throw101010

> Maybe the legal wrangling would be more involved in western countries, but I can't see why enforcement would be any harder.

For the USA, computer source code is considered speech protected by the First Amendment, there's not much "legal wrangling" you can do around this when it has been confirmed by the Supreme Court. Short of drastically restricting this right/freedom... don't think the US population would welcome this "wrangling" with open arms.

You're also missing the point I've made, China's ban and various blocklists have not killed Bitcoin, it is still used a lot in China these days, it's simply illegal to mine it... for now, they've gone anti to pro Bitcoin many times over the years.

Sure, but as I said, if they come after Bitcoin, it's a good time to worry about a lot of freedoms your governments are supposed to protect/afford you... it could be seen as the canary in the mine in that regard.

It has already been done [1], the issue is that Bitcoin is not really made for large files storage, so you'd store hashes to a torrent as you suggested or you'd split parts of the illegal content that then would require some other protocol be recomposed... Historically that has not been enough to cause legal trouble for network participants, another reason is that this data can also be deleted from your own node once you are made aware of it. It's been an anti-Bitcoin talking point for many years, nobody really cares about it.

[1] https://blockchain.comsys.rwth-aachen.de/

You misunderstand the point people saying this make. They know governments can suppress their freedoms ultimately but since Bitcoin is an open and public system, the measures governments have to use to "kill" it force them to limit very fundamental freedoms (like freedom of speech to restrict the publishing of its source code, freedom to consume the energy citizens purchase and/or produce how they want, neutral access to Internet, etc.).

These kind of measures are political suicide in Western democracies, hence why politicians are seen as powerless against Bitcoin in these places, why they "let" this market grow and why they just setup ways to tax it as best as they can (at the borders between fiat and crypto).

In places where preserving such freedoms is not a burden for governments you already see bans flourish when it is convenient for the people in power... but even then, it just marginally stops the actual access to Bitcoin as a network participant (which is not limited to mining). It doesn't actually kills Bitcoin.

But everyone knows that if governments around the world decided to install massive censorship, invade the privacy of all their citizen, and magically all were in agreement to do so at the same time, Bitcoin wouldn't survive... if you think this is a possible scenario, is Bitcoin really the thing your should worry about?

> The attacks of September 11th 2001 are fundamentally not reproducible irrespective of whether there is _any_ security screening at airports.

How so? The delay between the hijacking and the crashes in the buildings for both planes were around 40 minutes... even if there were jet fighters ready to go at the time, the lack of knowledge of the hijacking being in progress for much of this time and the short delay make this kind of attack still feasible.

What was actually improved our chances to avoid such attacks are the limited access to the cockpit and processes pilots must follow in case of hijacking.

The measures at the airport are to limit the risks of hijackings to begin with.

To collect as much customer data as possible, to (hopefully) anonymize it and bundle it to sell them to data brokers and extract more money from their customer base...

All of it with their "consent" (you installed the app and likely accepted their ToS/PIvacy Policy), under the pretense of providing them a service like counting the time/frequency of your interaction with the product or reminding you to use it (something you would already do anyways, maybe less accurately, if you are a functioning adult).

> Anyone who is conscientious and capable can navigate the traditional banking system too. In fact, that's pretty much what "capable" means.

This is a funny contrast, under the article above... and the thousands of similar horror stories with centralized custodians ignoring their "customer" and never being held accountable for their shortcomings.

It seems to be more than being capable when it comes to banking, it might just be that you need to be rich/powerful enough for the banks to actually care. Another difference with Bitcoin, the same access is provided to anyone. The almost 2 billions of unbanked people on this planet are not this way because banks can't reach them, but because they are seen as liabilities/risks they don't want... Bitcoin does not make such discrimination.

> You can even start your own bank, and then you can keep your deposits there and you will have a 100% guarantee that your bank will not screw you.

I do not understand how this is supposed to address my point about trustlessness on a scale. You don't describe a system as Bitcoin by holding you own deposits... it is a full system for transfers/payments/messaging. It seems like a diversion to not address the fact that the trust put in custodian is not comparable to a system based on self-custody and self-sovereignty like Bitcoin.

> But that has nothing to do with control,

It absolutely does for Bitcoin. Nobody is following the chain that changes the emission rate and supply cap. This is control by the participants of the network, and it isn't limited to miners, we have seen users and other economical actors signify this to miners when there was an attempt to fork to larger blocks. Please show me how you can make such choices with fiat, the end users have generally no direct say on the policies of their money's central bank.

> Maybe for you. Not for everyone.

Hence why everything tends to be public and open source for Bitcoin, so anyone who is conscientious and capable *can* do this.

Trustlessness is a scale, not a binary. It just so happens that in traditional banking you start at the very bottom of the scale and you pretty much stay there. With Bitcoin you get about as high as you can get on this scale for a form of money.

> That's a skill that many people have a much easier time picking up than coding or public-key crypto.

As much as they learn about the meanders of the traditional banking system, it still won't make them more in control of their assets, the more custodians and regulators you add between you and your assets, the less in control you are of them. And we aren't even talking about another form of control you lack with fiat currencies, their almost constant expanding supply.

At which point does this no true Scotsman stops?

Controlling your keys (yes this implies a backup, all wallets guide/help you to do it these days), having access to the source code of your wallet, and being able to verify the data of Bitcoin's public and open blockchain is obviously much better than blindly trusting your bank and getting cut off from your assets at any point through NO fault of your own.

> Until your keys are lost or compromised. Then you are irredeemably screwed.

Yes, you have discovered the big secret everyone in crypto is "hiding"... when they say self-custody they very sneakily imply you, yourself, have custody and responsibility of your assets. If this NEW digital option is not for you, don't use it, go trust custodians. Before Bitcoin you had no such choice.

In the case of banks you are also pretty screwed... just slightly less iredeemably in some cases... in the worste cases you might need to find a lawyer willing to help you, depending the amount it might just not be worth your time or the time of lawyers/judge. Unless the bank decides to hear reason magically or gets tired of your nagging like in OP's case... seem like a lot of trust and no control at all, at any point.

> That's trusting a third party.

It's not, Phoenix is a non-custodial wallet. They provide one shortly-custodial service to on-board on the Lightning Network (to provide a seamless experience, but you can do the process manually with your own node if you prefer). Once the channel on LN is open, it is non-custodial and trustless.

For Hardware Wallets, plenty of other providers exist, exempt of data breaches and dodgy services unlike Ledger. For Bitcoin Coldcard comes to mind.

For the risk of physically losing your keys, seems like a less random, more in your control, risk than trusting Chase Bank, see OP.

> trusting a crypto custodian

If that's your choice, at least you have the option to avoid this with crypto... that's one thing I will never get with people who systematically bash Bitcoin, nobody forces you to use it, it provides you optionality and full control of your assets, something traditional bank and fiat do not offer at all, you are forced by the state to pay your taxes with the currency they tell you, you are practically forced to use banking as a cash only life is pretty complicated these days... so why hate on a new option.

A couple seconds? Which project does this?

It's much easier to follow someone using a public ledger than having to beg/subpoena banks for records with the broken/outdated AML/KYC/KYB system, with bank secrecy in many places, with banks participating in illicit activities too sometimes, etc.

> Theoretically it's possible that people use it for legal means, in practice 99% of people do not.

This is a completely made up statistic and it is showing your bias and/or ignorance about the topic. The lower estimates from industry sources like Chainalysis (0.15-0.62%) contrast sharply with higher academic estimates (23-46%) because the latter tend to include illicit activities that happen off chain but get "washed" on-chain which explains their own huge range of estimation... it is hard to quantify but nobody serious ever came close to 99%.

Something for which there are estimates close to 90% is the volume of transactions happening on centralized exchanges, and since these are required pretty much everywhere to follow AML procedures, just like traditional banks (sometimes even more intrusive than banks), it means it is just as easy, if not easier, to prosecute criminals who would use these... with the added bonus of having a public ledger with records of their activity on-chain.

You should try the "Smart cuts" feature (which is labelled experimental). On common formats/containers (like videos from YouTube) it works really well.

Basically it will attempt a precise cut and if it doesn't coincide with a keyframe it will reencode both ends on each side of the cut and the nearest keyframes.

It is generally very small segments to reencode so it is pretty quick and the quality of these is nearly lossless too so the cut feels invisible.

The only issue is if your segments are really short (under a second) it will generally fail... but chances are keyframe cuts in this case don't work well either.

Is it really dollar-cost averaging if you start changing the dollar amounts spent based on risks, as their description suggests? I've always figured the point was to DCA on volatile assets because you want to disregard that risk/volatility on the long term.

Literally a useless word on its own now that the definition evolved this way... many such cases unfortunately.

I haven't tested it... but https://github.com/DreamNik/pg_doom

I wonder how many of these suits they will have to settle (and how many people will die/get injuried in the process) just for them to be able to avoid judgments being used against them in their other procedure for falsely advertising their car as FSD (and charging more specifically for it).

How do you figure that they should pay an additional price (their principle/silence) for this equity when they've supposedly earned it during their employment (assuming this was not planned when they got hired, since they make them sign new terms at the time of their departure)?

Why do you assume this if it is said here and in the article that they had to sign something at the time of the departure from the company?

I've seen him work on tinygrad on his Twitch livestream couple times, so more than likely him indeed.

They provide constant demand in low consumption periods which makes it possible to have a stronger grid when indeed there is a spike in demand due to external conditions like a heat or cold waves... something which will keep happening more and more (and more extremely) if you listen to climate scientists.

The keywords are scaling and stability, if you prefer to piss this money away on building plants that will work at 50% capacity for years you essentially pay for the rest of the capacity with no other utility, that's bad governance.

What happened to scaling the offer based on (future) demand? That is what a government who wants growth should focus on... instead of telling their citizens which use cases are acceptable or not.

See in Texas how the Bitcoin mining industry negotiated agreements for curtailing and greatly help scaling the grid better... this seems like a way more efficient approach to these offer/demand and scaling issues than "we can't let you buy our product because other people want to buy it".

Bitcoin is not a deflationary asset yet. It is a disinflationary asset until around year 2140 (with the rate decreasing every ~4 years and trending towards 0, at which point it will be deflationary).

For now its supply still inflates by ~1.7% a year.

Neither you, nor I will live to see that moment when the last bitcoin will be mined (as long as miners keep mining in our lifetime).

Bitcoin exists as an option to a lot of very inflationary assets (currencies which not that long ago almost reached 2 digit inflation rates) and having different kind of assets should be welcomed in my opinion, as it seems like a good way to diversify the risk you can't "straightforwardly measure".

I like to hold at least one asset for which I can almost guarantee a supply/emission won't change... better yet I can trustlessly verify it. If these propositions are not attractive to you or others, they don't have to acquire this asset either, it is completely opt-in, unlike the fiat money which your government forces you to acquire to pay their taxes.

If I may recommend OsmAnd~ (https://f-droid.org/packages/net.osmand.plus/) on F-Droid if you're on Android (unlimited free maps), or Osmand+ (10 free maps) on iOS. It allows setting roads that you want to avoid generally.

It's a FOSS alternative to Google Maps, it uses OpenStreetMap for cartography data, in my experience it's pretty reliable and actually much better for certain use cases (like forest paths, in my region). It also has much better offline abilities.

We are going in loop about them for sure!

Merry Christmas!

You might be in a country/region in which advertisers don't buy ads. But for quite some time now uBlock Origin isn't enough to block ads. Also if you are subbed/Twitch Prime to a streamer or have Twitch Turbo it might spare you a lot of ads too.

Nothing, it works just fine for now for me too. I'd still recommand an open source app called NewPipe over YouTube on FireFox, it seems way less hungry battery-wise... and there is likely also less data collection happening.

Exactly what happens on Twitch (that or a low quality version of the stream) if you use the few anti-ads that still work. And I don't mind that, if I do, I usually stop watching and move to something else... especially because their ads are even more annoying than YouTube, often multiple consecutive 30 seconds ads, unskippable. I do not know who watches these, especially when they cut something happening live.

I wouldn't call it a weasel word because it describes accurately the fact nobody gave them the authorization to use the likeness of Attenborough, and there are laws to protect people's likeness in multiple jurisdictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights) that might require such authorization (whether they could be applied in the case of AI remains to be tested, but apparently most of them do not question the "means" to impersonate but the act of it).

It raises an interesting discussion about this though, how is this different from someone making an impression of him and doing a comedy show of it for example. They also had to listen to him for hours to reproduce the voice correctly, are they now infringing some copyright when they use this voice?

To me, as long as you clearly state that this is an impersonation/parody, and there is no deception, I do not really see a reason to protect this, even for music. But I'd like to hear arguments for a protection and how it would be enforced, how do you judge of the likeness, how do you know/prove which source material was used for training for example.

> Because while corruption* is still rampant in the EU

> *also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.

Firstly, corruption is not "rampant" in the European Union, it is on average the least corrupt political organization on this planet: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022

Secondly, lobbying is not corruption, it is legalized, registered and regulated in most EU members and at the Union's level even more so.

If interest groups cannot communicate their interests to politicians, how do you expect politicians to inform their votes, make laws, and take decisions? Should they just guess or know everything about every topic they are solicited about? Should they "Google" the answers (the irony here should strike you in regards to the original post)?