HN user
https://fidelramos.net
Doing "almost exactly the same thing" is fubdamental to competition and capitalism. The ones doing it better will survive, that's how we improve.
About climate, I think you overplay it. China is already investing heavily in nuclear, and we should be doing the same.
I'm using firejail to sandbox Opencode, for security and to keep the agents from personal data. I documented it in my blog [1].
[1] https://blog.fidelramos.net/software/how-i-sandbox-ai-agents...
https://github.com/haplo/pelican-theme-reflex — My Pelican [1] theme. While I started it before LLMs were a thing, I was recently able to tackle all my open TODO items with AI.
https://github.com/haplo/pelican-copy-code — A Pelican [1] plugin to add a Copy button to all source code blocks. It happens at build time, so no DOM manipulation at page load time.
https://github.com/haplo/venice-kde-widget — A KDE Plasma widget to display Venice.ai [2] remaining
I'm currently writing a series of blog posts about these that I call Vibe-coding Escapades [3]. I will also write about bugs and technical problems that AI helps me debug and solve, some are non-trivial and have been pestering me for years.
[3] https://blog.fidelramos.net/software/vibe-coding-escapades
I've been eyeing the MNT Pocket Reform for a while:
I posted the link to the Spanish article by mistake, please notice that there is an English version available:
You are correct, this article is part of my self-hosted Tailscale series using Headscale, which is why I'm receiving the full benefits of moving Syncthing to it. Otherwise Tailscale would keep the same metadata that Syncthing discovery and relay servers were. I talk about that in Part 1 of the series, it's a main motivator for self-hosting Headscale.
At least DAI is holding well. It existed before LUNA and it continues to work today.
This is so cool that we can port useful stuff like this in minutes, thanks for sharing!
I packaged it for Arch Linux AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/whatcable-linux
Is that accounting for SpaceX stages being reusable? Honest question.
Make it Monero mining, it's CPU-efficient and private.
https://fidelramos.net - I'm trying to blog more in hope my children will read it some day, it's kind of autobiographical of my interests.
You are right of course, but I consider that a hardware concern, not BIOS.
Right, that's why the whitepaper is titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". The idea is to bring many of cash payments features to the digital world, which are not possible with payment systems with intermediaries: uncensorability (nobody can keep you from transferring cash); non-reversability (no chargebacks, escrow systems are optional); low fees (contentious because BTC decided not to scale on-chain, but that was Satoshi Nakamoto's idea.
That was precisely Bitcoin's goal as stated in its whitepaper [0]
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.
A decentralized blockchain has no middlemen, the trust is put in the network to be honest.
So why didn't crypto block or ban them from doing these scams using their technology?
Bitcoin code is open-source. How do you prevent someone from using open-source?
If you could pay rent and utilities and buy food using some sufficiently decentralized token, crypto may become a viable alternative.
You can do all that today, although it requires some learning and setup, but at least in the US it's totally doable.
I know of Joel Valenzuela who is an evangelist about paying everything with decentralized cryptocurrencies:
The interesting thing about cryptocurrencies is using them directly, i.e. when users have their own wallets under their full control. Then it's magical when you make a transaction to somebody and think that nobody is censoring, filtering, moderating or rejecting it in any way. Oh and no PII either.
Edit: typo.
As a GrapheneOS user I can speak of my experience: the app for my bank was working fine until 2 months ago, when after an upgrade it stopped working because of Integration API.
I will contact them to try to get them to support GrapheneOS, but I will not be holding my breath. I uninstalled it in the meantime and use my computer. If they ever require the app I would likely switch to a different bank.
I read OP as in "they just don't care about privacy [enough to change their behavior]", and in that sense I fully agree.
Same can be said about climate change. Sure they worry and complain, but when pointing out concrete measures they can take, basically nobody does.
Complaining is easy.
Some people will learn to use these AIs to make top-quality audiobooks (and books, movies, TV shows, comics...). It will be a more manual process than pressing a button, but still orders of magnitude less than what it took before. As a result there will be a tsunami or high-quality content.
There will be curation and specialization. Previously ignored niches now will be economically profitable. It will be a Renaissance of creativity, and millions of jobs will be created.
The Digikam DB is SQLite on a fast NVMe drive. The photos are on a 4 TB SSD. I have been using Digikam for maybe a decads, so the collection has been growing with me, but no issues so far.
I use Digikam on a 3 TiB collection and it works great.
Blockchain scalability while keeping decentralization is now a solved problem, you can research how sharding is implemented in cryptocurrencies such as XTZ or EGLD, or read this rationale [0] for terabyte blocks in Bitcoin Cash. Why do blockchains such as BTC or ETH refuse to scale on-chain then? That's a separate debate, but I believe there are vested interests in them not scaling.
Regarding volatility I agree that it's currently an issue, but not an insurmountable problem in my opinion:
1. Payment gateways can offer automatic asset conversion to minimize volatility risk for payment takers. This means I could pay in whichever cryptocurrency the payment gateway would take and the receiver would get whatever currency they have set up in their account. They might want to keep some currencies and convert others, so the payment gateway could offer an option to decide that, and in which amounts (e.g. "keep 10% of each BTC payment, convert the rest to USD").
2. Price volatility should reduce as a cryptocurrency is more widely used. In the alternate universe where BTC scaled to be larger than all credit card networks combined its price could be more stable than many fiat currencies.
[0] https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks...
I agree with part of what you say but not with the implication. Yes, Bitcoin Cash [0] is the Bitcoin that chose to scale on-chain. The split happened in 2017 and since then it has decreased in price both compared to BTC and USD.
What I strongly disagree with is that a Bitcoin with bigger blocks and hence larger transaction capacity is inherently less valuable. That is an unfair comparison because Bitcoin Cash, when the split happened in Aug 2017, could have been recognized as Bitcoin by the ecosystem, but it wasn't, and Bitcoin Core retained the BTC ticker. Because of that Bitcoin Cash had to start adoption from the beginning, losing Bitcoin's established network effects.
My original argument was that if Bitcoin had increased its blocksize before 2016 as Satoshi Nakamoto originally intended [1], then the Bitcoin Cash split wouldn't have happened, Bitcoin adoption would have continued growing (remember that back in the day big players like Microsoft, Dell, Steam and Newegg started accepting Bitcoin payments) and miners would progressively see more of their rewards coming from transaction fees and less from the block rewards.
This last point is one of the big problems with BTC right now: the network security will decrease in the face of dwindling block rewards unless transaction fees rise. I argue that Bitcoin was always supposed to scale in number of transactions, so the aggregate of transaction fees, even if individually inexpensive (roughly 1 cent), would become larger than the block reward. In other words: the block reward was just an economic incentive to kick-start the Bitcoin network, to attract miners that would secure it, but the transaction volume was meant to keep increasing to replace it.
[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...
You are right in the general case. But the public key is included in a transaction when it gets signed, and in this particular case the attackers already had part of the private key, that's what allowed a different attacker to combine both pieces and break the private key quickly.
The energy expense of Bitcoin is dominated by its Proof-of-Work algorithm, the cost of processing transactions is negligible compared to that. And the PoW operates over the root of the last block's Merkle tree, which is a hash of all the transactions in the block. Being a fixed-size hash it doesn't matter if the block contains 1,000, 1 million or 1 billion transactions.
Therefore Bitcoin could scale to handle millions of transactions per second with a sublinear increase in electricity spent. [0]
[0] http://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-...
Ok there is one good explanation for this case that I found in another comment here [0]: the person who found the private key made a transaction moving only part of the full reward, but in doing so exposed the full public key. A was monitoring the puzzle address for activity, picked up the public key, used it to crack the private key quickly and moved the rest of the funds.
Fascinating that the original cracker wouldn't know these details about Bitcoin transactions.
How could a bot/human steal the funds without knowing the private key?
Edit: typo
My take on this [0] is that Bitcoin price was growing exponentially with demand, or more exactly with the expected future demand. Cryptocurrency always have had a lot of speculation behind them, not unlike any startup, and that is OK.
As shown by the graph [0], adoption slowed down after 2016 when BTC blocks got consistently full and transaction fees rose to $50 and more. I believe if BTC had scaled to support more transactions the price would be much higher today, as Bitcoin would likely be used as a means of payment across the Internet and in many physical stores at well.
Discussions regarding the decentralization of larger blocks aside, something that is not clear to many people is that scaling a blockchain to handle more transactions doesn't mean a linear increase in energy use. In the case of BTC its Proof-of-Work algorithm operates over the root of the last block's Merkle tree, which is a hash of all the transactions in the block. Being a fixed-size hash it doesn't matter if the block contains 1,000, 1 million or 1 billion transactions. Arguably a more popular Bitcoin would be more valuable and therefore would attract more miners, increasing its energy consumption, but that just reinforces my original point.