Richard Kyanka, better known to the world as Lowtax, took his own life this week. He was the genesis of Something Awful, a dark humor blog and morality-free forum I enjoyed far too much as an impressionable teenager with a developing brain. Looking back it feels a bit gross as to how to mean the community was to harmless weirdos and who I thought was cool, were fucked up individuals. Either way, Something Awful was undoubtedly a big part of internet culture in the early 2000s and the death of its creator is a milestone in the history of the internet I love so much. This oral history of Something Awful by Vice from 2017 explains the legacy Lowtax leaves behind.
Our Prime Minister spoke at a G20 CEO Summit in Auckland (remotely) and said some interesting things about how the government he leads views tech regulation. The key point, which he's said for a while now, is "the rules that apply in the real world should apply in the digital world" - "we can't treat the digital world like it's the Wild West and it's a lawless space and you can't have business models, which depend on it being that either". But Scotty also said "it's important that those who are creating this digital world are part of that process [of modernising regulation] because if you just leave it to governments to do it, well, they’ll stuff it up. Because they don’t understand it the same way". Bit of an own goal there dude, maybe you should try and understand it before going aroun regulating it???
Many people cracked the shits a few days ago when Discord's CEO tweeted a mockup screenshot demonstrating the ability to link your Discord account with a MetaMask/WalletConnect cryptocurrency wallet, normally associated with NFTs. The feedback aimed at Discord potentially catering for scammers and enabling environmental damage must have been loud, as two days later the CEO replied to his own tweet with, "Thanks for all the perspectives everyone. We have no current plans to ship this internal concept. For now we're focused on protecting users from spam, scams and fraud. Web3 has lots of good but also lots of problems we need to work through at our scale. More soon".
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
📻 Sludgefeast - Dinosaur Jr
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