Somewhere in the last three weeks my phone turned into a slot machine. Every night at 9pm sharp Im sitting on the couch, sound up, playing HQ Trivia like its the only thing standing between me and rent money. For anyone whos missed this: its a live trivia show, actually live, hosted by a guy named Scott Rogowsky who talks like hes auditioning for a late-night gig he already half has, and if you get all twelve questions right you split whatever the prize pool is that night with everyone else who survived. Usually that works out to a few bucks each once you divide it by the fourteen thousand people who also made it. Ive gotten to question eleven twice. Never won. Ive come embarrassingly close to yelling at my TV over a question about the Property Brothers.
I bring this up not because trivia apps are usually blog material here but because the whole thing is such a weird little snapshot of where phones are at right now, a scheduled appointment, twice a day (theres a smaller 3pm game too), that a few million people apparently show up for on purpose. No push notification reminder needed, I just know its coming. Thats not nothing.
Meanwhile the actual serious tech news this month has been rougher going. If youve been anywhere near a computer youve heard about Spectre and Meltdown by now, the chip flaws that affect basically every processor made in the last decade. I patched my ThinkPad for it back in early January and for two and a half weeks it randomly rebooted itself, sometimes twice a day, always at the worst possible moment, once right in the middle of writing an earlier draft of this post. Turns out I wasnt imagining it. Intel came out this week and told people with older Broadwell and Haswell chips to just stop installing the current microcode update because it was causing exactly this kind of instability. So the fix for the security hole was itself broken enough that the company had to walk it back. I dont know how you inspire confidence after that, but I dont think this was it. My laptop is currently unpatched again and Ive made my peace with it.
And then theres crypto, which at this point I mostly just watch the way you watch weather. Bitcoin spent December screaming up toward twenty grand and its spent January sliding right back down, sitting somewhere around ten or eleven thousand as I write this. Last week a Japanese exchange called Coincheck got robbed of something like half a billion dollars worth of a coin called NEM, apparently because they were keeping that much money in a hot wallet without the extra security everyone else in the industry considers standard by now. Half a billion, in one theft. People are already calling it bigger than Mt. Gox, which is saying something if you remember Mt. Gox. I keep seeing people describe this stuff as the future of finance, and I keep thinking about an exchange that couldnt be bothered with cold storage losing more money in an afternoon than most actual banks lose to fraud in a year. Thats my one strong opinion for the week: if your exchange cant explain where your coins physically sit, dont put real money on it.
None of these three things are related to each other really, except that they all happened inside the same three weeks and I experienced all of them from the same couch. Thats sort of the state of things lately: my phone is a trivia show, my laptop is a liability, and somewhere in Tokyo a company kept half a billion dollars behind what amounts to a screen door. I dont have a grand theory tying it together. Some months you just dont get one, you get three unrelated things happening at once and a blog post about all of them.
If youre playing HQ, add me. Im not going to publish my username here because Ive read enough about people finding each other online through smaller details than that, but if you recognize the profile picture youll know it. See you around question seven, probably, because thats usually where I go out.