I love how it’s a public ledger of transactions so once a wallet can be identified to an owner, everyone can see what you’ve done. Not very great system to keep anonymous.

My vibes based thoughts on Quantum bubble: it’s been tried before and never stuck. It’s too science-y for the common folk to buy-in. AI sold fear, crypto sold “ownership” and “banking freedom” and of course “FOMO to invest early like imagine buying Apple when it was a $1!”, and dotcom sold anything computer.

But now everyone has computer, crypto questions never answered so it remains in a small capacity still on the “ya but what if”, and AI isn’t able to actually replace anyone after trillions of dollars poured in so it’s going the way of crypto (will still be around but not in our faces at every turn).

Quantum just never had and never will have those pulls. Like I remember the attempt to sell fear a decade or more ago when everyone was like “passwords and encryption become meaningless!” But it was still all hypothetical. Being hardware is a huge part of the fizzle. Software you can make pretty interface and spin up a PoC that doesn’t do anything but you can have someone use the prototype to get the “omggghg it’s real” feeling. Without hardware being accessible it just looks like nerds in lab coats and no one cares.

Ian Lance Taylor (of GOLD, Go, and other tech fame) had a take on chatbots being AGI that I liked to see from an influential person of computing. https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/673

The summary is that chatbots are not AGI, using the current AI wave as the usher to AGI is not it, and all around dislikes in a very polite way that chatbot LLMs are seen as AI.

Apologies if this was posted when published.

I remember popping into IRC or a mailing list to ask subsystem questions to learn from the sources themselves how something works (or should work). Depending who what and where definitely had differing experiences but overall I felt like there was typically a helpful person on the other side. Nowadays I fear the slop will make people a lot less willing to help when they are overwhelmed with AI generated garbage patches or mails losing some of the rose-tinted charm of open source.

It’s unfortunate that the bug bounty payout removal is probably the best immediate remedy for some filtering but with curl being everywhere resume padders are still going to rush to generate slop reports or patches. I hope they are more fast and direct with communication as well. Their current patience and politeness is admirable.

Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports have opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”. Oh but for sure it’s broken and you are expert enough to know? One of the examples the reporter kept replying with how a strcpy() could be unsafe and the curl devs were kindly explaining that yes in general that function has potential for issues but their usage was not such a case. Reporter just repeats without paying attention. Insanity.

I love working in systems writing C and assembly but I’ve grown many gray hairs over the years being yelled at that “C is the worst” or “lol memory bug” or the classic “this thing isn’t working perfectly for me so it must have been written in C and we need to rewrite it entirely in (alpha) language which is for sure better than the collective centuries of expertise in C existing now”. These LLMs sure do amplify these obnoxious voices because now the fancy chatbot says so.

If there’s any good news to pull from this, people are doing buy now pay later on AI powered burritos but skipping the pay later portion.

I missed predatory company Klarna declares themselves as AI company. CEO loves to spout how much of the workforce was laid off to be replaced with “AI” and their latest earnings report the CEO was an “AI avatar” delivering the report. Sounds like they should have laid him off first.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/klarna-used-an-ai-avatar-of-its-ceo-to-deliver-earnings-it-said/

when stocks are suffering Bitcoin is seen as the automatic money machine cause allegedly line can only go up. It doesn’t produce or rely on supply chain logistics and is immune to trade wars so it quickly gets popularity again. And there’s no such thing as a former coiner because once there’s a hint of potential bag holders arriving then they activate like fucking sleeper agents ready to push the moon-prop

This is from 2023 but when debugging an xfce issue this week I came across this forum post: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=16835

The user is competent enough to use xfce with Debian, but too incompetent to understand debug symbols is not a violation of privacy.

In capital markets infrastructure low latency and high throughput are the 2 core design principles of any system. Blockchain manages to violate both; how anyone could have thought this is “the future” is beyond me. I still hear all too often “ya blockchain (or cryptocurrency) doesn’t work now but I’m sure it’ll be great and useful eventually!”

Why oh why are people so attached to this proven failed tech idea? I’ll throw it the smallest of bones and say maybe a distributed ledger with cryptographic proofs has some very specific minor use case, but even if that maybe is true for one thing why is it shoved everywhere it doesn’t belong?

AI influencers are wild. Much like blockchain somehow AI will solve all your problems, but to access the grimoire that is LLM prompts gotta watch a video by someone who claims to have this knowledge access but had their presentation written by ChatGPT