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After months of delay, I am pleased to announce the implementation of email newsletters at Wasya.Co and Piousbox.com

The short answer is - I think it used to be much better. To be fair, doing marketing and obtaining new clients has always been difficult - arguably, it is more difficult than doing actual technology work. But in the past I think it was more rational and more usable.

So Vitalik, the guy who wrote the Ethereum protocol, recently posted this, which I feel I can comment on:

I'm not necessarily calling him a grifter - but analyzing his post falls squarely under the subject of analyzing grift.

I want to write first about my admiration of ducks, and swans by extension. They are the animals capable of flying (birds), and they also swim. They also walk on land. Ducks, and also swans, are therefore truly all-terrain, all-element animals: they've conquered earth, water and air. (And they're metabolic, living organisms so we'll grant them the command of "fire" in the sense of metabolic oxidation.)

You may be familiar with the saying, "duck typing". The idea is that if something walks like a duck, talks like a duck... then it may be a duck.

I've been in awe at some news I've been reading. Because they have been very powerfully written. It is like reading a good novel - which I no longer do, between reading news, documentation, and writing (which is to say, not reading), I no longer read what I know is fiction. Too bad though - some of the books in my past have been excellent. Take William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, my favorite american sci-fi authors so far.

Point and call is an managerial tool that is very simple to implement and it goes a long way in ensuring both safety of operations, and correctness of code.