Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
So, what makes you happy these days, Emily?

Well, hanging out with makers and hackers is usually pretty
uplifting. They're also distrustful, but also, often, kind weirdos
who eschew conformity. 

If those scenes are unfamiliar, check out https://www.rightscon.org/
or https://misinfocon.com/ or Make: magazine (full disclosure: I've
written books for Make).

I'm a co-founder and board member of Women Do News, a project to get
more bio pages of women journalists on Wikipedia. That's food for my
soul.

Sewing and knitting my own stuff instead of buying it is also a
solace.

I own a few crypto coins. It's an interesting sensation to have a
stake in whether Ethereum might actually break $100,000 by 2030. 
The blockchain is an entertaining topic over beers or dinner with
friends (if I ever get to do that again). I will risk differing with
the wise minds at Wired etc. to say it's pretty irrelevant to
billions of people, though. It's terrible for the climate and green
energy needs to go to a lot more prosaic things for the next few
decades, like homes and industry.
  

    
Emily: Yeah, I think we have to get the cities out of the same
political units as the "flyover" states. Shift the people, shift the
map, or it's gonna be two dobermans fighting in the back of a car
over a steak. With kids in the car. It held for a while but the
cultural divergence is too great. Same thing in the UK: London is
*another dimension* compared to Yorkshire etc. We have to redraw the
map, for peace to be possible.

This is by no means *good* news but I don't know what the
alternative solution would be.

It's a bloody mess. Maybe it'll blow over. It could blow over. Worse
things have blown over. I'm not prophesying doom. But if stuff start
moving, extremely agile responses will be required. We need to
pre-game this stuff in progressive circles so we can be ready to
react by the time negotiations begin.
  

    
Southern Oregonians secessionists want to be part of the new State
of Jefferson, along with the northernmost counties of California.
  

    

State of Jefferson has been around for a very long time, says this
Oregonian. 

today in divided, split Central Oregon where i live, i wore an N95 mask
outdoors in the middle school parking lot, to take a walk with my friend
before we picked up our kids. we usually do this unmasked, but she'd told
me that she was probably exposed to Covid a couple days ago.

a family of 6 or 7 people walked by, heading toward the school. i said,
"Howdy," as one does in a small town. they openly sneered at us and said
nothing back. in my not-so-very-punk-rock middle age, i had no blue mohawk
to sneer at, tattoos all covered up in the snowy weather. 

"did you see those people, looking at our masks like that?" asked my friend
as we walked off.

yes, yes i did. i saw them showing their children how to behave, too. 
  

    
I decided to be actually curious about Avalanche and went looking
for interesting things to read. Unfortunately, intelligent writing
on this subject is pretty thin on the ground.

The original 2018 paper is "Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel
Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies" and it's
pretty good. It was published anonymously on IPFS [1], but it seems
to have been by a team at Cornell? If you follow that link, it loads
so slowly that I thought it was broken. However, someone copied it
to Amazon [2], where it loads quickly. (That seems like a metaphor
for something?)

I've skimmed enough computer science research papers to say that
it's reasonably well-written and fits nicely into that genre. I
think I understand the algorithms, though not the proofs. Without a
deep understanding, we're not going to be able to tell if it's
subtly broken. I can only make shallow style nitpicks: they use they
mysterious abbreviation "whp" to mean "with high probability," I'm
guessing? Also, Figure 5 is missing.

I went looking at citations on Google Scholar and there are some,
but they're not that interesting. I did see one badly-written paper
that said it was all bullshit [3]. The original authors seem to have
responded that they misread the paper [4].

[1]
<https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUy4jh5mGNZvLkjies1RWM4YuvJh5o2FYopNPVYwrRVGV>
[2]
<http://knowen-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/attachment/file/1922/Snowfla
ke%2Bto%2BAvalanche%2B-%2BA%2BNovel%2BMetastable%2BConsensus%2BProtocol%2BFami
ly.pdf>
[3]
<https://chan-relay.snowblossom.org/channel/85ywfwa2quwkcd3d765ljcg5f5exqg8t7fj
fzs9a/reviews/2019-11-11-On%20pseudo-profound%20bullshit%20in%20the%20Avalanch
e%20whitepaper.pdf>
[4] https://www.notion.so/d7akk10/2a05cdcfb5fc43969c675c5660d17851
  

    
The algorithm is *really* simple. 20 minutes at a whiteboard, you
understand it: it's simulated annealing, but with the possibility of
adversarial actors. It's in a sweet spot for probability
calculations - any decent statistician can tell you exactly how
likely it is to fail under what conditions.

There's not much to go wrong with the algorithm. Compare this to
ETH2 and all the associated complexity. None of which is to say it's
going to work flawlessly - there is an implementation, and the field
is still young.
  

    
>emilyg: They're the mainstream in eastern Oregon, where most people
want to
secede and become part of Idaho.

True, but they are so sparse that they constitute but one of
Oregon's seven (thanx California!) legislative districts. Land
doesn't vote, and dirt doesn't march. 

That these people exist is not news. Their grievance is that they
are politically irrelevant, and they're right; they are. That their
relative population is minuscule still has the capacity to surprise,
however. I expect they will learn to live with disappointment.
  

    
One thing I worry about it whether their assumption of random
sampling of the network will hold, or whether it can be subverted.
The original paper is too high-level to tell. It's the sort of thing
that might work in theory but not in practice, particularly when
someone *wants* to break it.

On a related note, what exactly happens when there is a network
partition? They talk about it a little, but I don't get it. It's the
sort of thing that Aphyr would test.

I also looked at the source code [1]. It's written in Go which I
know how to read, and it looks well-organized and would probably be
a reasonable codebase to work on. But my skim isn't going to tell us
whether there are security holes either. I was curious about
bootstrapping and found the spot where it seems to choose randomly
from a hard-coded list of IP's [2]. Someone doing a deeper dive than
me might figure out where those IP's come from.

I found a postmortem of a concurrency bug in early 2021 that caused
a partial outage [3]. It seems like a reasonable sort of bug that
might happen to anyone. Are there more bugs? Who knows.

Beyond that, there are engineering updates that I don't understand
and don't seem to be about fundamental issues, and a whole lot of
hype. The CEO is Emin Gün Sirer who worked at Bell Labs, Digital
Equipment, and NEC, and then became a professor at Cornell. Sounds
great, but his Twitter account (named "el33th4xor" with a cartoon
avatar [4]) is now devoted to retweeting Avalanche hype. There is
also a more serious blog [5] that he doesn't write. I think maybe
it's for his graduate students?

So, that's as far as I got as far as finding intelligent writing. I
think the thing I'm missing is something a good science writer would
do, which is call up a bunch of other scientists and ask them if a
new paper is any good and how it fits in with the literature. Or
maybe there is someone in the Avalanche community who writes as well
as Vitalik Buterin, but I haven't found them. Or is there some
mailing list where the real cryptographers hang out?

So I still don't know how anyone would decide if it will really work
or if it will eventually collapse due to some undiscovered weakness.
If they had a red team trying to attack it, that might result in
more confidence? I guess we'll find out when attackers start getting
serious about trying to break it.

[1] https://github.com/ava-labs/avalanchego
[2]
https://github.com/ava-labs/avalanchego/blob/master/genesis/beacons.go
[3]
https://medium.com/avalancheavax/preliminary-analysis-of-the-invalid-minting-b
ug-bee940cbd9e9
[4] https://twitter.com/el33th4xor
[5] https://hackingdistributed.com/
  

    
Heya axon. How can we reform “two senators for every state”? Serious
question. Until population size dictates representation across the
board, it does seem like dirt’s going to continue having an outsized
vote. 

Meanwhile, whites are still the majority in the US for a few more
decades at least, and a really unfortunately large number of us are
freaked out that the sunset of the white majority is in sight. These
folks might have remained a backwater, mostly not voicing their
white resentments, if not for being stoked by FOX and Rush for
several decades, overlapping with the past two decades of the most
influential tech companies being run by dude bro libertarians.

As an environmental reporter, I tell myself that there are much
bigger and more ancient realities that put the human scale of time
in a helpfully reduced perspective. 

Although when one has to start contemplating history on an
evolutionary or galactic scale to cope with the current state of
things…

Ok, here’s a hopeful development: A German court gave Anwar Raslan
life in prison for his crimes against humanity. “The landmark trial
marked the first time a high-ranking former Syrian official has
faced Syrians in open court in a war crimes case,” as NPR put it
earlier today.
  

    


>  That these people exist is not news.

being dismissive of them has not been helpful, historically. think back to
the horror that dawned upon you in November, 2016. 

the attitude i'm hearing is "they're just a handful of hicks on too much
dirt, who cares." 

we should all fucking care -- both as humans, who care about our fellow
humans, and as politically concerned folks who don't want to be destroyed
by Trumpism, civil war, etc.
  

    
>> Although when one has to start contemplating history on an
evolutionary or galactic scale to cope with the current state of
things…

Boy is that the truth.
  

    
>emilyg: How can we reform “two senators for every state”? Serious
question. 

Serious answer: Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, to start. Guam,
too. Wtf does a constitutional republic need with territorial
"possessions"? Either give them statehood or independence.
Colonialism is soooo 18th century... 

Frivolous answer: Repeal Reconstruction. Revoke statehood for
coloring outside the constitutional lines. 

>magalen: the attitude i'm hearing is "they're just a handful of
hicks on too much
dirt, who cares." 

It's not that I don't care. It's that I don't think they pose a
meaningful risk. I think they're likely to be troublesome, but not
an existential threat to our republic.
  

    
The question of whether Oregon is likely to remain a blue state
seems mostly distinct from which party will control the US Senate.
  

    
You can't get statehood through the Senate. What next?
  

    
In agreement with #335.

"I think they're likely to be troublesome, but not an existential
threat to our republic."

Perhaps, but troublesome is bad and scary enough.
  

    
The hard question is how much staying power does it have.

The militia movement... I remember hearing about that *way* back in
the day, in the 1990s probably around Ruby Ridge. The folks who were
young militiamen then are fifty and sixty now. We're dealing with
their kids, and for the older guys, their grandkids.

I'm not enough of a historian of these matters to know if the
militiamen are drawing on the KKK heritage - is it the grandkids of
the guys wearing white hoods in the 1950s? I don't know if the KKK
grew straight out of the Confederacy, kinda like American Legion for
Confederates. I lived in the States for quite a while, but I've been
back in London for more than a decade. It's all kinda distant. 

Anyway I don't think it's going away anytime soon. Whether it
*matters* is an open question: the Civil Rights movement backs right
up on to Abolitionism and comes right into the present as Black
Lives Matter, but if they aren't rioting, for the most part the
mainstream of politics totally ignores their concerns. Which shows
that however many people support the cause, however right the cause
is, most of the time it will be ignored. Is it possible the
Trumpists / red hats / modern confederacy / y'all queda / vanilla
ISIS / militia types can be similarly ignored in future? The Civil
Rights movement has to fight for every inch of ground and is very
heavily opposed and policed: could the same fate await the Red Hats?

It's entirely possible. It could all just blow away in the wind.

Or not. It could stick very very hard and become a dominant
political force.
  

    
New topic: META? Metaverse? 

I got a Oculus Quest 2 a few months ago. Used it compulsively for
two weeks, then it sat gathering dust. 

I think the hardware is there but the software is still barbaric.
  

    
*Anxious chatter about a future American Civil War must be of a lot
of interest to historians of the Chinese Civil War.  They had to
choke it back a little so that they could endure World War II, but
then they just went right back at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War

*You have to wonder if the hegemonic Chinese would bother to pick a
side between "Red America" and "Blue America," or just suavely agree
that there's only one America, and then arm both of them.

*Everybody decries Xinjiang till they've got some rambunctious rural
region full of rebellious ethnics; then, hey man, that
face-recognition and all those tracker phone apps can be pretty
handy.
  

    
*Maybe some future Richard Nixon will fly to China in a "can't beat
'em, join 'em" arrangement, and the world will tremble all over.
  

    

"It’s not ‘Metaverse’ unless it’s made in an office park next to a
freeway in Menlo Park. Otherwise it’s just sparkling VR."

"Man is born free and everywhere he is into blockchains."

"Apparently ‘using a screen in a car’ is now ‘the car Metaverse’. I
tweeted this in a coffee shop, so I think that means I am
participating in ‘the coffee Metaverse.'


*Benedict Evans @benedictevans has been having a pretty good
pandemic.  As his former employers at the a16Z venture capital
outfit get more and more cranky, magisterial and self-important, he
becomes funnier.  He seems almost light-hearted as things get worse,
like "Chaos Under Heaven, the situation is excellent!"
  

    
In chatting with my Italian art-world colleagues here in Turin, they
seem less concerned about NFTs than they were just a few months ago.
There was so much loose funny-money there that it could have wreaked
savage havoc throughout the European art world, but NFT people are
indifferent to "trad art."  They want to fling their money at the 
prospects that excite and motivate them: exclusive tokens,
ape-shaped membership coupons, collectible toys, running shoes,
play-for-pay social games and metaverses that offer real-estate
purchases.

*There's a slice of Venn Diagram overlap, where Sotheby's lives,
where fine art does overlap with very expensive NFTs, but the NFT
world doesn't care to invade the art institutions.  It  seems to
wants to haul itself to Mars on Elon's coat-tails. It finds
art-world credibility to be not worth having -- it's too highbrow
and toney, it gets in their way.

They've got zero interest in cultural heritage, and they're obsessed
with moonshot schemes.  That could change, and it commonly does, but
they'll probably have to get old and gray first.
  

    
"Man is born free and everywhere he is into blockchains." - this is
a wickedness :)
  

    
Some Buddhists deal with the current state of the world by
practicing Tonglen... "In tonglen practice, we visualize taking in
the pain of others with every in-breath and sending out whatever
will benefit them on the out-breath. In the process, we become
liberated from age- old patterns of selfishness. We begin to feel
love for both ourselves and others; we begin to take care of
ourselves and others."
<https://www.lionsroar.com/how-to-practice-tonglen/> Maybe this is
what we should all be doing.

It's hard to know what's happening. Everything we think we know is
filtered through unreliable perception, and too much of the world's
information is filtered through unreliable media, and even more
unreliable social media, for most of us. We talk about militias and
civil war, but I have no intelligence about the competence and
potential power of militias in the USA. It's possible that they're
powerful enough to wreak havoc, it's also possible that they'd be
taken down in a couple of hours by government forces, even though
some of the government forces are sympathetic enough to pull their
punches. A lot of these militia folks are well-educated middle-class
Americans who should know better. Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader
of the Oath Keepers, is a lawyer and an army vet from Montana. What
got into his head? 

"Tonglen can be done for those who are ill, those who are dying or
have died, or those who are in pain of any kind." Sounds to me like
Stewart Rhodes and his compatriots are in real pain. What happens if
we direct our Tonglen practice at those guys? "Usually, we look away
when we see someone suffering. Their pain brings up our fear or
anger; it brings up our resistance and confusion. So we can also do
tonglen for all the people just like ourselves—all those who wish to
be compassionate but instead are afraid, who wish to be brave but
instead are cowardly."

We are where we are precisely because forces who consider themselves
above it all are stoking hate and division. They seem to know how to
leverage the chaos for their won benefit. Hate is a tool, hate is a
weapon. Sowing division, they reap power. The Civil War is already a
thing, and it works for them quite nicely. The Civil War is not a
war, it's a strategy.

I had the Incredible String Band in my head this week... "I know you
belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you... You give all
your brightness away and it only makes you brighter." That's a
world, too... there's more than one world, a world where climate is
collapsing, a world where hate is proliferating - those aren't the
only worlds, and they're certainly not the only possible worlds. Can
we end the fight by joining the fight? Or do we end it by refusing
to fight?
  

    
Bruce: "the NFT world doesn't care to invade the art institutions"

We learned from the experience of banking. The big banks *all* did
blockchain prototypes around 2016. It was a huge push and the
blockchain world expected to get fully integrated. 

https://www.santander.com/en/press-room/press-releases/santander-launches-the-
first-end-to-end-blockchain-bond not much more came of it than this.

So we know the "real art world" aren't coming along for the ride,
except in an kind of weird, episodic way (Beeple). I think our role
is to build a real commercial market for folk art and pop culture
rather than trying to storm the world of modern art. The Nerds
already won cinema (well, "films") with Marvel and Disney, and one
may imagine the same thing is going to happen to "art."
  

    
Joining the fight … or refusing to fight ? Or … not taking sides…!? 
If human beings are our enemy then with whom are we to live?


Tonglen & metta = mighty good medicine to clarify the above.  they
help establish & maintain grounding in Reality, stability &
resilience in necessary compassion … … &, in & of themselves, are
not enough.  IE, quietism.  To be true, they must be engaged thru
action.

——-=//=——-

Am still interested in hearing any wisdom about where mainland might
go with Taiwan … the US policy towards both being intentional
ambiguity … a consulate for the people’s republic, and golf with
wonks from the free republic.

=====—-/—-=====

Has Heather Cox Richardson answered any viewers’ question ( she
devotes whole programs to Q&A) about the history of the militia
movement ?