Why not just ban smartphones in school? There's ample research now that they're harmful to teen mental health

I think the best solution would be to properly tax carbon. That way Bitcoin miners would either become unprofitable or move to greener energy.

I don't think it's a good idea to establish the precedent that gov't can decide what you can and cannot do with your energy. You may think it's a waste of energy, but if the externality is properly taxed, I don't see the problem with letting it continue

Good! We need to hold these companies accountable. Around the mid 2010s they realized that it's more profitable to have addicts instead of users. Casinos, bars, and cigarette sellers are forbidden from selling to children. These addictive platforms should be subject to similar limitations

One truth about the modern media landscape: stories that pit groups against each other play well

Sounds like we need to push Signal in Afghanistan!

Yeah this article is not very convincing

Brave is great! No ads, Tor built in, and can install Chrome extensions. I don't use their crypto wallet and it's never bothered me

I think a good middle ground might be to ban smartphones but not phones entirely. If you want your kid to be able to call you, buy them a nokia or something without internet capabilities

I said "smartphones" not all phones. If I had a kid, I'd get them a flip phone so they could call or text me, but one without internet capabilities

This isn't a good situation, but I also don't like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not "valuable" uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.

Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.

There are lots of knee-jerk reactions because people saw the word "blockchain" in the title. It's as intellectually lazy as the shills who refuse to criticize the crypto industry for its shady parts

This just sounds like a decentralized Slack, with a blockchain to ensure all nodes have the same data. The details are sparse, but this sounds like a proof of authority system to achieve consensus between authorized nodes in the network. No cryptocurrency involved. It's just using blockchain as a consensus algorithm between decentralized nodes(which is what it was designed for).

It doesn't say, but since their target demo seems to be enterprises, my guess is that the idea would be companies run their own node in the network, which would allow a high degree of security and be interoperable with other enterprises.

"But you could use a federated system..."

I'm all for the growth of the fediverse, but it still has many problems. If you're running a large enterprise that needs a guarantee that all your messages are synced, in the right order, and nothing has been removed later, a proof-of-authority blockchain is a better system than something federated

My first thought is to rank items by totalVotes / score. This would prioritize posts that get lots of votes in both directions.

Example:

def getControversialScore(upvotes, downvotes):
  return (upvotes + downvotes) / abs(upvotes - downvotes)

getControversialScore(50, 10) # 1.5
getControversialScore(4, 5) # 9
getControversialScore(6, 30) # 1.44
getControversialScore(30, 28) # 29

Awesome work! Thanks for sharing!

I agree! There's a campaign pushing to avoid giving kids phones until 8th grade, but I think even that seems a bit too young

Tbf, most money nowadays doesn't physically exist nowadays. Only a tiny fraction of the "money" that is out there has a physical instantiation. Most of it is just numbers in bank servers

It seems to be a lightweight alternative to Mastodon that is easier for individuals to run on a private server

I don't think it's naive to think that there is an existential risk from AI. Yes, LLMs are not sentient and I don't think ChatGPT is Skynet, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if we could create an entity that is generally intelligent, has goals, and is orders of magnitude smarter than humans that is cannot be controlled. And that poses a risk if its interests come into conflict with ours

Global mega-corps are already a kind of AI. They're generally intelligent actors that find creative solutions to problems and work to advance their own interests, often at the expense of humanity, despite attempts to reign them in. A true AGI might be like a super-powered corporation, that can have it's big decision meetings every second instead of once a week

However, I am also concerned with global regulation of this stuff because if state actors are the only ones allowed to have AI, that could get dystopian very quickly as well so... 🤷‍♂️

I don't like it

This hasn't been my experience

Relevant Tom Scott presentation

The extreme ends of content moderation is Echo Chambers or Nazi Bars

I think the 32 ETH lockup + slashing does make it riskier to stake, but it also makes the chain more secure. As a malicious Ethereum staker, every failed attack costs me a lot of money. As a Cardano staker, I can attempt an attack many times because there I don't lost that much if it fails.

The lack of liquid staking is the only real drawback I see here, as it has allowed some centralization in the Lido token. Ethereum has yet to address that issue

I think most of the crazy lawmakers are not actually crazy. You probably need to be quite intelligent to make it through all the hoops to get elected to congress. It's an act that they know gets them attention on social media, but on issues that aren't partisan they can actually act like adults

And what about the open source models? Or the AI companies in countries that have more lax copyright laws? (Japan for example)

This technology exists now. We can't put the genie back in the bottle. Copyright came out of the printing press, which allowed cheap copies to be made. Now a new technology has emerged so we likely need a new set of rules to replace the role that copyright performed, which was incentivizing artistic creation

Not a fair comparison. Bank databases have been running since the 70s on code that has barely changed in that time. They've been battle tested for decades, so it's unlikely a new exploit is going to be easy to find.

On the other hand, if you wanted to run an election on a centralized database, think about what that means. All the votes need to go to 1 server somewhere, which will tell us all who won the election. A server that is run by an IT team who will have root access and could be phished, or bribed, or threatened. A server that only gets a real-world test once every few years.

Users have no idea if their vote is in the database, if it's correct, if it got counted in the final vote or not.

Don't get me wrong, I don't trust the current crop of DLT tech more than the pen and paper method, but at least it's more transparent than a centralized system

I wasn't aware of the tipping controversy. That's not a good look, but I don't use their crypto features (apart from IPFS every once in a while).

No tech company is squeaky clean in 2024, and Brave's baggage seems better than Chrome's.

Yeah I'm pro PoS in general, but I don't think we should forbid people from running PoW on their own computers. Seems like a step too far.

Side note, what's wrong with Ethereum's PoS in your opinion?

Someone gains access to your private key and you just... don't own your house anymore?

Under the current system you don't even have a private key. In some countries it's fairly common for someone to lose their home because someone bribed the official to change the title records.

I think that key management is blockchain's Achilles Heel, but there are some interesting potential solutions

Humanity:

I hadn't thought about this, it's a good point. Thank you for broadening my perspective

I wonder how Lemmy can avoid becoming an echo chamber

Tor is not built in

Source? I've used Tor with Brave

AFAIK if you don't trust the server and want to know exactly what code was run by it, there are only two options: a smart contract blockchain, or ZK Proofs (which came out of blockchain research)

It's a social technology. It allows outsiders to validate that the election tally code was run correctly. Elections are run every day on the Ethereum blockchain often that has financial implications for the voters. It doesn't mean they never get hacked, but it certainly gives the users more visibility and trust in their vote than a centralized black box

Awesome ideas!

I don't think running an election on a centralized database is a great idea

We agree something! :)

I think you should re-evaluate your thinking on the second part. I know it's popular to bash on blockchains here, but blockchain isn't all ponzi schemes and libertatians, just like the internet isn't all phishing emails and troll farms

The research wing of the blockchain world is very interesting, at least from a nerdy, theoretical perspective

A well financed actor would find it much easier to hack a centralized database than to hack a modern blockchain

It's possible that a donation would be sufficient. I have no data on how many users would be willing to put down a deposit and not willing to make a donation

I'm not a big fan of karma either, I definitely don't want to see it baked into the core protocol. However with this implementation, it doesn't seem to harmful as most users won't have it.

I would also love to see some experimentation with different methods of assigning karma on the fediverse. The Community Notes algorithm from twitter is very interesting as it boosts answers that have support across many groups of users. It's an attempt to encourage answers that reach across divides, instead of ones that foster echo chambers.

Let a million experimental flowers bloom!

I would think the admins would make slashing decisions

It's important that slashed funds are destroyed, not sent to anyone in particular. This ensures there is no way to profit by slashing unfairly. A malevolent admin could decide to start slashing for no reason, but they'd ruin their own server eventually as users left.

There may also be ways to curtail the admin's slashing power (ex: require 2 or of 3 admins to slash, or limited number of slashes per day) which could also be programmed into the contracts

And even in the worst case where an admin goes rogue and slashes the entire server, you're just out $10. It's not the end of the world

No it's not native. It's a JavaScript layer on top of native code that allows iOS and Android apps to share a codebase

This is not worth our time to keep arguing. I hope you have a nice day! :)

Name 5 societies in all of history, that are as diverse as the western world today and have the levels of opportunity for minorities

Obviously if the state doesn't enforce the titles they're useless. Sure if the president of a corrupt country decided he wants your house he's gonna get it. But a DLT would prevent lower level corruption that relies on the benefit of the doubt.

If a corrupt official uses their access to change the PDF title of your house to be in his name, he could take that to court to take your house from you. A ledger would prevent that change from happening, or at least leave a permanent record of the change