"but projects like the State of California’s effort to put auto registration on a blockchain are likely to simplify the painful process of dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles."
This is one of the most outrageously ridiculous sentence fragments I've ever read in my entire life. Just utterly deranged. Like literally what could blockchain offer the California DMV that a centralized database could not?
I have to agree, and on top of everything i deem this a straight up wishful reversal of the likely outcome:
Vehicle registration is governed by a central authority _by law_, not by technical necessity.
Therefore blockchaining-up the storage of registrations themselves will likely do very little to remove the need to deal with the responsible department -- it might rather make dealing with the DMV _much worse_ since they'll not have full authority over their records anymore, while third parties might be able to interface with them however they see fit, yet with no official communication channels with the department and zero authority over the actual legal side of registrations.
And even if they do keep full control over the nodes & contracts and just make it "Blockchain" for the buzzwords sake, the immutable nature of those records could very well end up being of little more use than having a persistent "paper trail", yet make it an absolute nightmare to correct human errors if the tech isn't implemented very carefully, and if personnel isn't very well versed in handling this new system.
At the very best, it could give retail more accessible ways of handling registrations directly on sale, but that'd still mandate a huge additional support and oversight effort by the department and might easily result in a much worse shitshow than current bureaucratic issues could ever be.
The thing that struck me is that, besides that deranged sentence, the author comes off as quite reasonable. He said he was an early believer in crypto and blockchains, but he doesn't deny all the crazy bad shit that has gone on with crypto.
So the fact that one of the best examples he can think of to defend the utility of blockchain is this deranged sentence just shows how hard it is for people to give up on things that they've invested a lot of their personal belief in. There is just "no there there", but it will take a long time for folks to realize it.
Man, blockchain tech is falling so far behind on the user experience front that it’s not even funny.
There was a bug on Sushiswap, a few days back, that required revoking access to the contract for each token.
To do that, you had to first somehow find the exact contract, find it on Etherscan, give it “write” access from your wallet, then revoke access to each token one by one from your wallet.
This process has literally not changed in 3 years. Metamask is almost 100% the same as it was in 2020.
All that money and dev energy is going into building increasingly esoteric DeFi ponzis. None of them want to fix the actual problem of bringing more users.
Total active crypto users outside of exchanges is in the tens of thousands at most.
I can maybe see some "chain of custody" type stuff for vehicle titles and transfers. But, of course, regular old cryptographic signing into a regular ledger works for that.
I've never heard of this project, so I can't speak to its implementation, however blockchain to handle DB + access api for relatively slow db operations I think is one of the rare great current blockchain use-cases. If done well it has the potential to be a piece of open-sourced infrastructure. And once it's done once well, it could be replicated to every dmv-like entity (IE almost every permit or sign-off based process) in the world. And the comparison to a state-run database, I think many of us would agree that is an area where there is plenty of room for improvement.
But this is the first I'm hearing of this project, so I'm not advocating for it specifically.
I for one totally trust an organization that can't operate a "pick a number" machine correctly to get my official ID and driver's license right on the block chain.
A permissioned blockchain might be good for that scenario.
If each DMV office had its own read/write copy of the database and it replicated to all the others, that would be a workable answer. Each police department and maybe even every police car, could update itself asynchronously, so if a police car went out of network range it would still have a complete copy of the database. If there were 100 million registered cars and 10 kb of data per car that’s a very comfortable 1 TB of data and if each car got updated once a year that is about 10 GB a day which is a lot for a mobile plan but no trouble to update when you get back to the station.
The government blockchain projects that I'm aware of that have had some success (AFAIK. I've been away from the space for a while and was only ever peripherally involved, e.g. https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/) it was more about having information exchange and a coherent view of information across a multitude of organizations. Not so much the cryptography, immutability, etc.
Mind you I'm actually not sure what the CA DMV would gain. It seems they're the only source of truth that matters with respect to CA residents. Title information maybe given that does move from owner to owner.
Proponents would likely say that a public blockchain would make it easy to prove, verify ownership of <vehicle/property>, maybe even transfer it, but then so could a centralized database with a publicly accessible API. It's an modernization issue at the end of the day, not a data storage issue.
I haven't owned a car for very long. Are there ever cases where the status of a registration is in dispute? This plan essentially makes their database public, hopefully encrypted, with registrants having means to decrypt their own record. Maybe that could help in some cases.
> Like literally what could blockchain offer the California DMV that a centralized database could not?
"After attempts to restore from backups failed because backups turned out to be incorrect, DMV head had to admit that they lost some data from the centralized database after a black-hat hackers attack. 'Please go to DMV and re-register your vehicle', the head was quoted as saying, 'because you're required by law to drive in a registered vehicle'"
This is a depressing list, I was expecting some interesting new bio engineering process or dunno quantum chemistry this or that for easier synthesise of whatever, but instead it was either marginal improvements like wasm or total BS like blockchain/cloud. AI/ML is probably the only interesting thing happening in tech at the moment, it has been getting more attention in the last year but that is because it has honestly enabled a lot of people to do things they could not do before. Personally I think that there is also a lot of things happening in computer graphics but the money has been miss allocated on creating virtual places instead of making the real world better.
It's funny, but looking back at the computer technologies that have been truly transformative since the 60s, it's hard to find anything that was considered sexy or interesting or had much hype. Heck, even the transistor, invented around 80 years ago now, was considered so uninteresting that Bell Labs gave it away. The semiconductor IC came out of TI in 1958, and again, it hardly made waves.
To be fair the article is badly titled and should probably substitute tech for software.
Not everything needs to be a revolution, and I find that kind of more pragmatic article very useful to understand what tools are becoming available for your craft.
Nice to see CRDTs mentioned in the capacity of decentralisation, they are almost always solely thought of in the synchronous real-time collaboration sense.
This current trend of synchronous real-time collaboration tools is brilliant, but only half the story when it comes to collaborative work (also mentioned in the OP). Asynchronous collaboration is how most of us spend our time working, and always will. CRDTs are also brilliant for that type of application, you can "fork" a document/structure and later merge them together (mostly) unaided. There is a massive need for improvements to the workflows that these can be applied to.
The article contains a complete misrepresentation of the origins of Kubernetes:
> It started as an open source release of Google’s Borg: the internal platform that managed their vast infrastructure.
Borg has never been open-sourced. Kubernetes was a greenfield project, and there's no Borg code in it whatsoever.
Kubernetes is probably more influenced by Google's Omega project, an attempt at "Borg 2.0" which ended up having its ideas merged into Borg instead. For example, Kubernetes' persistent store is inspired by Omega.
"but projects like the State of California’s effort to put auto registration on a blockchain are likely to simplify the painful process of dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles."
A surprising number of tasks can be performed online already at the CA DMV w/o any crypto or blockchain involvement. The few painful bits include an in-person driving test (“behind the wheel”) which is unlikely to be blockchained away. Then there is photo taking and vision test and some admittedly annoying paperwork if one goes for verification (RealID). How exactly is blockchain helping here?
While the "auto registration on a blockchain" is a bonkers goal, cars themselves don't have to take an in-person driving test (though they do have to have an emissions test that cannot be blockchained away).
If anything, this article exemplifies how much of a seismic change that GPT has wrought on our current tech scape. Everything mentioned feels utterly mundane by comparison, and yet are also what I imagined in 2021 what we’d be talking about in 2023
went to Disneyland for the first time two weeks ago, I'm almost certain they have mastered holographic displays. not sure if that would be considered mainstream or not, since it's still their proprietary magic tech, but it was fascinating.
> Memory-safe languages like Java and Python automate allocating and deallocating memory, though there are still ways to work around the languages’ built-in protections.
[+] [-] nathan_compton|2 years ago|reply
This is one of the most outrageously ridiculous sentence fragments I've ever read in my entire life. Just utterly deranged. Like literally what could blockchain offer the California DMV that a centralized database could not?
[+] [-] krsdcbl|2 years ago|reply
Vehicle registration is governed by a central authority _by law_, not by technical necessity.
Therefore blockchaining-up the storage of registrations themselves will likely do very little to remove the need to deal with the responsible department -- it might rather make dealing with the DMV _much worse_ since they'll not have full authority over their records anymore, while third parties might be able to interface with them however they see fit, yet with no official communication channels with the department and zero authority over the actual legal side of registrations.
And even if they do keep full control over the nodes & contracts and just make it "Blockchain" for the buzzwords sake, the immutable nature of those records could very well end up being of little more use than having a persistent "paper trail", yet make it an absolute nightmare to correct human errors if the tech isn't implemented very carefully, and if personnel isn't very well versed in handling this new system.
At the very best, it could give retail more accessible ways of handling registrations directly on sale, but that'd still mandate a huge additional support and oversight effort by the department and might easily result in a much worse shitshow than current bureaucratic issues could ever be.
[+] [-] kolinko|2 years ago|reply
There is nothing in blockchain that will help with the issues in DMV. If anything, adding blockchain may complicate things.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago|reply
So the fact that one of the best examples he can think of to defend the utility of blockchain is this deranged sentence just shows how hard it is for people to give up on things that they've invested a lot of their personal belief in. There is just "no there there", but it will take a long time for folks to realize it.
[+] [-] spaceman_2020|2 years ago|reply
There was a bug on Sushiswap, a few days back, that required revoking access to the contract for each token.
To do that, you had to first somehow find the exact contract, find it on Etherscan, give it “write” access from your wallet, then revoke access to each token one by one from your wallet.
This process has literally not changed in 3 years. Metamask is almost 100% the same as it was in 2020.
All that money and dev energy is going into building increasingly esoteric DeFi ponzis. None of them want to fix the actual problem of bringing more users.
Total active crypto users outside of exchanges is in the tens of thousands at most.
[+] [-] tyingq|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crop_rotation|2 years ago|reply
A lot of mumbo jumbo.
[+] [-] djl0|2 years ago|reply
But this is the first I'm hearing of this project, so I'm not advocating for it specifically.
[+] [-] indymike|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nasmorn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
If each DMV office had its own read/write copy of the database and it replicated to all the others, that would be a workable answer. Each police department and maybe even every police car, could update itself asynchronously, so if a police car went out of network range it would still have a complete copy of the database. If there were 100 million registered cars and 10 kb of data per car that’s a very comfortable 1 TB of data and if each car got updated once a year that is about 10 GB a day which is a lot for a mobile plan but no trouble to update when you get back to the station.
[+] [-] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
Mind you I'm actually not sure what the CA DMV would gain. It seems they're the only source of truth that matters with respect to CA residents. Title information maybe given that does move from owner to owner.
[+] [-] dns_snek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fauxpause_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orblivion|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdfman123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avmich|2 years ago|reply
"After attempts to restore from backups failed because backups turned out to be incorrect, DMV head had to admit that they lost some data from the centralized database after a black-hat hackers attack. 'Please go to DMV and re-register your vehicle', the head was quoted as saying, 'because you're required by law to drive in a registered vehicle'"
[+] [-] ethicalsmacker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KrugerDunnings|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cratermoon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charles_f|2 years ago|reply
Not everything needs to be a revolution, and I find that kind of more pragmatic article very useful to understand what tools are becoming available for your craft.
[+] [-] ryanpandya|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|2 years ago|reply
This current trend of synchronous real-time collaboration tools is brilliant, but only half the story when it comes to collaborative work (also mentioned in the OP). Asynchronous collaboration is how most of us spend our time working, and always will. CRDTs are also brilliant for that type of application, you can "fork" a document/structure and later merge them together (mostly) unaided. There is a massive need for improvements to the workflows that these can be applied to.
[+] [-] atombender|2 years ago|reply
> It started as an open source release of Google’s Borg: the internal platform that managed their vast infrastructure.
Borg has never been open-sourced. Kubernetes was a greenfield project, and there's no Borg code in it whatsoever.
Kubernetes is probably more influenced by Google's Omega project, an attempt at "Borg 2.0" which ended up having its ideas merged into Borg instead. For example, Kubernetes' persistent store is inspired by Omega.
[+] [-] crop_rotation|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danrl|2 years ago|reply
A surprising number of tasks can be performed online already at the CA DMV w/o any crypto or blockchain involvement. The few painful bits include an in-person driving test (“behind the wheel”) which is unlikely to be blockchained away. Then there is photo taking and vision test and some admittedly annoying paperwork if one goes for verification (RealID). How exactly is blockchain helping here?
[+] [-] phone8675309|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DantesKite|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andsoitis|2 years ago|reply
Nothing in the biosciences space! Or in space itself! Or energy!
They also sound like a list that some big professional services firm will put out as their outlook for the next decade's big technologies.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avmich|2 years ago|reply
Sounds pretty bad.
> Customers want technology that “just works.”
This shouldn't be the same as a "well-hidden technology".
[+] [-] danso|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twobitshifter|2 years ago|reply
We also have the beginnings of individual intelligence amplification which is a step beyond chatgpt now that the building blocks are in place.
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yoric|2 years ago|reply
What about the simplification of both renewable energies and nuclear energy?
I can think of things that are more exciting than blockchain and the metaverse...
[+] [-] Alifatisk|2 years ago|reply
Interesting, any fun examples?
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] legitimayzer|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cardboardbach|2 years ago|reply
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