Uhh… I do both
The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.
I grew up witnessing “the end of history” with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.
Then 2010s hit and I’m still processing the 180 degrees shift. I read dozens of books about nazis, authoritarianism, societal memory, cults, fucking roman empire. But I still have cognitive dissonance every time I open news feed.
Facebook and unregulated social media. Up to now most governments in the world don’t even have a clue or idea that the internet is a very powerful tool that should actually be regulated because there are very evil people who will always act in bad faith to manipulate others for power and control. The Golden era of the internet is definitely over, I think 2016 was a defined shift that will be recorded by historians.
In fairness, most internet users would have been extremely against regulating social media until quite recently
it’s all about how the regulations are designed… for the benefit of corporations? or regular people?
for example, there could easily be rules placing caps on the amount of advertising that’s allowed on any given platform. no fucking way now the government will ever put that cat back in the bag now that the 20 percent of GDP comes from tech monopolies fueled by advertisements.
Early internet was very much regulated. I wish we could all just go back to usenet and no internet on phones.
it was only regulated by its uselessness… it was the wild west of shit otherwise.
Regulated by my uselessness…
KICK MIDWEST.SOCIAL cabinet_sanchez "Fuck youu’
The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.
I grew up witnessing “the end of history” with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.
Then 2010s hit and I’m still processing the 180 degrees shift.
Fucking thank you! This has been hard for me to put into words. (I’m on the older end of Gen-X)
Holy shit thank you. You finally put it into words for me. The shift of 'the internet is the greatest tool for knowledge, to what it is now, some cancerous corpo bloated bullshit that ignorant people are harnessing just to find others to support their shitty beliefs. Been such a hard thing to watch and understand how the fuck we got here.
The shift of 'the internet is the greatest tool for knowledge, to what it is now, some cancerous corpo bloated bullshit
Spot on.
The worst part is that anyone who wasn’t around for the first 10ish years of the web has never seen how real and optimistic and grass roots and delightfully human it was.
We really lost a lot.
We used to think pop ups were the worst that could happen. Good god were we wrong.
To be fair 90% of the corporate bullshit we are looking at today is born out of the same mindset as popups.
I think it’s lack of empathy as the root for everything.
Which I believe is opposite of human nature but here we are.
Empathy is easily used for propaganda as well. All those “immigrants are going to r your wife” and “radical elites transing your children” are the appeals to empathy that work very well (there are examples from the left too lets be honest, they’re just less unhinged)
IMO you need empathy, rationality and introspection: empathy to feel for your fellow human, rationality to not fall for the grift, introspection to realize in what ways you were an idiot and self-correct.
The wave of scepticism that will inevitably come in 2030s will weed out the grifters, but I doubt it’ll last. Time is a flat circle afterall.
I see your point but I don’t think you’re describing empathy as much as fear in your examples.
There are some who think time is shaped like a Jeremy Bearamy…
I’m reminded of this article from a couple of days ago in the Globe and Mail, specifically as a response to Musk’s anti-empathy comments: Empathy is not a Weakness, it’s a Strength
That’s the saddest thing about people born after the 90s. We expected the future to get better. Kids now are just hoping we don’t destroy everything.
From “The Hunt for Red October”, to “you shouldn’t have started the war against russia then.”
Red Dawn to half+ our leadership bowing down to him, and a president calling him a good guy.
God damn what a wild ride.
The internet came way too quickly, or at least it evolved way too quickly for us. We should still be on 56k and surfing Limewire for what may or may not be what we’re actually looking for. 24/7 access to everyone all around the country, and world, was too fast as well. We can’t acclimate that fast. Our brains weren’t ready for it.
Nice, you’re spot on. We bonded for a while… now we’re in entropy!
Eh, I still think people are generally pretty nice to each other. The problem is that when that same nice person goes online, they behave differently. The more time we spend online, the more impact that “alter ego” has on our “IRL” personality.
So what we need is more IRL connection, but we’re instead spending more and more time online.
That is just not true. Plenty of nice people online and plenty of assholes since before online was even a thing for the average person. In fact if anything it feels like those assholes from before are re-asserting themselves.
Is it though? I find myself being a lot more combative online and more agreeable in person. That separation of my actual identity and lack of physical repercussions really makes me more confrontational online.
That theory was mentioned often in the early 2000s when most people stilled used pseudonyms online but it has been debunked since then by the many people who feel perfectly fine spouting the same kind of hate on social media under their real name and sometimes even in video form.
Physical repercussions do not exist in the real world for anything but the most extreme of actions. If anything the culture of lying to each other’s face (a.k.a. being polite) and looking away when abuse happens makes abuse very common in the real world, just ask your average minority or retail worker.
If that’s the case, then I guess it’s just exposure to more people so you’re more likely to directly interact with a sick. I would be interested in some statistics showing that the incidence of cyber bullying and other forms of abuse are comparable to IRL abuse. It just seems incredibly plausible that people are more outspoken from behind a keyboard than IRL.
I understand that crypto is a scam that will rob millions of people of money they desperately need.
But what you said there is literally the end of my understanding of what crypto is. It has something to do with computers solving math problems, and somehow that’s worth money.
What?
the problem with crypto is that when you try to explain it, it sounds so stupid that someone else thinks you have to be explaining it wrong
but if you want explanation, this one is fine https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html and this https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html
When I think of crypto I think of that bloke grubbing through landfill for a lost hard drive. I think of Sam Bankman Fried. I think of Trump’s meme coin. Yes, I’m sure someone must be explaining it wrong to this old lady.
So the same as most currency that isn’t backed by actual valuables? Like the US dollar after it stopped being backed by gold like 100 years ago?
Crypto is a world currency that people have assigned value to. Pretty much all other money is a currency that individual countries have assigned a value to. Both types can be just as worthless. Hyper inflation has made money from many countries worth less than a roll of toilet paper to wipe your ass with. For that matter, the US dollar could buy you 30 rolls of toilet paper 75 years ago. Now it can only buy you like 1 roll.
A pretty generous comparison. USD is at least FDIC insured and somewhat tied to our country’s finances. Crypto only stabilizes around the markets that use it, i.e. black markets.
At this point, the US is becoming a black market.
FDIC insures you won’t lose your money if a bank or something goes under. It doesn’t do anything to insure that the money’s value stays good.
You have a good point, the value of any money (even a lot of gold’s value) is a social construct, i.e. only what the population makes of it. For that reason, I don’t think that crypto is inherently bad, but the fact is that most people trading aren’t using it as money (you know, an intermediate good to facilitate trades), they’re attempting to use its wildly fluctuating value to make a quick buck. Those types of trades ironically only make it more volatile, and are what made it volatile in the first place, so there’s now a vicious cycle. Will crypto ever stabilize? Fuck if I know, I’m not qualified to talk about this, but frankly I think you could say the same about most people in the stock market and especially in crypto. Maybe if a critical mass of people start actually using cryptocurrency as a currency it’ll change, but who can say.
Crypto has already started stabilizing. But only proof of work can demand the trust and longevity to make it so. Everything else has the threat of a scam. Do not trust proof of stake. Research those terms and the Birds Eye level of the crypto they represent for more info.
These are great, but they don’t explain what a crypto coin actually is.
technical details vary and honestly matter little. what matters more is what people do with these things, and that’s what’s explained
Its just an entry in a ledger. It says something like, “blandfordforever sends courageousstep 1 coin” along with a cryptographic signature from blandforever that validates the transaction. This means you now have and can transfer that coin to someone else, provided that you have the key to sign the appropriate transaction. That’s all it is.
The miners are all competing to sign a “block” of transactions onto the ledger by figuring out new correct answer to a math problem that’s determined in part by a number from the previous block. They are rewarded for this by being able to send themselves a preset number of coins in this new block they’ve signed. Transactions aren’t final until they’ve been added to the blockchain by this mechanism.
This has been my favorite response so far. It explains nothing, but the mental image is priceless.
It’s a speculative asset that fluctuates based on the whims of billionaire hedge funds and early crypto investors. There is zero value in owning it unless you got in early enough. And even then it’s a situation of the last man holding the bag. Someone will end up losing their asses.
Most crypto is. Proof of work crypto is not and brings actual stability and longevity to the table. Most people don’t understand this. Proof of stake is never anything more than gambling.
On average the value of any crypto token is less than 0 because of the high cost to produce and transfer them. Ironically it seems people find the most wasteful tokens more valuable. “It’s hard to make so it must be valuable” or some such nonsense.
No, that’s basically it.
The reason for all this work is basically the concept of a currency that isn’t backed by and dependent upon governments while also being impossible to counterfeit, hence a lot of encryption because it fundamentally says that you can’t trust the other computers that you’re talking to. Everybody holds a ledger that says that you have $5, so you can’t suddenly say that you actually have $10. And all the math is to prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists at any time. The more currency there is from solving the math, the harder the math gets to slow down the creation of new money.
It all falls apart, though, because the only value that crypto has is what it’s worth in traditional fiat currency - the very thing that it’s supposed to replace.
So it’s just a bunch of computers doing a lot of math to make funny money that’s supposedly worth something because…of reasons?
prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists
which is a flawed premise itself. the supply of currency needs to expand at the same rate as productivity increases or else you get deflation which has its own set of problems
it’s also at the same time libertarian political project that aims to, how they put it, “separate money from state”, which is in itself absurd, but not for libertarians, because their only problem with capitalism is that they’re not on the top. crypto is an attempt to “fix” that “problem”. see also doings of peter thiel, curtis yarvin, urbit,
first they build a place with no state interference and then they learn hard way why there’s so many financial regulations. sometimes it’s deliberate and it’s a way to use novelty to repackage old financial crimes to deflect responsibility long enough to fuck off to Dubai. sometimes it’s scams all the way and scammer already lives in North Korea
You’re close. 1 unless the coin is proof of work you can’t trust it. 2 the value it brings it in the replacement of third party trust for economic transactions and the infrastructure and labor required for that, along with global, instant access to transfer infinite amounts of value as well as store that value logically within your own mind.
Downvotes are coming but if you’re seriously intellectually curious where the value is, read the Bitcoin standard.
You know what a normal database is.
The Blockchain is a distributed database instead of a centralized one where normally people can verify that each other part of the database is correct.
Generally anything a distributed database can do, a centralized database in good hands can do better. Except for crimes. It’s more difficult to get away with crimes when they can be shut down in one place.
Also it’s harder to undo Blockchain/crypto stuff. They sell this as a benefit while the primary use is scams and rug pulls.
“The government can’t get your money back.” Yeah, gonna be hard to get back thr money you were scammed out of with a court order, isn’t it.
They also try to sell it as anonymous, but it’s very much not. Everything is on the record, so if they link you to an address (and they generally can), they can see every transaction you’ve ever made. There used to be services to obfuscate this, but the government has well and truly broken through those. They can find you of they want to.
Crypto is a an MLM for guys. You can make money, if you’re lucky enough to be the scammer and not the scammee.
“it’s somehow worth money” is basically true of all fiat currencies. It’s worth what the consensus agrees it is worth.
(this comment should not be read as a defense of crypto)
Government currencies are backed by taxes - someone did something and gave a portion of the value of their labor to the government, represented by currency. The government then reinvests the labor into the country supposedly for the public good. This is expected to continue indefinitely and it is this cycle that gives the currency value.
Crypto companies have investors. Investors are only attracted by the prospect of growth. They have no natural revenue cycle, no way of creating value without hype and people gambling with their.money.
The exception is the value inherent in being a currency outside of the control and surveillance of the Governments. Hence all the illegal activities. As time goes on cryptocurrencies will be more regulated and controlled by government, and it will diminish that trait.
It’s fucking stupid.
Traditional currencies are backed by governments and the global economy. Boiling down USD/EUR to “it’s worth money because we say so” is many many magnitudes larger of a splicification than saying the same for crypto.
I think it helps to reinforce how silly crypto is, though. Once you establish that fiat currency is basically magic paper we all agree is worth something because it’s backed by things like the government’s reliability and contract to uphold that value, and then you say, “and crypto, designed to replace fiat currency, is backed by fiat currency,” the whole thing falls apart like the house of cards that it is.
How can you justify a funny money that doesn’t do anything new in terms of cyber security, while burning vastly more resources to do it, and is only worth something because of the currency that it’s supposed to replace, and that value rapidly fluctuates from moment to moment.
What is a fiat currency?
Oh, I just looked it up. So it’s the USD.
It’s any currency that is unbacked by a commodity.
Fiat currency is just as silly. As is all money, really.
“I trade numbers for food. The numbers are accessible via a magnetic strip on some plastic in my pocket.” or “I trade paper for clothing but the number of papers isn’t as important as the number printed ON the papers.” Both of these realities are absurd. :)
As a store of value representing labor rendered: neither of those are terrible systems and most people don’t understand either of them anyway. Fiat seems “normal” because we grew up with it. That said: I’m no apologist. Popular crypto currencies offer little novelty for the layperson, no true improvement on the concept of currency generally, and cost orders of magnitude more to maintain their required infrastructure. I fail to see the appeal.
There are some projects which focus on the practical utility of decentralized currency (I remember thinking Nano (wikipedia.com) was cool back in the day) but they don’t get the same kind of attention as meme coins because they can’t be abused as easily. I’ve heard stories of these kinds of tools facilitating commerce in places where the local currency collapsed. Neat as that may be it isn’t revolutionary… Still more convenient than bartering via cigarette though.
Fiat isn’t “silly” insofar as there’s an underlying reason why fiat has value. The US dollar is valuable because the US government only accepts tax payments in USD. As long as the US government demands tax payments and has the ability to make good on those demands, US dollars will have value.
It’s decentralized, so how do you prevent people from making up bullshit lies that didn’t happen about where the money is? You do it by incorporating a difficult math problem. Then to incentivize people to actually work on that instead of just using the money, people who solve it get a reward.
I am not pro crypto, just explaining.
See, this guy gets it
I don’t think there is one legal use case that can only be solved by a blockchain and not cheaper and faster with a classic database.
Except money laundering, crapto is fantastic for that.
I am sure scamming people out of their money with crypto is legal in a few jurisdictions.
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Yes. Absolutely. But I see where the appeal comes from. A few years ago I bought some Bitcoin for 50 Euro. A year later it doubled in value. That was nice. And that was moderate compared to when I first got Bitcoin and it was as cheap as dirt and suddenly it’s worth 70k. With the world in the grips of the billionaire class people get desperate for even a chance at moderate wealth. It’s a sad symptom of the fucked up world we’re living in.
The relative value of your bitcoin changed, but the amount of bitcoin itself stayed the same.
Same happens with cash I guess, except it tends to be worth less over time.
Just a big lottery you’ll never really win https://youtu.be/4DUkS98yw5Y
Yall seem to young to to understand crypto. Its original intent was to combat the crazy bad economic stuff from 2007. It’s not inherently a scam as a category. 2007s banking collapse was really scary when it happened if you were paying attention. It made 9/11 seem like NBD. Unfortunately not much has changed and you’ll probably get to see something similar again.
Huh. I’ve never heard that being the reason, especially when crypto was supposedly made outside US but the 2007 crisis was centered around US.
The original reason is in the name.
Public ledger blockchain is genius technology, whether you can imagine a use-case you consider valid is not a condition for it to actually be an amazing construction.
Then you don’t understand crypto.
The only crypto that makes kinda sense is the idea of a stablecoin (essentially a layer around a stable currency/reserve), but so far there’s not really a good implementation of one.
All the big crypto coins are just more volatile stocks with shittier tax implications (assuming you don’t try to skirt the law with it)
Ah yes the people who ran their video games on DOS are being left behind.
Help son, how do I open this app?!? With my finger???
It’s not “brain melting”. Even watching the internet go from “this is super neat, and way cool” (For nerds) to “Well, it’s ALL going through enshittification now” wasn’t “brain melting”, it’s just what happens under capitalism.
Going from seeing nothing but possibilities when I heard about some new device or software coming out to dreading what they are going to remove or break has been one of the most depressing parts about my life.
Hell, I was looking to replace my 10 year old mouse last weekend and couldn’t find one that was equivalent or better. I even asked people who were more into computer shit than me and I felt like I was taking crazy pills reading their responses. I ended up just fixing the problem myself rather than replacing it.
I have been looking for just the right mouse for ages and the market for mouses (mice?) is terrible. I’ve been looking for a 5 button mouse that supports bluetooth (reliability) and I am actually so frustrated with what the options are. They are either massively over engineered, huge, expensive paper weights or cheap, super light, cheap junk I can crush with my weak feminine hands. I have ranged from top of the line hundred dollar gaming one to junky light weight 10 dollar ones and I am still looking. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
I really like my Logitech mx master but I like heavy beefy mice
Hmm, I might try the MX Anywhere. I have a M240, I like the size and weight and the Bluetooth connectivity, but it only has 3 buttons, that got old real quick. Look like they don’t even sell that one anymore.
look at either high end productivity mice, or MMO/RTS gaming mice. there is so many thousands of options for mice if you’re willing to look.
Mine is a Logitech G602. To replace it I need something with at least 6 extra buttons (I actually use 2 more but I can compromise on those functions), it needed to be wireless, and take regular batteries (I don’t want to be stuck replacing it or having to use it wired when the built in one wears out). I wouldn’t have thought that would be asking for much but nothing lined up at all. And the shit people were recommending weren’t even close. Like, the point is I still want to be able to do what I’m doing now. Not just buy an expensive mouse you swallowed the marketing for…
G602
AH I have that one too, loved it for years but then the click went out and it started double clicking randomly. I took it apart to try and fix it and no luck, its in my dead mouse drawer along with 2 G302s, the MK mouse, a M240, several Microsoft mice, a Naga, Death Adder and 5 cheap no name mice. They aren’t all actually dead, just dead to me.
I ended up replacing it with the G502, which is not an upgrade or even a side grade but it works for what I need it to do for now. For my laptop I am using a cheap no name bluetooth mouse for now. It’s way too light and disconnects randomly, but it has bluetooth and 5 buttons with is the minimum count I need.
Yeah this is actually my 3rd one. The previous two developed a double clicking problem and were replaced under warranty. The most recent one the middle mouse button stopped working intermittently. When I took it apart I found that the button itself worked fine when I pressed it directly or even with the wheel as long as the screws were loose, I suspect the plastic peg that presses it when you push the wheel was worn down and no longer hitting it right. Fortunately I had the previous one it replaced still and was able to just swap the top halves on them. I’m seriously considering buying some switches to see if I can fix the old one too to have a backup. I’ll have to figure out the middle click problem too but I have some ideas for that. All that being said I’d just fucking buy one if a replacement was available.
I’m glad you at least found something that works for you. I’ve got a no name wireless keyboard and mouse for work that were the only set I could find with both a mechanical keyboard and regular batteries. It’s always a gamble but sometimes those no name brands are surprisingly decent.
He’ll, I was looking to replace
diff note: Why is autocorrect suddenly changing “hell” to “he’ll” all over?
Technology is circling the drain.
Us millennials basically had the internet to ourselves for like 15 years.
The only reason we’re still on it is chasing that high even though it’s gone
What? I’ve been on it since the early 1990s ….
Here’s a kicker: You’re a millenial, and yeah, us millenias had it all to ourselves, by and large, for about 10-15 years.
Remember when you can to configure Trumpet with the proper IP settings, and that was AFTER you configured your modem’s DMAs and IRQ’s (Unless it was an external serial modem…)
Then came +++ath
You also had to figure all this shit out by trial and error. Google or YouTube didn’t exist in 2000. Let alone like 96.
They’re a millennial if you assume they were also a child in 1990
I was a child (14-15) in 1990, but I’m definitely gen x…
Probably a safe bet… I feel I may be among the oldest in the crowd here, and we are a minority here.
Ok, millennial
Yep. Or Gen X. Depending on who you ask.
I feel both cuddled and attacked
Fuck, I’m considered an ELDER now?
Fr. I just turned 40. Give me my senior discount card.
Yeha I turn 40 at the end of the year. Over the hill buddies.
Dispense your wisdom, o my elder. I’m just a nineties boy, what do I know of the world before ?
I was born i 85. Not much more wisdom I can give I’m afraid. I am a tech early adopter and a coder so I understand crypto it’s just too volatile a market for me to care about. Wish I had invested in Bitcoin when someone asked me if I wanted to in 2012 though. Mostly my driving force for new tech adoption was my gaming habit. I had a colecovision, NES, Genesis, Playstation, Playstation 2, and all the systems from the next gen onward once I had job money.
Your elders refers to people older than you, not necessarily elderly people
By someone old enough to not just be a dad, but identify so much that it’s their username. Fuck this kid. I’m not old. Just getting fat, bald, slow, dumb… oh wait… maybe they’re into something 🥹 😭
elders
1990
I got to be alive before mobile phones and social media.
Worth it!
I am immeasurably grateful that the entirety of my youth is not on record.
Right? AFAIK there’s about 5 pictures of me between the ages of 8 and 25. A couple of those are driver’s licenses.
I seriously wonder how much brain damage I avoided by squeaking in my teenage years before the invention of smart phones.
Honestly I understand better now why old people complained about computers so much. We don’t even know what we lost.
I stood in line for VHS tapes. I also know that the blockchain is slow as hell and that cryptocurrency is glorified gambling for people with too much money - and I had a friend in the early 2000s that was trying to make a Bitcoin exchange.
Crypto? Yes, I know what a pyrimid scheme is.
I don’t expect them to understand crypto. No one expects them to understand crypto.
I expect them to understand FUCKING FASCISM.
Yeah.
We can move on to “complicated” things like crypto after we’ve made sure people understand basic things like FUCKING FASCISM.
Priorities.
Most of the kids I know who have this attitude would also call IT if they accidentally opened the Command Prompt or BIOS.
To be fair, us elders had grifts and money laundering too, so crypto is nothing functionally new.
No hate, but this is exactly proving the point of the meme. There’s so many new concepts and paradigms, each so complex and constantly evolving, that we need to rely on familiar comparisons that strip away the true identities of the subject. And I think this is true for pretty much every everyone in this information (bombardment) age, myself included.
People tend to forget that cryptocurrencies are based on cryptography, and were founded on the dream of building a decentralized system, built by the people, free from “big player” censorship and influence, in the wake of the 2008 crisis. If you are on the Fediverse, I guess you share that dream. But then the finance “bros” started coming in and badabing badabang now it’s another asset you trade through your bank like stocks or gold. Then came the NFTs and yes, somehow “crypto” evolved into being the prime speculation and scamming vector.
And the same goes on for every news topic. “Trump!” “Gaza!” “AI!” “Climate!”. Our brains try to reduce these mind-melting concepts hitting us all the time to simplified good/bad or us/them categorizations. And we’re left utterly unable to actually tackle and act upon anything at all.
No, no one is forgetting they’re built on cryptography. It just doesn’t matter. The underlying technology of a thing doesn’t have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
You don’t care what your car is made of as long as it has good fuel efficiency and crash rating. Steel ceramic and aluminum are just tools to that end.Research into cryptocurrency started long before 2008. Academics and odd crypto enthusiasts have been working on it since the 80s.
The intent from the beginning has been a mix of curiosity, paranoia, and buying drugs.
Bitcoin was hardly a “for the people” project. It was initially used almost entirely for black market purchases, largely via silk road. “The people” did not give a fuck about perfect anonymous digital cash. It solved a problem that most people didn’t and still don’t have.
The adoption order was: Math nerds > drug lords > finance > small investors. It’s still not actually adopted as currency by people.
When you create a thing for the purpose of making monetary transactions untraceable, and your first major users are all using it to hide where their money came from from the government, it’s really fair to say that you created a money laundering tool.Bitcoin wasn’t taken over by finance people, they’re the reason it didn’t taper out like previous cryptocurrencies, which either fizzled or were shutdown for being nuggets of financial crime.
Sorry, but then by that argument cryptography itself is bad because “pedos use it”? Criminals will always use privacy-preserving technology/techniques/strategies. Should we renounce our right to have secure communication, or a decentralized currency because of that? Hasn’t this argument been done to death already?
The underlying technology of a thing doesn’t have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
Excuse me, what? Of course it does matter if the backup for all your life’s photos is in an hard disk in your living room, or it’s on Google’s server. Of course it matters if the platform we’re talking on is Lemmy, and not Reddit. It does make a difference if the car you’re driving is gas or electric, where it was made, if it shows you ads or not. What are you going on about? It makes all the difference in the world, but that’s on “the backend” and no one remembers that it does matter
You missed the point and heard one that wasn’t being made.
No one said cryptography was bad, or that cryptocurrencies were bad because they were used for drugs and criminals.
I said that the cryptographic underpinnings of things like Bitcoin are irrelevant, and that what matters is the behavior of the system. It’s history as a vessel for laundering drug money speaks to it being a tool for money laundering, as opposed to some populist tool for freedom taken over by fintech bros. The fintech bros where there before any populist usage even started to take root.The underlying technology of the thing doesn’t matter. Pointing out the properties of things you care about doesn’t contradict that. You care about privacy, reliability, security and all that good stuff. You care that your car is electric because it has lower emissions and lower environmental impact than gas, not just “because it’s electric”.
The means are not the ends.You went on a rant about how there’s too much in the world that confuses people, but I think it might be you who’s a bit confused.
It’s really not proving much of anything. These new “concepts” and “paradigms” are nothing more than buzzwords thrown onto old concepts. Every scam is a scam that’s been done before even if there’s a new layer of glittery wrapping paper over it. Who’re you trying to convince more, the potential suckers or yourself?
The internet is a buzzword thrown onto old concepts? Instantaneous transfer of large amounts of data? Democratization and seamless diffusion of anything, from memes to “money”? “no but crypto is indeed a scam” is completely missing my point, and hitting the meme again
Your point is adding fancy words to make something sound smarter, likely screwing someone along the way, if the track record of the use of “paradigms” is any indication. It’s okay to let at least some things stay simple. If someone broke into my home, I wouldn’t call the cops and report a “spry possession-reappropriating malcontent”, I’d report a thief. Same with crypto, I wouldn’t report a “financial savant”, I’d report a money launderer. You see, sometimes adding fancy, unneeded words to something does nothing but make you sound like a pretentious tool.
“Paradigm” is a word I chose to convey a specific meaning, which is “the way you approach/think about something”. It might be more common in my language, I’m not trying to make either crypto or me sound smarter. I’m for precision of language, if you’re more into newspeak you do you. You also seem to think I’m trying to convince you that “crypto is good”, which is not the case. You have either misunderstood my comment, or are just trying to pick a bone. Either way, that’s not very debatable for a racoon :)
My point is that people fall into fallacies by simplifying things too much, and only looking at the surface. See how your doubling down on “crypto actually bad” is beside it? Granted, I really should’ve picked a different case in point than cryptocurrencies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I keep saying that humanity’s toys do evolve spectacularly while humans are still working on the same basic impulses they’ve been dealing with for millennia.
Trump is a petty conman who does everything in his power to consolidate as much power in himself as he possibly can so that he can funnel as much money to himself and his gang as he can. That’s not new. The environment he’s doing in may be more complex, or differently set up than in previous iterations, but the core is depressingly mundane.
Gaza is just people hating people and other people supporting different sides while all sides give each other more reasons to hate each other perpetually, some more war-crimey, some less so. Tragic, quagmired to hell and back, but not groundbreaking in and of itself.
As for AI, the framework is the usual capitalists trying to convince everybody that their new best revolutionary thing is a word sorting machine that can sort very, very many words now very fast. Trying to cash in on the hype is the eternal constant, the occasion this time is a very sophisticated chatbot/image generator based on all the materials the inventors could get away with stealing.
And climate stuff is just this generation of capitalists stripping the planet for parts while they can get away with it. The scale is bigger, but vulture capitalism is also not even remotely new.
Just like the principle of singular attributability of data via the blockchain is a fancy way of assigning stuff to one recipient. We’ve had approaches to this before. This time the blockchain’s ledger system is the big new anchor for the human element, which will invariably at first be either grifters or people who wanna bash in other people’s heads with it.
Noone is expecting you to understand crypto, but I hear this about modern technology in general all the time and I just don’t buy it. It’s only brain-melting if you’ve spent your entire life being deeply incurious. There are 80-90 year olds who understand this shit just fine because they bothered to keep up.
The problem with cryptocurrencies is that you can explain it, without going to technical details, to a person with the intelligence of an average investment banker. (Which isn’t much. Many animals make more profitable random investments when prompted.)
Same with generative AI I guess.
If anyone asks I just say it’s like giving you the serial number on the $5 note instead of the note itself.
Not a great example but easy to understand.
