jonstaab

They still do, and should. Your personal health is none of the government's business. The whole process for how we got where we are with mandatory seatbelt laws is insane.

This could have gone very differently. Once again, ancient Hebrew law comes through:

"If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death... But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible. If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned and its owner also is to be put to death"

This is pretty directly applicable. Cars are dangerous. If car makers fail to improve their safety, they're liable to being sued by consumers. Seatbelts fit the bill, as do airbags. In a free market, it's in the interest of the manufacturers to take care of their customers. Customers can be as dumb as they want.

I guess my question though, is why didn't it work out this way?

I wasn't aware of that, I'd love a link to learn more about it. But anyway, the architecture supports a totally decentralized network; Manyverse supports p2p gossip, I think across a LAN, and maybe bluetooth as well?

Reading the Urbit documentation now, it's melting my face.

The problem here is how SSB is used in practice; most content is not passed p2p, but through a single hub. This isn't part of the design, it just happens to be how they're bootstrapping right now. But it does mean that number of hops is not a good proxy for actual social closeness.

Yes, I think the current central hub has around 30GB or more of data. In my mind, this is the key limitation of Scuttlebutt, and I'm not sure it's fixable. Scuttlebutt is still worth learning from though.

I think "offline" is sort of a smell test for decentralized. The problem isn't cell coverage, it's resilience. Centralized networks can implement censorship, get hacked, lose your data, become unavailable, and have to be accessed in a particular way. With scuttlebutt, you none of those particular limitations exist, at least in the same way.

Last I checked (almost a year ago fwiw) you had blocks, mutes, and the ability to specify for your node how much you gossip in terms of how many hops you are away from the source.

What I'm interested in is something like the ability to subscribe to a trusted source's moderation in order to inherit their blocks and mutes, or at least to penalize certain content that is less likely to be trusted or interesting.

Maybe I'm getting some semantic distinction wrong. Each user's thread is essentially a cryptographically linked list. It differs from Bitcoin for example in that there's no change of ownership, and so no forking or input/output transactions, it's just a linear list of events. There are no gas fees or tokens, since there's no need to pay for anything, each peer voluntarily gossips information.

The description you cited is also probably more for marketing purposes than technical explication. No one wants to use a social media platform built on ETH, the experience is just horrible.

Scuttlebutt (the underlying protocol of Manyverse) is the best decentralized social network I've found so far. It takes a much more radical approach than that of federation ala Mastadon, which is just centralization in miniature.

Under the hood, scuttlebutt uses multiple independent blockchains, each tied to a single user. The upside of this is that it makes for a great eventually consistent gossip protocol; the downside is that the entire chain needs to be propagated for any of it to make sense, making it a very storage-intensive protocol.

Private messaging is implemented in a really interesting way using cryptographic envelopes that are publicly gossiped, but only decryptable by the recipient — whose address is also encrypted and therefore hidden.

Personally, I'm looking forward to when they introduce a good decentralized solution for moderation. This would help keep the size of the chain smaller, and make the information you see more usable.

The Scuttlebutt Protocol Guide [0] is a really easy and interesting read, I highly recommend it.

[0] https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/

Edit: clarified what Scuttlebutt is.

I probably won't do a good job, as I'm still wrapping my head around it, but here goes:

The first thing to note is that there is no "big conspiracy". There are conspiracies, but the driving force is that global economy gives rise to certain conditions related to modern monetary theory and currency manipulation that lead to an inevitable market correction. You can see this in the 8ish year short-term cycle, but there is a longer-term cycle known as the Kondratiev wave too. [0][1]

The global elite (known affectionately as "they") is anyone whose incentives are aligned with the current monetary system, and who has the power to reinforce or undermine it. This includes politicians, international bankers, humanitarians, etc. There is no overarching "cabal", but there may be one or more "cartels" fitted to a particular area of human interest. Most of these people probably only implicitly operate in their role as "they". These networks are no more than something like the UN or the WEF, and are often much less formal than that.

The key here for me is that this theory doesn't posit malevolence, but a shared vision for humanity focused on safety, security, stewardship, and prosperity. All good things right? This is just bog-standard progressivism.

But "they" know about the long term debt cycle. They know that we face real crises that will result in mass death and war if not managed, because we've deferred paying down the cost of our economy for so long (think of renewable vs industrial agriculture as a metaphor, erosion is making it harder and harder to get the land to yield crops). The best global policy is to get ahead of this correction by building structures of control and a narrative of self-sacrifice for the greater good in order to make scarce resources stretch. A great way to do this is to appeal to real global problems (climate change, pandemics, cyber attacks, fertility crisis) to influence people's behavior. LaserHodl calls these "Malthusian fear spells", because they will not automatically come true if we actually tackle the problems head-on.

The reasoning in the above article is a great example of this: don't tell people natural immunity works, because the most efficient solution to our public health crisis is universal vaccination, trade-offs against individual liberty, or even individual health, be damned. The intentions may be good; the side effects are going to contribute to the severity of the coming correction. But a submissive population will also be easier to manage in a crisis. Again, none of this may be explicit in the minds of any of "they", it's just a matter of historical perspective, power, and incentives.

Where the rubber meets the road is that LaserHodl claims the short-term debt cycle is set to coincide with the Kondratiev wave in the next decade. Additionally, 2030 is the date that Bitcoin is projected to hit $1MM or so [2], and is the deadline for the WEF's Agenda for Sustainable Development [3].

His (and my) hope is that Bitcoin adoption will drive a grassroots culture of low time preference [4], returning us to a healthy relationship with traditional values. This will in turn solve many of the the real world problems that face us instead of deferring them to future generations. Further, a culture of "opt-out at every level" will serve to undermine the efforts of those who attempt to further centralize government and consolidate power.

It's important to point out that Bitcoin is not a "weapon" against the global elite any more than a lock on your front door is. It's a defensive tool for building individual wealth and agency, which are the cornerstones of any civilization.

[0] https://investing-abc.com/debt-cycles/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

[2] https://www.bitcoinprice.com/predictions/

[3] https://www.weforum.org/projects/frontier-2030

[4] https://breedlove22.medium.com/money-bitcoin-and-time-part-1...

Did I not hedge enough? Two years ago I was a happy, contented liberal raising a family and working at my job. I still am, but I believe some quite different things about what is happening in the world, which old me would have dismissed out of hand.

The crux of his argument, and its downfall, at least in the short term is:

> All to say: discussions about controlling or stopping AI research should be deontological—an actual moral theory or stance is needed

I don't see this happening in the near future, at least in the West. We're in the middle of total epistemological meltdown, and only capable of reasoning from utility, or some insane framework like critical theory. If we get to Strong AI in our lifetimes, we're just going to spawn a bunch of reductive, racist robots.

Nope, they explicitly note that the GPL showed up 700k times in the training data: https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410067860299255810

Both things are well understood by the bitcoin community, at least. Bitcoin's utility doesn't depend solely on inflation or replacing the dollar as the global reserve currency, though that's a popular topic, since the collapse of the dollar would prove Bitcoin's place. For the second point, HODLing seems like it's forever, but it's only for the next decade or two; the expected growth comes from getting in early - just like if you bought an Warhol painting while he was still active.

So I agree, but the author of the article is using these arguments to strawman the crypto community, which is full of really smart people as well as idiots.

What is your setup like? I was just messing around with it just now using homebrew's gnu-apl package, and it just seems like a toy language, for example scripting mode is sort of bolted on top of interactive mode, since you have to add an ")OFF" command at the end of your script. How do you handle modules?

Autosuggestions would simply read "who's to say?"

It would be a fork bomb, each process of which would kill a random pid in an effort to "subvert structures of systemic hegemony".

It would just display its own source code, but as it wished it was, and the result would not execute.

I just went through the same 2012 Air -> 2020 Air process last week. I gave in after spending two weeks trying to get Ubuntu working on a Dell XPS 13 with bluetooth, my dock, wifi, a retina display, USB, etc, etc. I gave up when connecting my bluetooth speaker sent my kernel into a loop and sent the computer back to Dell.

There are a million dumb things to quibble over with MacOS, but at least it's not Ubuntu.

In the graph you can see a 3% drop in the last year or two alone. And the fallout from covid probably hasn't reached membership rolls yet. Culture shift aside, we will likely see a big drop this year as well, since faith needs to be cultivated, and relies heavily on community.

I'm personally holding out for a resurgence, as people see how morally bankrupt our culture has become (e.g., the Emmys viewership dropped almost 50% this year), and how uninterested our elite are in doing anything substantial for the econimic underclass, aside from manipulate them for their own political ends.

I'd love to join the discord and contribute my two cents, looks like the invite is expired though. Also, I hadn't seen Mint, that also looks like an awesome project.

Very cool project! I love stuff like this. I actually started a very similar fun project last week[0]. It's very much just a thought experiment, but the most interesting thing about it (I think) is the use of dynamic rather than lexical scope to control state. It's also designed to be extensible using python, js, and html.

I did take a quick look at the Wasp real-world app and was sort of disappointed. It seemed like a single file with lots of weird syntax that pulls in a regular old React app. Is there something I'm missing?

[0] https://github.com/staab/quack

I could see it taking that long if she was using a full movie database with millions of rows in it.

Thanks, corrected

> On my laptop, PostgreSQL takes about a minute to get denormalized data for 12,000 episodes, while retrieval of the equivalent document by ID in MongoDB takes a fraction of a second.

What? Her database can't possibly be indexed properly.

Maybe this would work for simple websites. But for web apps, it's a hard pass for me. For context, I write a web-based POS application, and waiting for a network request on every micro interaction is a no-go.

There are lots of other problems with this approach that could be solved, but aren't immediately obvious, such as (similar to React) over-rendering. If someone has their focus in an input within the frame that gets swapped out, they're going to lose their focus. This has implications for accessibility as well as just regular usability.

Well, over the same time period, but gold has been mined for thousands of years, and for a long time much less efficiently. And bitcoin mining will decelerate as halving occurs, until the last coin is mined in a bit over 100 years' time.

I used to worry about this question too. But how much energy has mining gold cost? Was it worth it? Will bitcoin have a similar impact? I imagine the answer is more, yes, and yes.

I built a PWA for disc golf speedruns: https://www.anhyzer.io/

I'm really quite pleased with it and I use it often, but there's only one course listed (the one I play on), and there's no feature for letting users contribute data for courses. Also, I use a database with public access, so if you know what you're doing you can hack the scoreboard.

If you're interested or want to add a course I'd accept PRs: https://github.com/staab/disc-golf

My question for all you smart data-oriented people is: why are we not considering the pandemic all but over? Particularly since the only study on asymptomatic cases has failed to prove transmissibility [0]? I know the results are "not generalizable" because of variable viral load, but you'd think we'd have better science available before implementing such draconian measures.

Related to the posted link: https://twitter.com/MichaelYeadon3

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201130131511.h...

I don't know anything, but I've read that ADE can take 1-3 years to surface.

The analysis was riveting as always. I'm not sure his position that Biden is a true moderate holds up though. Biden acts like a moderate, but Harris is the most radically left Senator we currently have [0], and kowtow's to BLM's view of the world, which is one of the more factionalist elements in our culture right now. I still don't understand why Biden chose her as a running mate unless his goal is to smuggle extreme leftism into power.

Not to say Trump isn't hard to defend, but at least he's not threatening to undo all the republican aspects of our government that give us stability like the left is (abolish the electoral college, pack the court, get rid of the filibuster, abolish the senate).

I wish we could all get along and row together on policies that make sense. But Bret is right about stasis reinforcing itself to the point of breaking up families. It's bizarre that it would, but I can feel it; everything has to be a conflict, and our opinions on that conflict itself are polarizing, even though that's not our goal.

[0] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/kamala_harris/41267...