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cowtools

2,183 karma

ex google engineer returning to berkley ;)

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my.pages.de 3y ago

Do we have to declare blockchain currencies illegal?

cowtools
2pts0
www.lesswrong.com 3y ago

I think strong general AI is coming soon (repost)

cowtools
4pts3
madattheinternet.substack.com 3y ago

Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet (2021)

cowtools
74pts70
lukesmith.xyz 3y ago

Modern “Freedom” Means Being a Slave to Impulses

cowtools
4pts3
linusakesson.net 3y ago

The Commodordion

cowtools
519pts65
www.lesswrong.com 3y ago

I think strong general AI is coming soon

cowtools
7pts3
www.reuters.com 3y ago

Gas leaks in Russian pipelines to Europe stoke sabotage fears

cowtools
5pts0
www.bleepingcomputer.com 3y ago

Revolut hack exposes data of 50k users, fuels new phishing wave

cowtools
3pts0
cryptostackers.substack.com 3y ago

Bitcoin is not a store of value

cowtools
224pts355
web.archive.org 3y ago

Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet

cowtools
3pts0
www.youtube.com 3y ago

Will Bitcoin Lightning Network Hubs Be Regulated? [video]

cowtools
2pts0
www.youtube.com 3y ago

How the Banks Bought Bitcoin [video]

cowtools
2pts0
www.youtube.com 3y ago

Big Blocks Can Scale, but Will It Centralize Bitcoin? [video]

cowtools
1pts4
basic256.org 3y ago

Why Basic Is Still Relevant

cowtools
1pts1
www.dagoma3d.com 3y ago

Harmless Guns- French 3D printer company sabotages printable firearms

cowtools
2pts3
hello.vrchat.com 3y ago

VRchat bans mods, embraces EAC

cowtools
246pts267
rdrama.net 3y ago

RDRama's Best User Is a GPT-3 Bot: The Story of BBBB

cowtools
2pts1
secushare.org 4y ago

The Internet Is Broken

cowtools
1pts0
arstechnica.com 4y ago

iFixit and Google launch official Pixel parts store

cowtools
3pts0
en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Cow Tools

cowtools
1pts0

Why does the gov. have its nuts in a twist over a privately-owned timewasting service?

The gov. should use public forms of communication, like their own websites and mailing lists. Why endorse this privitzation of their communcation channels in the first place?

What does it matter? Just use Tor for everything read-only.

If some service requires you to create an account, just give them false information. If they ban you, just create another account. At the end of day, the legalese is irrelevant. If it was relevant, then people would read it.

It is not like the user has any bargaining power with the platform owner to spy on them less for example, or even verify that they are upholding the privacy policy. These companies do not follow their own rules in banning you or otherwise.

I agree with your first statement about hoarding by early buyers.

However, the smug "write-only database meme" is getting a bit old. Cryptocurrencies, and even other crypto-payment systems (e.g. chaumian cash) obviously have different characteristics than centralized money. Come to think of it, you could just mockingly describe any computer program that has structured data as a database.

Cryptocurrency has almost nothing to do with databases or storing data. At its core, cryptocurrency is a system of distributing signed transactions that uses hashcash as a sybil-resistance and (order) synchronisation mechanism.

Google spreadsheets need not apply. The whole point is that you don't require a single party to sign transactions. The problem that cryptocurrency deals with concerns co-operation between adversarial parties. Centralization leaves you hopping from platform to platform forever.

Euclidean rhythms 4 years ago

The problem with creating buchla recreation modules is that you can never adjust the pseudo-resistive attenuation (PRA)

One is a chaumian cash system, the other is cryptocurrency with sender-obfuscation by ring-signatures.

The technical differences are too many for me to enumerate here. They are completely different technologies that make different efficiency-privacy-decentralization tradeoffs.

Functionally, Taler (and other forms of chaumian cash) are payment systems and not currencies. It requires a bank to implement it, in this sense it is less de-centralized, but likely much more efficient as there is no need for network consensus (because it depends on a central entity's blind signatures, etc. anyway). It has different (possibly better) privacy charichteristics than monero. They are both free and open source projects.

It's rarely a good idea to make moral judgements on history or international politics

Ultimately, you are forced to make rational decisions based on history and international politics. What hegemony is more aligned with your interests?

It is blatantly obvious that the chinese governance is immoral, and that it is not even controlled by the chinese people. Say what you will about the US, the bigger picture is that one nation is a free-democracy-with-exceptions and the other is a dictatorship that murders political dissidents and harvests their organs. There is no reasonable moral judgement that can be made that considers US dominance to be comparable to Chinese dominance.

In the same sense that there is an asymmetry in the freedom of US/Chinese markets, there is an asymmetry in the freedom of US/Chinese marketplaces of ideas. Just consider the preconditions of this argument: There is simply no equivalent chinese forum where they openly discuss the misdeeds of their own nation, so the anti-American argument is globally over-represented.

it is strictly impossible to establish a one-world government through force, at least given our current technology.

If a country has the army of robots needed to make it happen, then you have two problems.

your strawman is that having a generally pro-elon disposition = thinking elon is some kind of infallible savior

The reality is that the current moderation of major forums like Twitter, HN, etc is so one-sided that it produces whatever passive-aggressive posturing that we are engaged in with this very conversation.

I am not going to make a defense of elon or his actions, but I will say that I believe there are two good outcomes:

* Elon behaves rationally and makes twitter usable for civil discussion.

* Elon behaves irrationally and destroys twitter, creating space for competitors like mastodon, etc.

If you agree with this premise, then it should be clear that most any change elon makes to twitter is beneficial in the long run, good or bad. This is why I am not so quick to criticize.

There needs to be some form of sybil resistance, perhaps allowing unlimited post size, but charging 1 cent per character. Spam needs to be expensive.

The users should be allowed to decide for themselves what they see. My perspective is that hate speech is basically an identical problem to spam. If you can solve spam, you solve hate speech and self-advertisements and whole other classes of problem.

Also, it's a social media platform. You basically dox yourself. The current service requires you to give them your phone number and encourages you to use your real name and location on your profile. It doesn't get much worse than that.

One-Time Programs 4 years ago

The solution is to use a locked-down co-processor? Whoop-de-doo. This is just a shameful re-marketing of "remote attestation"