Overzeetop @ Overzeetop @beehaw.org

Posts

0

Comments

233

Joined

2 yr. ago

Again, it would take a substantial change to the code or reality. The options are to change the block size (more transactions per block), alter the difficulty curve (which is intended to limit growth in the limited bitcoin supply), alter the way blocks are solved (massive theoretical mathematical breakthrough or, possibly, a move from asic to quantum computing), or switch away from proof of work. The first increases the storage of the blockchain (substantially for a substantial reduction), rewrite - and get approval - to change the difficulty steps which had been a hallmark of the system, the third is magical thinking, and the fourth completely undermines the egalitarian ethos of the coin.

I’ve heard of no substantive move on any front to alter the plan because, for now, it working. And the true believers are generally libertarians who have faith that market forces will correct any shortcomings organically. This usually results in everything working perfectly right up until it doesn’t, at which point the wheels come off and the bus slams into the class of kindergarteners crossing the road.

You can't have a transaction without mining. Mining is the work done to solve a batch of transactions, so the exact cost of a transaction is easy to determine provided that you don't include the cost of plant (buildings and IT to run the miners, though this is usually very minor compared to the actual calculation consumption). Each block contains (typically) between 3000 and 4000 transactions and is solved every 10 minutes. As of today, it takes 2.6GWh to solve a block, given the current number of miners (137TWh/yr per https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), which is 744kWh per transaction at 3500 transactions per block.

The cost of a Visa transaction is more difficult because there are people involved and other plant costs (buildings to house the people who work for Visa). The actual cost to process a Visa transaction, in direct transactional power usage, is trivial because a Raspberry Pi can "process" hundreds of thousands of transactions a second locally - it's literally a couple hundred bytes of login/query/reply data, and adding or subtracting from a ledger which is mirrored to distributed servers. Distributed across a server with enough transactions to keep it busy it's probably a few hundred milliseconds on 1/8 of a 50W processor - call it 0.001Wh at the server, which is the equivalent of the 700kWh per bitcoin transaction. If we say that there are 10 machines all doing the same virtual transaction on each physical transaction (incl. POS, backup, billing, etc) and we figure a 5:1 cost of total power (a/c, losses, memory, storage) then we're all the way up to 0.00005kWh (0.05 Wh, or 180 watt-seconds) per transaction. That means that the overall cost for visa to process your charge is 1.5kWh/0.00005kWh for the computers or 30,000:1 due to humans being involved in the process.

Here's the thing, though: Bitcoin gets harder (more compute intensive) as time goes on, and the rate of increase is faster than the ability to solve, on a Wh basis. IE - Bitcoin transactions will get more expensive over time unless bitcoin changes their code - and there is always resistance to that because there is a financial disincentive to reduce the work in Proof of Work systems. This is mitigated on other blockchains by using Proof of Stake, but that has other implications. Visa, otoh, is taking advantage of AI and drops in processor and storage costs to lower their per-transaction cost because there is a financial incentive to reduce processing costs as the fees charged are fixed (nominally 3% of the transaction cost) and anything left over is profit.

"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize." -Tom Lehrer

After a while (a few months to a few years) the workplace politics becomes unbearable, or culture becomes too toxic, or managers straight up ignore our feedback.

In all likelihood, these are not time-variable conditions. When you first start you don't know about the politics - who's going behind your back to sabotage you, who's a climber, who is getting preferential treatment from management or HR. Ignorance is bliss. As you learn what terrible people you work with you find their existence to make the workplace "toxic." And it doesn't matter where you work - there will be terrible people, just different grades and distributions. Finally, the managers were ignoring your feedback from day one - they just pretended that you mattered so that you would settle in and become part of the machine. It's basic onboarding.

This isn't going to help you, but I quit and started my own business. It was...challenging. Prior to that, I found routines and resets in my daily work which let me (mostly) ignore the noise. Most were mental, setting timers to focus on tasks; learning to be a non-joiner with tact; roll with the sameness and view the work as "just a job". Some were physical, like eating lunch quickly and spending the rest of my half hour lying down in my car.

I should say that I still get burnout, even though I'm a one-person consulting company. I recognize that my focus comes and goes and I when I get a manic period I try to push though work to "get ahead" (or at least catch up). More importantly, I try to recognize when my energy is flagging and not try to push through it. I let myself have the afternoon off. Two years ago I started taking an "admin" week every quarter. I put a message on my phone that I'm in training or in meetings (so people think I'm "working") but I mostly just clean up the office, get personal project done around the house, and generally reset my focus. Sometimes I even do a little online training. Specifically - I don't go away on vacation. Vacation doesn't reset me like removing the life clutter that builds up when I'm busy at work and can't get to (or are too tired to) do the peripheral things. I fully recognize that this is not really a valuable strategy for a most jobs, but if you have a certain amount of autonomy and you're getting your deadlines met otherwise, scheduling some "training" time might be good. Just make it as regular as possible - put it in your year's calendar on Jan 1. For me, it's my reward for getting things done, and if I don't make it a hard commitment, I'll just move it - and it will never happen.

removing/reducing

The kids still have exposure, but the total load is reduced allowing the body to see and react to the infectious elements without being overwhelmed. All of the "but it's nature" fanatics should remember that the million years of evolution we have survived with exposure was done without enclosed, poorly ventilated boxes. And within the historical record, the some of the greatest failures of our "natural" immune system prior to vaccines and antibiotics have generally occurred when we enclosed people into poorly ventilated, densely packed communities. (though many failures come from drinking our own poo...usually due to densely packed populations with unregulated water standards/supplies)

Fair enough, though the app is stand-alone. AFAIK there’s no sync function (I’m iOS/Windows). The files are local and export is to whatever filesystem is on the device (iOS allows any connected cloud service).

May I suggest Concepts? In over a decade of searching for a pencil-on-paper analog, it's as close as I've found and it's dropped my paper usage from over 1000 sheets a year to under 50. There's a $10 (one time) cost for pdf import and export. The canvas is "infinite" but you can import a PSF of your favorite note-taking sheet, with or without guide lines/grid (or use the apps customizable grid), and copy it about the space. Then, when exporting, export just the PDF areas (The sheets/outlines you imported) into a single, paginated PDF file.

It's available for iOS, android, and windows, though the three versions do not have synchronized feature and the files are incompatible across platforms (for now, at least). There are other paid add-ons, but I've not found them necessary or useful for note taking.

Yes, many long chain polymers are carcinogens. That makes them bad. Long chain polymers are what make commercial non-stick pans non-stick. Note: they are different long chain polymers, but still just a bunch of polymer hydrocarbons because…that’s what makes both of them non-stick.

That's due to the short duration of BM. There's not enough time for societal conflicts requiring maintenance paperwork - domestic violence and family breakdowns, child custody battles, litigation involving multiple parties with warrants served for trial discovery. BM is also a self-selecting population of (let's face it) upper-middle class people who are there for a generative purpose. It's like saying you don't notice the need for a welfare councilor or federal free lunch voucher program at a $100k/yr private school. That's not a problem that comes up in that demographic.

I'm always surprised that nobody worries about the random long-chain polymers created in the seasoning process which are then released into your food as you cook.

Thanks for the great ride!

Dragged 20 feet vs a beautiful golden parachute. They really do live in an alternate reality.

Yeah, I'm with you and it's keeping me from really starting a new game. I got back into gaming with Elite Dangerous and got a kick out of the hours of offline research (because the in-game tools were fucking terrible when they even existed). It took me a while to get past the cool graphics and flight, but it got boring and tedious managing stuff. I failed to start Witcher 3 twice before just diving in and deciding I was going to not figure out anything and just play. It's a far more forgiving system than most, and the gameplay benefits from it (to the suffering of realism).

While I enjoy the games, I loathe the min-max and inventory management necessary in most games. That's not technically necessary if you spend a couple hundred hours perfecting technique. While that's less than a month for a full time gamer, it's about 5 years of play time in my life, so I end up looking up some obscure bit on line and chasing crafting for no good reason except to make my gaming time no fun. As a result, most of my SteamDeck time has been on simple arcade shooters and a couple of card-combat games. It's frustrating to know there are good games out there if I just had 20-30 hours to get into them, and also knowing that I'll have 20-30 hours free on a regular basis only when I retire some day. I guess my nursing home days will have lots of content, so I've got that going for me.

Oh, fine - if you’re going to just Willy nilly divulge your (checks notes) family Secret Santa present list to just anyone. You may as well write your medical history with a nude picture of yourself on a postcard and send it via UPS to People Magazine!!1!

We have been hopelessly, almost maliciously, misled by popular science fiction about the adaptability of humans to space travel and living on planets which are not exactly like Earth.

Nearly all of those books are nice, quick reads. I read them before playing Witcher 3 and watching the NF series first season. It greatly enhanced the game; it made me dislike the screenplay version.

Well, now you're making me want to go back into the series. I liked the premise of the first, but found the writing foreign - which, hey, it is! I felt like I really should read more everyday Chinese fiction as I didn't understand a lot of the nuance and it felt less polished (to my American sensibilities) as a result.

The Foundation series by Azimov. I read it when I was a teenager and remembered very little. It's a lot scarier today.

I sat in a conference room with 300+ other professionals in my field and they laughed that AI could take their jobs. I'm on the "top" of that pile of practitioners - I make my living in the niche where I'm the old expert who gets called in when nobody else can figure out a solution, or in the ordinary job to make sure it's done right the first time. Easily 80% of my job could be replaced by AI, if my industry were a big enough cherry to pick. Luckily for them (and me) it's not. For my industry the danger is that the AI will "solve" the problem of newly graduated professionals - the people who learn on the normal ways so that they can grow old and become the experts who understand the basics and work on the hard, unique conditions. If AI displaces the graduates so that I can increase my profits through a lower employee count, it's really just shortchanging society 30 years down the road when we won't have humans with hands on experience. That's the societal danger we face if we aren't careful. You and I can got on top of this, but if nobody behind us can there will be a gap in knowledge. (I'm re-reading Azimov's Foundation series. It feels a lot less like the idle entertainment it did when I read it as a teenager)

Posting anonymously can allow people to protect themselves

There it is. A knife can be used to prepare dinner as easily as it can kill a man.

Anonymity doesn't cause hate or aggression, it enables it by removing consequences. The hate and aggression has always been there, it now has an outlet where the aggressor can be offensive without repercussion and still see the reaction from others.

LOL. CEOs aren't going to be using AI for themselves; they have the money to hire teams of people (who will use, but vet, AI output) and provide specialized, boutique assistance. Instead, they will be forcing you and I to use AI because it costs them less money to serve us.

Robots and AI are orders of magnitude cheaper to run than humans, and have been for decades. ATMs are robots. Earthmoving equipment is robots. Computer software is a type of robot - from word processing to CAD to calculators. Mostly human controlled - as will the foreseeable future robots - but requiring fewer and fewer humans to do a set amount of labor (physical or mental).

What is the biggest push right now? Automated driving. What is the largest job sector in a majority of the US states? Delivery driver. There are fears of automated drivers missing edge cases and hitting pedestrians and (clutch your pearls) children. Over 40,000 people and over 1000 children were killed in the US by human drivers just last year. 3 Adults and 3 children were killed in Ohio just this week when a tractor trailer plowed into two passenger vehicles and a school bus because the driver wasn't paying attention. The simplest impact detection "robot" could have prevented that. AI is already better, on average, than humans - it's only our sense / belief in self determination that we erroneously think that we are (on average) better than a machine. And AI/ML/Automated drivers will improve with time, whereas humans are explicitly getting worse as we are offered more and more distractions in our daily lives.

AI/ML/Robots are already being implemented in the US Government (I know people who are doing it). They are coming for your job. They're coming for my job. It's only hubris that makes us think we are outrunning our digital competitors. The question is if we (through governments and regulation) will benefit from it or become destitute by it.