Cyberdeck Users Weekly: Recent Episodes
Paul Miller
Peter's way to mobile Linux * Motorola A780: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A780 * Motorola A910: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A910 * Openmoko Neo FreeRunner: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner
Really old stuff Hardware * 2000: Agenda VR3: The first Linux PDA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_VR3 * 2002: Sharp Zaurus (SL-5500): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus * 2004: Motorola E680, A780
Software * GPE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPE_Palmtop_Environment * Opie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Palmtop_Integrated_Environment
Gone Websites * handhelds.org https://web.archive.org/web/20090304221733/http://www.handhelds.org/geeklog/index.php * linuxtogo.org https://web.archive.org/web/20090318024046/http://www.linuxtogo.org:80/
Nokia N900, lineage and offsprings * Maemo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo (apologies for forgetting Maemo Leste, it's awesome. But: As long as it does not ship with a GUI for calling and texting, I doubt it's super relevant.) * http://maemo.org/ * Nokia N900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900 * Nokia N9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9 * Sailfish OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS * Jolla https://jolla.com/ * 10 Year Anniversary blog post: https://blog.jolla.com/happy-birthday-jolla/ * Facebook Live Event video: https://www.facebook.com/jollaofficial/ (starts after ~5 minutes)
Running a GNU/Linux userland on an Android kernel * Original Jolla announcement, that they would run Android hardware https://www.theregister.com/2013/09/17/jolla_sailfish_os_android_support/ * libhybris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29 * Halium https://halium.org/
Ubuntu Touch * Ubuntu Edge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge * Ubuntu Touch (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch * ArsTechnica coverage of the announcement https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/canonical-unveils-ubuntu-phone-os-that-doubles-as-a-full-pc/ * Ubuntu.com:
Who is J.M. Bush @jmbushwrites
Thank God for Bitcoin
Christianity 101 BibleProject
Romans 15:4
The Most Important Commandment
Micah 6:8
The law was our teacher
Bitcoin 101 The Bullish Case for Bitcoin
We reap what we sow
Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
Bretton Woods system
Denial of self
Christian questions about Bitcoin The rich young ruler
The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil
Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
Proverbs 30:7-9
Give to Caesar what is Caesar's
Zealot
Vengeance is mine, says the Lord
New FinCEN rule for Bitcoin custody
Daniel 6
Jimmy Song and George Mekhail pod about Thank God for Bitcoin
You Are What You Love
God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish
1 Samuel 22
The poor you will always have with you
Is Bitcoin the mark of the beast? Revelation 13:11-18
One more book plug Noded 76 with the Authors of Thank God for Bitcoin
Thank God for Bitcoin: The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money
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Really glad to have Matt Odell as a return guest. Instead of an interview we used this as an opportunity to talk about our wonderful dystopia full of 30 hour battery life, folded proteins, and zero privacy. Enjoy!
SHOW NOTES
Apple Silicon
Mac Mini vs iMac 5K
Syncing Bitcoin on M1
Why it's fast
Community builds of Visual Studio Code
The Verge's MacBook Air review
Redox OS with Jeremy Soller
(I was trying to remember the word "UEFI")
Apple bricks its own hardware
Jailbreaking your T2 Mac
PopOS PopShop
Your Computer Isn't Yours
(Matt's right there's no version with 32GB of RAM)
@bunniestudios - I can't think of anyone better than @marcan42 to be taking on a project like porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs!
GrapheneOS
Chromium OS Verified Boot
bunnie's Precursor open source mobile hardware
The Facebook headcrab
Pod people in Ready Player One
Protein folding is "solved"
Matt shames Paul for using TikTok
The Social Dilemma
Lex on AlphaFold 2
What machine learning isn't
Michael Rectenwald on "The Google Election"
Edward Snowden
Signal
Signal is the Messaging App of the Protests
Apple bans Bitcoin wallets (in 2014)
Follow Matt mattodell.com
Matt's laptop
(My mnemonic is busted, I bought Micro USB cables)
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In classic podcasting style, I managed to frontload this episode with highly technical questions up front and then we slowly morphed the conversation into a more conceptual what-is-the-future-of-computers sort of thing.
James is a really wonderful guy from what I've learned over the decade or so I've been following him on Twitter and you should def check out Actual if you're in the market for budgeting software.
SHOW NOTES James Long
Prettier
Actual Budget
Stripe
Mozilla XUL
React
Reason
rustfmt
Silicon Valley season three, episode six
The Local-first software manifesto
CRDT
Clarity Money ewwww
Quantified Self
Roam
"I want Roam to be not just a tool for thought, but a tool for computation" @jlongster
Using CRDTs in the wild
Jupyter
Observable
Literate programming
Light Table
A Visual History of Eve: 2014 - 2018
Microsoft Fluid Framework
Project Xanadu
If you have 100 hours to read a million words, check out this Wired piece on Xanadu
SHOUTOUT Ryan Florence
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This is a tough one because I'm fairly undecided. Are we sliding toward an apocalypse? Is too much getting worse to expect anything to get better? Is YouTube actually kind of a great thing? I've been stuck on this long enough that I figured I should just put it out there and let you decide. A lot of different thoughts here but I swear it's all connected.
Thanks to ZappyCode for buying a fake ad this week!
SHOW NOTES
GaryVee still preaches the hustle gospel in the middle of a pandemic
"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." @pierre_rochard (quoting Einstein)
The pleasure of walking tall
YouTube
Udemy
Melodics
Amazon
Citi Bike
"How often does the software you use on a daily basis (including web apps etc) succeed at fulfilling it's core purpose, without unreasonable levels of friction?" @masonremaley
Halo Band
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No offense to @jayriverlong, but I think his think piece on GPT-3 is kind of dumb: "In a GPT-3 World, Anonymity Prevents Free Speech"
So I did a whole podcast about it.
Also check out this book: How Innovation Works
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Today's episode is a work-in-progress essay about the role of UX and "ease of use" in tech, with a specific focus on Bitcoin. Here are some links to what I'm talking about in the episode. The full essay will be published on my blog someday. Thank you for your patience.
Bitcoin Node Q+A
Bitcoin Governance
Strike app
Bitcoin bites the bullet
Utreexo
"Don’t make me think" thread
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So I screwed up and didn't select my nice podcasting microphone for this episode and am instead speaking to you through that joke of a pinhole mic on my MacBook Pro.
The good news is that we're not here to listen to me, we're here to hear from the fascinating Jonathan Pallant: Town Mayor, retro computing enthusiast, and embedded systems engineer.
Jonathan Pallant, Town Mayor of St Ives, Cambridgeshire @therealjpster
thejpster on GitHub
St Ives
42 Technology
Monotron and some context Monotron
Monotron - a 1980s style home computer written in Rust
Monotron - Building a Retro Computer in Embedded Rust
C64 interrupts
Memory segmentation
DLLs
On The Metal podcast
Google Fuchsia
Redox OS
Windows Terminal
Neotron and abstraction Neotron
MS-DOS
Cylinder-head-sector
Neotron 32
KiCad EDA
Let's Try PCB Etching!
OSH Park
Tiva C Series TM4C123G LaunchPad
Neotron 528ST
JLCPCB SMT assembly service
VideoCore
Explain yourself!
"Woohoo! Made my EME-232 into Drive B: so I can boot from the Gotek but still read 3" disks. @ZxSpectROM, this has been so much fun :)"
Commodore 128
Bill Herd's Story of Commodore from the Computer Engineers' Perspective
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Something that's been refreshing about doing this new podcast is how little of my time is spent thinking about what "big" companies are doing.
But these big companies keep doing stuff. So let's talk about it!
Skate 4 Skate 4 has been announced!
Vergecast segment about Skate 4 in 2019 (at around the one hour mark)
Will Skate be the "Quake 3: Arena" of skateboarding games?
Session
Skater XL
Burnout Paradise
What I also want is a skateboarding shooter game. Trick combos generate shields.
Hey email app Vergecast interview with @dhh and Rep. David Cicilline
Starting to think big companies and big government sort of deserve each other. Will whatever antitrust tribunals we end up with this time around catch the subtlety and just ask Apple to allow sideloading? Or are we going to get a "Apple forever" mentality and enshrine it into law somehow?
Also patents = monopoly.
Audio tweets Twitter audio tweets
I almost tried to care about this but I didn't pull it off. I always wonder if we can make it to a post-literate society tho. Interesting to think about.
PS5 reveal It looks so dumb I'm sorry.
Also it has approximately 10,000x more "next-gen" games than the Xbox so far so I'm feeling pretty bullish on it. Might have to learn to use those stupid thumbsticks.
Wish there was a duck demo.
Lego robots These are getting very, very good. Scratch AND Python? Yes, please.
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On this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with John Cantrell, the lead of the Juggernaut decentralized messaging project.
I'm very enamoured with the idea of decentralized, peer-to-peer, e2ee messaging. But there are so many drawbacks and pitfalls, and it's hard enough to get your friends to even use something like Signal, that I had begun to give up hope. Lately, however, a handful of Lightning-based messaging experiments have popped up, and it feels like they're on to something.
@JohnCantrell97
Juggernaut
Accouncing Juggernaut blog post
whatsat Lightning messaging demo
Lightning key send
OP_RETURN
"Micropayment"
Plex
GrapheneOS
The ecosystem is moving
Sphinx app
Dr. Maxim Orlovsky
Lightning Labs Loop
Decentralized Twitter
LN-Juggernaut on GitHub
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These are some books I like!
Fire in the Valley by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger
The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
AI Superpowers by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee
How the Internet Happened by Brian McCullough
Life After Google by George Gilder
The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingus
Seasteading by Joe Quirk
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Permutation City by Greg Egan
The Information by James Gleick
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein
Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
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Today's episode is a little different. Basically, I want to convince you that you can and should learn to engage with the command line on your computer. There are a lot of tools that are only accessed, or best accessed, through the command line. In a perfect world maybe this wouldn't be the case, but in the world we live in the command line unlocks a lot of the hidden potential for your computer, and I feel like it's almost essential in the "owning" of modern technology.
Here are the basics:
pwd- short for "print working directory"
Type this into the terminal and press enter. You'll see the full path to wherever you "are" right now on your computer.
ls- short for "list"
This will show the files, folders, and executables that are in your current working directory.
cd- short for "change directory"
If you just type cd nothing happens, you need to tell it where you want to go. A few examples:
cd ..go to the parent directory
cd foldernamego to foldername
cd ~go to your home directory
If you get lost in the command line or you want to do something you don't know how to do using the command line, try xdg-open . (note the trailing dot, that means "right here"). This should open the the current directory in your GUI file browser.
Check out this week's newsletter (I'll link it on Twitter) for a more in-depth guide.
Quick recommends Here's the list of basic tools I start the episode off with.
DuckDuckGo for search.
BitWarden for password management.
Signal for messaging.
Refurbished enterprise SFF PCs for home server.
Fastmail for email. (Even cooler people are using Tutanota these days, but I haven't tried it personally)
Firefox + AdBlocker Ultimate for web browsing.
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Today I'm joined by William Casarin who is one of my favorite twitter follows. William is a freelance software developer, he runs a bitcoin consultancy called bitcoin wizard, and he's constantly building wild and weird projects that seem to "own" technology in the sense I'm always chasing after.
Explain Yourself (talking about tweets)
"thinking about hooking CI build events into my system notifications..."
NixOS
xmonad
z - jump around
pickdrop
Noise Protocol Framework
TLS
Diffie-Hellman key exchange
snow
WireGuard
Tailscale
ZeroTier
NEXT TWEET
"just scraped 20k chess puzzles from http://wtharvey.com maybe I'll get around to using my C game engine for a 3d+2d fics/lichess client with puzzle support."
chess-puzzle-db
Vulkan
NEXT TWEET
"bitcoind + usdt + ebpf + bpftrace ohhh I'm going to have fun with this."
secp256k1
NEXT TWEET
"So when people ask me why I write mostly C now..."
Haskell
Jonathan Blow
BitlBee
NEXT TWEET
"I need to figure out a good fediverse crossposting setup..."
ActivityPub
Mastodon
Gopher
"I have a gopher client running on my paper tablet lol"
Gopher)
Project Gemini
sacc gopher client
Second Life
MUD
Snow Crash
reMarkable
nix-bitcoin
"I think for my satellite nix-bitcoin node, I would want..."
nix-bitcoin
Nix: The Purely Functional Manager
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"You can't stop other people from reading that which you disagree with."
@pierre_rochard on Noded 0.62.0
Speech laws and regulation and platform moderation are always about what "others" should see. Because you have to see it to moderate it. Just something to think about.
The first amendment The way I'm thinking about "free speech," as a principle, is that I'm not going to use my power proactively to silence your speech. The actual law, of course, is about prohibiting the government from using its power to silence speech. But we're adults, we can talk about right and wrong it's okay.
Censorship is not an educational tool, it's a tool of control. You don't know what's being censored because you never see it. That was the whole point. So how do you know whether the right things are being censored? The potential for misapplication and the lack of means of correction are sky-high.
But platforms like Facebook and Twitter are in a dumb no-man's land where their "speech" is primarily the promulgation of other people's speech.
I personally would not want to be forced promulgate information I find abhorrent. But I also don't want to stop other people from accessing information I disagree with. Censorship doesn't restrain conspiracy theories, it validates them. The cure for wrongthink isn't a ban, it's better information. I also believe people who have facts on their side aren't afraid of people hearing "different facts."
And as great as I sound to myself when I say these things, none of it is useful as a prescription for how Twitter or Facebook should act.
Maybe there's like a range of speech-adjacent activities we can define:
- Censorship: actively using power to limit what someone can say or hear.
- Non-promulgation: "silencing" others through inactivity.
- Promulgation: republishing others.
- Self-publication: creating your own platform to host your own speech or the speech of others.
Promulgation is really some of the most powerful speech there is. And, of course, there's no promulgation without non-promulgation. Otherwise you're just transmitting static.
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are self publishers with a truly historic level of promulgation, and now they're trending toward non-promulgation, which seems only reasonable. Meanwhile government is flirting with censorship, because it really has no power other than to destroy and oppose. Meanwhile meanwhile I'm thinking I need to get myself some of that self-publishing apparatus to secure and promote the ideas I think are good.
As a sidenote, I do find it sad sometimes how narrow a view we often have of what is acceptable and useful discourse, but there's really nothing I can do to change that. If it's easy to stay within the appropriate bubble of thought, then times seem good. But it leaves you with no recourse if you start getting extra-bubble ideas. And it might be actively harming the formation of extra-bubble ideas (which was the whole point of non-promulgation, obviously).
So what can I do?
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Richard Myers is a "decentralized applications engineer" at Global Mesh Labs, which is a very good job title in my opinion. We talk about his work on Lot49, a protocol for incentivized mobile peer-to-peer communication.
A Richard Myers primer @remyers_ on Twitter
goTenna
goTenna Mesh
Global Mesh Labs
Tales from the Crypt #88: Richard Myers
Stephan Livera's podcast with Richard Myers
The opportunity RISE:NYC Small Business Resiliency Program
Lightning Network
NetBlocks
One NSA data center
How to Hide in Plain Sight (with Pictures) - wikiHow
How Lot49 could help Lightning Network for BEGINNERS playlist
Lot49: A lightweight protocol to incentivize mobile peer-to-peer communication
Tor (onion routing)
whatsat
Juggernaut
Sphinx
goTenna VINE protocol
Where we're at lightning payment over (simulated) HAM radio
Lnproxy - Proxy connections from a patched C-Lightning
Lot49 in C++
Bigger picture: when Netflix? Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent
NYC Mesh
Change.org Abolish the FCC petition (11 signers)
IPFS
A quick plug for my favorite programming language Square Crypto's Rust-based LDK
c-lightning
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I did a pod about Bitcoin, I hope that's okay!
Bitcoin resources I recommend Tales from the Crypt
Noded
Bitcoin Audible
Satoshi Nakamoto Institute
The Bitcoin Standard
A Bitcoin Future What if everything you bought got cheaper every year, but your salary stayed the same? You'd eventually go to space, right?
Human material needs are in some sense finite, but human wants are infinite. Human time is absolutely finite, but human ingenuity -- the ability to do more with the same amount of time -- is multiplicative and exponential.
In an economy we create value as we transact voluntarily, and in an economy with money we use money as an intermediary to store that value we create. In a Federal Reserve economy, that value creation is skimmed off the top and given to banks so they can give us more credit card debt. In a Bitcoin economy, we all get to benefit from value creation.
Bitcoin wouldn't fix theft, or the desire to steal. It just makes theft no longer our national monetary policy.
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Internet of Shit: the origin story @internetofshit
Product Hunt
"Samsung smart fridge leaves Gmail logins open to attack"
"Hackers can hijack Wi-Fi Hello Barbie to spy on your children"
"how many servers could it take to turn on a light bulb lol"
A history of IoT JavaScript
Raspberry Pi
Gartner 2014: "In 2020, 25 Billion Connected "Things" Will Be in Use"
Smart socket botnet
Highlights of IoT Philips Hue
Sonos
Litron
Brilliant
Cats Petnet outage
A better way? (Probably not) Home Assistant
Apple HomeKit
HUGE: INTERNET OF SHIT FULLY ENDORSES GOOGLE HOME Alexa everywhere
I always forget GlassWire exists and then I look like a dummy when I talk like it doesn't exist.
Sony patent where you yell "McDonald's!" to skip an ad
Less internet, less shit Stagg EKG electric kettle
Oh dang there's a Bluetooth version now
IoT might be useful if you can "own" it Nest Thermostat
Ring + police
UniFi doorbell (early access)
Apple Bounjour / Rendezvous
Internet of Shit merch Stickers
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The next generation of consoles Faster storage, ray tracing, higher resolutions.
Unreal 5: "nearly a polygon per pixel"
But what about Simulation? Single shard MMOs? Multiplayer physics?
To me, Dwarf Fortress still feels like the most next-gen game on the planet
Minecraft with RTX is the perfect example of what's going well and what's not improving in games.
Portable assets and avatars As photogrammetry matures and we approach photorealism, assets might be more shareable. And easier to create.
See: Quixel Megascans
There's probably a rough DIY photogrammetry aesthetic that will differentiate non-pro games from "pro", but it will still look great IMO.
If there's unification of the art pipeline, "remixing" game assets and game modes seems more possible. That would be truly groundbreaking.
What I want is a skateboard game that's also a multiplayer shooter.
Cheating What would a game be like where everyone was running the maximum amount of cheats they can get their hands on?
If you think about it, cheating is a form of "AR" for a virtual space. Maybe it doesn't have to be a bad thing for all games, it could be a feature!
What about the holy grail of anti-cheat: peer to peer multiplayer games. It works with chess!
I think it could come down to multiplayer physics simulation. If your character is only capable of producing forces within a certain range... those could be the rules you abide by. just thinking out loud.
Single shard Eve Online and Dual Universe are "next-gen" in this sense.
Beyond single shard: the "metaverse."
Whatever happend to VRML?
Digital scarcity Reamde. Hats. Real money poker.
"The dream is, I want a 12 year old camper from thailand to help pay for his family's food by killing me in an online video game and my slow reflexes" - Matt on TFTC
How do you have digital scarcity without centralized control? Bitcoin actually only solved Bitcoin's problem in this regard.
In Minecraft you choose to have scarcity to maximize fun.
What's the point of games? Factorio
StarCraft
Overwatch
Path of Exile
Minecraft
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Everybody needs an operating system. But do we need a new kind of operating system?
Right now we basically have three major options: Windows, macOS, and Linux. Windows and macOS aren't open source, but that's not the only thing that's wrong with them. Linux is open source, but oftentimes that feels like its only advantage over the other two.
For years now I've dreamed of an alternative desktop OS with a fresh new foundation. Something we can build the future on with more speed and confidence because it got the fundamental abstractions correct. An operating system shouldn't feel bloated or fragile or like a monumental hack on top of 70s-era technology. It should be the minimal layer of software that can effectively and safely abstract hardware and allow multiple user programs to run together in harmony.
For the past five years, my guest Jeremy Soller has been actually building an alternative operating system: Redox OS. I think it might be our best hope.
WARNING This conversation is extremely technical. In a sense, this is the sort of technical stuff that most users never have to think about. But I find it interesting because someone has to care about these technical details or nothing would get done. I'm interested in the low-level details because I think getting those right can enable more capabilities and excellence at the user level.
If you absolutely hate operating system talk, you can fast forward to around the hour mark where we talk about the Linux computer company Jeremy works at: System76.
Setting the stage Redox OS
System76
Pop_OS
Rust
Window 3.1
Assembly language
A Taxonomy of Kernels Monolithic kernel
Unikernel
Microkernel
How drivers work
PS/2 port
LPC bus
L4 microkernel
Trying Redox in a virtual machine
QEMU
The problem with phones UBports
PinePhone
Librem 5
Making Linux computers Thelio desktops
Lemur Pro laptop
KiCad
FreeCAD
coreboot
How to pitch in Follow @jeremy_soller on twitter
Follow @redox_os
Redox OS website
Donate to Redox OS
Redox Summer of Code
Security Meltdown and Spectre
oreboot
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A skateboard for our minds The computer is "a bicycle for our minds," as Steve Jobs once said.
Do you ever watch those velodrome events in the Olympics? They either have a rolling start, or they have to have someone holding them up for a standing start. The bikers look silly and helpless until they get moving. And then they go in a loop, round and round, very, very fast. If you turn a little too hard your wheels slide out from under you and you eat it. When bikers crash in the velodrome the road rash is horriffic and their paper-thin costumes are torn the shreds.
What if we thought of the computer as a "skateboard for the mind?" What would a "skateboard" computer be like? How do we get there?
The Cuckoo's Egg
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson
I brought this up on the last episode, but I'm reading a book called "The Cuckoo's Egg," and it's making me very jealous of how much agency this guy has over his machines. In 1989!
The Unix Philosophy Smalltalk Wearables I don't want to brag but I've been thinking about how we use computers, and how I'm disappointed by how we use computers, for a while. Here's a piece I wrote about the history of wearable computers in 2012, and how I was pretty sure Google Glass was the wrong direction.
Dyson sphere Along the lines of affective computing, another piece I wrote even longer ago attempted to explain how much our computers are dropping on the floor when they interact with us.
My comparison was to a Dyson sphere. Here's the Wikipedia definition:
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output.
Wrap-up There are some really cool people in the computer industry who are challenging the assumptions of inherent complexity. Jonathan Blow, Casey Muratori, Raph Levien. Sometimes they might come across and curmudgeons on Twitter. But I think they're fighting the good fight.
There's also a really good talk about what's gone wrong in computing called called "The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong, RIP.
Finally, I recommend the On The Metal podcast for a dive into this from fairly technical perspective. There's a whole battle raging just to make it simpler and more secure to boot a computer. I know not everyone can dip into this particular battle usefully, but it's at least cool to know it's happening.
I love riding my bike. And I'm actually really bad at skateboarding. But I want to get better.
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This week I'm joined by Matt Odell, the co-host of the Tales from the Crypt podcast. Not only is Matt Bitcoin-famous, he's also hugely informed on technology in general, especially when it comes to security and privacy. I'm grateful to have him as my first guest on Cyberdeck Users Weekly, and grateful to have someone as practically paranoid as Matt in the world pushing for better ways to use and own technology.
Here's what we talked about:
Matt's podcast Tales from the Crypt
Bitcoin Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Bitcoin Core on Github
Dear Family, Dear Friends, A letter to all of you who still have no bitcoin
Not bitcoin Ethereum Web 3.0
Namecoin
Dentacoin
Cryptography PGP
GPGTools
Blockstream Satellite
"Nyms"
WebAuthn
Signal
Messaging Lightning Network
Juggernaut
Sphinx
Matt's dead man's switch FinalMessage
SCANDAL: Paul doesn't use a VPN Mullvad VPN
Carl Dong's Mullvad top-up service
Practical Bitcoin privacy BTCPay Server
Wasabi
Samourai
JoinMarket
Coldcard
Phones PinePhone
Librem 5
GrapheneOS
Open source image processing
Paul's Bitcoin setup Let Paul scam you out of BTC
myNode
"Bugatti of nodes"
Matt's recommended resources Matt's YouTube guides
Matt Odell's website
bitcoin-intro
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WELCOME TO THE POD
In this episode of Cyberdeck Users Weekly we'll review a bunch of tech giants and what their potential weaknesses are:
AMAZON: MAKE IT MORE LIKE DEPOP Amazon can't track counterfiets (scale fail) and it uses its vendors for market research (evil).
Solution Why can't I just order from local stores and self-run warehouses? Why can't I buy masks from the guy who stockpiled masks?
See also: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/14/21065894/google-pointy-acquisition-in-store-products-stock-inventory-shopping
GOOGLE: MAKE IT MORE LIKE RIPGREP Google simultaneously knows too much about me and yet can't know enough to give me truly amazing and deep results (scale fail), and it attempts to control what I see (evil).
Solution Run searches locally before hitting the network. Most search just me trying to find that one CSS Tricks guide to Flexbox.
See also: https://minbrowser.org/
SEAMLESS: MAKE IT MORE LIKE SQUARESPACE Seamless takes a gigantic cut. What are they reallllyy actually offering? So much less than even something like Uber.
Solution A protocol you can adhere to for listing things.
See also: https://twitter.com/susie_c/status/1255971900599046144
FACEBOOK / YOUTUBE: MAKE IT MORE LIKE WORDPRESS Like Seamless, Facebook starts out by letting you build an audience, and then at some point it pivots and starts to charge you for access to your own audience.
Solution Matrix? Mastadon? Jitsi?
See also: https://pauljmiller.com/posts/how-to-fix-the-internet.html
APPLE: MAKE ME MY COMPUTER CARTRIDGES! Alternatives to Apple: Pi / Pine / Librem / Redox OS / Oxide Computer / System76
I didn't bring this up on the pod but my dream for phones is that when you "retire" one you remove the battery and plug it into your home server setup and it becomes part of the borg that hosts all your local services.
UH-OH: BIG PROBLEMS WITH DECENTRALIZATION:
Identity (unsolved)
Payments (Bitcoin)
Decentralization of messaging (Lightning?)
Polish and ease of use
BIG systems like operating systems and UI frameworks are rare or bad and possibly unwanted in the first place?
WRAP-UP THOUGHTS: HOW TO EVALUATE A TECHNOLOGY: 1. Is it actively harming me? 2. Can it be taken away, and how easily?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/futurepaul/message