dhork
@dhork@lemmy.world
- Comment on It hurts. 1 hour ago:
See my edit, it’s Jacksonville Beach FL
- Comment on It hurts. 2 hours ago:
Where is this?
- Comment on Is cryptocurrency good for anything? 2 days ago:
Bitcoin burns so much energy because it’s developers are stubborn. It’s really that simple. Ethereum transitioned to a different algorithm that uses a fraction of that energy and only a few dorks care.
- Comment on Is cryptocurrency good for anything? 2 days ago:
He managed to keep it up until all of a sudden he couldn’t. Madoff was undone when he had to produce 440 million that he didn’t have.
Meanwhile, Tether was able to meet billions on withdrawals, several times. After Terra collapsed, I seem to recall they saw $15B in redemptions, but I can’t find any reputable links on that. If Tether was a scam, shouldn’t it have failed a long time ago?
People outside of crypto don’t realize how massive Tether is, and how much money it has under management. As much as the crypto bros dislike Ce tral Banks, Tether has turned into one. If Tether were to ever implode, it would take most Crypto businesses with it.
- Comment on Is cryptocurrency good for anything? 3 days ago:
Tether is an interesting experiment here. They are traded as smart contract tokens on top of various blockchains. They don’t really have any intrinsic value, other than Tether LTD saying “every Tether is 100% backed by currency reserves”, and releasing unsatisfactory “audits” now and then. It’s main utility is that it provides foreign exchanges with a way to trade in something that is like Dollars without opening them up to the regulation that comes with trading actual dollars. It’s market cap is currently in excess of $180 B.
But, USDT has been around, in one form or another, since 2015. And while other “innovative” crypto products have crashed and burned, Tether has been able to keep its peg and has never failed to meet redemptions. Furthermore, it doesn’t need to be a scam. It’s whole point is to always be worth one currency unit, so all they have to do is invest that currency in safe conventional investments and they can literally make billions of dollars with very little overhead. The most obvious answer is that they are not a scam.
I still don’t really trust them, but I have used them on exchanges, always making sure to trade through Tether to something I can redeem on a US exchange for actual dollars. But, I have to acknowledge they have lasted longer the most crypto entities. I wish they would get a complete audit together, but at some point their reputation for having lasted so long needs to be worth something?
- Comment on Is cryptocurrency good for anything? 3 days ago:
You’re not wrong, but why is not having the backing of a government a bad thing?
- Comment on Is cryptocurrency good for anything? 3 days ago:
I found crypto earlier than some. (not everyone – if I had more I wouldnt have to work anymore, haha!)
IMHO, the main value proposition of crypto is permissionless peer-to-peer payments. If we both have crypto wallets, and you send me an address to make a payment to, I can send that without needing anyone’s approval first. I don’t need any bank to agree to have me as a customer first, or any government to approve why the transaction is taking place. All I need is a functioning payment network, and the original Bitcoin white paper solved how to provide that and preserve anonymity. (Really Pseudo-anonymity, but only the nerds care about the difference)
As an academic experiment regarding permissionless payments, it is a resounding success. But, it turns out, Governments have laws regarding who can pay who regardless of the medium. So, just because Bitcoin enables permissionless payments doesn’t mean you done need to ask permission.
Furthermore, the rapid increase in crypto prices really doomed any chance at all for useful adoption. Because people don’t want to spend crypto anymore. They view it as a Store of Value, and who can blame them, given how it has risen from nothing to a > $2T market cap, even after the recent downturn? You used to be able to use crypto in regular transactions, but not anymore.
- Comment on Has the scientific community ever reconciled with the fact global warming is going to happen and there is no stopping it? 1 week ago:
“Scientific Community” is kind of a broad term. It is composed of a lot of smarty-pants types who are unlikely to take “no” for an answer, and will keep trying to fix the problem.
In the end, you may be right, and there’s no way to stop the runaway train, and all these folks will accomplish is getting our hopes raised while they earn their PhD’s and present papers in worldwide conferences they all burned jet fuel to get to.
But, what if you turn out to be wrong, and one of those poindexters actually figures out how to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere in an economical fashion, and they manage to stop the train? That person will be instantly famous, and the Nobel Prize might be the least of their accolades. They will be remembered as one of humanity’s greatest minds. If they happen to be British, they will be buried next to Newton and Darwin, that’s how important it will be.
So, they will keep trying, because it’s as close as you can get in this life to immortality.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
My #1 tip for stopping media addiction is to turn off notifications. There is simply nothing going on that requires your immediate attention. It can wait until you have time to check. Try it!
- Comment on After killing Ali Khamenei why doesn’t the US attack Mojtaba Khamenei? 2 weeks ago:
It’s possible either the US or Israel had some extremely timely intelligence on the location of the old leader, and the new one is just being more careful…
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Communism
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
I’m no radiologist, but yeah. That makes the most sense. And I bet the doctors would have presented it in a positive way for your mother at the time, to prevent her from feeling any sort of guilt in regards to not knowing she was pregnant, and how it might have affected your twin.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
It could also be plausible that your twin was not viable, and did not develop in utero. So when she says they found your twin in the ultrasound, perhaps what they saw was whatever remained after the earlier absorption.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Makes much more sense if this all happened at 7 weeks vs. 7 months…
- Comment on Is it rude to go through the car wash with a bunch of snow on your car? 5 weeks ago:
Oh, well it definitely is, at least in the US. They’re not getting paid below minimum like waiters are, but tipping is still customary. Normally it’s only the ones with the towels on the other end getting tipped, though. I always assumed that they all split the tips equally, but I guess I don’t know.
If I were taking a car there knowing it needed extra work on the front end, I definitely would bring tips for both ends.
- Comment on Is it rude to go through the car wash with a bunch of snow on your car? 5 weeks ago:
It’s definitely a bit lazy. But everyone is allowed to be lazy sometimes. Or maybe you’re short, I guess, and legitimately can’t get to the top of your car.
The real question is: how well did you tip? People in these types of service jobs have an easier time doing that sort of thing if they get something extra out of it.
- Comment on What's going on with Olympic skiers and penises? 1 month ago:
Did you read the articles attached to the headlines?
They found that ski jumpers can get a measurable advantage is thier suits are loose fitting, because it increases drag. As a results, their suits are carefully regulated and they are made based on a full body 3D scan.
It’s been speculated that some ski jumpers may have been taking injections meant to increase the size of their flaccid penis before that scan, so that it will be included in the scan, and then if they are back to normal size before the competition, it has the effect of their suit fitting more loosely and increasing drag.
- Comment on Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face 1 month ago:
Legally, they can’t be sure you didn’t sell the account, even if the email address is the same.
Not defending the policy here, it’s bullshit. But I’m simply pointing out that they have excuses to beat any logic you throw at them. Logic has nothing to do with it, so it can’t be beaten by logic either.
- Comment on Given the Onion's purchase of Infowars was rejected by a judge a while ago, I think at this point they should just buy the company anyway through a very hostile takeover. Seriously! 1 month ago:
What’s your question?
- Comment on If WWIII broke out tomorrow do you honestly believe america would win? 2 months ago:
- Comment on What do all the subgenres of music mean? How does anyone make sense of them? 2 months ago:
Some genres have more commonality than others. Blues songs often have a similar 12-bar structure, for instance. Not all Blues songs, of course, but there are some songs you can listen to and quickly identify it as Blues based on the structure. This structure exists to improvise on top of. Jazz has a lot of improvisation built into it too.
I also think genres in the past were based on which radio stations they were played on, back when radio was the main way to hear new music. “Pop” music simply meant “popular”, was meant to be more broadly acessible, and was played on Top 40 stations. Whatever counts as “pop” changes with the times. Now, while the distinctions still exist, I don’t think most young people get their music from the radio anymore, so the genres ar not to rigidly defined.
What I think it comes down to is that bands identify themselves based on whatever they listened to, and what influenced them. So the best way to know what genre a band plays is to ask them.
- Comment on AI Electric Bills 2 months ago:
Or is it building the infrastructure to accommodate them the issue?
It’s this, but that’s only part of the story.
Datacenter companies are very efficient at building new ones now, once they have all the proper permits and can start building it can go from an empty lot to fully functional in a year or two. Maybe longer for the huge hyperscalar ones.
Once they are online, their power demand is comparable to a small city, coming online all at once. But the local utility never had this demand in its plan, so they have to build more capacity to service it, and building a new power plant takes much longer. In the meantime, the demand will outstrip their capacity and the utility will have to buy more power on the open market. This drives up costs for all their customers unless the utility is allowed to charge these customers more.
As a side note, they often get advantages and tax breaks because they promise to bring jobs to the area. And the initial construction jobs usually are significant. But once the place is built, it’s ongoing operations only requires a few dozen positions, many of them low-tech and outsourced like site security. The higher-tech jobs (like the network engineering) is often not on-site anyway. A shopping plaza would generate more jobs than a datacenter.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
No, that’s not quite how it works.
Calling the newly minted coins a transaction fee “paid from the pool of unmined coins” isn’t really accurate, as those coins didn’t exist until they were mined. The algorithm carefully controls how many new coins are made.
But miners do not set fees at all. Users set their fee when they make their transactions, and miners pick which transactions they want to attempt to validate. We expect miners will pick the transactions with the highest fee per byte, because they want to increase their reward if they manage to find a block. But they don’t have to, and they may have reasons to pick other transactions.
The whole point of it being trustless is that no party needs to coordinate. Users create transactions, miners validate them.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
Bitcoin was extremely successful at making what it set out to do in the first place: make a fully distributed, peer-to-peer, trustless currency. Anyone who has ever been forced to pay bogus transaction fees ought to be able to appreciate paying for things without needing a bank, or any intermediary at all. It’s like cash you can e-mail.
But, most people into crypto now don’t care about this utility, they just want Number Go Up. So they don’t transact with it anymore, they just hold it (or actively trade with it). Which makes the whole ecosystem not useful for anything except feeding itself.
I still think that, in theory, there are areas where cryptocutrency can be used for real innovative purposes. But these will never actually be done, because the people on a position to do those things would rather make quick money selling shit tokens to unsuspecting people.
Do you want to learn how it all works? Feel free to do so, it’s all Open Source. But if your goal is to invest… Well… Read up on it and understand it first. This will help you differentiate the good ideas from the scams. (And there are a lot of scams!)
- Comment on What free to play games can run smoothly on my old laptop? 3 months ago:
Nethack
- Comment on Whatever happened to the days when shit just...worked? 3 months ago:
Honestly, I think the difference is how much software is in these things now. Everything is a computer. And software is something that is very cheap to do half-assed, but expensive to do well (and reliably).
TVs are a perfect example of this. The TV of 40 years ago had an analog tuner directly attached to a CRT. It did only one thing, and did it well. Today’s TVs are basically embedded computers with large screens. And the embedded software was probably written by the lowest bidder.
- Comment on If the US was partitioned, what new states would you want to appear? 3 months ago:
I didn’t make the graphic, I just stole/hotlinked it. I am very familiar with PA, although it’s main redeeming quality is that it’s not New Jersey.
- Comment on If the US was partitioned, what new states would you want to appear? 3 months ago:
- Comment on Why does no one in the bible have a last name? 3 months ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot
Judas’s epithet “Iscariot” (Ὶσκάριωθ or Ὶσκαριώτης), which distinguishes him from the other people named “Judas” in the gospels, is usually thought to be a Greek rendering of the Hebrew phrase איש־קריות, (Κ-Qrîyôt), meaning “the man from Kerioth”.[17][9][18][19] This interpretation is supported by the statement in the Gospel of John 6:71 that Judas was “the son of Simon Iscariot”.[9] Nonetheless, this interpretation of the name is not fully accepted by all scholars.[17][9] One of the most popular alternative explanations holds that “Iscariot” (ܣܟܪܝܘܛܐ, ‘Skaryota’ in Syriac Aramaic, per the Peshitta text) may be a corruption of the Latin word sicarius, meaning “dagger man”,[17][9][20][21] which referred to a member of the Sicarii (סיקריים in Aramaic), a group of Jewish rebels who were known for assassinating people in crowds using long knives hidden under their cloaks.[17][9] This interpretation is problematic, however, because there is nothing in the gospels to associate Judas with the Sicarii,[9] and there is no evidence that the cadre existed during the 30s AD when Judas was alive.[22][9]
A possibility advanced by Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg is that “Iscariot” means “the liar” or “the false one”, from the Hebrew איש-שקרים. C. C. Torrey suggests instead the Aramaic form שְׁקַרְיָא or אִשְׁקַרְיָא, with the same meaning.[23][24] Stanford rejects this, arguing that the gospel writers follow Judas’s name with the statement that he betrayed Jesus, so it would be redundant for them to call him “the false one” before immediately stating that he was a traitor.[9] Some have proposed that the word derives from an Aramaic word meaning “red color”, from the root סקר.[25] Another hypothesis holds that the word derives from one of the Aramaic roots סכר or סגר. This would mean “to deliver”, based on the Septuagint rendering of Isaiah 19:4 (a theory advanced by J. Alfred Morin).[24] The epithet could also be associated with the manner of Judas’s death, hanging. This would mean Iscariot derives from a kind of Greek-Aramaic hybrid: אִסְכַּרְיוּתָא, Iskarioutha, meaning “chokiness” or “constriction”. This might indicate that the epithet was applied posthumously by the remaining disciples, but Joan E. Taylor has argued that it was a descriptive name given to Judas by Jesus, since other disciples such as Simon Peter/Cephas (Kephas “rock”) were also given such names.[24]
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
Why not just trade Alberta for Minnesota and be done with it?
