Quint is a modern specification language that is a particularly good fit for distributed systems, such as blockchain protocols, distributed databases, and p2p protocols.
Quint combines the robust theoretical basis of the Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA) with state-of-the-art type checking and development tooling.
Relevant: Leslie Lamport’s TLA+ Home Page.
How to present a paper (via lamport.azurewebsites.net).
List of sexually active popes.
Wikipedia – What article has the wildest name?
A curated list of awesome Live Coding Music frameworks, libraries and software.
Relevant: sounds.studio.
Kassandric Kendzior.
Last Chance Ride – Autocracy, democracy, and what’s in store for 2024.
They Knew came out in 2022. If the four-year pattern holds, its insights will become conventional wisdom in 2026. I recommend you get a copy before then, since They Knew is about — among other things — politicians plotting civil war and billionaire fanatics trying to carry out a manmade apocalypse.
Relevant: The Trump Timeline.
Mr Johnson* and die Wallners, die!
Die Wallners: In My Mind.
* ref. the movie “Afire” (“Roter Himmel”).
The metaverse economy: Is it real?
The brief (recent) history of reversing metaverse bets:
- January 2023: Microsoft shuts its virtual workspace AltSpaceVR.
- February 2023: Microsoft ends its industrial metaverse project a mere four months in, and fires 100 people. It also slashes staff from its VR headset HoloLens’ team.
- Also in February 2023: Chinese internet giant Tencent ditches plans to make VR hardware as a mature market for it appears to be many years off.
- March 2023: Meta pivots toward generative AI in its “year of efficiency.”
- Also in March 2023: Walmart shuts down a six-month-old branded space in the gaming world Roblox called Universe of Play.
- March 2023, again: Disney eliminates its Metaverse team, comprising of 50 people.
- June 2023: Google scraps its Project Iris for AR glasses, choosing to focus instead on AR software.
10 years ago… A pity this did not gain momentum.
NetAffair: European Networking Paradigms.
(Still, ed.) few people realise that the original voices from these early days of inter-networking are still around.
Safer, Not Later: How “Move Fast and Break Things” ruined the world by escaping the context that it was intended for.
In the decade since it has been retired as Facebook’s official motto, it has been used to defend some truly horrific abuses within the tech industry. You only need to visit the orange website to see it still being used this way.