SI_Rob

9 ms·

31.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
You might want to google "hashcash," for a little history on PoW and email. It's an idea that goes back before Bitcoin and was one of its influences.
32.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
Decentralization of anything other than leverage over liquidity and thus price, which is what the Bitcoin 1% (more like 0.01%) holds, is nothing more than a misdirection story to furnish prospective Joe 99% Bitcoiners with the illusion that
33.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
Careful, there's only one story for Bitcoin: "the price goes up" (I hear the kids today have shortened that to "NgU"). This story is very sustainable when Bitcoin's 1% ("decentralized") have been hol
34.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
Sure, I mean it is increasingly apparent that Bitcoin has, as they say these days, "said the quiet part out loud" with respect to what kinds of motives really drive the stock market, and what signals its participants actually resp
35.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
The entire point of Bitcoin is that you irreversibly give up something you value in exchange for creating a Bitcoin in return. The Bitcoin now stands for that lost value, and there is now a corresponding psychological motive to replace the
36.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
This issue reminds me of the IQ testing and measurement problem of regression bias, which likewise arises from statistical artifacts from decades past (when tests were administered to much more narrow and self-selecting groups of subjects t
37.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
> we [..] could have more federated and decentralized platforms, or at least more client-side filtering inside of centralization curation We should start a center to discuss and curate these ideas, a place where we could get together and
38.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
How about, polarization is highly compressive and humans have limited time and mental resources to devote to the many competing concerns they encounter. Those issues that they sense are important in some broad abstract game of value creatio
39.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
the deep problem, to me, is that nuance and complexity are self-censoring. any position that doesn't losslessly compress into a chant or a rally cry or 240 characters is effectively censored by its own unfitness for the infrastructure
40.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
nuance and complexity are self-censoring. any position that doesn't losslessly compress into a chant or a rally cry or 240 characters is effectively censored by its own unfitness for the infrastructure of mass propagation. like the dem
41.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
All the clubs, bars, and schools have been shuttered for months. That buildup of stifled young adult socialization energy had to be dumped somewhere.
42.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
True, but that's more of a current snapshot than a categorical determination. It's more like the social sciences started breaking away from the humanities many decades ago, and have been increasingly pulled in the general directio
43.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
> More usefully, I'd ask, "Why the Moon?" Just a guess, but maybe it's because this president seems obsessed with editing himself into the narrative of numerous political and national news events that were historicall
44.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
probably not related except by irony, but Wired's original print format used a large tabloid-like page dimension.
45.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
> and profit. I see what you didn't do there :D
46.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
It sounds rather like the coordination friction that constrained social usage of the internet before "always on" (and its exponent, the drool-proof smartphone) became the default; perhaps VR is still in an ergonomic analogue to th
47.
by SI_Rob 6y ago
Wouldn't any such apps used for anything beyond toy experimentation quickly re-centralize around maximal cliques? At scale, the demand for responsiveness tends to drive out the demand for everything else.
48.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
These structures are dotted all around central Mesoamerica and forms of them exist even in regions inhabited by peoples who are not otherwise associated (linguistically, ethnically, material culture, etc) with Mesoamerica at all, like Puert
49.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
IIRC the term for this is "sympathetic magic"
50.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
nitpick because the slant of your argument is correct, but in a self-hosted system you don't necessarily need a single machine to encode 10 video feeds, each client (assuming this is a P2P approach) only needs to encode one - the user&
51.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
> Tone-policing, cancel culture, and identity politics are a real problem though The tyranny of structurelessness[0] strikes again. All of the above are symptomatic (though sometimes known by different names) of movements whose members d
52.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
While waiting in a temp apartment to move into a new home in a hinterland satellite of LA (a fairly large one, ~350k pop or so), I was delighted (and somewhat skeptical) to learn that AT&T had a U-verse package with 1GB/1GB fiber f
53.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
Or, "How William The Bastard became William The Conqueror"
54.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
This is the one tic that makes it grating for me to listen to anything spoken by Noam Chomsky (interviews, discussions, monologues etc. - his written material not so much), regardless of how persuasive I may find his arguments. Add "yo
55.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
Self-reinforcing arms race to sit up high and see over the top of traffic. If people could be trusted to reliably signal, merge, etc. the perceived need to see 300 feet ahead to predict behavior of immediately adjacent drivers would diminis
56.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
> it wasn't possible to buy ETH direct until ~2017 not even with paper wallets? I realize this would be uncommon given the late start of, ahem, intheoreum, but this should have still been common at meetups and such. Also, mining is
57.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
> There should be punishment, but basing it on the losses from peak is very strange and not realistic. Isn't this the usual protocol for damage suits in general? As I understand it, plaintiffs should plan for a 10x or even 100x red
58.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
It's even more insidious than that. An astonishingly high fraction of people in both the news media (and particularly in the financial news media) as well as in variously leveraged positions of power in government and quasi-governmenta
59.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
A guy who advocates blockchain solutions yet dismisses cryptocurrency surely misunderstands both. Also whatever main "fallacy" (to use author's word) is at work in both of these is ultimately rooted in confused and ambiguous
60.
by SI_Rob 7y ago
A bitcoin miner is in essence a kind of inside-out electrical meter: It measures, with remarkable precision, how many electrons (bundled as SHA256 operations) you burn to support the network finding a block, rather than how many you bought,

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