Yetino

The other end of the spectrum has its own problems too. My first and last names are both quite rare — deliberately so, thanks to my parents. That means when someone, say a potential employer, googles my name, it’s reasonable for them to assume every result they see is about me. For a while, I actually liked that. It felt like having a unique identity online. Until one day I discovered someone else had created a YouTube channel under the exact same name. Presumably they happen to share this unusual combination legitimately — but the content on that channel wasn’t exactly what I’d want showing up when someone searches for me. I tried to “correct the record” by setting up my own channel, just to add some better signals. But since YouTube isn’t my thing, my videos barely register, and Google still insists on showing the other person’s channel first.

It feels counterintuitive that the competition from WhatsApp, iMessage, etc, never managed to bring down the price of MMS. Any ideas?

A few years ago I wrote some toy code to scan for raw texts stored on Ethereum. Some were interesting to read. See below (the way to read: expand "click to see more" -> "Input Data" -> "view input as" - select UTF8)

* A (a bit creepy) love letter https://etherscan.io/tx/0xee30531afa6147ce450d9404bcc3fb9758... * A Chinese student activist's open letter (some media reported about it at the time) https://etherscan.io/tx/0x2d6a7b0f6adeff38423d4c62cd8b6ccb70...

The first half of your argument makes sense.

Justifying the use of proof-of-work appears to be a fallacy of relevance though

As a former blockchain enthusiastic, I would say do spend some time (if you can afford) to play with it as a hobby, but that's pretty much it. There is a limit the "blockchain applications" can achieve. Many successful ones have a similar form of re-interpreting a hash, e.g. CryptoKitty or crypto zombie games and even the now shinny NFT. It can be fun to work on some blockchain projects, as many exercises are like clipping a duck's wings and then figuring out how to coax it into somehow climbing up a tree.

Also the blockchain space is a big echo chamber. There are lots of fallacies that the enthusiasts are blinded to. For instance, there is the illusion of validity, i.e. confusing the correct identification of a problem (e.g. abused of centralised power) with the correctness in a proposed solution (e.g. fully removing trust). But as long as one is aware of these, it's fun.

Probably start by building a smart contract to experience the limitations (and the WTFs). Then probably move on to study ZKP (which probably can have some real-world usage)

Possibly one business will come into being: quit-Facebook coaching. Probably won't be as big an industry as smoke-quitting or Alcoholics Anonymous but might still be profitable.

I have just started to learn differential privacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy), and am wondering if the following might be feasible in principle: on the browser level, instead of blocking the trackers, add a certain level of noise to the submitted data. This might form a truce between the end users and the trackers. Through statistics, the trackers might still be able to learn something about the end user group as a population; at the same time, each individual user's privacy isn't breached much more than they are completely offline. Admittedly this might be ridiculous and is just me under Dunning–Kruger effect as a beginner in this field.

The paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04014-z The code https://github.com/vgupta1/EvaTargetedCovid19Testing

Borrowing cryptocurrency terms, this seems to be a Proof of Excitement consensus algorithm

OpenSushi

Except when you own more than 30% of the pigs then you have a higher chance to double spend a pig