You’re not wrong, but it took a while to figure out how to eliminate proof-of-work entirely. The only reason I’m not giving a year is I’m not sure who was first.

Aside from that, integrated economic regulation isn’t a particularly “flashy” area of research, nor is it lucrative, so naturally it will progress more slowly. That doesn’t mean anything about the possibility or practicality of it, though.

On, yeah, no argument from me there. I thought you meant those things aren’t feasible, not that they aren’t the primary use case.

But the issue of laissez-faire capitalism persists, and crypto, in my opinion, is poorly equipped to deal with it

I mean, proof-of-stake protocols didn’t exist until 2012, and that was a hybrid protocol. Exclusively proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies weren’t available until long after that IIRC. There’s a lot we still don’t know about what blockchains are capable of, and it’s entirely possible that we figure out how to regulate them effectively.

But you point still stands;

And that is why it shouldn’t suddenly become the main means for payments.

I agree wholeheartedly.

…did you respond to the wrong comment? Cryptocurrency is available from wherever you are - that’s more of a core feature than wishful thinking.

That’s not what I got from the article. (Link for anyone who wants to check it out.)

My interpretation was that decreasing solar/wind electricity prices slows the adoption of renewables, as it becomes increasingly unlikely that you will fully recoup your initial investment over the lifetime of the panel/turbine.

In my mind, this will likely lead to either (a) renewable energy being (nearly) free to use and exclusively state-funded, or (b) state-regulated price fixing of renewable energy.

It’s funny, I’ve had an Android, a Nokia Windows Phone, and an iPhone, and Windows Phone was the only OS in which I didn’t open every single app through search. The utter lack of an app ecosystem definitely played a part, but I honestly don’t think either of the other two handle home screens/“app drawers” very well. Every modern social media platform/messenger/etc. is built around vertical continuous scrolling because it’s easier. Why is horizontal, paginated scrolling the default for home screens?

But, I’m starting to realize that no amount of evidence is sufficient for folks who want to federate with Meta

This is an incorrect assumption, because

And somewhere in this very discussion some other person has given a very plausible overview of their potential EEE approach. I’ll add a link to that comment later when I have time to find it again.

I would be very interested to read this! There are definitely limits to my optimism here. I think Meta is a horrible company and I don’t expect them to act in the best interests of the Fediverse; I’m just not yet convinced that them giving up what is essentially free and ad-free API access to one of their platforms cannot be used to our advantage. Threads federation could absolutely be catastrophic, but it’s also possible that it’s a good opportunity; that’s all I’m saying.

They will corrupt and exploit any environment they are a part of via any means they can.

Right, unless they can’t, though. Ideally the Fediverse should be resistant to this kind of influence without resorting to defederation. I’m also concerned that defederating from Threads will make more Threads users than Mastodon users.

We don’t need to be able to predict every last detail of how they will do so to know it is true.

I mean, some idea of what they might do would be nice.

They have a track record of being awful, anti-consumer corporate citizens. WHY would we want to try to invite them in and try to contain them?

I couldn’t care less about Meta itself. My interest begins and ends with Threads users. There are a ton of people that would never give the Fediverse a try for one silly reason or another—predominantly, I would argue, the fear of the unknown—and this seems like it could be an opportunity to overcome that obstacle if leveraged correctly. The prospect of everyone and our parents using social media that is not completely beholden to Meta is exciting to me.

Again, maybe I’m wrong, but this whole thing is basically an experiment, isn’t it? I’d like to see what happens before reaching any conclusions.

Maybe I’m just being naive, but this seems like an argument in favor of federating with Threads. One of the reasons Facebook and Instagram are so effective at driving engagement is that users have basically no ability to curate, sort, or filter the content that they see, especially since third-party clients are banned. You can’t even view most things without logging in.

The implementation of ActivityPub in Threads is a strange departure in this context - (federated) Mastodon users can view all of the content Threads has to offer without subjecting themselves to Meta’s arguably predatory curation algorithms. It almost seems like an escape for people who want to use a Meta-sized platform without Meta getting its grubby little fingers all over your mental wellbeing.

If people are worried that Threads will affect likes and comments (and therefore like/comment-based sorting algorithms) on other instances, it should always be possible to exclude Threads’s contribution to those metrics, no?

That defeats the brute-force attack protection…

The idea is that brute-force attackers will only check each password once, while real users will likely assume they mistyped and retype the same password.

The code isn’t complete, and has nothing to do with actually incorrect passwords.

I’ve used Java 21 pretty extensively, and it’s still comically bad compared to various alternatives, even apples-to-apples alternatives like C#. The only reason to use Java is that you’ve already been using Java.

Because Drake is from Canada

IE6 era vibes

But… this is a nearly opposite situation, no? Microsoft added a bunch of their own shit with no attempt at standardization, and instead of simply not using those features, a ton of websites started making IE a hard requirement.

Obviously you can’t turn a person white so they probably mean the led.

This is true, but it still has to distinguish between facetious remarks and genuine commands. If you say, “Alexa, go fuck yourself,” it needs to be able to discern that it should not attempt to act on the input.

Intelligence is a spectrum, not a binary classification. It is roughly proportional to the complexity of the task and the accuracy with which the solution completes the task correctly. It is difficult to quantify these metrics with respect to the task of useful language generation, but at the very least we can say that the complexity is remarkable. It also feels prudent to point out that humans do not know why they do what they do unless they consciously decide to record their decision-making process and act according to the result. In other words, when given the prompt “solve x^2-1=0 for x”, I can instinctively answer “x = {+1, -1}”, but I cannot tell you why I answered this way, as I did not use the quadratic formula in my head. Any attempt to explain my decision process later would be no more than an educated guess, susceptible to similar false justifications and hallucinations that GPT experiences. I haven’t watched it yet, but I think this video may explain what I mean.

Edit: this is the video I was thinking of, from CGP Grey.

I still don’t follow your logic. You say that GPT has no ability to problem solve, yet it clearly has the ability to solve problems? Of course it isn’t infallible, but neither is anything else with the ability to solve problems. Can you explain what you mean here in a little more detail.

One of the most difficult problems that AI attempts to solve in the Alexa pipeline is, “What is the desired intent of the received command?” To give an example of the purpose of this question, as well as how Alexa may fail to answer it correctly: I have a smart bulb in a fixture, and I gave it a human name. When I say,” “Alexa, make Mr. Smith white,” one of two things will happen, depending on the current context (probably including previous commands, tone, etc.):

1. It will change the color of the smart bulb to white
2. It will refuse to answer, assuming that I’m asking it to make a person named Josh… white.

It’s an amusing situation, but also a necessary one: there will always exist contexts in which always selecting one response over the other would be incorrect.

Legal money transfers are not a use case. Crypto is simply much more expensive to maintain. All these mining rigs and all that electricity must be paid for.

Various currencies are moving away from the proof-of-work model, FWIW. Ethereum was mentioned in this comment chain as one of them.

I’m… agreeing with you…

Did it? Friendly reminder to all that the French Revolution was a failure.

There may be good examples out there, but I’d argue Atom isn’t one of them. VS Code was clearly intended to be a spiritual successor with MS branding IMO, it is a fork of Atom, and it is equally open source (MIT license).

Proprietary on the server/distribution end

Zoinks!