Good morning. Hello. How are you? #904
Duolingo hell, More Apple Vision Pro stuff, Gensler and the SEC v Binance and Coinbase, Chinese Three Body adaptation
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good. Arthritic fingers, check. Tennis elbow, three months in, check. Not quite enough sleep, check.
These diamond league Duolingo competitors are the real deal. This is going to be nearly impossible to win this league. But I need this badge. But it has to be this week, I cannot do this a second time. It is taking up all of my free time. Every day I pass the leader by 1,000 points or so, and by the end of the day, someone is a thousand points ahead of me. Right now I have 7,100 points ish, and last night around 9PM someone passed me, this bastard Marco, raising to 8,100 points. I’m not trying to dominate, just yet. I’m just trying to stay in the running. But it’s going to take an entire day off on Sunday to clinch this thing. And I have stuff to do. But I need that badge.
But I swear, if I don’t get first this week, barring a bedridden illness, I am never trying to win this league again. These people are machines.
Yesterday I went to the Apple developer site and downloaded a bunch of videos from the sessions that are happening. A few things announced on Monday are related to my work, so I figured I ought to get up to speed on those, and while I was there I grabbed the “platform state of the union” and a bunch of videos on designing and developing apps for the Vision Pro. I am slowly getting more into the thing. I don’t know why. The marketing hype didn’t really do it for me, but watching all the developers talk about all the nuances of it is kind of getting me excited. There are substantial accessibility features built in, which is pretty cool. The OS seems fairly robust — though it drives me crazy how Apple keeps saying VisionOS and its components were built from the “ground up” for AR, but also VisionOS is built on the common core with MacOS and iOS. It cannot be both! Words have meanings! But I digress. I’m kinda into the thing now. I was wondering how they were going to do the developer environment so you could see what you were making for the thing and the answer is impressive: both a simulator for your Mac that shows how your apps will look in a series of different rooms (though you don’t seem to be able to upload your own room to it yet), and a whole ability to code with the thing on, where your Mac monitor appears in the air in front of you and the app you’re building appears in the air in front of you as you code it. Both seem pretty awesome. Thew new app Reality Composer Pro seems great. Their implementation of an industry-standard texture mapping framework is nice. The integration with Unity seems especially impressive and you can use Unity code right along with your Swift code. And the Swift bridging software now extends to C++ but not, alas, Go. Which was never a realistic possibility to begin with, but a man can dream.
I will also say there are a lot of sessions about the Shareplay framework and API and other sharing and social frameworks, and even though Apple didn’t show a single “watch with a friend” app in the Keynote, it seems very clear from the developer sessions that they really, really want their developer community to build these things. So I will temper my critique that they are focused on isolating us all. I mean yes it would be dumb for Emma and I to sit on the couch together and watch a movie, each wearing a Vision Pro. But it would be far less dumb for my friend Nick and I — in different cities — to be wearing them while we both watch Dead Ringers and shoot the shit about it while we watch it I would like that very much Nick when is the last time you saw Dead Ringers I wonder how its aged.
Also, hilariously, all of the clothes are maybe 5% more rumpled in the Platform State of the Union keynote than the main WWDC keynote. But everyone still talks like robots and makes the same utterly inhuman hand gestures. One woman was wearing two Apple watches. There was only one foreign accent and, again, no regional American accents. Not allowed. Unless your Tim Cook then you’re allowed to have an oh-so-slight hint of a Southern lilt as an hommage to your alma mater.
Anyway, god help me I am now looking forward to the Vision Pro and I am half considering getting back into coding to make… something for it, but… yeah maybe not.
So the SEC is going for it, “suing” both Binance and Coinbase as being illegal, unregistered securities exchanges. Binance hilariously punched back last night by proffering a story about how Gary Gensler, chair of the SEC, once attempted to be an advisor to Binance, meeting with Zhao in Tokyo and pitching himself. This was in 2019 when he was a lowly Sloan professor, before Biden tapped him to run the SEC, but it is not a particularly good look. Binance is attempting to get him removed from the case, but I don’t think that will work or make much of a difference for them unfortunately. I suspect his POV is permeated throughout the Biden SEC, the other commissioners aside.
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I find crypto technically interesting, as you will recall from my long-ass essay about Crypto a while back. But I don’t especially personally care about the financial aspects of crypto, and generally agree there was a lot of unseemly shenanigans and fraud going on. I have a lot of mixed feelings about all of this, which I suppose makes for unexciting reading because I can’t pull off a polemic. But here are some of my thoughts:
It is unseemly for the SEC to be so schitzo in its approach, especially with Coinbase, whose IPO they approved. They’re not wrong in arguing “just because we approved your IPO doesn’t mean we approved all of your business practices” from a legalistic point-of-view, but also… they kind of are wrong. It reeks of poor sportsmanship and capriciousness….
…and while they would absolutely be able to overcome that in front of a judge or some expert panel, I think the SEC would be a higher hill to climb in front of a Jury. I don’t know how SEC lawsuits work but I assume Coinbase and Binance will have the option for a Jury trial and I desperately hope it comes to that. I hope Coinbase fights this all the way, because that makes for good television.
I feel for Coinbase more than Binance mainly because they have endeavored, for years to work with the SEC and have gotten bupkis. I generally agree with their pov that they would like some clear laws and a cooperative SEC and if there were just clear rules they would follow them.
But I really hope congress doesn’t negate these lawsuits by passing laws legalizing crypto exchanges becuase the court case would be really fun.
But also I think congress should pass a law legalizing crypto exchanges.
And I think this because I am deeply conflicted about securities laws protecting the “poor” while letting the rich do what they want. Er, excuse me, “accredited investors.” I can see both sides of this issue, which is sort of peripheral to these cases but also at the heart of them. I think it’s completely reasonable that the government has laws protecting the naive masses from scams. But I also agree with those who say that these limits are keeping certain classes of people from good investment opportunities. I also think it’s completely unreasonable how the SEC implements this protective vision, because they do so by pretty much killing off an entire class of perfectly reasonable, legal and safe investment opportunities. It is weird, and even ignoring crypo the laws are impenetrable, hodge-podge, and patchwork. Like “oh let’s just carve out crowdfunding because people like crowdfunding” — a thing that happened — makes sense but also completely negates the very founding principles of our approach to securities investment protection: that the only way to protect the masses is to ban their access to “unregistered securities.” But once that crowdfunding crack is in the facade, there’s no real reason to not do the same for Crypto.
When Sony sued the VCR makers, the courts came back with the substantial non-infringing use doctrine: a technology should not be illegal, even if a lot of people do illegal things with it, if there is a substantial portion of the user base who are doing legal things with it. Put aside that most people were just making personal copies of movies and that shouldn’t have been illegal anyway, it’s not a terrible doctrine, and I think something similar should apply with crypo: if a bunch of people are doing legal things with it, you can’t paint the entire industry with the brush of being illegal. There are lots of people doing things with crypto that aren’t scams.
I think the SEC’s view that all cypto are securities is flawed, and of course its unfair, given that Ethereum made the cut before they decided this. Airline miles aren’t securities. More to the point I think there is a fundamental difference between sharing the profits because a community and commodity increases in value and sharing the profits when a company increases in value, and the SEC is conflating the two. Crypto is mostly more like Magic the Gathering cards. You can do a thing with it, the cards themselves can increase in value, and Wizards of the Coast can, and routinely do, issue more cards and make more money off of them. This is not true of other stock. You can’t use your stock in Coca Cola to play a game or go see Skrillex. The SEC glosses over this and I disagree with their analysis. Your membership to Soho House does not let you vote on their debt issuance or buying a competitor, even if it did also let you vote on, say, the temperature of the pool or what whiskeys they carry.
All that said, as a generally indifferent observer, I really want this to go to the mat. I want this to be a knock-down drag out fight because I am too nerdy and aloof to watch actual sports.
This is old news now but last Thursday Emma and I assembled a bed for Jane. One of those Ikea-like kit beds. And we did not argue. I think we deserve some sort of award.
Weirdly, the mattress and the bed — both “full/double”-sized — are different in size by a full five inches. This seems… excessive. The bed is about an inch smaller than standard beds, which isn’t that weird, I can see how they want it to sort of recede into the background, but the mattress is a seven-or-so-year-old Casper. Anyone else have older Casper mattresses that have…. swelled? Or were the wrong size to begin with? It is very odd.
I finished the Chinese TV adaptation of The Three Body Problem last night. Thirty episodes. Took a while. They did the canal scene thing really well I was wondering how they were going to pull that off. All in all decent effects for that, if slightly too painterly and motion-blurry. I believed it. I like how Chinese TV doesn’t seem to care about acting ability as much as American TV. Its kinda refreshing: here is a plot here is a lot of symbolism and we present it to you in a very workhorse-like fashion.
Oh and all the American soldiers, whenever they were running, had their seargant or whoever say the same line, over and over, because to a Chinese audience its just a bunch of foreigners running and shouting so why bother recording extra, realistic dialogue. I appreciated that. I’m sure we do the same all the time. And I loved the “whiteface” Americans played by made up, heavily-accended Chinese people.
And I love there is a new character, just for the TV show, called “Colonel Mike.”
Justa mix for you today. Mostly new, a little old. Breathing Underwater really is the best Metric song. Haven’t heard it in ages. And Ahead is the best Wire song fight me. Got a great beat and you can dance to it. Forgot about the synth gem Tomorrow by Electric Youth really just a beautiful song. And lots of new stuff.
Until tomorrow!
The canal scene! Man i need to watch this.