raktheundead

The T-90 of air defence systems.

“Berenstein Bear”, but not “Mandala Effect”?

I’ve still got my copy of Windows 3.1 on 3.5" 1.44 MB disks; there are seven in total.

Now, Windows 95, that was a monstrosity on floppy disks.

Lithuania is considered, along with Latvia and Estonia, to be a developed country now. It really took a step forward after being freed from the chains of Russian subjugation.

I think the PRC lacks something in the soft power stakes; they’ve created some degree of good will outside the West, but they suck at projecting cultural output that doesn’t stem from the imperial Chinese era.

You hang it out the side of the plane when you want to get out and taunt your enemy face-to-face. Well, face-to-face with a separation of a few miles, that is.

I’m guessing there is also some schadenfreude, at least among some people, at seeing a European country getting colonised by a semi-Asian one.

All this tells me is that Indians’ objection to colonisation is that they weren’t the ones doing it.

You know, one of the things I resent the most about shits like Thiel and Andreessen and Altman going around with ideas like supervillains from a Saturday morning cartoon is that whenever I try to talk to other people that aren’t familiar with them about their ideas, those ideas are so excessive and ridiculous that I end up looking like a crank and conspiracy theorist just talking about them.

Shouldn’t have stuck that stupid fucking Bitcoin shit inside.

It absolutely is our war; do you think Russia will stop with Ukraine? Do you think it sets a good precedent to once again allow states to annex territories that aren’t legally theirs with impunity?

It is a moral imperative to ensure that Russia can no longer engage an offensive war within our lifetimes.

Its original purpose was always Gold Standard 2: The Digitalisation for Austrian School-influenced ancap wankers.

To wit: https://indieweb.social/@web3isgreat/111529277780126306

Nostr Assets has announced that the “inbound capacity of lightning channels” was depleted.

You’re disingenuously ignoring the opportunity cost of having to build additional power plants - resources required not being usable elsewhere; environmental impact of those resources or, especially in the case of hydroelectric power, of building the power plants themselves, since cement has significant carbon dioxide emissions, along with the fact that proof-of-work algorithms have a tendency to expand in a grey-goo style and suck up as many resources as possible.

The former is a reason why energy conservation efforts and regulations have been put in place. The fewer power plants you require to run everything, even if they’re renewable energy, the better. Proof-of-work mining threatens that, because when your incentive to mine is more money, that encourages people taking more than their fair share of energy. It also encourages power theft.

Proof-of-work mining doesn’t do a thing to solve the issue of green energy, since there’s no sort of quality-of-service system in place which bumps cryptocurrency miners down to the bottom of the pile when it comes to prioritising power usage and even if there was, it’d create an arms race between power plant operators and people trying to subvert those controls so that they can use more power for mining, cf. Nvidia’s graphics card limiters versus Ethereum miners. You’re either naïve or disingenuous if you’re expecting cryptocurrency miners to just cede power when there’s money on the line if they keep their operations going at top priority.

Furthermore, even if every single watt that Bitcoin requires to mine was generated by 100% clean energy, the network would still be creating nation-state levels of e-waste.

This is just another one of those techno-libertarian pipe dreams about an efficient free market which don’t bear fruit in the real world, just like the “why do we need emissions regulations anyway? Surely, the free market will sort that out, brah” bullshit. It’s the fallacy of the broken window writ large.

The Lightning Network can only do the much-vaunted transactions-per-second number that it claims in theory; in practice, the number is a lot lower and even once you get past the onboarding stage takes something in the order of a couple of magnitudes of times the energy cost of a Visa transaction. Even the Lightning Network developers admit that for the LN to work as advertised even in theory, with a given case of two channels a year (naïve, when considering the only way to actually consolidate a LN transaction is to close a channel) for 7 billion people, block sizes on the Bitcoin network would have to be increased to 133 MB.

So this is basically a bunch of chancers selling a Heath Robinson machine built onto another, much worse Heath Robinson machine with no practical way to scale to the numbers they want.

Bitcoin is the ur-cryptocurrency, the Original Sin from which all of the other flaws from cryptocurrency arise.

That’d be the same Lightning Network with NP-hard issues with routing and a whole host of problems right down to the fundamentals, right? (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

And even beyond that, having to stack another layer on there is a technical non-starter to begin with. For one thing, adoption of the Lightning Network is fundamentally bottlenecked by Bitcoin itself - if the entire Bitcoin network was dedicated entirely to onboarding people onto the Lightning Network, it’d take 28 months to onboard all of the people in the US alone, let alone the rest of the world’s population.

There’s a saying by Antoine de Saint-Éxupery that’s rather relevant here: « Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher. » Roughly paraphrased, it means, “It appears that perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.” Trying to stack extra layers on top of a precarious base goes against any sound engineering principles. In this circumstance, Bitcoin would be the thing to take away - it offers nothing and is in fact detrimental to an efficient system of exchange.

Yeah, whataboutism is essentially telling on one’s self; an implicit recognition that one has no better arguments than to try to distract.

The ultimate STEMlord misunderstanding of culture; something absolutely rife in the Silicon Valley tech-sphere.

F-35 was more the high-profile failure. The F-22 was just produced in lower numbers than planned because there was no perceived need for a specialised air superiority fighter in the expected numbers after the Soviet collapse.

I kind of feel like dating apps are sneer-worthy in another context anyway, but this comment does a decent job of summing everything up:

Wow, a new way to rip whatever joy was left in dating through the pursuit of profit!