I have zero experience with networking hardware. How hard is it to recable an apartment for a newb like me? How does that even work, do I gotta pull wires out of the walls?

Ah thanks for explaining! Yeah the inability to purchase it directly on local exchanges is a bummer, although if localmonero vendors are available in your area, you may be able to pay them using your local bank account too.

These days you definitely don’t have to download the entire blockchain to use it; you can just connect to someone else’s node. But if you want to restore an old wallet, you unfortunately do have to run through each blockchain transaction after the wallet was created, to see if any of those transactions belong to you. There’s also a mobile app nowadays called Cake Wallet.

All in all, I agree that it’s not the friendliest crypto to use, unfortunately. Its main selling point is privacy, and criminals are more incentivized than others to protect their privacy, so I’m not sure how it’ll ever shake off that image.

What about it was a hassle for you?

Ditto on pushback coming from private citizens rather than big corporations. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, NIMBYs in my neighborhood killing a proposed denser construction project. The “greedy” development firm wanted to build, the NIMBYs killed it. The article itself even mentions this, this is democracy doing its thing:

Homeowners wielded huge political influence to block any changes they believed could hurt their property values.

Blaming corporate greed is a stupid take. If only we relax NIMBY zoning laws, then the “corporate greed” of developers would automatically incentivize them to build all the dense housing we need (they are in fact very happy to build denser smaller lots if allowed to, contrary to what fire retardant claims), and finally start increasing the supply of housing in order to lower market price.

The whole comment literally just explained how this benefits employees too, but you chose to ignore all that and say something completely irrelevant.

No, there shouldn’t because that would imply restricting what I can do with the information I have access to. I am in favor of maintaining the sort of unrestricted general computing that we already have access to.

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Hahaha that’s a good one, I’ll give you that!

If only you were capable of saying more than “Nuh-uh you”. Sigh.

The Universe doesn’t give a fuck about your summer home, nature doesn’t give a fuck that you worked hard to get it.

Nor does the universe care about your sense of fairness or lack of understanding of econ 101. Keep restricting supply while demand increases, and watch what happens. Oh wait, we’ve already seen what happens, and yet we refuse to acknowledge it.

So be it. A population deserves the problems it gets.

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Vacancy rates in the places where people actually want to live are really low. Besides, are people not allowed to have vacation homes?

Market price is a function of supply and demand. We’ve been under building housing for years.

The most important part of what you said is that you’d build “SO much” housing. If we’d just let the free market build all the housing it wants without letting NIMBYs get in the way, we’d have largely solved the housing crisis.

Please first define “creativity” without artificially restricting it to humans. Then, please explain how AI isn’t doing anything creative.

Dude, they said

If AI is just blatantly copy and pasting what it read, then yes, I see that as a huge issue.

That’s in no way agreeing “that’s it’s a massive clusterfuck that these companies just purloined a fuckton of copyrighted material for profit without paying for it”. Do you not understand that AI is not just copy and pasting content?

What was “stolen” from you and how?

I think it would be much worse if artists, writers, scientists, open source developers and so on were forced to stop making their works freely available because they don’t want their creations to be used by others for commercial purposes.

None of them are forced to stop making their works freely available. If they want to voluntarily stop making their works freely available to prevent commercial interests from using them, that’s on them.

Besides, that’s not so bad to me. The rest of us who want to share with humanity will keep sharing with humanity. The worst case imo is that artists, writers, scientists, and open source developers cannot take full advantage of the latest advancements in tech to make more and better art, writing, science, and software. We cannot let humanity’s creative potential be held hostage by anyone.

That could really mean that large parts of humanity would be cut off from knowledge.

On the contrary, AI is making knowledge more accessible than ever before to large parts of humanity. The only comparible other technologies that have done this in recent times are the internet and search engines. Thank goodness the internet enables piracy that allows anyone to download troves of ebooks for free. I look forward to AI doing the same on an even greater scale.

Oh wow, yeah ducking wouldn’t help so much if you’re ducking to be at face level with glass 😬

Hopefully we’ll never have to find out. Chilling in an interior room is probably a good call, the closest survivors to the Hiroshima ground zero were cocooned inside a bank vault.

It’s in case you’re sufficiently far from the blast radius that your greatest danger is flying glass shards and other debris. The people at ground zero are fucked no matter what of course, but a lot of people live in suburbs outside the city that could have their lives saved, or at the very least could avoid more serious injuries by ducking and covering.

This sort of education actually already happened in Japan during WWII. There were multiple survivors from Hiroshima who saw sights such as this:

He would recall passing a woman who seemed to have bluish leaves growing out of her flesh. She must have been standing near a stained glass window when the sky opened up, and the strange plants were in fact leaves of glass deeply rooted in one whole side of her body. She walked by without uttering a word or a sound, like a ghost; but with each step, the leaves chimed with what seemed, to a boy of six, like a strange jingle-jangle tune.

That’s why you duck and cover, because in case you find yourself still alive after the blast, you do not want to want to be someone with so much glass embedded in them that they look like jingling vegetation. Depending on your distance from the blast, there will be a few seconds between the flash of the atomic bomb and when the blast wave hits, and those few seconds are an opportunity to save yourself from a lot of unnecessary pain afterwards.

Some of these Hiroshima survivors went on to Nagasaki, where they would educate everyone they came across on their experiences in Hiroshima. This is just one such account:

Almost from the moment Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Hisako arrived home with their child, neighbors started arriving at the door, wanting to know what Mr. Yamaguchi had seen in Hiroshima. He was nauseous and fatigued and his fever felt as if it were still climbing; but he decided to answer every question, and offer advice: “Wear white clothes—which will reflect the heat rays. Black clothes tend to catch fire easily. Keep all of the windows open, because if glass shards are stuck in the body, treatment is very difficult. And if you see the pika, you must at that very moment hide yourself behind a sturdy object.”

He hoped that his advice to his neighbors was unnecessary. He prayed that the white flash and the black cloud would not follow him to Nagasaki. He hoped so, but he really did not believe so.

That all happened within 3 days, man. Just 3 days after the first atomic bombing, humanity was already learning how to adapt to atomic bombs. They teach you “duck and cover” because that’s literally what Hiroshima survivors had taught Nagasaki survivors 78 years ago. But of course they should’ve explained the historical context to you so that it was clear why such knowledge is useful.

In case anyone reading this is interested, the quotes are from the book “To Hell and Back: The Last Train From Hiroshima.” It’s a fantastic book with many more vivid accounts than the two I just picked out.

Do you see either of those happening anytime soon?