raktheundead

I’ve still got my copy of Windows 3.1 on 3.5" 1.44 MB disks; there are seven in total.

Now, Windows 95, that was a monstrosity on floppy disks.

Shouldn’t have stuck that stupid fucking Bitcoin shit inside.

Its original purpose was always Gold Standard 2: The Digitalisation for Austrian School-influenced ancap wankers.

To wit: https://indieweb.social/@web3isgreat/111529277780126306

Nostr Assets has announced that the “inbound capacity of lightning channels” was depleted.

You’re disingenuously ignoring the opportunity cost of having to build additional power plants - resources required not being usable elsewhere; environmental impact of those resources or, especially in the case of hydroelectric power, of building the power plants themselves, since cement has significant carbon dioxide emissions, along with the fact that proof-of-work algorithms have a tendency to expand in a grey-goo style and suck up as many resources as possible.

The former is a reason why energy conservation efforts and regulations have been put in place. The fewer power plants you require to run everything, even if they’re renewable energy, the better. Proof-of-work mining threatens that, because when your incentive to mine is more money, that encourages people taking more than their fair share of energy. It also encourages power theft.

Proof-of-work mining doesn’t do a thing to solve the issue of green energy, since there’s no sort of quality-of-service system in place which bumps cryptocurrency miners down to the bottom of the pile when it comes to prioritising power usage and even if there was, it’d create an arms race between power plant operators and people trying to subvert those controls so that they can use more power for mining, cf. Nvidia’s graphics card limiters versus Ethereum miners. You’re either naïve or disingenuous if you’re expecting cryptocurrency miners to just cede power when there’s money on the line if they keep their operations going at top priority.

Furthermore, even if every single watt that Bitcoin requires to mine was generated by 100% clean energy, the network would still be creating nation-state levels of e-waste.

This is just another one of those techno-libertarian pipe dreams about an efficient free market which don’t bear fruit in the real world, just like the “why do we need emissions regulations anyway? Surely, the free market will sort that out, brah” bullshit. It’s the fallacy of the broken window writ large.

The Lightning Network can only do the much-vaunted transactions-per-second number that it claims in theory; in practice, the number is a lot lower and even once you get past the onboarding stage takes something in the order of a couple of magnitudes of times the energy cost of a Visa transaction. Even the Lightning Network developers admit that for the LN to work as advertised even in theory, with a given case of two channels a year (naïve, when considering the only way to actually consolidate a LN transaction is to close a channel) for 7 billion people, block sizes on the Bitcoin network would have to be increased to 133 MB.

So this is basically a bunch of chancers selling a Heath Robinson machine built onto another, much worse Heath Robinson machine with no practical way to scale to the numbers they want.

Bitcoin is the ur-cryptocurrency, the Original Sin from which all of the other flaws from cryptocurrency arise.

That’d be the same Lightning Network with NP-hard issues with routing and a whole host of problems right down to the fundamentals, right? (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

And even beyond that, having to stack another layer on there is a technical non-starter to begin with. For one thing, adoption of the Lightning Network is fundamentally bottlenecked by Bitcoin itself - if the entire Bitcoin network was dedicated entirely to onboarding people onto the Lightning Network, it’d take 28 months to onboard all of the people in the US alone, let alone the rest of the world’s population.

There’s a saying by Antoine de Saint-Éxupery that’s rather relevant here: « Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher. » Roughly paraphrased, it means, “It appears that perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.” Trying to stack extra layers on top of a precarious base goes against any sound engineering principles. In this circumstance, Bitcoin would be the thing to take away - it offers nothing and is in fact detrimental to an efficient system of exchange.

Yeah, whataboutism is essentially telling on one’s self; an implicit recognition that one has no better arguments than to try to distract.

F-35 was more the high-profile failure. The F-22 was just produced in lower numbers than planned because there was no perceived need for a specialised air superiority fighter in the expected numbers after the Soviet collapse.

It’s still something I’d rather have than not; not having it makes for a less fluid experience.

First of all, not American.

Second of all, nine-dash line and neo-colonialism in Asia, Africa, South America and Europe says very differently. As does the Han supremacism that Xi surrepitously perpetuates.

That moment when you pretend to fight against imperialism - by implicitly supporting imperialists in the PRC.

Microsoft definitely did: https://www.zdnet.com/finance/blockchain/microsoft-is-shutting-down-its-azure-blockchain-service/

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were also serious internal discussions from some cryptocurrency booster within the ranks at Google as well.

And this is an example of the “AI as a continuation of the same grift as blockchain” pipeline, with exactly the same vague business wank with no substance behind it: https://www.aiunleashedglobalsummit.com/summit

A lot of companies investigated cryptocurrency obliquely; “blockchain” was the hype word for several years in tech. And several of those companies had a serious sunk-cost fallacy going when they perpetuated their blockchain projects, despite blockchain only at best being a case of Worse Is Better, where a solution that sucks, but exists can be better than a perfect option that doesn’t.

It’s also worth noting that the same VCs who backed cryptocurrency have pivoted to generative AI. It’s all part of the same grift, just with different clothes.

inb4 “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people”

He never ate his own balls like he said he would. Coward.

First of all, it suffers from what TV Tropes would call the Eight Deadly Words: “I don’t care what happens to these people”. I won’t fault the acting; I feel the actors did the best they could with the writing they had. It’s just that I thought the writing was extremely uncompelling and there was nothing about the characters which made me want to learn more about them or their troubles.

Secondly, I don’t like the structure of the film. It’s a melodrama, a type of story that I do not enjoy by default, with some plot points that are so heavily telegraphed that it sucked the energy out of the film. The multiverse structure that the film relies on was uncompelling to me. The action scenes lacked any sort of visceral impact to bring them back down to Earth; they were so obsessed with flashiness that there was nothing for me to connect with.

And thirdly, while I can enjoy absurdist humour, this film felt like it thought it was cleverer than it was throughout. I’ve heard a description elsewhere of this film as “nicecore Rick & Morty” and while that’s awfully reductive, it still gets to the root of some of the problems I had with the film.

I don’t know how to do spoilers on Kbin and frankly, most of that movie is a walking spoiler alert. Without giving too much away, it had to do with an oblique reference to another movie.