I kindof hate the slogan “they go low, we go high” (from Hillary’s campaign.)

But this is an example of the “good” side of that slogan. The political left(-of-what-passes-for-center-in-the-U.S.-now-a-days) isn’t given to publicly calling for assassinations of the opposition party. It’s not even given (and, yes, there are exceptions) to calling privately for assassinations of the opposition. And that’s a good thing.

It means the left(-of-U.S.-center) hasn’t turned into the fascist-dictatorship-trying-to-happen that the right has. It’s not the left(-of-U.S.-center) calling for civil war and pandering to creeps who chant “blood and soil” while carrying tiki torches around the capital.

The day left(-of-U.S.-center) news sources delight in assassinations even of opposition as dangerously unhinged and power hungry as Trump because that sentiment started with snide remarks like yours is the day we have to worry that maybe the Democrats are sliding into their own brand of fascism.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m for radical support of LGBT rights, womens’ autonomy in matters of personal health, universal free healthcare, and most other “liberal” causes. (I also identify as well left and libertarian-ward of the Democratic party and would love to see “to each according to need” be our modus operandi. I’m also for direct action.) I don’t fault the Democrats for being “too radical” by a long shot. (More likely, the Democrats will continue to be far too willing to let the Republicans control the narrative and cheat their way to political power. And that’s the bad side of “they go low, we go high”) And I don’t believe it’s very likely that the Democrats will slide into widespread advocacy for political violence like the Republicans have much more so already.

But taking delight in assassination attempts and wishing they’d been successful – even those directed at Cheeto-flavored Hitler himself – isn’t helpful.

All that said, I get it. I’m pissed at the U.S.'s descent toward fascism, too. But wishing him assassinated isn’t going to change anything for the better.

In this thread: Cryptobros downvoting every realistic take on cryptocurrency for being “bearish” and “FUD”.

The other three quarters are just scared that Elom will sue them if they cut advertising.

(Not really. I suspect many of the other 75% just aren’t willing to admit they’re planning to loosen ties with Twitter (I will not call it “X”) just yet.)

Sweet! Now let’s all go commence scowling at Redis until they do the same.

I’m just speaking from their history. Like when they embraced Java, built their own JVM, shipped it with Windows, and then forked the Java language by adding Windows-specific APIs to Microsoft Java and not adding the Java 1.2 features to Microsoft Java. You can’t convince me their aim all along wasn’t specifically to kill Java, and cross-platform technologies like it. The whole “Windows tax” thing is another good example. And “Open Core.”

And, who knows. Maybe they’re either nicer now or less competent at that kind of evil. But if so, that’s a relatively new thing. Their history as a company is full of (not-so-)“secretly planning to control the world”. And they have never really faced any consequences for their anti-trust violations. And if they didn’t want people to hold grudges, maybe they should have thought of that before fucking everyone over as thoroughly as they possibly could.

I guess you could say Microsoft was perfecting the art of enshittification before it became such a pervasive thing. Plus, I largely blame Gates personally for the rise of the institution of proprietary software, which is also complete BS.

Mind you, I don’t blame you for working for Microsoft or anything. No ethical consumption (or employment) under capitalism and all that. And it’s not like I’m not doing evil things on a regular basis as an employee where I work.

Microsoft gives the Wine team infectious mononucleosis. Got it.

But seriously, Microsoft is nobody’s friend and shouldn’t be trusted.

Yeah, if I had just fucked over the world to the tune of $1 billion, I’d probably be deflecting attention to threats other than me too.

Edit: Typo.

Thank you for being honest about being pro-tax-evasion and pro-money-laundering.

One bank issues unbacked tokens

1. The Taler protocol has bank auditors built-in.
2. Your hypothetical would just as much apply to existing debit cards.
3. Unbacked tokens. You mean like Tether? (Let alone Terra.)

Also, it promotes taxation which automatically makes it a cult & scam?

The fuck? How does Taler “promote taxation?”

Fuckin’ Libertarians.

How I understand it is:

• You go to your bank (or use a webapp or whatever) who knows who you are and get them to initiate a withdrawl from your bank account to your Taler wallet in the amount of, say $100.
• The balance in your Taler wallet goes up by $100. The bank also decrements your bank account by $100 and puts that $100 in an escrow holding intending to pay it to whatever recipient(s) can provide cryptographic proof that you gave them Taler.
• You go to a merchant and pay out of that $100 Taler balance $9 for a cheeseburger and fries.
• The merchant receives $9 in Taler from you and checks with your bank that that $9 hasn’t already been spent previously before concluding the payment process and giving you your receipt and burger.
• You now have a burger and fries and your Taler balance is $91.
• But the merchant doesn’t learn anything about your identity in the process. But they do have proof that your bank has $9 in escrow earmarked for them (the merchant) specifically.
• And your bank doesn’t know which of their customers to which they’ve ever given Taler is the one buying from the merchant in question. They just know that of the total sum of Taler they’ve issued that hasn’t been collected yet, $9 is earmarked for such-and-such merchant/burger joint.
• The merchant can settle up any time, but theoretically the bank can charge per-transaction fees. In order to minimize fees, it behooves the merchant to batch up settlements. The merchant can claim actual USD for every dollar that was used at that establishment by customers via Taler over, say, the last week or whatever in one big settlement batched transaction.

I’m leaving out some details, but that should give you a decent idea of how things work with Taler.

Now, as for this bit:

if Taler can change hands during said “link”.

That, I’m not sure of. It might be that you can transfer Taler from your wallet to someone else’s wallet (that they could then spend) without any identities being revealed, though they wouldn’t be able to get real USD or whatever without working with your bank which would generally insist on confirming their identity. But I’d think in order for the recipient in that situation to know that they actually had real Taler and not Taler that you had already spent and that wouldn’t actually work if they tried to spend it or cash it in, they’d have to make basically an API call to your bank, though unless the bank blocked all traffic from every VPN and traffic anonymizer (like Tor or I2p) in existence, I see no reason why it couldn’t be done in a way that preserved the recipient’s anonymity.

So yeah. Not sure. But even if that bit isn’t a thing, I still want Taler to take off.

I’m not an expert on it, but I’ve done a certain amount of study on it.

I’m pretty sure there are no privacy guarantees for money receivers. Merchants/sellers would still be identifiable by banks and governments and such. So Taler isn’t what anyone selling heroin or doing murder for hire would want to be using as an accepted payment method. (At least not any more so than credit/debit card transactions will help the seller with keeping their doings secret.)

But Taler can keep the buyers’ identity secret. Unless you’re doing things in ways that reveal information about yourself, your bank and your government wouldn’t know you were buying fursuits even if they knew the merchant was selling fursuits.

So all that to say that no, the merchant couldn’t cash out anonymously.

I don’t know how I could possibly have been more explicit about it not yet being ready for any real-world use cases than I was.

If you want the name of a payment techology that isn’t snake oil, isn’t blockchain-based, isn’t a cult, doesn’t claim to be a currency, doesn’t work on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, but actually does provide certain privacy guarantees for your basic purchasing needs, is cryptographically secure, and can be used with only FOSS, I recommend looking into GNU Taler.

The only downside is that it’s not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.

Cryptocurrency is speedrunning ruining everything. We might as well have a laugh at the cryptobros’ expense in the meantime.

Generative AI is cringe now. You must not have gotten the memo.

How exactly are software updates supposed to extend the life of a mouse?

I get that theoretically with a subscription, they could offer to replace your mouse if the hardware broke. (Sortof like an extended warranty that you reup every month or year or whatever. Not that that isn’t a scam, but I can at least see how it could maybe look good on paper to certain people.) But that has nothing to do with software.

If the software breaks due to a software problem (and, be honest, how many people in the history of the world have ever had a mouse break due to a software problem?), I’d think it would be unlikely you could get an update to the mouse. And if the hardware breaks, the chance that it can be fixed (or even worked around) with a software update seems negligible.

Are they thinking with software updates they’ll make it continue to support newer wireless communication protocols that don’t exist yet or some BS like that? Not that that makes sense either.

Am I missing something or is the BS in this idea more evident than in most?

So one potentially viable way to destroy AI would be to repeatedly train LLMs and image generators on their own (or rather previous generations’) output to get garbage/junk/bad training data and then publish the text/images in places where bots trawling for training data are likely to find them.

Probably bonus points if the images still look “sensical” to the human eye, so that humans eyeballing the data don’t realize it’s the digital equivalent of a sabot. (Apparently the story about sabots being thrown into machinery is not true, but you know what I mean.)

I do wonder how frequent it is that an individual developer will raise an important issue and be told by management it’s not an issue.

I know of at least one time when that’s happened to me. And other times where it’s just common knowledge that the central bureaucracy is so viscous that there’s no chance of getting such-and-such important thing addressed within the next 15 years is unlikely. And so no one even bothers to raise the issue.

Well, yeah. It’s OpenSea. That’s like saying “76% of videos on Pornhub are porn.”

AI has already peaked. It’s all downhill from here.