37 karma · joined March 24, 2022
I remember, not so long ago at all, it felt as though my position was more or less the only position I saw reflected by others online and offline. Practically everyone I knew who had something to say about Cryptocurrency would have the same basic points— giving power back to the people, providing an alternative to the traditional (read: banks/finance industry) methods, hedge against inflation, hedge against government overreach, etc.
Nowadays, it seems like popular opinion has really switched. Obviously, with just about anything, there’s going to be some negatives and some downsides. From day one with Cryptocurrency, for example, the most obvious use case was for criminal activity and moving value outside the prying eyes of whatever 3-letter agencies that are applicable in your jurisdictions.
I understood that counterpoint to Cryptocurrency just fine. I agreed with it, as well. Criminals do use Cryptocurrency, it’s just a fact— it’s explosion in popularity has certainly opened up and/or made more reliable and easily available many new revenue models for the seedier folks amongst us. Ransomware, for example, has greatly benefited from Cryptocurrency’s creation and gradually increased adoption into the mainstream.
Bringing me to my point, or I suppose question, rather, is the argument that Cryptocurrency uses a ton of energy and is bad for the planet. While this is also true, especially for proof of work stuff like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it feels like whenever I hear discussion of Cryptocurrency using this argument, there’s often little to no genuine conversation being made about how to improve upon it. I’m sure all of us know about other transaction verification methods that don’t eat nearly as much energy, so I’m not going to dive into that now.
To state my opinion bluntly, it feels like the whole energy / electricity usage argument of Cryptocurrency has came about rather abruptly and inorganically. I don’t remember hardly anyone talking about this issue with nearly as much (seemingly blind) passion or negative attitude in, say, 2013-2020~.
Furthermore, while yes— the energy usage of cryptocurrency is a problem, and a damn near inherent problem at that— it seems to me like it’s such a minor drawback comparatively speaking to the other evils in the world. 14 trees burn in the Amazon Rainforest every second. A kid dies in Africa from starvation or malaria every 15 seconds. Oil companies cover up their emissions and pay for favourable regulations that allow them to continue to pollute at industrial scale with little to no pushback.
I am no tinfoil hat wearing cryptobro, don’t get me wrong, but considering how little pollution cryptocurrency produces comparatively speaking to $insert_megacorp_here, and how weak of a logical counterpoint that seems to be against the inherent positives of cryptocurrency, it seems to me like this argument is one that is almost wholeheartedly emotional in nature and one where I wouldn’t be surprised if the roots of it were astroturfed by a select few who did not want to see crypto succeed.
As an analogy, certainly we all remember the marketing BP put in to the “reduce your carbon footprint; *we ALL have to do our part* to reduce global warming” slogan thing they got going. Meanwhilst, they were spitting out pollution at rates that even if every single one of us lived like Taoist monks still wouldn’t have made a dent in.
Am I the only one that thinks this way? I would love to be proven wrong if there’s any counterpoints to my perspective that I could be made aware of.
/rant
My coworkers find it endlessly amusing to tease me for listening to bass music, or as they call it “trash compactors having sex” while writing code. I admit that it’s odd, specifically the intensity of the music I’ll listen to while writing stuff as mundane as a login panel, but it works very well in regards to keeping me focused and on task.
To this day, though, any music with any lyrics at all is a no-go. I can’t tune out the words, at all. Luckily, EDM seldom has lyrics to speak of in the first place, so I that problem is solved quite cleanly for me. It is quaint, however, when I take my headphones off at the office to greet someone walking in / say hello and I realize how bizarre the sounds coming from my headphones are in the context of my brightly lit office.
I hope that I give off a vibe closer to Christian Bale as Michael Burry from The Big Short, but I doubt it.
I am not aware of any singular FOSS project in creative work that performs similarly to Topaz Labs’ product for all input videos (note to reader: if I am wrong, correct me— I only have second-hand anecdotes to go off of from my friends who work with this kind of work in their careers, and precious little first-hand experience from upscaling old family memories to experiment with the software). As far as I am aware, this is because different upscaling models are trained on, and thus effective / mainly used for a specific type of content. The same upscaling model that was trained on interpolated 480p videos with compression artifacts will not produce the same results as one trained on, say, anime videos/manga, e.g. the models used by Waifu2X [1]. Hence, with Topaz Labs’ application, you select the model that was trained on footage that best matches the footage you wish to upscale.
All that being said, I do know that some (if not all) of the upscaling models Topaz uses are FOSS. Much of their application is just syntactical sugar upon the models it uses, making it easier for non-SWEs to use. I’m not sure whether or not the models that Topaz distributes have any level of training done by them, in house— logically, I would assume as such, otherwise their product wouldn’t be as performant as it is.