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I've been experimenting with using ChatGPT for worldbuilding, including NPC dialog and stuff. I was rather satisfied with the results, that is until I saw your comment. The text it generated for you is very similar to what it gave me. The style is immediately recognizable, the structure is extremely similar, and in case of "For I am Grimgor Blackfist, the most feared warrior in the land, and no one can stand against me." I literally got the same sentence with a few words changed.

I wonder if it's possible to customize the prompt in order to make the output more unique otherwise everyone who is using ChatGPT for fantasy writing will end up with very samey and super recognizable style.

I consider obligatory 20% tipping as that weird American thing along with guns and (absence of) healthcare. People have elaborate arguments and discussions about them, and the side in favor can look very rational and plausible, and their hypotheses can even have a lot of explanatory power, but they are easily refuted by looking at basically every other developed country.

I travel a lot and eat out a lot and I haven't noticed any discernible difference in service between the countries with obligatory, optional and prohibited tipping.

Same, never got any headaches from any screens. Regardless of the type of the screen, lighting or viewing position. Have been using computers for almost 25 years, with many 10h days and occasionally 15+ hours.

As I got older I started getting neck pain though, if I sit too awkward. But still no headaches ;)

The crucial difference is that at no point I felt I was stuck. I could paste any line of code into ChatGPT and ask it to explain it. Practically every time I got a meaningful and valuable explanation, moreover the explanation was in the context of my code. Similarly all functions it generated were matching the context of my code so I could just copy and paste it and it just worked, most of the time.

Rather than going through Google and Stackoverflow it felt like working side-by-side with a moderately competent developer. Mind you, I have tried the google-and-stackoverflow method before for the exact same thing, and failed every time ;-)

I have been developing a hobby project (AI powered document search) for a few months and was in sore need of a frontend. My frontend development skills however are stuck in late 1990s and I have zero skill with anything but plain HTML and a little bit of JS. Several times I tried learning React, reading tutorials, watching videos, but the whole idea of it was very removed from how I learned to code, so I gave up every time.

Today, I asked ChatGPT to develop the React app for me. ChatGPT guided me through the entire process starting from installing npm and necessary dependencies. The commands it suggested sometimes didn't work but every time I just copy-pasted the resulting error message into ChatGPT and it offered a working solution. I gave it the example of JSON output from my API backend and it generated the search UI which, to my surprise, worked.

My wet dream for the past few months was to implement infinite scrolling for my search. Again, after hours of google searches, tutorials, etc. I just gave up every single time. Not today. I asked ChatGPT to add infinite scrolling to my app. It wasn't easy. It didn't produce a working app immediately, it took a couple hours of conversations: I had many questions how different parts of React worked, how to fix errors etc. etc. In the end however, I had my working search app, and with infinite scroll to boot!

I haven't done a single google search or consulted any external documentation to do it and I was able to progress faster than I have ever did before when learning a new thing. ChatGPT is, for all intents and purposes, magic.

Same general idea: it's not in the dating apps' best interest to get their users into successful long-term relationships and out of the dating pool.

This is blatantly untrue. Venezuelan bolivar has lost 100% of its value (within a rounding error) - current exchange rate is something like 800 trillion of old bolivars to USD. Argentine peso is doing somewhat better than bitcoin this year, only losing 40%, but you don't have to go far back for it to become much, much worse. In the entire history of bitcoin there are very few periods when you'd come out on top holding argentine pesos rather than bitcoins.

Evidence for existence of a (il)liquidity premium in the stock market is very weak. What this means is that the market has been liquid enough for a long, long time.

Consider high frequency trading. Does it really matter for capital allocation that you can sell your Google stock for a fair price in 10ms instead of 20ms? There are hundreds of PhDs working on algorithms and billions invested into infrastructure to make those 20ms into 10ms, which I'd argue is a byproduct of how exchanges work and doesn't serve humanity in any way.

It seems that this already exists: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bjw8bv/smooci-app-escort-...

I usually don't go out of my way to pay with bitcoin, but recently needed to buy a PSN prepaid card and every website I tried either declined my 2 credit cards and paypal outright or requested some ridiculous verification (record myself on camera holding a passport to my face? To buy a $10 prepaid card? No thanks)

In the end I stumbled upon a shop that accepted bitcoin and got my PSN card in the time it took to get one network confirmation.

I highly doubt it really mines bitcoin because with the current difficulty a typical modern graphics card can expect to mine less than $0.01 worth of bitcoin a week if left running 24/7 on full load.

Edit: what I meant is that EpicScale in all likelihood mines another cryptocurrency, not bitcoin. Especially that it seems to use CPU which is utterly useless for bitcoin mining (you won't even get $0.01 in a year with the latest i7!)

The answer is certificate pinning. For example, it is impossible to MITM google services if you are using Chrome because the correct public keys are hardcoded in the browser itself.

If the site certificate is not pinned, you can use a 3rd party service hosted outside the MITM proxy to compare certificate fingerprints (such as https://www.grc.com/fingerprints.htm)

Yep, it is exactly the same rhetoric, word for word as used in other NSA-praising comments on HN. Posted by a 1-year old account that had exactly 1 comment in their history until today.

CHF appreciated 40% in 15 minutes and then retraced about half of it. That's Bitcoin-comparable levels of volatility.

most coins (no reference, just surmising) are in exchanges rather than wallets owned by the end user.

Are you saying there are 7+ million BTC stored on exchanges? I disagree based on two data points: Bistamp's reserves were 180K in November 2013 and MtGox's were 850K (with 650K of them missing) at the time of its death.

Even if you add BTC-E, Chinese exchanges, Coinbase and LocalBitcoins, it most likely won't exceed 2-3 million which means the remaining 80% is owned by end users directly.

More info: https://coinfire.cf/2015/01/05/bitstamp-confirms-deposit-add...

"We are working to determine what has gone wrong. The majority of our coins are swept and placed in cold storage often so this shouldn’t be a major issue right now but we are still working to determine the breadth of the issue. This seems to be a server issue and not a compromise but our teams are still investigating."

I wonder if it is possible to implement blacklists so that each relay operator may exclude their node from serving requests for hidden services they don't approve of.

E.g. a law abiding tor relay operator in Mauritania may decide to block the infamous underground apostasy discussion forum. It still remains accessible via other routes but the Mauritanian relay is now not involved with serving the site in any way.

I'm talking about particularly large chains of transactions (like hundreds or even thousands of transactions within the same day, often with most of them included in just a few blocks).

If they actually need to pay to that many different addresses it would be far superior to make a single tx with multiple outputs.

My first theory was that someone is trying to inflate tx volume and the simplest idea they came up was scripting the Bitcoin client to make thousands of small payments in a row.

http://pastebin.com/whyuCDqi

Tab-separated columns are as follows:

- Date - Percentage of "strange" txs - Number of transactions with strange txs discarded - Length of the longest chain of strange txs

Note: coinbase transactions are ignored by the script as they are "involuntary" and do not represent economic activity.

A few weeks ago I made a script to look for transaction chains like this in the blockchain, and it turned out they have been going on every day since mid-2010. Currently they account for 20-25% of tx volume but the percentage was much higher in the past (up to 50-60% for some days in 2012). For most of 2014 it was about 15%.

I'm not sure what the sender of these transactions is doing (trying to inflate tx volume? some badly written software?strange mixing algorithm?) though even if you discard those transactions from analysis it doesn't change the overall picture much.

Also, "Osborne 486, with about 64k of RAM if memory serves me correctly. "

First, a 486 with 64K RAM is ridiculous as they typically had multiple megabytes of memory.

Second, he worked with that PC for 7 years and isn't quite confident of how much memory it had? This doesn't sound quite right either. I can clearly remember the amounts of RAM my first few PCs had, starting from 1999.

I would think the first step would be buying bitcoins with paypal

This is where your plan fails. Since it is very easy to rollback the payment with paypal, no one is going to sell you bitcoins in exchange for it, except for tiny amounts.

If you look at localbitcoins for example, there are very few sellers who accept paypal, all of them limit trades to very small amounts (mostly $100-200) and require high feedback scores and some form of KYC

Excerpt from one of the offers: "Due to previous fraudulent transactions. I can only sell you bitcoin via PayPal if you take a photo of yourself holding valid U.S. government issued ID where your face matches the photo. "

Not the parent poster, but it works the same way in Thailand. Here in Bangkok first 150 kWh are cheapest, 150-400 are more expensive and 400+ is the most expensive tier.

Very few companies want to possess bitcoins as a liquid store of value.

I don't disagree, this is a valid criticism. What I meant by moving goalposts was that the argument changed from "you can't pay with bitcoin anywhere" to "you can pay with bitcoin at Newegg but this doesn't count because their merchant immediately converts them into dollars"

Recently, I've been noticing this kind of moving goalposts from bitcoin critics a lot. From outright rejection of Bitcoin a few years ago it went to "blockchain is a great technology but not the currency" or "yes, many places accept bitcoin but they immediately sell it so it doesn't count" or "bitcoin shows great promise but it will soon be superseded by a superior cryptocurrency"

Personally I see it as a gradual acceptance of a new technology by the public.

I made multiple purchases with Bitcoin both small and large (in particular I've been buying air tickets exclusively with Bitcoin for the past year) and have never been scammed.

I blame Satoshi for choosing the unfortunate word "mining" as the name of the technical process that confirms bitcoin transactions. I feel it is responsible for a big part of the scammy reputation Bitcoin has today.

If only it was called something like "transaction security auditing" or "ledger integrity verification" so that people would take it more seriously for what it really is.

I'm reasonably sure that ethereum will be a failure because of a fundamental incompatibility between speculators (enticed by "get rich by being early adopter just like those bitcoin folks from 2010") and developers (who actually increase the value of the platform)

I have a novel idea for a decentralized application which I think might take off. There is no way in hell I will build this with Ethereum where it will disproportionally benefit "early adopters" doing nothing and sitting on their butts. (Instead I will likely fork an existing codebase such as NXT or one of the lighter altcoins)

I believe many developers interesting in building actual apps (not 10-line code snippets shown as examples on the website) feel the same.

To build on the analogy from an earlier Ethereum thread, that's like Google selling developer versions of Google Glass but because of speculators buying them in bulk, the price is $100,000 per item. As a result, no one actually develops for the platform.

The standard client and by extension most miners will reject outputs smaller than a certain value ("dust")

You are correct that the protocol itself doesn't have a minimum output size, so if you mine a block yourself you can include dust reliably.

Nothing. The way arbitrary data is stored in the blockchain is encoding it in the financial transactional data.

For example, you could use a similar method to "store" data using Paypal: use the amount of cents in each transaction to encode a byte of data (e.g. $1.17 means 0x75 etc.) and make transfers to random people until enough bytes have been transferred. That's it, your copyrighted data or CP is now forever "stored" on Paypal servers.

I don't think this accusation will hold up in any reasonable court. Taking into account the cost of storing data (20 bytes in a single output of minimum 5400 satoshi + fees) your hypothetical instructions and code to retrieve the images would be of comparable size to any images you can reasonably store.