Out of curiosity, have you actually spoken to blind people about how useful they find Braille?

We need to stop expecting change to come from our rulers. We need to take change into our own hands.

Israeli lebensraum, not Jewish. Conflating Judaism with Israel is anti-semitic.

You can’t vote to end the genocide. Democracy isn’t real.

This doesn’t really make sense. Programmers are usually just paid a salary. My salary is the same regardless of how many subscribers there are. I don’t give a shit. If everyone started pirating everything it wouldn’t really impact my job. There’s plenty of dev work to do.

Free video sharing platforms are basically not viable as a business model. For a free and open internet to succeed, YouTube has to fail. At the moment, it only exists because Google subsidises it.

The ideal way for video sharing to work is for large content creators to set up their own federated video hosting websites (or pay for someone else to do it for them) and potentially offer some small amount of free capacity for those who want to upload small, not-for-profit videos

Fact checkers are all just self-important opinion columnists.

your foresight is much better than mine! I even deleted a bunch of my old stuff because, “I can just stream it whenever I want to watch it”… they took me for a fool, and they were right!

It kind of depends on your perspective, I wouldn’t say they profit from it monetarily - they definitely make a significant loss in raw $ from free users, but there is some amount of beneficial optics for the company, if people use it for fun/harmless activity.

I think we both want the same thing. I don’t want to tone police you or any of that shit, and I believe you’re totally justified in how you feel about AI, but I really do hope you have a read of my comments from the perspective of someone who agrees with you rather than someone who is trying to pick a fight with you.

First of all, most AI tools have some free tier. I doubt the other commenter paid a penny.

Also, just because they did it, it doesn’t mean they “required” it… I’ve laughed at cat videos before, that doesn’t mean that I require cat videos to be amused.

Fair enough, thank you for your time.

Clearly, their intent was to provide an example of a relatively harmless use of AI as a way of demonstrating to you that your position may have been a bit reductive.

Your reaction, of behaving like, lets be honest, a bit of an asshole, wasn’t really warranted.

Can you seriously not imagine how a corporation could benefit from generative AI, or are you just being obstinate and saying it’s useless because you think it’s unethical and you hope that by saying it’s useless that you can effectively manifest that?

Because there are plenty of use-cases for generative AI. None of them have to be good, or even products. Your phone machine example is a good one - it’s not a product, really, it’s taking the role of a human to fulfil some obligation, or to intentionally make it harder for people to add to the company’s support burden.

I think there are some useful applications for generative AI, but I do agree that the incarnations we have are unethical. And again, I really don’t think that simply telling people that they’re bad people for using it is going to win them over to your side.

Yeah, totally - I think it’s designed to be hard to understand, both tech stuff and financial stuff is often made intentionally confusing, in my opinion. It’s not dissimilar to the bitcoin mixers, but it’s still much stronger - the system is automated, you can’t mess it up as a user, you’re less reliant on a single-point-of-trust, and so on.

You might be on to something about quiet periods - I don’t really have the knowledge to say either way. There might be a bit of stuff that goes on in the background for wallets even if they’re not actively conducting “real” transactions. But, I don’t know, really.

The transaction data itself does need to be publicly readable, because otherwise the whole consensus mechanism that the blockchain relies on wouldn’t work.

From what I understand, which honestly, isn’t a lot - the method used to anonymize transactions and balances is more like obfuscation than anything else. The system uses various techniques to fuzz up the data in such a way that it becomes impossible to trace.

It’s a bit like if you wanted to send a bank transfer for £200 but anonymize it somewhat, you could transfer that money around between a bunch of other bank accounts, before sending it on to the final source. And if multiple people are doing the same thing, it becomes essentially impossible to determine where the money entered and left.

The problem is though that such systems aren’t true encryption in the same way that RSA is, for example - the data isn’t unreadable, and it’s not impossible to reverse, it’s just that there’s so much junk data and it’s such a mess that it makes the true transactions difficult to identify and the end user has extremely strong plausible deniability. However, it’s likely just a matter of time before some state actor finds a vulnerability in the technique that allows them to trace transactions - if they haven’t already done so.

I’m back to pirating all of my music. I will buy CDs or pay for downloads for artists that I really like or smaller artists, but I am fucking through with the streaming platforms. They just enshittify more and more.

Cryptocurrency has basically many of the same problems as traditional banks, it’s just a matter of who is controlling it. Monero is slightly different from most, because it is much more anonymous, but it’s really only a matter of time before even that advantage is lost.

There is no substitute for physical currency if you want privacy and anonymity.

I think that you’re right, with the way that our society is structured, it is unethical. It’s essentially the world’s most advanced plagiarism tool.

However, being realistic, even if no private individual ever used it, it would still exist and would be used by corporations for profit maximising.

In my opinion, telling people that they’re bad people for using something which is made unethically isn’t really helpful. For example, smartphones aren’t made ethically, but the way to get that to change isn’t to change consumer habits - because we know that just doesn’t work - it’s to get organised, as a collective working class, and take action into our own hands.