Sonori @ sonori @beehaw.org

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Joined

2 yr. ago

At thai point, I would be impressed that the laptop even physically exists in the first place.

You do know China dumps orders of magnitude more radioactive material into the ocean then Japan ever has, right? I mean it’s not at levels high enough to be more than a curiosity in either case, but it is detectable and tracked by independent third parties.

Ya, I live in a state with a closed primary and where the general regrettably tends to be a forgone conclusion, so like every Dem and Socialist I know here I’m a registered Republican when primary season rolls around, because that’s the only way you’re vote for the moderate counts.

I don’t see the contradiction, Russia went from the center of a nominally socialist union to a hypercapitalist libertarian dictatorship, of course the Republicans are going to try and support it.

Having worked with schools that use chromebooks before, generally the entire point of using them is that Google is your IT department. You don’t need any on site servers beyond a router from your isp, and can just return anything that breaks to Google for a replacement, all very cheaply. The records can all be administered by whatever teacher is least scared of computers and can use the nice gui. Especially for smaller schools with say a dozen or so total staff, not needing to pay a employee or MSP to fix the computers is a big deal.

Nextcloud however, as much as I like using it, requires a server. It requires the ability to understand hardware requirements enogh to get a good nas, an ok understanding of dns, and when the gui updater breaks, an ability to ssh in and run the updater manually. You need ssl certs, and if your using letsencrypt port forwarding, and public dns entery, and keeping on top of updates. Jan, fourth grade teacher who plays Stardew Valley and so isn’t too terrified when asked to go into the brightly colored menu, is not going even know it exists, much less install it.

Also, the problem with Fedora is that it also requires an domain, which means installing and configuring dedicated domain controllers, which is not an simple task. You need a deficated IT person, or you go with an MSP, and the MSP will just set up a windows environment in a few hours and be done with it.

Yes, you could technically use email like SMS, while the standard allows for up to five days for the message to go through that’s pretty rare, in practice it’s primarily used to send long messages from one computer to another, not a single sentence or two between phones.

In practice, it is about as secure as SMS, as both require similar levels of dedicated effort to interpret. Most of the actors with the hardware used to intercept and decrypt SMS are the same actors who can compromise a server, or outright have acess to the backdoor they paid 10 million to put in RSA. Not that they need it, as the largest email providers by far do often work with law enforcement anyway. Both SMS and email attacks are seen at about the same rate and scales, which is to say rarely outside of government agencies where both are unfortunately routine.

Signal is primarily designed and marketed to fufill the same basic role as SMS, as evident from just how much of an afterthought anything but the mobile app is, how said app copies the same format as SMS for messages, how it required an phone number to use and sync phone contacts, and how it did support SMS for quite some time. It is emently reasonable for Signal to have continued to have featured the messaging format most of the people it could talk with used.

Why is email less bad than SMS? It’s about as (in)secure.

Email also fulfills a different role, as it is for longer, more formal, and less time sensitive messages. Nevertheless, more modern and technical encrypted email clients go out of their way to still work with unencrypted messages insteand of being deliberately incompatible as Signal is.

About 22 percent of the US government’s national dept is money one department of the government owes another part.

Offhand, the majority of the government dept is in government lines and bonds. While the government can buy back its own bonds, people tend not to sell said bonds for less than their worth and so you would need more money than what it takes to just pay off the bond. Moreover, said bonds are generally low interest, and so often get smaller with inflation.

In addition, most banks, mutual funds, hedge funds, large corporations, etc... tend to have rules that say that there is only so much financial risk they can be exposed to, so if they want to make a high risk high reward bet, they need to have a certain amount of low risk of investments aswell. Government bonds are seen as about the lowest risk investments possible, and so can often be more valuable than just the money the bond itself is actually for when used as the bedrock upon which the modern risk based US financial system is built on.

Given that bonds have an limited lifespan, it’s almost always cheaper for the government to let it time out then to buy it back.

Similarly, a not insignificant part of it is in pentions. Basically when you work for the government your paycheck says you get X part of your pay now, and Y when you retire. The idea is that no matter how bad you are at managing money or if you get a bunch of medical dept or such, you have a guaranteed retirement fund. Meanwhile, from the governments perspective, thanks to inflation Y is going to be worth a lot less real money when you take it out then if they gave it to you now. Y is dept, and since the government employs a lot of people, Y is actually quite a lot of dept.

It’s worth noting that a solid link between money printing and inflation has to my knowledge never been demonstrated outside of hyperinflation scenarios. The chief problem being that there are far to many inputs to inflation and deflation to solidly say how much influence some of the smaller ones like total money supply have.

SMS is also the common standard for talking to people.

For the vast, vast majority of people, the technical security of, ‘hey, you want to catch a movie next saturday’, is far less important then the message actually getting through.

Qute simply, it is far more important for a communication method to be easy and universal then to be secure against attacks the vast majority of people do not think they will ever encounter. When most people want to tell their neighbor two houses down that the dog has gotten out again being able use the app they already use to communicate is far more important to them then then a bunch of technical jargon about end to end encryption.

Yes, the market decides how useful it is, and given many online platforms that once accepted crypto payments have quietly dropped such features do to a lack of actual demand, and physical retailers, transit agencies, etc haven’t seen enogh customer demand to accept such payments when the vast majority of an already small number of transactions is between speculators rather than consumers buying real world objects.

Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lightning are centralized systems, in that they are a single central way of doing things that is dictated by the majority of the people processing the transactions. These rules have changed and updated over the years, and a 2024 mining node would not be compatible with 2012 one for instance owing to the migration from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB.

Similarly, while we’re not taking about Etherium, it is a very similar in concept and up until recently consensus mechanism, and was forked to reverse a series of whale transactions back in 2016. Ya sure, Etherium classic maintained the transactions, but its also a tiny fraction of the size and relivence of the one that bowed to whale and miner pressure.

Back in BTC land, as of 2023 Antpool and Foundery together own 53.4 percent of the gobal bitcoin hashrate, which pretty directly translates to mining power. You say that if a mining pool acts unethically it will be abandoned in short order, but historical precedent seems to suggest the opposite. If a majority of miners decide on an alternate transaction history, historical precedent is that they win. This is hard to do by outright threat, but historically easy to accomplish by greed.

Yes, if you are scamming people on Facebook marketplace, elemanating all after the fact consumer protections is great. If you are honest, then it is not an typical problem because consumers are limited in how they can use chargebacks, and small claims court can deal with such matters, where as proving jurisdiction can be vary hard in crypto transactions.

The vast, vast majority of people, especially common people, are consumers, and consumers should always be inherently protected over businesses.

You should not have to pay a premium for fundemntal transaction security measures like disputability, reversibility, and hold times. An attacker which gains acess to my account should also not be able to bypass such measures, seeing as that is both the most likely and most damaging form of attack.

You suggest that no one is selling high value goods overseas in fear of fraudulent chargebacks, but actual market behavior doesn’t seem to be effected by this, likely because most international transactions use backed in fraud and holding checks instead of credit cards.

Bank transfers also have a several day going period during which they can be reversed, large transactions often have to be approved in person, and even smaller yet major ones by phone. Someone hacks into my computer and gains access to my wallet it’s empty while I have no recourse, if they do the exact same thing to my back account it’s an triviality to get it reversed if it’s even possible at all. That is why it is unheard of for anyone to be extorted, hacked, or otherwise loose acess to their bank account directly, yet people loose access to their crypt wallets every single day.

Neglecting the absurdly of claiming inflation is theft, you realize that the actual total supply of currency is completely decoupled from inflation and deflation outside of hyperinflationary and hyperdeflationary death spirals, right? One would think that this would be pretty obvious to someone with a knowledge of BTC, as what was enough coin to buy me a pizza in 2010 is now enough to buy a mansion worth nearly half a billion dollars in 2024, and yet as you say the total supply of currency has remained largely the same between thouse two dates. That is an absurdly volatile shift value on par with a small nation in complete economic collapse, not something which is posturing itself as a serious gobal one world currency.

I don’t know about what holidays there are in your part of the world when you can’t use cash, checks, debit, or credit cards, but they don’t seem to exist here in North Amarica. Massive bank transfers sure, but thouse take days anyway to ensure that all or most of my money can not be stolen, being unable to loose that much instantly is a key security feature, not a bug, and one should never be in the position where one needs to loose that much money in a day.

Cash still works when i’m offline, as do checks, debit, and some credit cards. They can all be used when both parties are offline, no internet involved. I don’t give a shit what the monitary system backend is doing during a gobal apocalypse when the gobal internet splits in half, I care about being able to by food after a hurricane or when the store’s internet is down, and my card or cash can do that while BTC by its very nature can’t be used without acces to the internet.

Personally I would have liked for the runner up in the last election to automatically fill in for you if you can’t make it, or if that would lead to too much inconsistency if after missing ten sessions they got replaced by the runner up until the next election.

1. Yes, but reduceing demand spent on frivolous projects also cuts down on waste immediately, instead of the decades it take to physically make things.
2. Electrical waste is the fundamental value that underpins the entrity of Bitcoins exsistance. Bitcoin has a per transaction energy cost of 767kwh per transaction. That is enough to physically drive an electric suv like the Ionic 5 from Seattle WA, to Jacksonville FL, for every single transaction. Visa can handle nearly a million transactions for the same energy cost, and is part of a global banking system that handles the needs of billions of people, not a hobby project for a few tens of thousand of speculators.
3. While chasing very cheap energy is critically important to miners given the vast amount of energy consumed, most poor countries would like to phase out more expensive sources of energy like coal and gas in favor of cheaper solar already, but cannot do so because they need to supply the demand of miners who generally need to be operating for as much of the day as possible to make the cost of the back. If these electrical grids really were to that point, then they would be consistently running with or at least hitting zero fossil input, something which is incredibly rare even in developed nations withs decades of building out renewables.
4. While transactions are secure in a technical sense, as far as any user is concerned they are vastly less secure than traditional transactions because they inherently cannot be reversed or disputed in any way, unless your a whale and can convince everyone to fork the entire monetary system of course. Anyone who gains access to an account can take all its contents and you have zero recourse, not to mention that disputing transactions is the primary security against fraud and deception, and hence why a system that eliminates all aspects of it has been overrun with fraud and deception.

Bitcoin is a massively centralized system. Not only because it is a single central system, but over fifty percent of that system is controlled by just five groups, who by definition have complete control over that system and are accountable to exactly no one.

Market cap is irrelevant, just the current price people are willing to pay times the total amount of bitcoin to ever exist. It has nowhere near that liquidity, and no fundamental value to hold beyond its speculative nature.

5. People who are unbanked are unbanked because they have no need for one. Typically, becuse either they lack enough money to be worth storing it or because a household or family has only one account they share because again, they get paid in and buy things in cash, useing the internet or finding anything not in cash requires a two hour bike trip, and because they can’t afford to leave it laying around.

No bank is going to have a money holding money for someone, the problem is that the someone doesn’t have money or any need to spend it beyond a five minutes walk around thier village. You would know this if you actually researched the reason poor people in remote and developing areas might be unbanked instead of just using it as a talking point to liquidity into a speculative asset.

Moreover, most major cell providers in poor nations also already allow customers to store and transfer funds directly from their account to others. Other nations like India have things like their Universal Payment Interface, which allows any two business, customers, or people to make instant free transactions.

6. The average per transaction cost of a bitcoin transaction is 4.87 USD with it having spiked to over 37 USD per transaction within the last three months. I mentioned spiked because the transaction fee changes by the minute depending on how many people are competing to make a transaction at any one time, and this is the same price given to everyone throughout the entire system, this makes it unreliable to anyone who doesn’t want to randomly pay a major premium in order to buy something in the next ten minutes. That’s a lot of pennies and is a minimum pre tax floor on top of every single transaction made with it.

It is also inherently only as reliable as ones internet connection, and in many developing nations that is no where near 100% uptime. If the power or internet go out, all acess to your money does aswell, as you can’t make changes to an allways online database without acess to the internet.

Your also going to run into the Pasific and Atlantic pretty soon. Most people who live in Hawaii for instance probably arn’t going to be very happy spending two weeks in the middle of the ocean when they want to visit their kids who went off to college on the mainland. Combine with the fact that while more efficient ships also need fuel and produce carbon, and I don’t think it would make enough of impact to be worth the cost.

A proper high speed rail network would help eliminate some shorter flights, as would a bunch of regional rail, but I feel like flying is one place where the high cost and limited supply of carbon capture produced synthetic fuels might actually be the most effective answer. Limit flights to trips between hubs more than a thousand miles apart or so, or which can’t get a practical rail connection.

The other main thing that your going to run into is that the airline network is the only real intercity public transport system in north america. For a lot of smaller towns, especially in the West and Northwest, the once daily puddle jumper is the pubic transport to speak of, and flying for thirty minutes to an hour or two is always going to compare favorably to a four to six hour drive to get to the city.

How about just using the rules the Olympics have been using for fifty years for competitive sports that they came up with after doing a proper study into the issue, which is if your fully transitioned for more than two years you can compete.

For sports where there isn’t a pro industry and people arn’t getting paid to compete, like in schools, just let people do whatever they present as. The point is to have fun, not ban people for maybe having a quarter of a percent advantage. If it was then games like basketball would need to have height and weight classes. The whole reason we allow, much less spend money funding, sports in schools, parks, and community centers is for exercise and fun, not just to cater to the adults betting money on the results.

Yep, expansion of coal is a failure on all levels all right.

More expensive than even natural gas, let alone solar, is only financially viable with government handouts, dumps more carbon into the air than any other mainstream type of energy, renewable or not, creates vast open ponds of radioactive fly ash, and since all mining has moved to new open pit low sulfur coal in the eighties it doesn’t even employ more than a handful of people.

Silicon valley’s core business model has for years been to break the law so blatantly and openly while throwing money at the problem to scale that by the time law enforcement caches up to you your an “indispensable” part of the modern world. See Uber, whose own publicly published business model was for years to burn money scaling and ignoring employment law until it could drive all competitors out of business and become an illegal monopoly, thus allowing it to raise prices to the point it’s profitable.

The thing is, i’m not sure at all that it’s even physically possible for an LLM be trained like a four year old, they learn in fundamentally different ways. Even very young children quickly learn by associating words with concepts and objects, not by forming a statistical model of how often x mingingless string of characters comes after every other meaningless string of charecters.

Similarly when it comes to image classifiers, a child can often associate a word to concept or object after a single example, and not need to be shown hundreds of thousands of examples until they can create a wide variety of pixel value mappings based on statistical association.

Moreover, a very large amount of the “progress” we’ve seen in the last few years has only come by simplifying the transformers and useing ever larger datasets. For instance, GPT 4 is a big improvement on 3, but about the only major difference between the two models is that they threw near the entire text internet at 4 as compared to three’s smaller dataset.

Personally, the thing that gets me the most about the whole thing is that the vast majority of the singe use ones you find lying next to the road have perfectly good rechargeable lithium batteries in them. No charging port or easy way to refill them, but for two cent change pins on the main circuit board and a change in the molding the same device could easily be used for a decade or more.

I mean you don’t often get an whole anthology dedicated to how much you told people they must show unconditional love and acceptance to everyone they meet unless your really dedicated to it.