Thanks!

Does Mono have any purpose any longer? What is the point now that dotnet core is so well-established?

Holy shit, I’m so sorry to hear that. I’ve been going through a physical rehab of my own the past year and it is so awful. Recovering from such a major surgery as that must be horrible, I can’t imagine.

It seems to be human nature to group together like that. It makes sense from a game theory perspective, too. Perhaps political parties are inevitable

Last year suffered a severe shoulder dislocation that lasted ~2.5hrs, while in the middle of nowhere. It was unimaginably painful and I struggled to believe it would ever be over. The ambulance took so long to arrive.

But the real fear came in the following days, weeks, months. Knowing that it could happen again at any moment without warning, even from the simplest movement with no strain at all. When the severe one happened I wasn’t doing anything unusual, I just reached out to pick something up and pop. My damaged muscles were in such a state that it could pop out with no real cause.

Nowadays I’m doing much better. I’ve had a surgery to fix it, with 90% success rate. But that 10% risk still keeps me up at nightbsometimes.

Everything is political. The only software that is “not political” is that which aligns with your personal views.

Experiments in rats have found that once plastic is introduced to their environment, their ability to reproduce declines drdmstically. Genitalia are smaller, slerm rates lower. And the effect compounds and grows generation after generation, getting worse and worse so long as plastic is consumed.

Studies have also shown that human fertility (regarding actual physical ability to reproduce, not the choice of whether to do so) has dropped dramatically genetation on generation since the rise of plastics

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2023/dec/19/chemicals-affecting-sperm-reproductive-health-infertility

https://youtu.be/KNzlfYJaaCg?feature=shared

And in that situation, the safest bet is to say no. See: the invisible dragon https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Dragon_in_My_Garage

improving and integrating the technology is raising harder and more complex questions than first envisioned

Many people not only envisioned but predicted these problems as soon as the hype cycle began.

Interesting article. I’d have loved to see some stats on how LLM investment and LLM startups are doing.

I miss Tarja, but that is an incredible performance. Most bands sound kinda bad live, it is much more difficult to sing live vs in a studio and far fewer elements are in your control. Yet, despite Nightwish’s vocals being so challenging she hits every note while singing live and headbanging surrounded by constant pyro. So much hard work must have gone into preparing for this set, what a pro.

Why can I not find that post on beehaw? Some ActivityPub weirdness?

Done and done https://s-arash.github.io/ascent/

Very cool

You can go full crazy like I did, use a Windows keyboard with macOS mappings.

I was used to mac when I switched to using Linux on my desktop, which has a Windows keyboard, for work. I didn’t want to re-learn my bindings. And I touch-type anyway, so the keycaps don’t confuse me. It mostly works great except for the # key, for that I have to press altgr+3

I think you’re missing their point a bit

They don’t even need that sort of power for the argument to hold weight but yes, they do hold exactly that sort of power and use it for things like ensuring that Buckingham Palace isn’t affected by racial equality in employment laws https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vetted-more-than-1000-laws-via-queens-consent

Then they hide it from us, too

They are “British heritage” because they killed, conquered and stole from our ancestors.

Stealing “the properties of women” is BS, since back then women had no right to ownership;

That is not quite right. Married women had no property. Plenty of unmarried women had property, and with-hunting was a for-profit legalised industry of robbing these vulnerable women. But European history isn’t really the point so let’s move on.

I don’t think your description of a tulip market is quite right. The point of the tulip market is just that the tulip itself has no inherent value other than the expectation that someone else will buy it for more. This has similar properties to an MLM in that eventually, the person at the end of the chain (holding the “hot potato”) is out of luck. And I wouldn’t say that is how all markets work, either. Healthy markets are built on products of value, not speculation.

Crypto is as profitable as USD

This is a minor point but note that holding USD is not profitable, due to inflation. This is a key difference between crypto and regular currencies. Crypto becomes more scarce over time and so will trend toward becoming more valuable, while the dollar becomes less valuable. Becoming less valuable is a good desirable trait because it encourages people to spend money and actually get the economy moving, rather than hoarding and speculating.

You seem to me like you’ve drunk at least a little of the cyber-libertarian kool-aid. If so, we’ll probably not see eye-to-eye any time soon. But I’ll try to give you a gist of my perspective on the whole affair and you can make of it what you will. The block chain does not offer any substantial benefit as a virtual currency over a regular database, as we have been using for decades. Systems like Steam’s inventory, Neopets collectible pets and World of Warcraft have been creating virtual currencies that worked perfectly long before crypto came along, and without accelerating global warming by using a small country’s worth of power to do it.

You will doubtless respond that decentralisation is the difference that the Block Chain brings along, the value offering. But no-one actually runs their own wallets. If Steam Inventory were using a block chain nothing would change in practice whatsoever because I’d just have a wallet stored and managed by Steam, and access it through a web interface just as I do now with Steam Inventory which is backed by a regular database. It would just be an implementation detail that makes no difference to the actual end-user, who is never going to run their own wallet.

Trust is brought about by regulation and insurance. I know my money is safe because my bank is backed by my country’s central bank, and decades of regulations protecting my investments. With crypto the idea is that trust is guaranteed by the block chain, but again no-one actually runs their own wallets because it is a pain in the butt to do so. So what happens in practice is that you store your wallet with some third-party provider that can later run off with your money with minimal consequences or gets hacked and in either case you don’t get your money back. Both of these scenarios have happened numerous times as I’m sure you must be aware, I hope I don’t need to cite them here.

This isn’t difficult to figure out, everyone that seriously looks at crypto knows it doesn’t really have any practical use-case beyond money laundering and black markets. So why all the paragraphs and paragraphs of libertarian ideological banter about how Bitcoin will usher in a new age of peace and prosperity and fix all the world’s problems etcetera etcetera? Because that is a great way of scamming people, and that is what crypto is at the end of the day. All the folks telling you to “hodl” and creating mountains of memes about how great it is to hold bitcoin and wait, were only doing so in the hope that the people who ate that nonsense up would be daft enough to hold during the next crash, which prevents the price from falling too far and enables the more Machiavellian crypto holders to cash out.

That’s the really sad part of the whole affair. I think there are a number of people who genuinely drink the libertarian kool-aid and think that Bitcoin et al are somehow going to bring about a brave new world, and they’re ultimately just being played for fools by the scam artists who peddle that crap without believing any of it.

What the libertarian dream has achieved is the same thing it always does, it causes exactly the problems regulation is intended to prevent. Insider trading occurs in at least 25% and possibly up to half of all crypto listings. Billions of dollars are stolen by scammers. Banks scamming their own customers (Which, funnily enough, was resolved quite neatly because of precisely the regulations that libertarians want to avoid).

Alright I’m tired. This is just a rant not an essay, you can take it or leave it. Nothing is proof-read. I don’t really have a conclusion other than to say once again that crypto is a scam perpetrated by nasty horrible bad selfish people that are harming society and the planet.