not a bug.

      Generative Art, the kind in most NFTs, is not subject to copyright

    4. If you buy an NBA Top Shot, let's say of a particular clip of something that happened in the NBA, you can't enforce that against someone who is displaying that piece of video somewhere else. And on top of that, the NBA can prevent you from displaying that particular video clip, if you're displaying it in a way that conflicts with the license that was purchased through NBA Top Shots

      NFTs are a limited license of the intellectual property

    5. NFTs do not supplant copyright law, not even close. NFTs are bound by normal everyday rules of copyright.

      NFTs and Copyright

      When you buy an NFT, sometimes you get the copyright, but most of the times you don't. Again, it entirely depends on the original terms of sale related to the NFT.

    6. these smart contracts,

      Code of Smart Contracts are not legal contracts

      these tiny programs are not real contracts, they don't bind the downstream purchasers. And in fact, as we've seen, they can break over time.

    7. if you buy an NFT that doesn't have any sale terms whatsoever,

      NFTs without sales terms are not protected by law

      what have you purchased? The answer is probably nothing. At least nothing that the law can protect.

    8. you can buy a Bored Ape NFT on OpenSea, which is a large marketplace for NFTs. When you do, the Bored Ape Yacht Club says that you get access to certain perks. These include getting access to their discord server of like-minded purchasers of Bored Apes.

      Are off-chain activities offered by NFT seller legally available to secondary suppliers?

      But for the most part, those are perks that are offered off-chain and by the originator of the NFTs. Bored Ape could change their mind because it's questionable whether the terms and conditions travel with the downstream purchasers of every single Bored Ape. If those terms and conditions legally fail, say Bored Ape says they're not in privity with all of those downstream purchasers, and then they decide to cut off access to maybe some bad actors who were spamming the Bored Ape discord. Well, then those purchasers who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, they have zero recourse, because if they're not in contractual privity, there's nothing that binds Bored Ape to provide those things long term. They may in fact provide those things, but they might not legally be required to.

    9. When you initially buy an NBA Top Shot, you get limited rights to use and view the NBA Top Shot, only within the NBA Top Shots platform. But here's the thing. NBA Top Shots is a private marketplace. The NFTs only have any real value when you use the walled garden of NBA Top Shots, you have to use their app or their website

      NBA Top Shot only works on their platform

      for the NFT to have any functionality at all.... Effectively NBA Top Shots is simply a normal Web 2.0 website where you're allowed to buy and sell things only within their specific platform. And the terms of sale travel with the particular NFTs because everyone is buying into the same system.

    10. When you're buying an NFT, the real thing that you're buying is bound by the contract between the buyer and the seller, those are the primary purchaser and seller. There are some times when there is no contract, we'll talk about that. But theoretically at least, the value of the NFT is decided by the contract terms between the buyer and the seller of the NFT. But one of the huge fundamental problems that we'll talk about a lot in a second,

      NFT contract is between initial buyer and seller

      is that in practice, there's rarely any contract between the initial primary buyer and the secondary buyers, and then all of the downstream buyers later on. And on top of that, there is zero contractual privity between secondary buyers and the original issuer of the NFT. That's a real problem when the only value associated with an NFT comes from the initial sale terms.

    11. These programs are called smart contracts, which is misleading because look, here's an example of a smart contract. There's no legal language in there. It doesn't function as a legal document.

      No legal language in "Smart Contracts"

      A lawyer's view of blockchain "smart contracts"

  5. Jun 2022
    1. Feature development typically focuses on improving reliability, performance, or utilization, which often reduces toil as a second-order effect. We share this 50% goal because toil tends to expand if left unchecked and can quickly fill 100% of everyone’s time.

      A kind of technical debt for site reliability engineers.

    2. Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows. Not every task deemed toil has all these attributes, but the more closely work matches one or more of the following descriptions, the more likely it is to be toil

      Definition of “toil”

    1. Cede, as part of DTCC, is the actual owner of pretty much all publicly issued stock in the US. This arrangement was put into place so that stockbrokers didn’t have to send around paper certificates all the time just to trade. The stocks stay at Cede, and brokers exchange rights to those stocks held at Cede. When you buy shares in a stock, you hold an entitlement, to part of an entitlement held by your broker, to stock held by Cede. Cede owns the actual stock, but you have beneficial ownership of your shares — you are the shareholder who can vote at general meetings and receive dividends on the shares.

      How stock trade settlement works

    2. “Smart contract” is a fancy term for small computer programs that run directly on a blockchain. Bridges work by having a smart contract on both the blockchains. The bridge uses a relay to transmit messages back and forth between the smart contracts on each of the two blockchains

      How blockchain bridges work

    1. The nature-of-work factor generally focuses on the degree of expressiveness of the plaintiff's work. Artistic and fanciful works tend to be highly expressive, so it is generally more difficult to win fair use defenses involving such works. Fact-intensive and highly functional works tend, by contrast, to have a lesser quantum of expressive content. Hence, fair use may be easier to establish in cases involving such works.

      Nature-of-work factor is more favorable for fact-intensive and highly functional works

    1. Stoller acknowledged that there might be a “genuine leap of technical capacity” brought about by crypto, but he hasn’t seen it for himself. The rampant and accruing amount of fraud involving crypto is also an indicator of intent to Stoller. “If blockchain proponents want to advance their technology, they would eagerly seek to get rid of the fraud, but I don't see that happening,” he said. “That signals to me the fraud is the point.” Or more specifically, as Kelsey Hightower argues, money is the point: “It’s not like someone looked at blockchain and said, ‘Oh, my God, we finally have a better database for storing transactions!’” Instead, what made blockchain’s big promises so compelling were stories of people turning a small amount of money into a lot. “And in our society, we equate morality to money,” Hightower said.

      “The fraud is the point”

    1. To me, the problem isn’t that blockchain systems can be made slightly less awful than they are today. The problem is that they don’t do anything their proponents claim they do. In some very important ways, they’re not secure. They doesn’t replace trust with code; in fact, in many ways they are far less trustworthy than non-blockchain systems. They’re not decentralized, and their inevitable centralization is harmful because it’s largely emergent and ill-defined. They still have trusted intermediaries, often with more power and less oversight than non-blockchain systems. They still require governance. They still require regulation. (These things are what I wrote about here.) The problem with blockchain is that it’s not an improvement to any system—and often makes things worse.

      Blockchain does not improve monetary systems

      With cryptocurrencies—built on blockchain—we still need: centralization, trust, regulation, governance, and a whole host of other things that are already in TradFi.

    1. In other words, transaction reversibility is not about the ledger, but rather about the transaction rules that a currency uses. A reversible currency requires that someone anoint this trusted party (or trusted parties) and that they use their powers to freeze/burn/transact currency in ways that are at odds with the recorded owners’ intentions. And indeed, this is a capability that many tokens now possess, thanks to the development of sophisticated smart contract systems like Ethereum, that allow parties to design currencies with basically any set of transaction rules they want.

      Transaction reversibility requires trusted party

      In order to mimic the capabilities in TradFi to make business decisions to reverse transactions, cryptocurrencies rely on smart contract systems and an anointed trusted party to achieve the same thing.

    2. Beyond proof-of-stake, there are other technologies in deployment, such as the proof-of-time-and-space construction used by Chia, or more centralized proof-of-authority systems.

      Ah, yes...that thing that was driving up hard drive prices a few years back.

    3. Proof-of-work is not the only technology we have on which to build consensus protocols. Today, many forward-looking networks are deploying proof-of-stake (PoS) for their consensus. In these systems, your “voting power” in the network is determined by your ownership stake in some valuable on-chain asset, such as a new or existing electronic token. Since cryptocurrency has coincidentally spent a lot of time distributing tokens, this means that new protocols can essentially “cut out the middleman” and simply use coin ownership directly as a proxy for voting power, rather than requiring operators to sell their coins to buy electricity and mining hardware. Proof-of-stake systems are not perfect: they still lead to some centralization of power, since in this paradigm the rich tend to get richer. However it’s hard to claim that the result will be worse than the semi-centralized mess that proof-of-work mining has turned into.

      Proof-of-Stake can replace Proof-of-Work

      This is a big caveat here...the nature of the tech leads to a centralization of power that means "the rich tend to get richer." For the sake of removing the environmental consequences of consensus building, does it seem worthwhile to anoint a subset of users to get richer from the use of the tech?

    1. When the digital music industry was getting started, they invented a new form of quantum indeterminacy. When a customer paid $0.99 for an Itunes track, they were engaged in a license. When that transaction was recorded on the artist's royalty statement, it was a sale. Like Schroedinger's alive/dead cat, digital music was in superposition, caught in a zone between a sale and a license.

      Bought from artist, licensed to listener

    2. sex workers are the vanguard of every technological revolution. What gives? Well, think about the other groups that make up that vanguard – who else is an habitual early adopter? At least four other groups also take the lead on new tech: political radicals, kids, drug users, and terrorists. There's some overlap among members of these groups, but their most salient shared trait isn't personnel, it's exclusion. Kids, drug users, political radicals, sex workers and terrorists are all unwelcome in mainstream society. They struggle to use its money, its communications tools, and its media channels.

      Exclusion from communication tools drives some to adopt tech

      Early adopters of new tech are there because they have been excluded from other communication mediums.

    3. The kids who left Facebook for Instagram weren't looking for the Next Big Thing; they were looking for a social media service that their parents and teachers didn't use.

      Example with kids leaving Facebook for Instagram

    1. the creation of an ebook from aprint book falls under the author’s exclusive right to create derivative works. Moreover, printbooks and ebooks have very different characteristics – ebooks can be reproduced and distributedinstantaneously and at minimal cost. Internet Archive has no right to take those benefits foritself without compensating the rightsholders. While Internet Archive claims in a recent letter tothe Court to be “improving the efficiency of delivering content” – as if it is the only entitycapable of delivering ebooks to library patrons – Plaintiffs have invested heavily to create now-thriving markets for library ebooks.

      Benefits of ebook derivatives belong to the publishers

      Where does the court land on reformatting as a "derivative work"? The IA-supplied ebook is a page image duplication with limited dirty OCR search. The publisher, with the source format, has so much more opportunity to create derivative services for the ebook.