It’s common in many internet circles to refer to prominent people by their initials. Hackerdom has a long tradition of this: rms gls esr jwz et al. It also tends to happen in US federal politics for some reason (jfk rfk gwb fdr et al) but not to everyone.

There's a little bit of cargo-culting with the practice: I thought CZ was short for the Czech Republic. The only reason I know "SBF" is because the New Yorker obliged him in that William MacAskill piece.

Good point. Though I thought the reason was that early hackers went by their usernames, and UNIX usernames were limited to 8 characters, so they had to abbreviate.

At least the political ones (some) came about for clarification (JFK and RFK are both Kennedies, GWB is to distinguish from "Bush"). Others come from their names being long or hard to remember/pronounce/spell (I suspect this is what happened with AOC).

The Robert Caro books about Lyndon B Johnson detail his effort to force meme “LBJ” as a reference to him.

(Mostly in terms of insisting various communications employees use it in press releases and what not).

It seems he liked the iconography of it, especially in putting himself in similar company to FDR.

Both his daughters have the LBJ initials, his wife is mostly known as Lady Bird Johnson (a nickname that predates their relationship, but is not her given name)

OT: Are those books worth reading? I loved the Power Broker but the LBJ books are a whole lot to get through.

Short answer, yes.

Longer answer - from my prospective - I enjoyed the first book Path to Power the most, which revolves around LBJs early life up to becoming a US Representative. I thought it was very on par with the Power Broker. That an the Power Broker would probably be my first recommendation to an ambitious college kid who wants to know the real Politik of how the world works.

The next book Means of Assent was my least favorite of Caro’s books, but still highly enjoyable.

Master of the Senate and Passage of Power are both great. But sort of specific to LBJs spot in life. Great, but I’m not sure they sparked my thinking quite the way the Power Broker and Path to Power did.

Maybe.

The books are designed to be standalone-ish, so later volumes spend a fair bit of time repeating things from earlier books. Caro goes deep, deep into various shady acts and new scandals which were probably shocking and relevant in 1982 but less so four decades later.

Caro also touches on a lot of the same topics as The Power Broker, and the picture he paints of LBJ ends up sounding quite a lot like Robert Moses. Is it because all powerful men inevitably end up as bullying psychopaths, or does Caro have something of an axe to grind? 50/50, maybe.

Can't forget pg and sama

Fun crossover: IKE, internet key exchange had a proposed successor JFK

Who are "et" and "al"? /s

FDR went by FDR because those were his initials and ehh, people do that sometimes. Have enough presidents and sooner or later you'll get a president who does it. JFK and LBJ did it as conscious homages to FDR. There is a book "In The Shadow of FDR" about post-WW2 US politics that mentions this.

DPR fans?

Because they think the people they're most similar to are respected old-school hackers (rms, jwz, etc.) instead of carnival hucksters like P. T. Barnum.

i can just imagine jwz squirming at the idea of this and it is way too funny...

If they were imitating the older style they would use lowercase

P. T. Barnum doesn't deserve the bad reputation. See eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310056

Because Bankman-Fried is a mouthful/typeful to say every time, and Changpeng is a big, non-western name, and Zhao too common by itself.

Source: me referring to one of them in conversation a lot with no incentive to kowtow to his preferred branding.

Maybe: Crypto is full of acronyms, token tickers are a great example and apropos here --> their names have been "tokenized"...?

Ownership of personhood as documented by holding an NFT.

You've been reading the DID spec.

Which is basically an energy-wasting form of the Blue Checkmark?

With the proof of stake release for Eth, is this point still valid?

Bitcoin is still energy intensive, but that has nothing to do with NFTs.

Not even that, because that'd be a web of trust, like PGP or Keybase.

You see the same thing with Middle East Leaders - MBS, MBZ, etc.

When the names are even semi-complex and the reach is global, people default to acronyms.

Pedantic nit:

Those are initialisms. An initialism is when the individual letters are individually pronounced, like "emm-bee-ess."

An acronym is when the initial letters are pronounced as a word, e.g. SOAR ("Situation Options Act Review-and-Reassess")

The broader sense of acronym—the meaning of which includes terms pronounced as letters—is sometimes criticized, but it is the term's original meaning[1] and is in common use.Dictionary and style-guide editors are not in universal agreement on the naming for such abbreviations, and it is a matter of some dispute whether the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced "as words", nor do these language authorities agree on the correct use of spacing, casing, and punctuation.

[1] https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/1844;jsessioni...).

If there's one thing I really dislike about HN culture, it's the consistent derailing of a thread to "um, actually" someone on a semantics distinction that literally nobody has ever been confused by, or to shoehorn in new terminology that doesn't improve communication in any way.

Agreed

I enjoyed reading the diversion. I don't think it derailed anything, except perhaps for your reply.

> literally nobody has ever been confused by

um, actually...

Some of the most interesting things I've read have been digressions from the main point. Your observation is a case in point: We're now talking about HN culture instead of wild times in the crypto economy. Is this a derailment? Or a digression?

It all depends upon whether people perceive it to be something that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity," a line right from the guidelines. In your case, the difference between initialisms and acronyms (if any, see another reply) does not, and I accept that. Sorry!

Also AOC, MLK, FDR, and JFK!

With the exception that people like MBS, MBZ, AOC, etc. are objectively much more well known.

They go by acronyms on social media, namely twitter, the main place people interact with them

https://twitter.com/cz_binance

https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX

CZ is Czechia though

It will get it's acronym back shortly.

Unless it turns out that Changpeng is of the Habsburgs. Then we will have a serious clash in Europe again.

He doesn't have the chin...

pretty much everyone is a descendant of franz joseph

The acronyms are very twitter friendly.