poundofshrimp

I think you got "gold" and "currency" mixed up. Gold is not supposed to be cheap/free to exchange. It is a property of a currency.

It’s intense but not hilarious

I suppose it wasn’t obvious in 1996, even to someone like Bill Gates, that mobile telecommunications and the “pocket PC” would become intertwined and the former would drive the adoption of the later.

As someone who was in the past a salesperson, I don't see how data-hungry digital advertisement is fundamentally different from old and tried sales methods. Salespeople would kill to know as much as possible about their prospects including their personal life, so that they can appeal to basic human emotions. I mean, this is literally how sales are made. The difference is that in online ads this part of the process is automated with algorithms, which apparently rubs some people the wrong way.

If you are repulsed by sales as an activity, I can see how you'd arrive at the "manipulation" point of view. However, I would much prefer this type of "manipulation" to being hard sold in a car dealership, for example, or having to endure cold calls from strangers. Undesired synchronous sales interactions are much more emotionally draining than seeing computer-generated ads online, IMHO.

To folks that are complaining of being manipulated, I always felt that if you can be coerced into impulse-buying something voluntarily, and then regretting the purchase, there is probably not anyone to blame but yourself. Putting aside the existence of ads for a minute (I hate ads too), why do you feel that voluntarily purchasing something based on an ad is “manipulation”? If you resent such purchase afterwards, seems to imply you made a bad decision (rather than anyone manipulated you).

EDIT: care to elaborate the downvotes?

This is clearly a chicken and an egg problem. You can’t have stability until crypto is used in the mainstream and has a much greater mass overall, so that short-term speculations don’t result in massive volatility.

I think ppl who dismiss crypto as having no social benefit don’t really get the decentralization benefit w.r.t. trust. Crypto is objectively inefficient and full of scam right now, but the fact that you can exchange value over the Internet, don’t have to trust any third-party and it’s really difficult for anyone to censor the exchange, is huge. If the inefficiencies are solved, then I don’t see how it is possible for fiat to keep up.

This doesn’t seem fair. Sure, Shell is the largest emitter, but what about other emitters? We need a carbon tax that would distribute the responsibility evenly.

> That... what autopilot does.

Actually not true. From their website [0]:

“Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.”

[0] https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot

Using a good library is not enough. For a simple example, try setting “height: 100vh;” on the body, and then open the page on an iPhone. You may be surprised that the height of the body does not fit into the screen and a scroll appears (I was, when I learnt about it). Similarly, there are many small differences that exist between Desktop <> Mobile or Chrome <> Safari. Sometimes the differences are significant enough to make your page appear completely broken.

> releasing worldwide pandemics from laboratories...

Just curious, do you have some links to back this up? Seems like a far fetched hypothesis to me.

Not anonymous if you give your PII to create accounts on the web.

The GH issue is interesting. Suppose each user belongs to two flocks, and each website gets randomly shown one of the two. Will this solve the problem? I’d imagine the number of possibilities after a certain while will make it impossible that cohort histories collected by two different websites will match for the same user.

Taxing unrealized gains doesn’t make any sense. Many people would end up forced to sell part of their equity to afford paying tax on the gains.

Mind to elaborate what kind of loopholes you’re talking about?

From my understanding, if someone were to do this IRL, and the autopilot disengaged in the middle of the ride, then the occupants are fucked because there is no way to force the autopilot to engage. I wonder if this has caused crashes already.

How are hierarchy of power and phycological safety related? Obviously, speaking up != your opinion is always upheld. The point made is that a culture that encourages speaking up makes for a better functioning team. It doesn’t change the reality of employer-employee relationship or the power balance.

Increased power increases security of the Bitcoin network because it makes a potential 51% attack more expensive.

If you mean the hashing will stop - it won’t, because that’s how the system is secured. The creation of new bitcoins is irrelevant as far as energy use goes.

It is. The source must have reported the convo.

I’m curious to see if existing regulation in this regard has been effective. I know there is HIPAA, but does it actually reduce data leaks in the Health Care field?

Bitcoin would be clearly a better choice. Yes, you don’t need a subpoena to view the ledger, but the ledger doesn’t necessarily provide a way to identify you.

The “battery” in the article is misleading. I wouldn’t call bitcoin a battery any more so than I would call aluminum a battery.

The point the article appears to make is that bitcoin mining is much more elastic in its energy use and is therefore uniquely fit to fill some niche energy markets.

That’s completely different from and quite a far cry from being a “battery”.

If more energy is spent on bitcoin, it is usually because the value of the miner reward grows and attracts more mining. Miner reward value grows due to either 1) the market value of the coin itself grows or 2) the miner fees grow. Both are market forces and ultimately depend on demand for bitcoin transactions. So I don’t see a contradiction here.

If they approached me, I would have been a happy 16th participant.

> A total of 15 men (mean age, 32) participated in the research

A sample size of 15. Seriously?

For most topics, English Wikipedia is more accurate than any other article you are likely to find on Google without looking too hard.

Same with memes found in books. The host being alive has not been a requirement...ever?

I wonder how much that cost?

Lambda all the things!