almost

Playing Ultimate Online for the first time was incredible. A MUD with full graphics! thousands of people online at once!

But mostly just the mystery of that unknown world. Using just the printed map that came in the box I decided to walk between the town I started and another town. Such an adventure, getting chased by wild animals, meeting real people some friendly some not. And finding that the map wasn’t exactly accurate.

And later on getting together groups of people to adventure into a dungeon. Including the all important wizard who would be able to open a gate so we didn’t have to walk all the way there (after they tried and failed a few times, grumbling about how many regents it was using). The the absolute chaos as we got word from other fleeing players that there was a murderer (a player who’s name had turned red because of the number of other players they had killed) further down in the dungeon. Should we cut our losses and gate back out or were we a strong enough group to take them on?

I'm just in the process of moving to Northflank from Heroku for my Django app after trying SO MANY other PaaS services. I really like how they organise things (apps have multiple services, the build stuff makes sense) and their support so far has been amazing. One of the few where I'm confidant they're not going to work as I need without too much work from me and not cause me stress in the future.

For fucks sake you're not a repressed minority and not everything is conspiracy against you and your magic internet scam machine.

Less carbon emissions

Yeah it does take the shine off it doesn't it?

That's one freedom I'm happy to see restricted. Let the lame NFT people find some other gimmick for their 1 millionth monkey-based ugly JPEG project.

That's really cool

Reading the introduction section should be enough. It’s pretty clear that they’re talking about Amazon targeting ads based on your interactions with the Alexa and not, as the title here implies, based on just listening in to other things you say.

The paper does talk about “voice data” which I think is a bit misleading. “Voice data” to me would imply an analysis of the sounds your voice makes directly for ad targeting purposes but it’s clear enough from the context what they actually mean.

Amazon does plenty of rubish things already, no need for us to make up extra things!

I just can't think why you might have trouble convincing people to try it :p

But you yourself bought up convenience in your original comment. If your argument is a purely moral one then no need to specify how little fiddling is required to get LSP working. But I do think if your only argument is yelling at people about it being immoral to use VSCode you ain't going to get far. Why not talk about the cool things Emacs has while acknowledging the things it still has that could be improved?

VSCode is open source by the way, MIT not GPL but you can go compile it yourself (or use VSCodium).

As someone who uses Emacs for (almost) all my editing needs and has done for about 17 years I just don’t understand how you can have these beliefs. LSP-mode is great and now with things like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs getting setup and getting things reasonably configured is a lot easier. But still!

VSCode is pretty cool and is easy to use right out of the box. It does some things with ease that would be very hard with Emacs. And JetBrains looks like it does some amazing stuff.

I still end up sticking with Emacs myself, but the idea that that it’s perfect and simple and for everyone and that there’s no sensible reasons to use the other options is just insane.

I would love this as well. Finding it really hard to read with everything so wide. But the book does look good!

Boy are we going to look stupid when a non-scam crypto use comes out! Total egg on our collective faces! One of these days! I mean obviously not today, but soon, right?

Good! Nice to see they’ve done the right thing even if it was a little late. I’m sure they got a lot of pressure both from users and from their own employees.

Please do write up and/or share more sensible articles of what “web3” is and what it does. I’ve read a few and they’re always the best arguments against it. Sure it might all sound good when all you have to say is vague things about it being interesting and exciting. But as soon as you pin it down to and show what you actually mean when you use the word then things are a little different.

Credential stuffing is a thing. So it’s pretty good if a compromised website just cannot leak your password.

But as the other comment pointed out the current situation with web form login is that password is sent to server so it wouldn’t be worse than the the status quo.

It’s funny you should bring up other situations in which people in the know manipulate “less sophisticated” actors for their own benefit.

And that you think the alternative you’re arguing away from is investing in gold and silver is kind of hilarious. Precarious metal “investors” are just a different generation of poor fools.

I though Web 2.0 was all about missing vowels in names.

Freenet and Tor have existed for a while and are solutions to these problems for those that need them. You’re not interested in that though are you? No coins so no option for speculation.

Web3 as it currently stands (as I said before it’s a slippery weasel word so no don’t you’ll change it to suite) also needs all that stuff. Most “web3” apps are served via Cloudflare ffs!

People choose to do that because it’s convenient. There’s nothing in any of the nebulous ideas around “web3” that would change that.

You can use a federated social network RIGHT NOW. Or you can just make your own website TODAY. No permission needed, you get complete ownership. It’s the amazing decentralised dream that was (and is) the internet. Only thing it won’t do is potentially make you rich (at the expense of others) just for getting in (and out!) at the right time.

Web 2.0 was never a thing. It was just a vague term some people came up with so they’d have something to say in their magazine articles/blog posts. There is no Web 2.0 or in fact web2.

Web 3.0 I have a soft spot for. It was a stupid name and the ideas didn’t really work but the semantic web people had their hearts in the right place.

Ah so that’s your criteria, you should have said.

Before we mostly had to deal with people emotionally invested in a new thing, now they’re all financially invested as well. It makes for a different conversation.

It’s called survivorship bias. Most things that people called bullshit we don’t remember because they were bullshit so why would we remember.

Now “crypto” is a little different because the the promise (not always followed though on, it’s still negative sum) of money to anyone who can bring themselves to believe. Like many bubbles and ponzi-like schemes before it’s primary functionally is to promote itself, and damn that’s one of the few things it’s really good at.

Yes it’s totally normal to take a word with no real definition (or at best a definition that shifts depending on what’s needed) and have to “prove” it’s BS.

If I tell you that web4 is all about complete freedom and an end to world hunger and it’s based on cow farts is it up to you to prove that it’s BS? (It’s early days for cow farts, you can’t judge them o what they can do right now)

I’m absolutely sure that Putin and his cronies will find enough use for crypto (avoiding sanctions, carrying out criminal enterprise) that they’ll be more than happy about this minor inconvenience.

Of those three things “crypto” is ok for trading drugs, not very good for murdering people (not for lack of people trying but luckily it seems like death prediction markets and dark web assassins aren’t really a thing), and not at all useful for overthrowing dictators. It’s absolutely fantastic for dictators who want evade sanctions and continue enriching themselves.

It’s weird that this article waffles on about PCs and how the author thinks that’s a good analogy. It’s not very convincing because you could easily pick another technology pair and show it the other way (often worse is just worse).

But the thing that really seems weird is that all you need to do make it interesting is 1) define what you mean by web3 (it’s a slippery weasel word that changes meaning whenever the people using it needs it to) 2) define a few uses that are obviously better than the alternatives and justify them without hand waving (including explaining why what would appear to be fundamental show stopping flaws are not in fact that)

If you can’t do that (and no one seems to be able to) the maybe, just maybe, it is bullshit?

It’s not a big it’s a feature :/

Sure why not you can believe that if you like. Obviously there’s no reason to think it would but don’t let that stop you. What on earth has gold got to do with it though?

The absolute best argument I’ve seen so far against “web3” is this very pro-web3 and very clear article.

https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-...

Read that, and make sure you understand the basics of what Ethereum, IPFS and maybe a few more technologies from the article etc actually are, then think about if that sounds like sensible thing to do.

If you can still take it seriously afterwards then I’m impressed!