Oh, it didn’t take Israel for the venture capitalists among them to want to harvest defense money. AI support has always had a contingent that intends to use it for military purposes. Same with remote vehicles. Same with robots. Same with, well, pretty much every advance in science - chemical agents, biological agents, lasers, space, nuclear power. Practically anything we create has a military use if you’re morally bankrupt or thirsty for power or money. Nearly every project starts out with “to serve mankind” as its goal.

Humans are so massively susceptible to gamification. It’s nice for providing motivation, but it ends up being like an addiction the way companies leverage it.

Yeah, I saw it the other day. I would bet a lot of money that the information was already stored. In fact, if their data group didn’t already store that information (link clicks to external websites) they should all be fired. This is just a way that you can find something that you’d previously looked at on facebook (which, oddly, may be the only site on the planet with a worse search function than reddit).

Since even inadvertent or unintentional copying can be punished as infringement, any takedown should be subject to the same level of scrutiny and false claims should be awarded statutory damages matching infringement of registered works, collectible by the party who’s non-infringing work was blocked, but actionable by any party who is denied access. So if you can’t get to content due to DMCA you can sue, but you cannot recover damages or expenses - if you win, the $175k(?) per fraudulent take down is payable to the content owner. In that way, it’s recognized that an individual looking for content is injured by the takedown, but there is no financial incentive for take-down vigilantism.

You think the old bird is bad, you should see the rabid slobbering of neckbeards still obsessed with reddit or the masticating Meta connecting Threads to Activity pub. The impotent outrage is palpable.

I won’t argue that AI won’t solve the housing problem. And I agree that we can build a bunch of housing. But it won’t be where people want to live, or it won’t be affordable. I’ve got people in my town screaming for affordable housing. Even with subsidies its hard to get things going when the local municipality is practically bending over backwards. Why? Because it has to be on a bus line. It has to be within walking distance of X services. And all the land that fits those criteria is millions of dollars an acre. Even if you could find them, the contractors can’t find enough qualified, reliable workers at premium rates to service their million dollar home builds. I’m in the industry and I don’t care how much “will power” you have; short of taking land through eminent domain and using it for free, you won’t have anyplace that meets any kind of criteria for livability. Hell, I could go buy 1000 acres just an hour down the road for $1M and put up 10,000 houses that only cost $50k each to build. Thing is, nobody is going to buy them. There is literally no demand, even for cheap housing, that takes an hour drive to get anywhere useful - and if you get closer in, you won’t find land that’s affordable. Heck, by the time I extended infrastructure to them or built it out, it would be 3-4 years before the first resident could move in, and that’s with zero delay on any governmental paperwork.

“Y’all come here an’ look at 'dis 'fore I calculate it!”

AI does have little to do with it, but we can’t do housing the way people want housing. The land does not exist in sufficient quantity, in the desired areas, without other strings attached (such as private ownership). And it would still take a decade to build it all because there aren’t enough tradespeople in the places where you want the housing built.

Severability is standard boilerplate. As is waiving of all liability (essentially in perpetuity, even if not stated as such), incidental and consequential damage, and indemnification of the writing party against any and all claims. This is a mole hill on the landscape of click-through licensing fuckery.

Yeah, it’s high on my list. Along with a half dozen other AAAs from the last decade. I think Cyberpunk is next on my list, though there’s a Fallout languishing on my Deck I keep meaning to go back to.

lol- yup. It’s free in the same way that building your own house is free. Which is true if you already have the skills and free time. And even if you’re light on skills there’s tons of YouTube videos and forums where you can get any technical data you need. Right?

Still cheaper than switching to Linux, even if the price were high.

At this point, I think my pavlov-like reaction to Thursdays and grabbing the free games is the game now. I know full well I’ll never play these games.

I don’t know…loudly proclaiming you’re not gay is pretty gay in my book.

the whole network could be run with a cleverly configured raspberry pi

Which would defeat the entire purpose of a distributed blockchain. I’m ribbing you, of course, on that ;-) Bitcoin was not built for efficiency and the very basis of distributed proof of work trades efficiency for security. The more “successful” it gets, the larger the incentive to waste power in a fight to win each block reward becomes - by design.

Again, it would take a substantial change to the code or reality. The options are to change the block size (more transactions per block), alter the difficulty curve (which is intended to limit growth in the limited bitcoin supply), alter the way blocks are solved (massive theoretical mathematical breakthrough or, possibly, a move from asic to quantum computing), or switch away from proof of work. The first increases the storage of the blockchain (substantially for a substantial reduction), rewrite - and get approval - to change the difficulty steps which had been a hallmark of the system, the third is magical thinking, and the fourth completely undermines the egalitarian ethos of the coin.

I’ve heard of no substantive move on any front to alter the plan because, for now, it working. And the true believers are generally libertarians who have faith that market forces will correct any shortcomings organically. This usually results in everything working perfectly right up until it doesn’t, at which point the wheels come off and the bus slams into the class of kindergarteners crossing the road.

You can’t have a transaction without mining. Mining is the work done to solve a batch of transactions, so the exact cost of a transaction is easy to determine provided that you don’t include the cost of plant (buildings and IT to run the miners, though this is usually very minor compared to the actual calculation consumption). Each block contains (typically) between 3000 and 4000 transactions and is solved every 10 minutes. As of today, it takes 2.6GWh to solve a block, given the current number of miners (137TWh/yr per https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), which is 744kWh per transaction at 3500 transactions per block.

The cost of a Visa transaction is more difficult because there are people involved and other plant costs (buildings to house the people who work for Visa). The actual cost to process a Visa transaction, in direct transactional power usage, is trivial because a Raspberry Pi can “process” hundreds of thousands of transactions a second locally - it’s literally a couple hundred bytes of login/query/reply data, and adding or subtracting from a ledger which is mirrored to distributed servers. Distributed across a server with enough transactions to keep it busy it’s probably a few hundred milliseconds on 1/8 of a 50W processor - call it 0.001Wh at the server, which is the equivalent of the 700kWh per bitcoin transaction. If we say that there are 10 machines all doing the same virtual transaction on each physical transaction (incl. POS, backup, billing, etc) and we figure a 5:1 cost of total power (a/c, losses, memory, storage) then we’re all the way up to 0.00005kWh (0.05 Wh, or 180 watt-seconds) per transaction. That means that the overall cost for visa to process your charge is 1.5kWh/0.00005kWh for the computers or 30,000:1 due to humans being involved in the process.

Here’s the thing, though: Bitcoin gets harder (more compute intensive) as time goes on, and the rate of increase is faster than the ability to solve, on a Wh basis. IE - Bitcoin transactions will get more expensive over time unless bitcoin changes their code - and there is always resistance to that because there is a financial disincentive to reduce the work in Proof of Work systems. This is mitigated on other blockchains by using Proof of Stake, but that has other implications. Visa, otoh, is taking advantage of AI and drops in processor and storage costs to lower their per-transaction cost because there is a financial incentive to reduce processing costs as the fees charged are fixed (nominally 3% of the transaction cost) and anything left over is profit.

Thanks for the great ride!

Dragged 20 feet vs a beautiful golden parachute. They really do live in an alternate reality.

Yeah, I’m with you and it’s keeping me from really starting a new game. I got back into gaming with Elite Dangerous and got a kick out of the hours of offline research (because the in-game tools were fucking terrible when they even existed). It took me a while to get past the cool graphics and flight, but it got boring and tedious managing stuff. I failed to start Witcher 3 twice before just diving in and deciding I was going to not figure out anything and just play. It’s a far more forgiving system than most, and the gameplay benefits from it (to the suffering of realism).

While I enjoy the games, I loathe the min-max and inventory management necessary in most games. That’s not technically necessary if you spend a couple hundred hours perfecting technique. While that’s less than a month for a full time gamer, it’s about 5 years of play time in my life, so I end up looking up some obscure bit on line and chasing crafting for no good reason except to make my gaming time no fun. As a result, most of my SteamDeck time has been on simple arcade shooters and a couple of card-combat games. It’s frustrating to know there are good games out there if I just had 20-30 hours to get into them, and also knowing that I’ll have 20-30 hours free on a regular basis only when I retire some day. I guess my nursing home days will have lots of content, so I’ve got that going for me.

Oh, fine - if you’re going to just Willy nilly divulge your (checks notes) family Secret Santa present list to just anyone. You may as well write your medical history with a nude picture of yourself on a postcard and send it via UPS to People Magazine!!1!