linusakesson.net

Forum comments in chronological order

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for what people (other than myself) write in the forums. Please report any abuse, such as insults, slander, spam and illegal material, and I will take appropriate actions. Don't feed the trolls.

Jag tar inget ansvar för det som skrivs i forumet, förutom mina egna inlägg. Vänligen rapportera alla inlägg som bryter mot reglerna, så ska jag se vad jag kan göra. Som regelbrott räknas till exempel förolämpningar, förtal, spam och olagligt material. Mata inte trålarna.

May 2023

Three PETSCII pieces

Anonymous
Sun 21-May-2023 21:30
As an irc unicode artist who started with PETSCII in 1981, I appreciate the great skill and thought put into this PETSCII work.

Machine Yearning

Anonymous
Sun 21-May-2023 21:32
i have hacked a simple sid player to yield fake stereo sound. makes songs much less painful on the ears. noise gets particularly wide, sinewaves not so wide.

purists dont like it of course.

I minted an NFT of A Mind Is Born

Anonymous
Tue 23-May-2023 02:08
Most NFTs on etherium that I know of are merely links to a web server. I can't view this one from the link, but I assume it's a link to a video capture of the demo. Perhaps it would be cool to have the NFT contain the program itself, considering that it is only 256 bytes?
Anonymous
Tue 23-May-2023 02:16

lft wrote:

Next, we have to consider the possibility that the announcement was forged.

Do you have a publicly distributed PGP key? That would make the process of issuance a lot simpler.
Anonymous
Tue 23-May-2023 03:04
The basic problem of blockchains is that they try to impose scarcity into a domain that _by its very nature_ resists it.

Digital money (e.g. bitcoin, monero), namespacing (e.g. namecoin, ENS) domains require scarcity to operate. There are legit use-cases.

It is also completely unnecessary, since the things people want to make scarce are all social constructs in the first place.The only change is who the trusted party is (and it's also mostly not a change - it's all rich people).

The goods I purchase online with cryptocurrency are hardly "social constructs"? The change (compared to paypal or credit cards) is that that the payment system is now secure and somewhat private from the government and banking institutions.

Everything done using blockchains, from money transfers to lotteries to contracts, are already achievable without using something like 1% of the worlds entire energy use to accomplish it.

It's true. There are chaumian cash systems like DigiCash and GNU Taler which are secure, private and efficient. However these systems will never replace the traditional banking system which benefits from the insecurity, surveilance, and inefficiency. The intermediary solution is cryptocurrency. The proof is in the pudding: if banks were willing to improve then DigiCash would have been implemented all those years ago, and there would be no reason to create bitcoin in the first place.

NFT's in this context, is a skewed lottery where mostly already wealthy people will be paid enormous amounts of money (which will be written off as tax-deductible) for literally nothing. This is not dissimilar from the traditional art market, but has the added detriment of burning up the planet.

Yes, same could be said of the traditional art market. As for PoW... what drives the demand for power usage? The income of the miners, which consists of the fees (paid directly by users) and the block reward (paid by owners through inflation). The fees consist of a very small fraction (<1% in bitcoin for example) of this miner income. Perhaps the usage of the cryptocurrency results in power usage by holding up the price, but the idea that merely *using* a cryptocurrency results in power consumption is tenuous at best. The power usage of etherium (for example) is about the same- regardless if the blocks are empty or full.

In terms of the social impacts of blockchain research, from my view it's been an enormous drain and waste of resource that could have been spent on actual, useful progress in decentralisation, federation,

Huh? I don't believe it.

and scientific research (supercomputers are more expensive because blockchain mines buy up a lot of stock).

Miners use specialized ASICs, not the type of hardware you see in datacenters. If they're competing for GPUs, then good: I guess AI hell will be postponed for a couple more years. Greetings from 2023!

If _half_ of the people duped into dumping their efforts into some doomed blockchain project instead had been working on, say, torrent-based live streaming, or strong software support for better, federated social networks, trading sites, chat protocols and so on, I think we could have had real, major competitors to the big five.

True, but that's like complaining that someone invested in losing stocks when they could have donated it to charity instead. The type of person to *invest* in cryptocurrency these days are not necessarily the type who care about or even *use* it. Do you really think this type of person would otherwise have donated to open source software development? Not much of an opportunity loss if you ask me.

For the economic side of things, blockchains serve very much as contradiction heighteners in existing late capitalism

Is there some sort of doublethink i'm oblivious to here? It's just another form of currency.
Socialists like to use the phrase "Late Capitalism" because they imply the end of capitalism is nigh. That's wishful thinking, but I'm not that optimistic!

Now, all this being said, if you need to hustle to survive or live comfortably, I won't judge anyone for jumping into the grift and trying to grift with the best of them. Chances are against you unless you're already rich, however.

In terms of you, Linus, and you, the buyer's relationship, I would encourage you to, if you want to do similar things in the future, to instead solve things using traditional assymetric key crypto. Set up a certificate for "Dibs on <whatever>", link it to an announcement page on here, sell that, and send an update on each sale. I'm sure you can figure out how to do this reasonably.

And you have a trusted party (linus) who can be contacted, generate a new key in case the old gets lost, etc. same as it would have to be on the Ethereum blockchain anyway. Just with less burning of fossil fuel.

It's not a bad idea. You could have a system like this without a blockchain, but it makes it such that the buyer and the seller cannot act independently of LFT. Which sort of defeats the point, no?

P.S. Now that I've finished my comment I can see that "Don't Fight" is a rule at the end of the page. You know, there is nothing wrong with a nice flamewar every now and then!

Machine Yearning

Anonymous
Sat 27-May-2023 08:09
if you love the machine, you'll understand everything. Beautiful!

PCH / Unreal