I don’t like it

I have to give credit where it’s due, I actually like this change. Likes used to be private, and then they became public and subject to the toxic performativity of social media

It’s anti-tech propaganda. The same is happening with crypto. Certain groups don’t like it, so they try to convince the public that it is bad for the environment so it will be banned

This isn’t a good situation, but I also don’t like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not “valuable” uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.

Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.

Good! We need to hold these companies accountable. Around the mid 2010s they realized that it’s more profitable to have addicts instead of users. Casinos, bars, and cigarette sellers are forbidden from selling to children. These addictive platforms should be subject to similar limitations

This is not worth our time to keep arguing. I hope you have a nice day! :)

Obviously if the state doesn’t enforce the titles they’re useless. Sure if the president of a corrupt country decided he wants your house he’s gonna get it. But a DLT would prevent lower level corruption that relies on the benefit of the doubt.

If a corrupt official uses their access to change the PDF title of your house to be in his name, he could take that to court to take your house from you. A ledger would prevent that change from happening, or at least leave a permanent record of the change

Tor is not built in

Source? I’ve used Tor with Brave

AFAIK if you don’t trust the server and want to know exactly what code was run by it, there are only two options: a smart contract blockchain, or ZK Proofs (which came out of blockchain research)

It’s a social technology. It allows outsiders to validate that the election tally code was run correctly. Elections are run every day on the Ethereum blockchain often that has financial implications for the voters. It doesn’t mean they never get hacked, but it certainly gives the users more visibility and trust in their vote than a centralized black box

I don’t think running an election on a centralized database is a great idea

We agree something! :)

I think you should re-evaluate your thinking on the second part. I know it’s popular to bash on blockchains here, but blockchain isn’t all ponzi schemes and libertatians, just like the internet isn’t all phishing emails and troll farms

The research wing of the blockchain world is very interesting, at least from a nerdy, theoretical perspective

Not a fair comparison. Bank databases have been running since the 70s on code that has barely changed in that time. They’ve been battle tested for decades, so it’s unlikely a new exploit is going to be easy to find.

On the other hand, if you wanted to run an election on a centralized database, think about what that means. All the votes need to go to 1 server somewhere, which will tell us all who won the election. A server that is run by an IT team who will have root access and could be phished, or bribed, or threatened. A server that only gets a real-world test once every few years.

Users have no idea if their vote is in the database, if it’s correct, if it got counted in the final vote or not.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t trust the current crop of DLT tech more than the pen and paper method, but at least it’s more transparent than a centralized system

There are lots of knee-jerk reactions because people saw the word “blockchain” in the title. It’s as intellectually lazy as the shills who refuse to criticize the crypto industry for its shady parts

This just sounds like a decentralized Slack, with a blockchain to ensure all nodes have the same data. The details are sparse, but this sounds like a proof of authority system to achieve consensus between authorized nodes in the network. No cryptocurrency involved. It’s just using blockchain as a consensus algorithm between decentralized nodes(which is what it was designed for).

It doesn’t say, but since their target demo seems to be enterprises, my guess is that the idea would be companies run their own node in the network, which would allow a high degree of security and be interoperable with other enterprises.

“But you could use a federated system…”

I’m all for the growth of the fediverse, but it still has many problems. If you’re running a large enterprise that needs a guarantee that all your messages are synced, in the right order, and nothing has been removed later, a proof-of-authority blockchain is a better system than something federated

A well financed actor would find it much easier to hack a centralized database than to hack a modern blockchain

Someone gains access to your private key and you just… don’t own your house anymore?

Under the current system you don’t even have a private key. In some countries it’s fairly common for someone to lose their home because someone bribed the official to change the title records.

I think that key management is blockchain’s Achilles Heel, but there are some interesting potential solutions

Yeah this article is not very convincing

Brave is great! No ads, Tor built in, and can install Chrome extensions. I don’t use their crypto wallet and it’s never bothered me

I don’t think it’s naive to think that there is an existential risk from AI. Yes, LLMs are not sentient and I don’t think ChatGPT is Skynet, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if we could create an entity that is generally intelligent, has goals, and is orders of magnitude smarter than humans that is cannot be controlled. And that poses a risk if its interests come into conflict with ours

Global mega-corps are already a kind of AI. They’re generally intelligent actors that find creative solutions to problems and work to advance their own interests, often at the expense of humanity, despite attempts to reign them in. A true AGI might be like a super-powered corporation, that can have it’s big decision meetings every second instead of once a week

However, I am also concerned with global regulation of this stuff because if state actors are the only ones allowed to have AI, that could get dystopian very quickly as well so… 🤷‍♂️

My first thought is to rank items by totalVotes / score. This would prioritize posts that get lots of votes in both directions.

Example:

def getControversialScore(upvotes, downvotes):
  return (upvotes + downvotes) / abs(upvotes - downvotes)

getControversialScore(50, 10) # 1.5
getControversialScore(4, 5) # 9
getControversialScore(6, 30) # 1.44
getControversialScore(30, 28) # 29