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Modafinil Is Wall Street’s New Drug of Choice — New York Magazine

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Modafinil, which is marketed as Provigil in the United States, was first approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, but since then it’s become better known as a nootropic, a “smart drug,” especially among entrepreneurs. More recently, it has attracted traders like Borden who don’t just need a pick-me-up to get through a deadline; they need to be on, without a break, for months, even years at a time.

via Modafinil Is Wall Street’s New Drug of Choice — New York Magazine.

It reminds me a lot of A Deepness in the Sky, minus the giant spider aliens.

Bitcoin might not be a currency

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There are a couple of reasons why the bubble is sure to burst. The first is just that it’s a bubble, and any chart which looks like the one at the top of this post is bound to end in tears at some point. But there’s a deeper reason, too — which is that bitcoins are an uncomfortable combination of commodity and currency. The commodity value of bitcoins is rooted in their currency value, but the more of a commodity they become, the less useful they are as a currency.

via The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency — Money & Banking — Medium.

Definitely one of the best articles I’ve read on Bitcoin. I think the idea of bitcoin as commodity actually makes a lot more sense, given that it’s an artificially constrained resource that’s “mined”.

Chromebook Experiment

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Last week I bought myself one of the Samsung Arm Chromebooks. My theory is that when at conferences this is a nice form factor, light, with a good keyboard for taking notes (interactive etherpad is a key piece of OpenStack design summits), that’s going to last a conference day. It’s also super cheap, so if anything happens to it, I don’t care.

Unlike a phone/tablet, this still means I have sane ssh access, and possibly able to still do code through an ssh connection to a server somewhere. We’ll see how the experiment holds up over the next month or so.

Honestly, the thing that’s going to give me the biggest headache is the touchpad, which is actually pretty good. But I’m someone that has 10+ years of muscle memory on the Thinkpad track point, and I don’t think I’ll ever get more than tolerant of touchpads.

10 Years of MHVLUG

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logo-white10 years ago today I was on a plane, back from Portland, Oregon, to experiment on something new. For the previous 3 months I’d been working towards a kickoff for a local Linux Users Group.

We had a venue: the Mid Hudson Library System Auditorium. We had a date and time:  Wed the 5th of March, 6pm. We had a speaker: Michael Kaegler talking on Linux Firewalling. We had a mailing list and a website, and could clearly see there was interest in the group. But we’d never had a meeting, so this was the moment of truth.

But I was on a plane, racing to get back for the meeting. A month prior my job had changed, I’d started working on OpenHPI, and I’d picked up some standards work, and that meant a trip out of Portland for a 2 day standards meeting with a lot of Intel folks. I managed to get a flight which “should” get me back in time, but I had a plan B to have a Mike Salerno kick off the meeting in my absence. I landed at 5:15, was in my car by 5:30. The meeting was at least 35 minutes away, and there was traffic. Plan B was going to have to be good enough.

When I walked in the door I was blown away. The room was packed! There were at least 35 folks when I arrived, and over the course of the meeting it grew to 50. Wow. I was hoping that it would be more than just me and a few coworkers, but never had I imagined this. I wondered how long this experiment would run, fully imagining that after two years we’d run out of steam and interest and move on.

It’s been 10 years, and MHVLUG is still running strong, better than ever.

For everyone that was part of our first decade, making MHVLUG successful: Thank You. This is a community first, and it’s the people that make this awesome.

For everyone that hasn’t checked us out yet, our 10th Anniversary meeting is tomorrow. We’re going to be talking about: Linux where you least expect it. There will be cake, coffee, and conversation. There will be time for socializing and mixing, to become part of this dynamic community. Join us as we start decade number two.

The Long View

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It’s good to step back some times and look at the really long view. Charlie Stross just did this with his new blog post on 2512, which provides a plausible look at what that world might be. I especially like the framing, about thinking what the world was like 500 years ago:

Five hundred years is a nearly unimaginable gulf from today’s perspective. Five centuries ago, the Portuguese conquistadores were beginning their rampage through South America; Martin Luther was finishing his doctorate in theology and thinking about sin: the huge sequence of civil wars that racked Japan for over a century were raging: the Great Powers were still the Chinese empire and the Caliphate (although the latter was undergoing a shift in center of gravity towards Istanbul and the Ottoman empire). The great powers in Europe were Spain and Venice; the English speaking world was a few million barbarians occupying a handful of damp islands on the outer fringes of Europe. It’s more than twice the historical existence of the USA to this date. Of our social institutions, very few survive from that long ago: the Catholic Church (and various orders and sub-groups within it), the Japanese Monarchy, and so on. A handful of universities, banks, and other institutions. The half-life of a public corporation today is about 30 years: ten half-lives out — 300 years hence — we may expect only one in a million to survive.

The whole post is definitely worth your time, but I do keep coming back to that half life statement. We take it for granted some time that organizations that exist today will be there tomorrow. But the reality is there is nothing magical about organizations, it’s about the people. Things only get done because some decides to do them.

Contemplating the long view seems like an appropriate Sunday morning activities.