I can't remember if I've heard of this guy before, but just from the quotes posted I can already say I really like him.
Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations
A few days ago, Mozilla Foundation invited netizens on Twitter to send in cryptocurrency donations via a new payment service provider. This move by the Firefox browser maker rapidly drew criticism, including that from Jamie Zawinski – who named the Mozilla project and was one of the original Netscape developers. You can read …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 5th January 2022 22:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Expanding horizons and equations
Ah me, the author has done JWZ a disfavor. Equating the insight that klepto-currencies are hard on the planet with the mere quip that regexes are hard is.. um.. hardly fair. And the resulting pain and toll are hardly comparable. Give the guy credit for expanding his horizons over the ensuing 25 years.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 11:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Expanding horizons and equations
Wow you have misunderstood that comment. Is not that regexps are hard, which they are not really. Is that they are regular and if you seek to parse something which is not a regular language with regexps then you ... have two problems.
So for instance lots of people think, 'look I can parse email addresses with regular expressions, it is easy to do'. And they can not because RFC822 email addresses are not in fact a regular language because of at least comments which can be nested: 'splodge@splodge.splodge (splodge (main account))' is legal, ''splodge@splodge.splodge (splodge (main account)' is an error.
But people do not know this, so they start out with their regular expressions and eventually they get something that will parse all the addresses they know ... but does not actually work. And to do that they perhaps end up with this (which explicitly does not cope with comments).
And so we have a troupe of idiot clowns rushing around who think they can use regexps when either they can't or the regexp they need is much larger than they think. And so we have endless things which will not parse splodge+splodge@splodge.splodge or whatever it is. And when they do get a regexp which works most of the time they end up with something big which has security holes in it because it does not properly validate the thing they think it does and they cannot see that because it is big line noise thing.
And so they have two problems, and we all have two problems.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 13:25 GMT heyrick
Re: Expanding horizons and equations
"but does not actually work"
The number of times I've had websites reject my spam drop email address because it has a '.' in the middle (this.that@domain.com). It's perfectly legal, but people who tested their code on a sampling of the email addresses of others in the same office are going to miss a lot of legitimate addresses, and in commercial terms, potentially lose revenue.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 14:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Expanding horizons and equations
The company that settled on [I]nitial [Surname] as their naming convention, as in "msobkow", or any of a host of other naming practices, including some variants that look like employee number hash codes.
When you're talking "global internet", you can count on their being a LOT of people doing exactly what you think doesn't make sense.
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Sunday 9th January 2022 19:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Expanding horizons and equations
The company that settled on [I]nitial [Surname] as their naming convention, as in "msobkow", or any of a host of other naming practices
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Thursday 6th January 2022 16:40 GMT David 132
Re: Expanding horizons and equations
> forename.surname@company.tld is almost the archetypal email address!
I work for a large company that, as expected, uses that format. Everyone, from most-recently-hired intern up to CEO, has firstname.lastname@ as their email address.
Except for one colleague of mine, who has firstname@ as his.
How he achieved this I don’t know but I believe it had something to do with working for the IT department at juuuust the right time a few years ago…
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Friday 7th January 2022 18:13 GMT John Robson
Re: Expanding horizons and equations
As a temp I took the first.last@ combo at a company many moons ago. 6 hours later (TZ difference) a permie joined and ended up with first.last2@ since we shared names exactly.
I did offer to switch, but since I was in the IT office they wouldn't hear of it.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 18:47 GMT JimboSmith
Re: Expanding horizons and equations
Who on earth messes that up? That's about the most common form corporate email address format in existence. forename.surname@company.tld is almost the archetypal email address!
I know one media company back in the dialup days who used a variation of this. Their stars had email addresses that were firstnamelastname@mediacompany.xyz for their fans. Those were looked at by a PA not the talent themselves. For business purposes they also had firstname.lastname@mediacompany.xyz which were supposed to be private and the talent looked at themselves.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 14:27 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Expanding horizons and equations
But you are sort of proving his argument. While you can create all kinds of very reliable parsers with regular expressions, handling edge cases can lead to regular expressions which themselves are impossible to read and, hence, maintain.
Fortunately, we now have better tools for working them, things like regex101.com which help you step through them, but also heuristic tools (fuzzers) that help test them to cover those cases you didn't think of.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 14:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Expanding horizons and equations
Had intended to prove jwz's argument because jwz's argument is true. Regular expressions are simple to understand and if you use modern language they are even easy to write.
But they are not powerful enough to do things people want them to do (like my rfc822 example). And also, well, is easy to understand 6502 and is easy to write code for 650s in hex or even assembler. But you would not want to write large programs that way if you could avoid doing that. And yes, tools exist to help you with giant regexps just the same way tools exist to help you with giant program written in hex. But most people like not to write in hex or even assembler.
Of course regexps have good place: if you are writing parser for language regexp is completely appropriate tool for tokenizer etc. But not for whole parser.
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Saturday 8th January 2022 10:12 GMT djnapkin
Re: Expanding horizons and equations
That isn't how I took the comment and comparison at all.
The regex comment is very well known & high profile, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who enjoys it but didn't know who coined it.
The comparsion was purely pointing to Zawinski's excellent ability to turn a phrase - something that is well apprecited by the denizens here, to be sure.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 14:27 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?
It's always been possible to avoid some of the fairly arbitrary sanctions, though this sometimes incurs a high cost. For individuals, money drops usually work pretty well. And there are equivalents for countries: why shouldn't Iran sell North Korea oil? The embargoes and sanctions generally just create black markets, of which the cryptoexchanges are just a new variant.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 15:59 GMT JimboSmith
Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?
why shouldn't Iran sell North Korea oil?
Off the top of my head because they’re both nuclear states and cooperating on missile technology and the bomb. Also at least one of them is a dynastic dictatorship and no one is quite sure what would happen if the Kim has one too many wheels of Emmental cheese and they can’t save him. They launched another projectile last night didn’t they. According to my Iranian friend Iran’s not as stable a country as everyone would like it to be either.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 18:22 GMT doublelayer
Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?
I don't know what goals, if any, that post wants to recommend. Whichever way that was supposedly going, it's not getting it right. If circumventing sanctions is a positive thing in their mind, then cryptocurrencies are one of the many ways that can be done. They don't really work as well--North Korea does use a lot of them, but mostly by keeping and exchanging them in other countries where it's less obvious it's them. They do the same thing with dollars and euros. Exchanging cryptocurrency for other stuff is hard if you're located somewhere with sanctions, just like with other money, so the situation is mostly the same.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 13:33 GMT JimboSmith
Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?
Please start taking the medication again, you’re obviously having another episode.
Countries are concerned and rightly so about the vast amounts of power being used (wasted) in the creation of these things. Have you seen the price increases we’ve experienced recently in the UK for power?
“Wake up, Tom! You know, and I know, that chaos and bedlam are consuming the entire world! Cryptocurrencies are only the beginning, Tom. We have an inch of topsoil left.”
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Thursday 6th January 2022 16:43 GMT RegGuy1
Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?
"Is this maybe the reason Central Banks are hushing to adopt them?"
They are shit scared of losing control. They were invented for the dark web precisely because they could not be traced. If I buy a kilo of weed online I don't want my local plod knocking on the door...
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Thursday 6th January 2022 12:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"
Well, it's not like gambling in that people often end up with more money than they started.
Also as I'm sure you know before you go posting on the internet, many crypto currencies use minimal electricity and Ethereum is scheduled to switch this year.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 14:06 GMT JimboSmith
Re: "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"
Well, it's not like gambling in that people often end up with more money than they started.
Define money for me in this context, are you talking about fiat currencies or more crypto? What people end up with depends on the willingness of someone else to buy the stuff off them. If you can’t find a buyer then you’re stuck with the stuff. If someone finds a way of increasing the supply artificially say by finding a quicker mining method or just inventing them then again the value drops, maybe to nothing.
The fact that these things are unregulated doesn’t worry you at all? Onecoin and Bitconnect to name two don’t make you think twice? What burning issue are crypto currencies going to solve? Other than the obvious what can my ransomware demand (other crimes are available) be paid in?
Also as I'm sure you know before you go posting on the internet, many crypto currencies use minimal electricity and Ethereum is scheduled to switch this year.
So if I buy a ‘mining device’ for Bitcoin and run that as opposed to using my laptop to play games I won’t see my energy bills massively increase?
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Friday 7th January 2022 18:48 GMT Ian 55
Re: "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"
"Ethereum is scheduled to switch this year" - that's been 'true' for at least a couple of years, hasn't it?
Even if it ever does make the switch, it still fails in every regard in desirable aspects of a currency, unless you're a scammer or a hacker.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 09:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
...the more their energy requirements grow, without any discernible upper bound, which is grossly irresponsible given the global environmental crisis.
Ethereum 2 (when it's merged - Q2 this year) will be a Proof-of-Stake system which is predicted to be at least 200 times (and up to nearly 900 times) more energy efficient at processing transactions than the entire Visa payment network is today.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 11:48 GMT Andy The Hat
That's ok then ... if you are a crypto-scammer you may lose the accumulation of stuff that was worthless when you obtained it if you get caught. That sounds much like if you raid a bank and get caught you'll have to give back what you stole.
I wonder how they compute the energy efficiency as "900 times more efficient than a visa payment"? Perhaps they are privvy to the internal operating procedures, software and hardware systems of the VISA system? Or perhaps they are actually using their own referenced figures which appear to show that a Bitcoin transaction is about 1200000x the cost of a single VISA ... So allowing for a 99.95% energy reduction that means it's still 6000x less efficient than VISA. Or am I not seeing something?
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Thursday 6th January 2022 12:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Visa publishes a Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report every year.
The one from 2019 states "In calendar year 2018, we used approximately 711,268 gigajoules (GJ) of energy from electricity, natural gas and other fuels." That same report states they processed 124.3 billion transactions in that year.
Obviously not all of that energy would have been spent processing transactions. Their 119 offices and data centres need to keep their 17,000 employees warm and the lights switched on, but at the end of the day their entire business is about processing transactions.
It'd be nice to think the person who published the Bitcoin comparison did more research than a 20 second Google search, but that's how long it took me to find that data.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 14:27 GMT Charlie Clark
but at the end of the day their entire business is about processing transactions.
Not really: this is a misconception that the monopolists are keen to see circulate but their main business is preserving their monopoly on transactions and hence margins and mining all that lovely personal data they accrue by it. Alternative payment provides would, theoretically, drive down both fees and energy use.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 14:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Given those figures (their 2019 report is here (PDF link)) is very simple to get number of 5.4kJ/tx, including all office expenses etc, for Visa.
Here and <a href='https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/>here (this is link cited by previous person)</a> Etherium people claim that in future better version they will manage 35Wh/tx. Well a joule is a watt-second so this is in fact 35*60*60J/tx or 126kJ/tx.
Which is (will be in future better Etherium) more than Visa by a factor of about 23. So not 200 times less or 900 times less, but in fact 23 times more.
People who support ponzi scheme lie, even to themselves about ponzi scheme: what surprise this is to all of us.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 15:56 GMT Mark #255
"But what's a watt-hour worth?"
I was wondering how these numbers translate into something I've got an intuitive feel for, and decided that heating up water for tea might be it.
That (new, improved, if-it-ever-actually-happens) proof-of-stake transaction cost of 126 kJ would heat 377ml of water from 20°C to 100°C, to make a fairly large mug of tea.
The 5.4kJ to process a Visa transaction would heat up 15.7 ml, to make a tablespoon of tea.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 18:47 GMT doublelayer
I don't know if their numbers are correct, but I do know you've read the post wrong. They could still be flawed or lying.
"I wonder how they compute the energy efficiency as "900 times more efficient than a visa payment"? Perhaps they are privvy to the internal operating procedures, software and hardware systems of the VISA system?"
Their numbers for Visa are cited in the post, which you've referenced later on, so why are you asking where they got them? You already have the answer. It wasn't them who came up with those numbers. Attack that source (Statista) if you will.
"Or perhaps they are actually using their own referenced figures which appear to show that a Bitcoin transaction is about 1200000x the cost of a single VISA ... So allowing for a 99.95% energy reduction that means it's still 6000x less efficient than VISA. Or am I not seeing something?"
What you aren't seeing is that it is Ethereum who said this, and Bitcoin you're comparing it to. Ethereum is already more efficient than Bitcoin, and they anticipate cutting their energy usage. The comparison to Bitcoin is just so they can use the dataset. If Bitcoin improved by 99.95%, it wouldn't give them parity with Visa, but Ethereum could surpass them with that level of improvement. The numbers you've cited cut the Ethereum step out and acted as if it was Bitcoin getting improved. Bitcoin is not getting improved and will stay as inefficient. Time will tell if Ethereum's claims work in practice.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 21:56 GMT the hatter
Re: In a desperate attempt to remain relevant …
Previously whatnow ? Have you been on this internet thing ? I mean apart from to save some money on shopping ? He did enough before, and enough after, and he's certainly never been one to hide in the background, or keep his views quiet about things that don't work as they should.
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Friday 7th January 2022 10:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Lisp
Is Greenspun's tenth rule:
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
Corollary due to Robert Morris (who is that Robert Morris):
... including Common Lisp
Of course these jokes date from the time when Common Lisp was regarded as a very large language (not helped by not specifying the library separately from the language), which was before C++ metastasized and before things like Java etc which are truly bloated.
Now I look and just in bytes: full CL implementation including IDE, many documentation is 225MB, another one including whole git repo for it is 262MB. Firefox is 346MB, Racket (derivative of Scheme, a 'small' Lisp-family language) ... is 925MB. CL is not large now.
Zawinski's law of software envelopment is
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Suspect today it might read '... until it includes a web browser/server'.
(I believe the RTM comment is not about CL's FORMAT function or the awful LOOP macro as I thought it was but probably about CLISP in which much of the language was implemented directly in C, which was then the buggy slow CL implementation of half of CL and which I think they used for Viaweb (I don't know as all this was before I was big enough to remember). Most CLs of course just have enough in C (if are running on C machine) to get the system into memory and perhaps do low-level memory GC & I/O, and the rest is all in CL.)
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Thursday 6th January 2022 16:49 GMT mark l 2
What is needed instead of a crypto currency like Bitcoin where the proof of work just goes into verifying transactions and mining more bitcoin for ever increasing energy costs, is one where the actual computing power is put to some practical use.
Look at something like SETI or Folding@home apps where unused computer cycles were put to use on their huge datasets, If that model could be commercialised so your computer cpu/gpu power can be rented out for a fee to people who need to crunch a large amount of data, then I could see that being a worth while endeavour.
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Thursday 6th January 2022 18:58 GMT martinusher
Crypto is the epitome of "A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing"
Ignoring the detail that blockchain is inherently not np-complete -- its one of those problems that doesn't scale the whole concept of proof of work is a dreadful kludge that is based entirely on the notion of wasting computing resources and so power. Like a lot of bright ideas it just doesn't scale -- its one of those things that works on the bench, as it were, but rapidly fails when developed for use on a large scale. (Pretty much the story of computing, or at least spectacular softwre failures.)
That said there's no point in getting hysterical or sanctimonious about it. It exists, and a slice of the population has sunk considerable amounts of money speculating in it so its not going anywhere soon. Its just going to decamp to wherever power and bandwidth can be obtained cheaply and like many other money schemes it will parasite off anything or anyone who either doesn't notice or doesn't care ("someone else's problem").
Central Bank Digital Currencies are different. They have to be designed to be both energy efficient and secure which explains why they're taking some time to roll out. Currently digital payments are all subject to a bank tax -- fee -- which is a bit like paying 3-4% extra VAT on every purchase (and a lot more if the purchase is in a different currency to the one you use). Making the system official should stabilize this with the costs of running the currency offset by the savings in managing actual cash.
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Sunday 9th January 2022 23:30 GMT Henry Wertz 1
I guess, but...
I guess. I mean, JWZ is right, proof of work cryptocurrencies use major amounts of electricity and all that. AFAIK the expectation was the supply of new coins would dwindle, not that more and more electricity would be spent keeping the new coins flowing -- it seems to be that's what's happening, which indeed is not great environmentally.
But, they could accept the donations in cryptocurrency, exchange them for "fiat currency" (i.e. cash) at an exchange, then the cryptocurrency is back in circulation, the energy used to make it is not some sunk cost that was lost when it was donated.
Of course, if accepting cryptocurrency donations is just going to get them bad PR and few crypto donations, maybe it won't be worth it. Personally, due to the reason I gave above, I'm fine with it either way.