David Rosenthal

I roo am trying to curate my RSS feed to be doom-scrolling free. These largely achieve that for me. You'll find a smattering of political posts in them, but that's an inevitable side effect of living in abnormal political times.

https://scrollprize.org/ - The Vesuvius Challenge: Using high intensity X-ray scans and computation to attempt to retrieve lost scrolls from Pompei; real uplifting Sci-Fi stuff! Possibly the most heartwarming thing I know of on the internet; snatching ancient knowledge from the flames of history! What could be more poetic?

https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline - In the Pipeline: The blog of Derek Lowe (pharmaceutical chemist), (in)famous for articles like "Sand Won't Save You This Time" Always interesting, though a lot of the chemistry goes way way over my head. Some political stuff lately, unavoidably given the current secretary of health.

https://blog.dshr.org/ - David Rostenthal: Digital preservationist.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com - Jeff Geerling: Raspberry Pi, Arm, digital radio, and other nerdery. I enjoy his videos, but I love that he does a plaintext version (first?) that's not just a transcript.

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/ - Rob Pike: Programming luminary (Go, UTF-8, Unix, etc.)

https://fasterthanli.me - Faster than Lime: Amos's blog leaning heavily towards Rust. I'm a beginner in Rust, but I love this guy's style of writing even when the stuff he's writing about is beyond my current skill level.

Anyway, those are my go-tos…

Honestly, those who lost money did so because they were aiming for profits, not for The Network State, or for having non-seizable money etc. On the other hand, for those who got in early because they were online and curious at the time, with a small amount of money back then has made them billionaires today, an extremely low risk. If they arrived a bit later, millionaires, still with a really soft risk.

Then of course, there are MANY problems starting with BTC https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html but they generally aren't what most people talk about, and today, even if the complexity is insane, the documentation sparse, and the code quality questionable, Lightning is actually the only truly scalable solution we have for micropayments and payments of various amounts, generally not large ones. It has some absurd aspects, but that hardly matters. It works.

More generally, we don't have a crystal ball; where we can, we diversify, certainly limiting risk but also taking a bit of a gamble; where we can't, we choose to watch and see how it goes, knowing that we'll pay for it in terms of returns.

As things stand for me personally, given the level of IT obscenity in the traditional banking world, which in 2026 still doesn't have decent APIs open to retail customers, or at least decent export functions, shameful websites, a push towards completely unacceptable mobile apps, absurd limits etc etc etc, well, the worst CEx is less bad than the best bank. I don't…

Theo's rant about what an hypocritical idiot ESR is also sounds pretty reasonable to me: he has a point.

ESR's free to make ridiculous laws about eyeballs that aren't true and nobody follows while never actually reviewing any code himself (except for the climate scientists' code which he totally misunderstood and misrepresented), but blaming it on Linus was a dick mode.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Climategate

>During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.)

porridgeraisin: Speaking of ICCCM (aka I39L) and X11 selections, have you seen David Rosenthal's glorious rant about the Sun Desktop that somebody leaked to the unix-haters mailing list (who, moi?), which comes…

I can't speak formally for the Internet Archive, but the existing content and services are not going to disappear overnight: funding comes from several sources, thought has been put in to organizational structure, and things have been designed to keep core access and preservation infrastructure running with minimal cost and effort (eg, if the economy tanks).

Getting the content coverage people sometimes assume we already have is another matter. Additional funding (thanks for you donation!) go towards additional crawling and keeping up with the endless treadmill of media types and protocols. Eg, headless browser crawling development and deployment to capture javascript-heavy sites (https://github.com/internetarchive/brozzler); this is much more expensive than "classic" crawling.

For more on increasing storage costs and the under-funded state of web archiving in general, I recommend David Rosenthal's blog, eg:

https://blog.dshr.org/2018/05/longer-talk-at-msst2018.html

https://blog.dshr.org/2014/03/the-half-empty-archive.html

Far more effective and robust than hoping the archive is "suck it up for us" is to upload snapshots/dumps/exports yourself! Anybody can create an archive.org account and upload content (recommend https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive over the HTML form), within reasonable limits. Obviously, care needs to be taken to remove sensitive (and personal) information first.

It's clear that the internet is now a "low trust society". Unfortunately this is now leaking like a superfund side into the wider society in which it is embedded. High-trust societies are much more efficient because much less effort has to be wasted on security. But they also present an opportunity to "defect" by defrauding people, and can only remain high-trust so long as the ability to punish frauds can keep up.

This is bad for internet freedom as people demand greater ability to make reprisals against the frauds. I sometimes think that what people miss about the "old internet" was it being a high-trust society because almost everyone allowed on it was through an institutional connection where they had to be on their best behavior. We can see landmarks like the Morris Worm, and the posting of goatse and GNAA on Slashdot forcing them into more active moderation.

(References: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265155 ; https://blog.dshr.org/2019/07/the-web-is-low-trust-society.html ; https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-in-the-low-trust-society

All currencies are built on trust. The reason the wildcat banking era failed was lack of trust. The reason various national currencies failed was never about resources, but lack of trust in the government behind the currency. The USD has been a very strong currency because it's backed by a stable government with a strong economy and has a stoutly independent central bank, which has built up enormous trust as a custodian of the currency.

I grant that the rhetoric of Bitcoin is about energy usage, but it doesn't work that way in practice. The most obvious use is the rise of Ethereum and its shift to proof of stake rather than proof of work. But there's plenty of other evidence. David Rosenthal has some good evidence there, like:

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/10/it-was-ten-years-ago-today.html

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/sufficiently-decentralized.html