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Tweet[s] now protected but thanks to Netscape/Mozilla founder and San Francisco night club owner JWZ, Jamie Zawinski, here were some results.
All of you pre Uber zealots are adorably naive. The cab industry is scum.
replacing scum with even scummier scum? like, taxis were bad but they were fucking regulated.
If uber had simply been an app that handled payment and calling for service, it would have been a panacea to almost all of the problems taxis used to have. Unfortunately they also took the opportunity to screw over their drivers and now that they seem unstoppable they’re taking the opportunity to screw over their customers too.
No. The can industry still sucks ass today, even with the apps. They are all independent with little accountability. Uber fixed that and forced those fuckers out of their service. Uber is just a flat out better service.
Uber needed a HUGE pool of labor to draw on for its success, traditional cab companies couldn’t handle it even if they weren’t fucking scummy.
I hate Uber but I’m not crying for the cab industry. Fuck those guys too.
But its success is based on taking jobs that at least had living wages attached to them and replacing them with jobs that are ultra-precarious. The proliferation of jobs like driving for uber is one of if not the most pressing issue with the economy today, where people are employed but they’re not being paid enough.
Agreed.
Uber is also scum tho. Seems there’s always going to be something dodgy about getting into cars with random strangers.
Uber, even today has a FAR higher success rate with my personally. Even two weeks ago I had a driver telling me his card reader wasn’t working until it magically did when I started threatening to simply not pay and walk away. This has happened to me multiple times even with my reduced cab rate.
The worst I’ve ever dealt with in Uber is waiting and cancelled pickup despite using it far more often.
The problem isn’t the user experience, same as with Amazon, it’s the abusive relationship the company has with its employees. That it deliberately tries to avoid labor laws that protect workers via legal technicalities.
I like the map that shows me where public toilets are. I don’t know how that fits into this paradigm.
Illegal Gloryhole finder?
Nah that’s a different app
what’s the fake money for criminals
I can only imagine he means American currency, and the anti-counterfeiting technology embedded in it. It’s the most popular currency in the world.
Oh, bitcoin? The accounting package that requires the power of a small nation to maintain it? Well, I guess that works, too.
the bitcoin blockchain doesn’t require all that power. nothing about the code dictates that. it’s a social phenomenon, just like the markets.
Okay, “maintain” isn’t the right word, but the mining process is designed that way and it’s baked into the whole currency. Actual work could have been done, but instead we burned it all for imaginary money (which isn’t much different from fiat currency).
The bitcoin blockchain requires more power than any other blockchain while providing less features.
The only outstanding feature of bitcoin is it’s price.
the bitcoin blockchain doesn’t require any power. any miner can stop, the blockchain would have less power, and still continue to function.
The bitcoin blockchain doesn’t require any power.
Yes. It does. No transaction can occur without proof of work being performed.
any miner can stop, the blockchain would have less power, and still continue to function.
Marginally less power, but nowhere near the reduction needed to compete with a PoS blockchain.
For example Ethereum PoS uses 2,600 MWh per year (= a single 1MW windfarm). Bitcoin uses 53,000x more energy than Ethereum.
the whole network could be run on two raspberry pis. there is no minimum power requirement in the protocol.
the whole network could be run on two raspberry pis.
No. Then someone would buy 3 raspberry pis and claim all the bitcoin.
Bitcoin was a great idea in 2008 but in 2024 it has been overshadowed by other blockchains in every single dimension except for market cap.
Cryptocurrency
that’s not fake money, and it isn’t “for” criminals. it’s real, and that’s why criminals use it.
Regardless of your personal opinions about cryptocurrency, that is absolutely what this post is referring to by saying fake money for criminal.
they’re not opinions, but I’m sure you’re right about the post.
Go throw crypto at a stripper then!
they probably don’t accept tally sticks or turquoise as payment either. were those fake money too?
Yes.
great. live in your bigotry.
The fuck are you talking about?
They only “use it” to transfer the funds. Once they have it, they cash it in. No criminal is keeping it in crypto form. They use it the same way they use Apple gift cards.
tally sticks were debt tokens. people used them as money out of convenience, and would exchange them for cash if it was possible.
An easy way to tell if it’s “real” money or not is to see if goods are ever priced directly in it, where it isn’t just directly indexed to the exchange rate of an established currency.
Hint: Even places that accept crypto payments don’t do this. The crypto price fluctuates based on the moment by moment exchange rate to the local currency.
So latin American currencies are not real money. We already knew but wow harsh reality
sumerians denoted everything in silver shillings, but trade was done will all manner of commodities, including barley grains. your theory of money sounds like it comes from the Adam Smith cult.
Are barley grains a currency? I’m not understanding your argument here. In a practical sense, cryptocurrencies are far too volatile to use as a currency and the “stable” coins are tied to things like the US dollar. Well, I should say allegedly tied because “stable” coins like tether haven’t been audited to actually prove it’s tied to the underlying.
tally sticks denoted debt in Britain, and were used directly as money out of convenience, but they were themselves denoted in roman currency iirc.
Can I ask what the point of arguing semantics here is?
Maybe you have put in the effort to figure out all the avenues to use bitcoin to pay for things, but its not easy and you sound more like a drug addict scrounging for metal and bottles, and then wondering why noone else is interested in your hustle.
Why do you care if people call bitcoin real or not anyways? For most people its not real, for you I guess it is, does that make sense?
All money is fake, it’s legitimately just made up.
Gold coins?
it’s all made up but the only fake money I can imagine is counterfeit.
OMG Such edge
How is that edgy? It’s a fact.
Everyone knows how money has no intrinsic value. What does pointing that out add to anything?
Just to give some contrast the saying that crypto is “fake”
If you’re “invested” in cryptogoboligook and you’re not ripping someone off–guess what?–you’re the mark.
Regardless, you can generally use money to buy things.
You can’t buy anything with crypto because it’s 15 years later, and “mass adoption” is never happening. It’s “fake money”.
since people treat crypto as money, it is money.
Crypto is an un-backed and unregulated security – the value of which fluctuates wildly. Turns out most people don’t like being paid in something that can drastically lose value in the span of hours.
The few people and institutions that accept crypto as payment either immediately convert it back into real money or are “investors” treating it like the security it actually is.
most money throughout history has been “unbacked” and unregulated
“unbacked”
I’m assuming those quotes are referring to fiat currency. Faith in the solvency of the issuing government, widely agreed upon exchange rates, and regulated prices of goods are all forms of backing. Sure: you can argue that’s “not enough” but crypto “currencies” don’t even have that. Hence why their values fluctuate by the minute – which defeats the entire purpose of “money”.
unregulated
… government controlled central banks and entire bodies of law exist to do just that. Nobody is regulating crypto.
People certainly don’t treat crypto like money.
And I suppose that’s where our conversation has to stop because you’ve now outed yourself as willing to say any outlandish thing to support crypto.
Because I do not believe you can actually think that.
I am not defending crypto. I’m correcting people who don’t know what money is
The only ones that treat it as money are in on it. Otherwise, you could go to a Best Buy and get a TV with your crypto-card.
I can’t buy a TV with turquoise either. or sumerian shillings.
And what does that tell you? That maybe those things aren’t legal currency??
Can you buy a tv with a silver bar?
No, because it’s not legal currency. Are you getting it now?? Valuables aren’t all accepted currency….
Your argument is DEEPLY flawed.
Is it too thick sarcasm, incompetence or you just wanted to say smart cards?
Bitcoin isn’t legal tender. Just accept it.
I hate to be “that guy” but your definition of money is a little constrained. By that definition, the only “money” is the money of the country you’re currently in. Can you walk into a bestbuy and purchase a TV with Yuan?
You’re likely trying to say “Can you walk into a normal store of an appropriate country and pay with that currency” but even that is flawed, as certain stores don’t accept credit/debit, or don’t accept cash.
My definition of money is “legal tender.”
Money refers to some token which is commonly accepted as a form of payment for goods and services and for the repayment of debts. In some contexts - dark web marketplaces, for example - certain cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero are money. In the context of the physical world, generally cryptocurrency isn’t considered to be money, but rather a security - a tradable financial asset, but not a form of directly usable money - the asset has to be exchanged for e.g. USD to be spent.
In this way, cryptocurrency is a bit like WoW gold. I can’t pay for my rent with it, and I can’t really buy any physical property with it, so it’s not money in that context, but in Azeroth, it’s money. I might be able to exchange my digital asset for real money or physical assets, but only in black markets.
Hope this helps
I can’t pay for my rent with it
Many landlords accept USDC
and I can’t really buy any physical property with it
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/miami-beach-home-most-expensive-bought-cryptocurrency
Dude, if it’s newsworthy then it’s not a common occurrence. And no, many landlords do not accept crypto lol.
You previously said buying property can’t be done. Now you’ve shifted to “not common”.
https://www.muralpay.com/blog/how-to-use-stablecoins-in-your-daily-life
How to use Stablecoins to Pay Rent While direct payment of rent in digital dollars might not be mainstream yet, Rent.App allows its users to pay their rent in USDC or USDT with no fees. By creating or connecting your digital dollars wallet on their website, you can input your landlord’s email and the amount you wish to send them for your rent. However, your landlord will need to create or connect their wallet to the platform to receive the money.
Now you’ve shifted to “not common”.
The opening line of my comment literally reads:
Money refers to some token which is commonly accepted as a form of payment
me too
I mean, the same can be said for Norwegian Kroner (assuming you’re not in Norway) and nobody doubts that it is money. I can’t pay my rent with it, or buy bread with it, I need to exchange it for “real money” (Euro for me) but it is real money.
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to explain - NOK is money, but only in Norwegian contexts. Runescape gold is money in a Runescape context. Bitcoin is money in the context of dark web marketplaces. The more contexts that some asset is considered to be money, the more widely recognised that asset is as a “real” money. If cryptocurrency becomes more commonly accepted as a medium of exchange, then it will more broadly be recognised as money. But as it stands, for most people in most contexts, cryptocurrencies are not money. I hope that makes sense!
With real money you can take out a loan. Kinda the whole point of money, it represents value that is owed.
While crypto loans would be technically possible it would be a foolish thing to do since it’s effectively a short on something that could increase in value. Real money has a small but steady (well, ideally) inflation so you can be confident in taking out a loan and not having to worry about the currency doing something crazy like doubling in value resulting in you owing double the value than you initially borrowed. This is not the case for crypto so it’s simply not a viable currency for financing anything.
Since it’s not viable for financing, it’s not a real currency and never will be. Like is someone supposed to take out a business loan in real currency, convert it to crypto, pay someone else who would then have to convert it back to real money so they can pay back their loan? Why would people want to do all of these conversions back and forth to and from crypto? Because they like the risk of the value dropping for the brief time they’re holding onto it?
your standards aren’t based on historical fact.
All money is fake.
I guess? It’s social construct what we all agree to because trading 20 bushels of wheat for a chicken is a pain in the ass.
Can confirm. I used to play RotMG and everyone defaulted to trading potions and knowing a bunch of conversion rates
That’s 1200lbs of wheat for one chicken. You’ve been getting ripped off.
And used by criminals.
Anonymous and untraceable internet traffic tool for paedophiles, data thieves and occasionally a journalist living under an oppressive regime. But mainly paedophiles.
I think the majority is actually people buying drugs online, but yeah, pedophiles are a big demographic on there.
And it’s not like getting rid of Tor would stop CSAM.
I used Tor once out of curiosity. Wanted to know what kind of stuff I could run into. I FAFO. I don’t use Tor anymore.
What is FAFO?
Fuck around and find out
I haven’t been on in a bit but last year it was fairly sanitiszed compared to what it used to be. Back in like 2010 you were dodging CP left and right trying to order your weed gummies or whatever. Now it seems like it’s still around but segregated into its own spaces.
Fake money for criminals only because it was useful for me when I wanted to buy drugs while living in a place with little access to them
It’s especially funny since criminal enterprises have used “legal” currency since its invention. It’s almost like criminals are gonna criminal, regardless of the “tender”. 🤌🏽
The weed and lsd were to this day the best I have had too. I don’t love crypto currencies for many many reasons but it has been years and I still think about those trips
Cryptocurrency with Tor has unironically done more for drug safety than most administrations worldwide. I hate the framing “fake money for criminals” because while there are despicable crimes, not all of them use cryptocurrency, in fact USD was the most common last time I checked, OTOH what constitutes a criminal can be an arbitrary rule. Woman in Texas having an abortion paying with crypto? Fits the definition but I’m not sure people here would condemn it.
I’m not happy with how cryptocurrency turned out with the huge speculational bubble, NFTs, not even a huge fan of smart contracts but I think the idea of a decentralized and maybe even anonymous ledger is very much in the spirit of the fediverse.
Crypto massively helped me when the banks wanted 45 bucks for an international transfer for my buddy to send me money for something I made him. Fuck banks
That’s not even touching on the glaring fact that this anti-crypto sentiment is propped up by those who stand to benefit from downplaying its utility - until they’ve got all their plans ready to fire, of course. The same is true of cannabis these days, and (for those that read) was the same for alcohol only a little while ago, and tobacco before that. There is nothing in this current timeline that will be allowed to attack the economic power dynamic, much less correct it. This hype is as much a pre-packaged and deftly engineered product as the military-sports complex is, but where is the conversation on that, citizens? 🤷🏽♂️
I’m gonna pile on the “not happy” side with environmental concerns. You see, with Bitcoin, if crypto mining was as easy as just verifying the next block in the chain, it would be easy and the market would flood. You’d have hyperinflation. The system controls the rate at which new bitcoins are minted by artificially increasing the computational difficulty of the problem. And the end result is that crypto mining intentionally wastes power output comparable to that of a country.
Calling hashing “mining” was probably the most stupid thing in bitcoin. Since it have nothing to do with minting new coins. It is tru that miners get a bonus in addition to the fees of the block when successful. But that bonus is reduced regularly and will eventually go away.
The power consumption used by hashing became quickly insane by companies chaseing a quick buck.the whole Blockchain could be run by two raspberry pis, and the cap is still limited to 21million. I suspect you don’t know what you’re talking about
It could be. I explained why it isn’t. Why don’t you offer an alternative hypothesis for why so much power is used?
it’s used because because more machines areining than 2 raspberry pis
“legal” currency
Are you goldbug?
Extremely confident source of misinformation
Well yeah but… Fake money, is “real” money real? The support structures behind bitcoin and dollars or euros are different and both have positive and negative aspects. All in all bitcoin is worse, mainly for the power usage, but if it comes to ease and speed of transfer for the average user bitcoin rules. I guess we can mostly thank banks for that.
It should be called “unregulated money laundry for criminals”
Well… Partially. It could be so much more than just nerd investment gambling and criminal money, but the technology is just fundamentally too flawed for that.
There are many different technologies, which one is flawed?
I’m referring to all blockchain based ones. Block chain, by design, is beyond extremely inefficient
I’m happier about being able to buy drugs on the dark web than I am about giftcards, even though they’re conceptually related (eg. both “fake money”).
You should have to go to the “dark web” to buy drugs, unless it’s highly destructive like meth
(on a side note, I hate that dark wev name, it implies something evil, it implies that only hackers can get there, its just sites you won’t regularly find on Google, or different places like telegram channels)
*Shouldn’t
Yeah, autocorrect
Only really true in some countries. In the Netherlands you can extremely easily and instantly transfer money from one account to another (even at another bank) for free, using simply their IBAN. There’s also apps for convenient stuff like requesting a small payment by generating a link or splitting the restaurant bill, etc. Again all working directly with your real bank account.
In France you need to physically go to your bank’s branch, prove your identity via 4 different pieces of ID, write a physical check, sacrifice a goat to the overlords, and then the transfer will get there in a couple of weeks.
If anything makes money “real”, it’s the social contract behind it - “use this to pay your taxes or else” gives the dollar weight that no cryptocurrency can claim. That’s why they’re more accurately described as securities rather than currencies.
Of course, but in the end they both rely on a social contract. Bitcoin is worth x amount because that’s what people are willing to pay for it
Okay, but national currencies failed before because people would keep dollars and just convert at the time when they need to pay taxes
Source: I still remember the Soviet ruble collapse and hyperinflation
Do you mean the Russian ruble? The Soviet Ruble was pretty stable during it’s existence.
This raises the question of how much pollution is created by the dollar in the form of increased consumption from shortened time preferences. The dollar inflates to encourage people to spend more now instead of save, so that the economy gets bigger.
Well yeah, but that you can potentially also do with crypto, I’d say that is a whole other level on top of currencies
Yeah but you can’t not do it without crypto
Man it’s so brutal when you think about it like that. Inflation is theft by the back door.
The feds job is to force people to stay productive. It’s a feature, not a bug.
That’s not how it works. When you invest into the stock market, it actually beats inflation in the long run. So inflation doesn’t actually make me spend any more money than I would otherwise, since investing it would still later improve my buying power even more
You mean that investing in the stock market is a hedge against inflation? I can’t argue with that. But not everyone has money to invest in the stock market after rent, bills, food etc. Unless your wages/benefits rise in line with inflation or you have money to spare, you basically only have the option of buying worse stuff or simply going without it.
These gains from productivity have gone to the wealthy, and the costs of pollution have gone to the poor.
Uber
Airbnb
Bitcoin
OpenAI
did I guess right
I think the last two are more general, just cryptocurrency and generative AI respectively.
Also Lyft, Wamo, Cruz, and a few other small ones.
Seems AirBnB is the only main player in their category.
vrbo
There are also at least three ubers where I’m at. It’s more about a business model.
fake money for criminals is just money in general, at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking
at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking
The blockchain explicitly tracks transactions between wallets.
yeah, it has a use case even if the best use case is crime
The problem is that, as something that is used first and foremost as a speculation vehicle, crypto can’t really be a true currency replacement. The amount of deflation, and instability, crypto see, due to the design, basically prevents it from ever being a true replacement for contemporary money.
Now, having a block chain credit system that’s availability is not derived in the way that current crypto is could very well be one. Just not what we are being offered now.
crypto can’t really be a true currency replacement
Its been increasingly popular among the unbanked, as it grants a lot of the functions of the modern financial system at a marginally lower cost than check cashing companies and payday lenders without requiring the participant to be considered “credit worthy” by the transacting institution.
You can have a digital wallet and make digital transactions and you don’t need to carry a giant wade of cash on you all the time, even if a traditional financial institution wouldn’t touch you. That’s a boon for crooks, sure. Its also a boon for people working in the gray market - migrant laborers sending money home to family, state-legal pot/mushroom dealers who don’t have federal sanction and can’t use normal banks, gig workers and other contractors, international workers and businesses needing a universal currency to trade against. And its a boon for the working poor, particularly folks who don’t have a physical bank nearby.
Because the currency has material benefits for the unbanked (and therefore legally vulnerable) population, it becomes a popular place to ply scams and grifts and other dirty financial tricks precisely because you know the people you’re fleecing will have no legal recourse after the fact. But that’s the parasitic nature of second class citizenship.
You’re not vulnerable because you’re using crypto nearly so much as you’re vulnerable because you’re denied access to traditional banks and courts.
So it is a replacement for Western Union. Not a bad thing if it’s helping people transfer money without a middle man taking too much.
I am aware of this, still doesn’t make it a viable replacement for traditional currency
Not for someone with access to the traditional banking sector, no. But for those locked out, it’s the only available alternative.
It is only good for that at a limited scale. The issue is that it’s adoption will be stymied, governments not wanting to give up hold to their influence over currency, or not, by the simple fact that it is either in a near constant state of deflation, or it gets abandoned by the broad market. There will have to be one implemented that has it’s scarcity regulated in such a way that it retains a mostly gradual inflation. The way their scarcity is currently designed it essentially forces the currency value to increase significantly, without huge periods without value growth, or it gets dumped.
A block chain, crypto, that holds a relatively steady value, in a similar manner to normal currency, is what will be needed for it to truly take off as a full market replacement.
That’s just a Stablecoin, like Tether. Unfortunately, stablecoins have a rather tawdry history as ponzi schemes. Terra/Luna being a classic example.
Yes, I am also aware of this. The execution of an anonymous currency was done so poorly, for something trying to be an actual currency alternative, that is set having something like it back decades, if it didn’t kill the idea of a currency that a country didn’t control.
Thanks to illegal hotel chain I can stay in the big city while helping someone who is pressed on rising rents
They’re also partially to blame for the rising rents
More common however it’s apartments renting rooms they can’t lease or houses/condos owned or built solely for AirBnB renting.
I’d say fake money.
For uber, we’ve never had the overpriced cabs that it was made to circumvent in the first place. It was more of a wild west with lots of smaller companies with in-house made sites. We’ve even had an app that checked their prices, ordered the cheapest ones and cancelled others once a car is found. Then a major player entered the market, and they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, giving estimates but driving by the meter, which ended up consistently much higher in the end. Then uber came, and started undercutting everyone with stupidly low prices, but their app/maps are an unbearable garbage. So they did a merger with previous one, combining the idea with decent app, and continued until competition crumpled. And now they’re screwing both drivers and customers hard, but there’s now no alternative.
The only good thing that came out of it is incentive structure and the punishment for drivers for not taking orders. It made it so that a customer you can safely order without fear that you’d have to wait hours fimd a car - their hot potato order can’t be passed off forever, and somebody has to pick it up eventually, even if it’s a bad driver who majorly fucked up recently and now has to take it for a redemptiom, or otherwise he’d lose his job.
Airbnb never made financial sense to me. Because every time I looked there, I found the same, and much better options, for as much as half price on local ad boards. Seems to be just a convinience factor, as renters just put their properties at 2x there for an off-chance a rich tourist checks in.
AI to me seems like a dead end. The innovations are cool and flashy, but they inevitably fall short of being reliable enough to be useful. Like, I don’t use chatgpt anyhow because there’s always a chance it’ll spit out plausible bullshit which makes it so that every answer must be double-checked. And if you can find the source to check against, then why even ask the bot in the first place? Same for art, it can get you maybe halfway there, but refining the prompt takes skill and time that’d be better spend learning to edit and make real art instead.
But for cryptocurrencies I should’ve bought in way sooner. Even if they didn’t hit ATH’s every few years. I find that even drug dealers and crooks are more trustworthy than my own government, who is actively malicious, and has hurt my financial wellbeing harder and more often than even the crypto rug pulls. And that’s coming from someone who got hit by luna, ftx, and even mtgox, among others. Still better than the government straight up saying that you don’t own any of your money anymore. Yes, the ecological impact sucks, but it’s not a crypto problem specifically. I don’t see how mining is worse than, than, say, a literal mining operation across the road that uses electrical heating because they’re too poor to fix their windows and put proper insulation, and running heaters just makes financial sense? There must be regulations to make dirty power more expensive, which will make the problem solve itself. And if we have green energy, who cares what one’s using it for? Mine, game, hang christmas lights, whatever, who gives a shit
government straight up saying that you don’t own any of your money anymore
What are you referencing here?
I feel like I should be recognizing some specific thing here, but I can’t figure it out.
Well it’s third world problems, but the specific event I had in mind was when Russia froze all it’s citizen’s foreign assets in 2022 in an attempt to save it’s own currency from plummeting. This left a lot of people stranded, myself included. I did eventually get mine out, but the law, as far as I know, is still in place, so I tend think it was purely by luck and some mistake on the bank’s side. Others didn’t have it that lucky, I’ve heard of people being fined as much as $400 for just trying. But, it’s just one case, I believe there’s lots of other places where you just can’t trust the government with money - African, South American, Central Asian countries first come to mind. Even Canada had a scandal where they froze COVID protesters assets - I don’t support the cause, but I don’t think the government should have power over dissenters assets either.
Sure, offshore accounts and physical assets can work in those cases too, but it can be challenging to get a hold of them as an ordinary citizen. Crypto circumvents that by being uncontrollable by design and widespread enough that I can exchange it in some back alley in one place and then again in another with less risk and overhead than any other way.
Ah, that all makes sense. I live in the US, so I’m looking at it from that lens.
don’t think the government should have power over dissenters assets
Agreed, but this is a thorny problem. Clearly the government has a legitimate cause to freeze some assets in some cases (obvious example: US govt freezing Osama bin Laden’s accounts). This becomes an abuse-of-power question, then. Unfortunately, we as humanity don’t have a good answer to it.
third world Russia
Technically, Russia would be second world :)
I do think cryptocurrencies fall short of the promise/hype with the exchange problem – either there’s a big bank-like clearinghouse that the government can target with freeze orders, or you’re in “You have to know a guy who knows a guy” territory when it comes time to actually use the cryptocurrency. I can’t pay my mortgage by transferring Bitcoin or Ethereum to my bank.
I used to drive for Lyft, is it not a thing anymore?
Still a thing. A lot of the other competition died out though.
Good analysis, but I’d say your not taking a vital factor into account with “AI”, it’s only going to get better, and crooks, conmen, corporations, etc are going to find new ways to weaponize it. I use LLM’s often, and for my purposes, they are truly amazing (now that Google search is fucking useless)
I wouldn’t be so sure it will get much better. It might just stagnate, barely getting any better as we reach the limits of what is possible with our current hardware.
Also it’s starting to run out of good training material, once they’re ingesting a majority of stuff that’s already AI generated it might devolve like a kid whose dad is also his uncle.
Jesus fucking Christ this is cynical.
I think it’s more absurdist than cynical, but is cynical really a problem here?
We’re running 21st-century technology on a 13th-century economic operating system. It’s bound to produce some outlandishly antisocial results.
As a developer and tech enjoyer, there are some inventions in the past 30 years that I can’t imagine living without.
But there are also some horrific economic systems and social dynamics that have taken hold in large part due to inventions of the past 30 years. Some effects that are so bad I’d gladly hit the snooze button on some of the tech to delay it until we figure out the social/economic side first.
Cynics can never see the forest for the trees.
Even a paranoid schizophrenic is right twice a day…
You keep using that word…
That doesn’t make it wrong.
It is wrong
Which part, specifically, do you think is wrong?
It just might.
It’s really bad out there. Cynicism is at levels I never imagined growing up in more optimistic times. We are surrounded by wonders and have all the opportunities to reshape our world into anything imaginable but we all collectively decided to sit inside, read how other people are miserable, and internalize that misery so we’re also miserable, even though all we’ve done is read about other people’s feelings.
Our species’s default mode is to be cynical and lazy and I hate it.
Our species’s default mode is to be cynical and lazy and I hate it.
Oh, the irony… A less cynical perspective would be that as a whole humans are pretty empathetic, and most people want to live in a world where everyone is happy.
Yeah. Other people’s cynicism is bad enough but what really gets to me is my own.
The existence of more optimistic times should be evidence that this cynicism is not the species’ default state. We’re in a bad spot and we don’t even currently have the hope of revolution.
I wish I could care enough to hate this comment
My brother in Christ, all money is fake. Even gold coins are ‘fake’ money, because all money is a social construct used to represent an abstraction of value added through labor.
all money is a social construct used to represent an abstraction of value added through labor.
That’s the definition of money. It’s not fake. It is an abstraction, but it’s not fake, and we’ve built an intricate system of laws and regulations about it.
Bitcoin is fake money. It’s not backed by any government or any real rules and regulations. It’s the same as every other “tech” company. Take an existing thing, remove all regulations, pretend it’s a new thing, and pocket the increased revenue.
government backing only defines money under Adam smiths theory, but we had money and governmentless money long before smith.
And there was a different government backing it (though not in the same sense of the word) and a different set of laws and regulations around it.
you’ve swallowed the adam smith koolaid. anarchist societies existed with money.
That’s a cute fairy tale.
if you want to deny history, i’m not going to stop you, but you should be ashamed of misleading anyone else who reads this.
I’m ashamed that anyone is dumb enough to be taken in by your obvious lies.
Money existed before there was an intricate system of laws and regulations. Money existed before there were fiat currencies, backed by nothing except a gov’t’s promises. The fact that bitcoin doesn’t have those doesn’t make it any more real, or less real, than any other thing used as currency. It has value because people believe that it has value.
Gold is much the same way. Gold has an intrinsic value for making things that conduct electricity (particularly because it doesn’t corrode), but all other values exist because it’s both relatively rare, and people have decided that it’s pretty.
Money arose at the same time as government. The two are linked.
Currency existed prior to governments; Native Americans in some areas used rare shells as a form of currency; the currency wasn’t a part of their governing process, and by any modern standards, their governments were very loose.
that’s not true.
s/added through/extracted from/
How many Bitcoins for lettuce?
if you were foolish enough to buy a Liz Truss your keeping your damn Liz Truss
At current exchange rates, about 0.000029. That’s going to vary slightly from day to day, in much the same way that the price in Euros, or Japanese Yen will vary if the price is in USD, because currency valuations fluctuate comparatively.
I remember a time the GBP was worth about $2.50 US; it’s currently more like $1.30 US. Euros used to be worth considerably more than US dollars, but it’s very near parity right now.
As I said, money is an abstraction, it’s not a real thing. European labor didn’t used to be more valuable than American labor, and now it’s worth the same. The abstraction that money is has drifted farther away from the reality that it’s supposed to reflect over time.
Everything is an abstraction. A cat is an abstraction. There’s no cat, only an animal living in your apartment that looks like other similar animals.
What makes this money fake you’d ask? Probably because you cannot buy lettuce for it. Only illegal stuff, money, other fake money and, in some places, you can buy a hotel room for a few nights. Idk, crypto looks more like a commodity than currency to me.
What makes this money fake you’d ask? Probably because you cannot buy lettuce for it.
…But you absolutely can buy lettuce with it. You just have to find someone that will accept that particular currency. Are you seriously going to argue that Canadian currency isn’t real money just because I can’t buy produce in the US at most stores using Canadian loonies or toonies? And you can use American currency very, very easily to buy illegal stuff; pretty much every in-person drug dealer in the US accepts folding cash. (They just don’t take credit cards, PayPal, Venmo, etc. because that’s easily traced.)
Edit: a physical cat is not an abstraction. A physical, individual cat is the thing itself. The abstraction is the concept of “cat”; when you think “cat” as a concept, you aren’t thinking about a specific, individual animal, but of a concept that defines ‘catness’; it probably has fur, whisker, pointy ears, a tail, etc., even though an individual cat may not have any of these things.
But you absolutely can buy lettuce with it. You just have to find someone that will accept that particular currency.
Well, I can find a nerd who would sell me some lettuce for Nintendo Switch. Does it make Nintendo Switch a currency? Nope. With Canadian dimes I guess I can go to any shop in Canada and buy it, which makes it a valid currency in Canada. What you are right about, is that almost every currency is regional.
you can use American currency very, very easily to buy illegal stuff;
Oh thanks, if they allow me to the US I’d probably make use of this information.
Edit: a physical cat is not an abstraction. A physical, individual cat is the thing itself. The abstraction is the concept of “cat”; when you think “cat” as a concept, you aren’t thinking about a specific, individual animal, but of a concept that defines ‘catness’; it probably has fur, whisker, pointy ears, a tail, etc., even though an individual cat may not have any of these things.
Fuck Kant. As you mentioned, cat is definited through catness, but catness is defined through cats, hence a cat abstracts all cats. Unless you think of all other cats, your physical cat is a cloud of atoms
how much lettuce?
