What is a Hard Fork and why is it so bad when the New York Times is wrong?

This post is a daughter of yesterday's Podping update but the whole thing really stuck in my craw so much it needs its own post.

Why does this matter?

I really want to explain why this is important. This is not just two idiots being wrong on the Internet. This epic fail is the output of:

the editorial staff of the New York Times;
the writing staff of the New York Times;
the legal team of the New York Times;
and with the addition of one of the most highly revered, independent tech journalists, Casey Newton, who runs his own very successful Substack blog.

This matters because in this simple decision of naming a new podcast, and broadcasting their utterly made up, false and deceptive definition of a phrase in widespread use, the New York Times should be made to feel ashamed.

The erroneous definition of a "hard fork" by the New York Times

The New York Times top technology editors just named a podcast Hard Fork and then gave a COMPLETELY erroneous and made up definition of a Hard Fork: to justify the show's name. Which just shows how much they know at the Old Grey Lady.

A hard fork is a programming term for when you're building something that gets really screwed up. So you take the entire thing, break it and start over.

🖕 This is complete nonsense!

My comments on Podcasting 2.0 show

My comments on this made it into the latest episode of the Podcasting 2.0 Podcast where the New York Times tech journalists work gained the moniker epic fail.

When did the term "hard fork" start being used?

That is a search for the term "hard fork" from Google's index of books. We've had electronic computers since the 1960, the term "hard fork" didn't make it into a book until starting after early 2009. Hmmmm what happened in 2009? Here's a clue.

What does Google say about a "Hard Fork"

There is no mention of "a programming term for when you're building something that gets really screwed up".

Getting inside the minds of Casey and Kevin

If I had to try and crawl into the brains of Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and try to understand how they came up with their own made up definition of "hard fork" I'd think like this:

neither of them have any background in programming or building a tech product;
looking at their LinkedIn profiles reveals writing jobs all the way down;
there's a button on GitHub called "fork";
programming is hard (because they don't know how to do it);
pressing the "fork" button on GitHub and changing a lot of stuff must be a "hard fork".

More on why this matters

Social media and the Internet are flooded with calls to stop disinformation and censor or shut down this point of view or those facts. Leading the charge, often, are these two writers and the wider milieu in which they swim. Their new Bible is the New York Times and its claim of being "all the news that's fit to print".

This is the same New York Times that covered up Stalin's crimes and genocide and for which their reporter, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize (which they were made to hand back eventually).

Whilst getting the definition of "hard fork" wrong is not in the same league as apologising for and hiding mass starvation in Ukraine, it does belittle and obfuscate the work of anyone using Blockchains for anything. That includes Bitcoiners and my particular interest, the hard forks of Hive which steadily improve our system.

These ongoing and regular, planned, hard forks are not evidence that Hive is broken, they are evidence that it is publicly improving. In a co-operative, non centrally controlled system, such as Hive built on a Blockchain, a hard fork is synonymous with a system upgrade where disparate individuals and teams, all have to agree and work in cooperation.

Once you know this, what you have to ask yourself is, what else is the New York Times wrong about and spreading misinformation and lies?

Full transcript:

Kevin Roose 0:00
I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

Casey Newton 0:02
And I'm Casey Newton from platformer.

Kevin Roose 0:05
Casey, we should probably explain why our podcast is called Hard fork.

Casey Newton 0:10
Oh, yeah. So a our other names didn't get approved by the New York Times lawyers

Kevin Roose 0:14
true.

Casey Newton 0:15
And B, it's actually a good name for what we're going to be talking about. A hard fork is a programming term for when you're building something that gets really screwed up. So you take the entire thing, break it and start over.

Kevin Roose 0:26
Right? And that's a little bit what it feels like right now in the tech industry, like these companies that you and I have been writing about for the past decade like Facebook and Google and Amazon. They're all kind of struggling to stay relevant.

Casey Newton 0:38
Yeah, I mean, we've noticed a lot of the energy and money in Silicon Valley is shifting to totally new ideas, crypto, the metaverse AI, it feels like a real turning point when the old things are going away. And interesting. New ones are coming in to replace them.

Kevin Roose 0:52 And all this is happening so fast. And some of it's so strange. Like, I just feel like I'm texting you constantly, like what is happening? What is this story? Explain this to me talk with me about this because I feel like I'm going insane.

Casey Newton 1:06 And so we're going to try to help each other feel a little bit less insane. We're going to talk about these stories. We're going to bring in other journalists, newsmakers, whoever else is involved in building this future to explain to us what's changing and why it all matters.

Kevin Roose 1:20 So listen to hardfork it comes out every Friday, starting October 7

Casey Newton 1:25
wherever you get your podcasts

Transcribed by https://otter.ai