The Social Contract Theory in IT

 A lot of IT revolves around social contracts - a set of rules in a community or forum; what is "legal" when writing code in different languages; how should an UI look so that most people could use it easily.

 However, one of the most known ways for networking "social contracts" to come to be is trough Request For Comment (RFC). The main point of RFC is to introduce new guidelines for networking, since it is ever evolving. This means that some RFCs are experimental and might not be used later. Some become IETF standards. 

Network operators, software developers and hardware manufacturers around the world keep an eye on RFC in order to be able to create products that are as useful as possible - compatibility being one of the main concerns.

As some of old RFCs are taught as rules to IT students, for example RFC 1034 - explaining domain names from 1987. That's 35 years ago!

What makes RFCs better and a bit more nuanced than regular social contracts is that even a bit more experimental RFCs exist, even though they might be replaced later. And that makes sense - networking itself is changing every day. And thus, the most useful ones get to stay and become obvious knowledge to the specialists.

https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/social-contract-theory

https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1034

Wiki Review: Decentralized Finance

 A well-written wiki article that analyzes many aspects of cryptocurrency - influence of celebrities and scams, for example. The article was quite balanced in terms of negatives and positives, there were great examples of both. If I had to write such a wiki article, it would definitely be way too biased - when it comes to some topics, I am almost uncapable of keeping my mouth shut.

I especially liked the example of Ukrainian refugees who were able to keep their money safe by trading it for cryptocurrencies. And for me personally, the largest issue with cryptocurrencies today is the amount of computer power that they "waste". I was glad to learn that more environmentally friendly solutions are being worked on. 

I enjoyed the writing style. The sentences did not drag on for too long and everything was very straight-forward. I would have liked to see more sectioning of paragraphs - however, it is definitely my personal preference (me and long paragraphs do not mix well). There were enough pictures to keep the reader entertained, and they illustrated the points being made well. However, the graph "Stability of cryptocurrencies" did not really make sense to me - I would have preferred to see percentages on both of the Y axis's. That way the two graphs could be compared to one another as well.

All in all, this was a great wiki read. I harbor only rather basic knowledge about cryptocurrencies, so this read definitely came in handy. I would even recommend it to others who are interested in learning more about cryptocurrencies. Probably one of the best aspects of this wiki - the topic has real learning value.

Book Review: Neuromancer by William Gibson

I really enjoyed the read - would definitely recommend this to any fan of the cyberpunk culture/aesthetic. Apparently, this book was one of the first to contain such cyberpunk themes. The terms Night City and "eddies" definitely reminded me of the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. That was probably one of my first encounters with the cyberpunk aesthetic - I really-really enjoyed the game. Especially driving my car around and enjoying the cityscape of Night City. I played it to the end, however, I never got quite over the fact that as a female character I was not able to romance Panam. But still, it really got me to enjoy the aesthetic and the looks of it all. When reading the book, I imagined a lot of the things to look like something out of Cyberpunk 2077.

I have to clarify, though - the Night City of "Neuromancer" is way different from the Night City of "Cyberpunk 2077" - the game is not based on the book as one might guess at first. "Neuromancer" was written in 1984 and it has aged well, especially for a science fiction novel. It is packed with references which can make the book a bit hard to read - however, there are explanations available on the Internet. I was also get my hands on an Estonian version of the book - "Neuromant", which was not translated very well, however, it had explanations of all the terms at the very back, which helped me to understand the context (I decided to read an e-book in English, instead).

Thus, this book took me quite a bit of time to finish - this is not the type of easy science-fiction read one might imagine. I definitely had to have some patience for myself, as I am used to "swallowing" a book in a day or less. This one took me around a week.

Although not an easy read, Gibson is great as an author - the book is packed full of action. It revolves mostly around character dialogue and actions, less on thoughts or feelings. It almost seems like there is little time to feel, when the main character Case (a "cyberspace cowboy") is kidnapped and brought to Armitage - a man who wants to use Case for his missions. 

He also does not use very specific or hard to understand words for the description of the cyber space. A lot of it is left to the reader to imagine.