makeasnek

makeasnek, 3 days ago (edited 16 hours ago)

We need more censorship-resistant, private, decentralized communication protocols. We need them to be widespread enough that lawmakers see censoring/controlling them as technically impossible and politically unwise. That means they need to be easy to use for the average person so we can get sufficient adoption. Donate to your software of choice, that’s how it happens.

makeasnek, 3 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Bannability is similar to lemmy. Each “instance” (or “relay” in nostr words) can decide what content/users can live on their relay. The difference is that you are usually connected to multiple relays. So if you want to follow somebody who is banned by other relays, nobody can take that choice away from you. Likewise, nobody can stop you from publishing, though your reach may be limited by relays sharing blocklists etc.

There are some right users there just as there are on any social media network. You can just click block and move on and/or pick relays with stronger moderation policies. If Lemmy has a “left” tilt, Nostr has a “libertarian right” tilt. But over time it’s expanding and becoming more generalized, just like how Lemmy isn’t 100% tankies now.

makeasnek, 3 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

You don’t have to pay relays to use nostr. Been using Nostr for a while and love it, it’s an underlying protocol like AP is for Lemmy, Kbin, mastodon, etc. The main “interface” for it right now is as a twitter clone.

You don’t lose your identity if your instance shuts down which is a major pro (Bluesky also has this advantage over AP). The UX is a little less polished than Mastodon but I find the underlying tech concepts more solid, privacy respecting, and censorship-resistant. For example, DMs are automatically encrypted so relay operators can’t read them.

makeasnek, 3 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Replying to this comment so people don’t get put off by it. Nostr has an optional feature where you can tip other users using Bitcoin lightning. So if you like their post, you can send them .001c or $100 or whatever you want. You don’t have to use it though. It’s valuable IMO as a way for content creators to get paid and will be a key driver of content creators choosing to use it over other platforms, but to each their own. You can also dedicate a % of your tips to your nostr relay or app to supporting hosting and development.

Crypto is full of garbage and scams, Nostr uses Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, a single hack, or a single broken promise. Whatever you don’t like about “crypto” is probably actually other stuff that isn’t Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a way to transfer coins around the world quickly, and it works, and nobody can print away the currency’s value by inflating the supply. It has a trillion dollar market cap for a reason, which places it in the top 25 countries by GDP.

makeasnek, 3 days ago

Freenet and YacY are worth adding to this list.

makeasnek, 3 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Lightning is a terrible protocol. The Lightning devs themselves state that it’s basically unusable and you shouldn’t even try sending transactions valued more than a few hundred dollars

FUD. I use lightning on a daily basis, it’s getting continual development, and millions are still being poured into development efforts. Some devs stopped working on it and now more new devs are involved, which is common with long-lived OSS projects. You can use it to send money to anybody on planet earth with a cellphone and a halfway reliable internet connection. In under a second. For a penny in fees. Try that with a bank wire. It’s a non-centrally controlled network, like OPs post is about. It does what it does very well, and it has been live and growing for years. Over a few hundred USD, you’re probably better off with a main-chain tx anyways as fees are flat instead of % based.

If you tried selling all that bitcoin, the price would tank

Yes that’s how market caps work. It doesn’t change that it’s a massive market cap.

makeasnek, 3 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

You can either increase blocksize (and therefore decrease decentralization) or build L2s. Look at ETH with their big, often blocks. You can run a Bitcoin node on a 10 year old laptop, good luck running an Eth node with those specs. You need at least 1TB of space, and it’s gotta be SSD. Which is why many Eth nodes are hosted in corporate datacenters, over half the network. You can split hairs over what counts as a “node” etc but the end result is the same: increased centralization due to large chain size/requirements.

Monero doesn’t need L2s yet because it doesn’t have the transaction load to fill up available chain space enough to impact decentralization. Long-term, we cannot store all transactions on every node and do that forever. Small txs do not belong on chain. I love XMRs approach to privacy, it will need L2s at some point. Or pruning, which comes with some significant tradeoffs.

makeasnek, 3 days ago (edited 5 hours ago)

It would be nice to have a decentralized or federated buy/sell platform that replaces craigslist. Facebook marketplace has absolutely eaten craigslist for lunch, and I hate that I have to use it to sell stuff, but there are few viable alternatives for local sales.

eBay is great until you want to sell a $300 iPhone and don’t want to mess with buyer return fraud which is rampant on that platform (and most custodial payment services like PayPal). I don’t sell anything on eBay for over >$100, got burned too many times.

makeasnek, 3 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Many of these regulations will make it harder for humanity to share in the benefit of AI. The corps currently involved in AI development have made some pushes for regulation. You don’t normally see corps do that, so that raises some questions. Why? Answer: They want to stamp out competition.

You know who has no trouble complying with and/or bending large, burdensome regulations? Huge megacorps. You know who does have trouble complying with them though? Small startups & open source initiatives.

makeasnek, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Increasing the money supply, all other things equal, decreases the value of the currency. It’s that simple. The price, or value of the currency is the net of supply and demand for that currency. Same demand, higher supply, lower value per unit.

This link argues inflation is more complicated than that, which I agree with in my opening sentence, inflation has many causes. Of course it’s more complicated than that. But that doesn’t change the underlying basic reality that inflating the supply on its own reduces the value of the money. Supply and demand is simple, unpacking which % of the 10% inflation experienced in an economy is caused by money printing or push-pull or supply chain disruptions is a more complex and possibly impossible to fully answer question. The complexity of answering that question is a good argument for why we shouldn’t give central banks the ability to change the money supply or interest rates, as they cannot have the information required to know whether raising interest rates will fix inflation because they can’t even know for sure what is even causing it. I mean, inflating the currency supply is certainly a part of it, but picking apart the other pieces is when it enters that grey area of unknowability.

makeasnek, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

If I take out a $10,000 loan, which for simplicity’s sake let’s say is worth 10,000 loaves of bread, and next year, when payment is due, $10,000 is “worth half as much” ie I can only buy 5,000 loaves of bread with it, I only have to pay back “half the loan”. I still pay the same $10k, but at the time I paid it back, I only had to trade half as much bread (my storage asset of choice) for it.

makeasnek, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

If I bought one unit of Apple stock, if the USD loses value, it doesn’t effect the value of my apple stock. It now takes more dollars to buy an Apple share, but my Apple share is still 1/100 of Apple. Currency devaluing makes it look like I’m making money because the share price rose, but I’m not. To be fair, I’m making money but the total value has not changed. I can trade that Apple share for more dollars now, but I probably can’t trade it for more bread or other “assets”.

If the currency loses 8% of its value, one would expect the share of Apple stock to cost 8% more currency. So if my “return on investment” is 4% but the currency is worth 8% less, that means Apple’s value has changed in addition to inflation happening. My stock lost value there. Not due to inflation, but due to Apple being valued less by the market for some unknown reason.

The impact is still disproportionate. While I lost 4% in your example, a pleb holding cash lost 8%. And plebs have a greater share of their net wealth in cash.

makeasnek, 5 days ago

You’re getting taxes either way, either via inflationary supply or paying a portion of your paycheck. Those gains get taxes when they assets are sold so in theory that’s fine, but buy-borrow-die is a loophole to get around that which should be fixed.

makeasnek, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

I’m glad to finally see this cockroach serve time for something but it unnerves me a bit that his something is ignoring a congressional subponea. We are given the fifth for a reason, I remember when this exact same subpoena power was directed against suspected communists during the red scare. And when republicans have used it in their numerous BS “house investigations” into everything from Fauci to Hunter’s laptop. Some of those lib subponea recipients rightfully told them to kick rocks because the investigations were stupid.

And when grand juries (a different kind of subponea power) have been used as fishing expeditions to disrupt activist groups, or target Wikileaks. Pushing a world where you can be forced to testify to the government is questionable imo. Giving people immunity and forcing them to testify isn’t a great solution either, as that information can still be used to further tyranny even if you cannot personally be charged with what you say. Our ability to refuse to cooperate is an important check on tyrrany, that’s why we have the 5th in the first place.

makeasnek, 6 days ago

Very excited to see this, and to be able to follow BlueSky and Mastodon users from my nostr app

makeasnek, 6 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

I’m not super worried, but I did buy a few extra groceries. We do not have the public trust in public health agencies to manage a pandemic. I still wear N95s at the store, I have more boosters than my entire social circle combined, and I don’t trust a damned thing the CDC says at this point. I “followed the science” and trust scientists. But I don’t trust the CDC and If I don’t, why would anybody else?

I remember them telling us covid was low risk, that it would be contained, and not to panic. That masks didn’t work, that there was no reason to buy them. And that it wasn’t airborne despite evidence piling up for months. I remember the Surgeon General going on tv and telling us to wrap a t-shirt over our face as an effective mask. They took years to update their mask guidance, last I checked they still suggest surgical masks despite N95s being widely available and vastly more effective.

I remember them turning down millions of tests from the WHO so they could release their own, only to release tests that did not work and had to be recalled. That costs us weeks when days mattered. I remember the FDA going after a scientist in Seattle who offered free covid tests against FDA policy, threatening any scientist who dared to offer free local covid testing when CDC had a backlog measured in weeks. In fact, I remember the CDC fumbling at basically every possible point in the pandemic’s trajectory from day 1 until present day where they release boosters right after the peak of infections, after everybody has already gone back to school and everybody’s gotten sick, and when the boosters do arrive not only are they late and meaningless, they are an entire strain behind.

I remember them publishing “studies” with such poor scientific rigor that my 5th grade science project would blow them out of the water. One in particular the CDC used to prove masks work, which they absolutely do, and they went on a whole media tour touting this study, was a case study with two hairdressers. One hairdresser wore a mask and one didn’t. The one who wore masks didn’t infect any patients, while the maskless one did. Except this proved nothing at all because on average, most people are not infectious. Even if neither of them wore masks, it was a completely expected result. Absolute hot garbage science from the agency that is supposed to be the best at it in the world.

Fuck 'em all, that entire agency needs to be replaced.

makeasnek, 6 days ago

arious far-right groups basically created the framework for their anti-science actions with the COVID pandemic and various anti-vaxx groups that existed before it. Therefore they will double down in their efforts to resist any kinds of mitigation efforts because of “freedom” and “do not comply”. Hell, many of them are buying raw milk in hopes of “gaining immunity” and of course “owning the libs”!

That was a “viable” strategy for a disease with a 1% mortality rate. H5N1 is expected to be much higher AFAICT. And there is some solid analysis showing that this particular form of owning the libs resulted in some swung elections.

makeasnek, 6 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Honestly this applies to a lot of people in civic service. Not rich politicians, but the people trying to run your local or state government. Often the races are uncontested, because they literally can’t find even one other person who wants the job. Some of them are incompetent or pursue these jobs for power-seeking reasons, but many of them have their hearts in the right place and want to give back to their community, often while fighting ridiculous red tape at one end while contending with threats and harassment from citizens at the other. And the pay is often terrible. My local city council positions would qualify you for food stamps/EBT.

makeasnek, 6 days ago

Let your MEP know their voters care about privacy. These efforts have been defeated before, it just requires vigilance. Your letter can be as simple as “I care about privacy”. That’s all you have to write.

www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

makeasnek, 6 days ago

We need decentralized, federated search. I remember YaCy from years ago was attempting this. Anybody know if there’s anybody actively working on this?

makeasnek, 6 days ago

Interesting thanks I’ll take a look!

makeasnek, 5 days ago

You can’t save if your currency is constantly losing value. Putting money in a savings account is just slowly moving value from you to whoever controls the money printer and expands the supply.

makeasnek, 6 days ago

Ironic for a country with no free speech rights. But Russia has historically been a scientific powerhouse, especially in mathematics and physics.