I have never been fond of cryptocurrency. I don’t see the use, except perhaps for illegal transactions. I used to say it has all the disadvantages of cash combined with all the disadvantages of a credit card.

There have also been a number of cases of people losing their cryptocurrency in various ways, beginning, perhaps with Mt Gox debacle almost a decade ago. Something as inherently insecure and untraceable all but invites these problems. I hesitate to call them crimes, because they really leave no evidence behind and even actual ownership isn’t clear. I’m not aware of any significant law enforcement success in recouping cryptocurrencies that (allegedly) have gone missing. It’s an feature, not a bug.

Recently the FTX exchange (shades of Mt Gox) has had assets allegedly go missing. Prosecution seems swift but as inconclusive as ever. I can’t help but wonder if Mr Brinkman-Fried made the mistake of taking money from the Wrong People. Like Bernie Madoff, the only person I can recall convicted for the debacle of the 2008 financial crisis, he may have made the mistake of stealing from the rich and powerful.

From New York Times Dealbook.

The indictment of S.B.F. is unusually vague for a financial fraud of this kind, legal experts told DealBook. That suggests prosecutors are still looking for others with inside knowledge of the operation to explain what happened. “The very sweeping charges show they have confidence in their case, but there is no smoking gun in the indictment,” said Renato Mariotti, a partner at Bryan Cave who prosecuted securities and commodities fraud at the Justice Department.

There is a Japanese restaurant in a strip mall by the local supermarket. The whole shopping center has been re-done and is pretty spiffy now. We walked past the Japanese place last week and it looked nice. Somehow we had never been here. Didn’t know anyone else who had been here, either. I remembered that there was a similarly named Japanese place near that spot over 20 years ago. It had the feel of a fast food joint with formica booths, order at the counter. We used to go there when the kids were really small. They would eat teriyaki and rice and if they made noise or a mess it wasn’t a big deal. The restaurant also has a big bookshelf of Japanese manga comics, otherwise not much to remember.

Today we went there for lunch. Nice place with Japanese and Korean dishes. Pretty busy at lunch. Had to park over in the supermarket parking lot. Had a pork bulgogi bento, which was really the reason I wanted to go. Our old stand-by Korean place burned down many years ago and I never found a suitable replacement.

I couldnt resist asking the waitress if there was a connection between the old Manga Teriyaki joint and this new place. Yes, there was. The parents ran the Teriyaki place and now the kids have taken over and upgraded it into a nice sit down restaurant. Not sure when the changeover happened. I’ll definitely be going back.

From Texas Monthly.

The 2023 Bum Steer Awards

I look forward to the annual Bum Steer Awards from Texas Monthly. Somewhat sadly, the bummer of the year is the city of Austin itself.

2023 Bum Steer of the Year: Austin

More on OpenAIs chatbots. An author asked a chatBot to write his obituary, with disturbing results. I need to try this myself.

The Alarming Deceptions at the Heart of an Astounding New Chatbot

Joseph Stiglitz asks whether recent inflation is due to lack of supply or too much demand. If the answer is too much demand, raising interest rates is the right thing to do. If the real problem is supply disruptions, then this won’t help and will actually hurt. Spoiler alert: it’s supply disruptions.

The Pandemic and War — Not Government Spending — Caused Inflation, According to Nobel Prize Winner

From n+1.

Why Is Everything So Ugly?

i bought one of these cute little MiniPCs a while back. Great price, and came with Windows 10, not that I wanted it. Installed Ubuntu and used it happily. It was still able to boot windows from the GRUB menu. I figured I might need it one day. I’m not sure what came over me, but today I decided to take a few minutes, boot Windows and do an update. What could go wrong?

First it wouldn’t boot. Somehow related to the dreaded UEFI security. I suppose stopping you from booting up is the ultimate in secure computing. I searched for a fix on-line and found several. All seemed dodgy or complex and none seems to have any explanation for what was actually wrong. I’m found a way to force a Windows boot via the BIOS. Good enough for me.

Updates were slow. Like really slow. In my boredom I noticed the clock was off by several hours. I guess I hadn’t set the time zone. Without thinking I set the correct time zone. Big mistake. Suddenly all bets were off. Some things worked, others didn’t. I decided to reboot, hoping for a return to sanity. Now I’m unable to even power down. I guess I have time. I’ll wait the bastards out. And to think I used to do this for a living.

There have been some ongoing improvements to Natural Language Processing and associated Artificial intelligence. AI “chatbots“, which are able to converse in normal human language, have become fairly robust. OpenAI in particular has made some new work widely available. Ben Thompson at Stratechery discusses.

AI Homework

From iEEE:

75th Anniversary of the Transistor