Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19

[Tim May]

On Dec 8, 2003, at 12:22 PM, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 12/8/2003 2:46:37 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> timcmay at got.net writes:
>
>> So, you are free to be "Matt Gaylor, Activist!" and to try to get
>> articles published in "Liberty" or "Gold Currency Times" or wherever
>> you get published, but I have other things I'd rather be doing.
>>
>> Preaching to me that I ought to be sacrificing my time for the
>> betterment of some skatepunks by publishing in "Piercing Magazine" is
>> the silliest kind of altruistic thinking.
>>
>
> No Tim, not altruistic. My reason for wanting you to write is a 
> selfish one.
> Self preservation.  You are able to tie technology into the bigger 
> picture,
> and you do have something valuable to say.  You already sacrifice your 
> time in
> pointless diatribes about the good ole' days on CP-  I'm just making a 
> plea
> that you do something more useful-
>

You need to read my long, long essay in "True Names," then. This is 
more widely available than anything I would waste my time doing for 
"Body Peircing" or "Skate," even if I wanted to.

As for writing for "Reason," they haven't asked, and their editorial 
focus is increasingly statist. Cf. Cathy Young's quote at the bottom of 
this post.

As for my diatribes here, the references to the archives and to how 
Sarath shouldn't be posting homework questions and all, well, these 
take very, very little of my time.

I spend much more time trying to get XEmacs to do a smarter job of 
recognizing Haskell keywords!

(And thinking how the integrated development environment I had nearly 
20 years ago with my Symbolics Lisp Machine, with integrated debuggers, 
browsers, inspectors, and an editor (Zmacs) was so far ahead of 
anything I can now get with any combination of Emacs, XEmacs, OCaml, 
Mozart/Oz, or Haskell. The one good and integrated environment I have, 
that is not proprietary to some company, is Squeak, the Smalltalk 
environment. But for various reasons I am not doing Squeak at this 
time...lazy evaluation is the kind of executable mathematics that is 
where it's at, as we old farts used to say.)

More will change, and _has_ changed, by writing code than by trying to 
convince the nosering set that they should be learning Perl or Python. 
And it's not as if there isn't a vast sea of material already out there 
at everyone's fingertips!

One of the reasons I don't place high value on writing "new" articles 
anymore, unless new topics come up, is that I believe strongly that an 
article written a year ago, or five years ago, is just as meaningful as 
a "current" article (which may actually have been written earlier, pace 
the usual delays). This is closely-related to my reaction to people 
attempting to predict "future" stock prices: I'm more interested--to 
the extent I ever am in such schemes--in the behavior on past series, 
which can then be quickly tested. A subtle point, but an important one.

So if I get interested in some topic--let's pick Haskell and crypto, to 
stick with this example--I will spend literally several hours per day 
for several weeks reading from the vast number of articles and postings 
which have been written on the subjects. This search takes me off into 
a bunch of different directions.

And this is the way to do it, not get on sci.crypt and ask some 
question like "Hey, has anyone ever tried Haskell here?" And not 
getting on the Haskell mailing list and asking if anyone has every used 
it for crypto. The answers are already out there, possibly a few months 
old, but so what?

Now when we started (ObOldFartMode: On), no one had much discussed 
things like "the dining cryptographers problem." So people like me and 
Hal Finney and a few others spent many hours a week writing articles 
linking the problem to things like digital money and anonymous 
remailers.

Why should any of us rewrite those same articles today?

(I also spent many thousands of hours working on the FAQ which 
everybody else was complaining about but which no one who volunteered 
to do it was either qualified to do it or was committed enough to get 
beyond the usual two-page kind of summary. My version, the one I chose 
to write, I dubbed the Cyphernomicon. It is widely available and Google 
has no problem finding parts of it. One need not even download and read 
the whole thing. Just type in something like "timed-release crypto" and 
off you go. Those who want it, can get it. Those who still don't know 
how to use Google or other engines are preterite anyway.)

I'm not sure what it is Matt thinks I need to be doing for the good of 
the herd. Writing a weekly column in "Newsweek" so that the great 
unwashed masses will learn about the importance of crypto? Writing a 
monthly column in "Skatepunk" or in Starbucks' in-house newsletter 
about prime numbers and bit commitment?

Laughable, for various reasons.

News flash: I have no desire to write on a deadline. I write when I 
feel like writing. And a good chunk of what I write gets spidered by 
Google. What can be more satisfying than that?


--Tim May

Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; 
perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." 
--Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.