• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2023

help-circle








  • I could not disagree more about Contact. I read the book first. I found it to be an incredibly realistic depiction of what contact with alien life might look like. The clashing of world powers, science, and religion are central themes. The movie slimmed down the story as you would expect, but they completely changed the message at the end. The book ends with Ellie finding actual evidence for some divine being which eliminates her conflict with faith. The world governments had already been forced to cooperate much more. Now with the final conflict resolved, it’s implied that humanity can move forward in a more unified direction. The movie has her just believe in God, more or less. The Christians were right…








  • Why do they want to step into what we are doing here?

    I think there’s a much simpler explanation. Elon’s actions are causing users to want to leave the platform. Meta wants to pounce on this opportunity. ActivityPub is an established, open source protocol that allows Meta to quickly spin up a Twitter competitor. The federated nature means that Meta can reduce regulatory risk. At the same time, they can lobby for increased scrutiny of Twitter since it isn’t interroperable like Threads.

    I have no idea if this is actually how Meta is strategizing. But what I definitely know is that Meta absolutely doesn’t consider federated social media a threat. They aren’t trying to squash us. They’re aimed at Twitter. If they make some change that degrades the experience for us, absolutely we should consider defederation. Until then, let’s try to make some converts out of Threads users.


  • The more I think about it, Warframe is a bad use case. What would give the NFT power would be the game recognizing it which is still a central authority. DE would be better served by implementing an API that the market could use to make trades.

    I think the best use case for NFTs doesn’t really exist yet. The “NFTs don’t solve any problem” argument is limiting your imagination to problems that have already been solved. I think at some point a type of game or software will emerge with no central authority. Maybe a FOSS project with lots of popular forks or a connected network of games from different developers. In this environment, ownership of a digital asset may be something that’s good to transfer between instances or trade between users without having to get all the developers to agree on who gets to control the market.


  • It’s a little more than that. It’s a way of trustlessly proving ownership. Certainly, a company like Valve will be against NFTs because they benefit from having complete control over things like the CS skin market. But I also play Warframe. The main market is an unofficial third party web site which let’s you copy text into chat to organize a sale. It’s clunky. I think the Warframe trading situation would benefit from items being associated with an NFT so the third party service could actually make the trades rather than simply facilitate. DE benefits from trading being a bit awkward so people buy plat instead of trade for it, so that’ll never happen.

    Overall, I suspect NFTs will be the most likely of the crypto ideas to actually find some real use cases. Not needing a central authority to verify ownership is too useful of an idea.



  • I kind of disagree but kind of don’t. I think most of modern urbanists don’t want cars banned, they just don’t want it to be the only practical way to get around.

    Also, I’m a big gearhead. I like driving and working on cars. But I don’t like commuting in traffic, paying to keep a car out of necessity, finding parking, breakdowns. I feel so liberated and free when driving on a mountain road with the top down. I feel similarly free when I get drunk and walk home, get groceries on my bike, or read a book on the bus. I don’t think public transit is right for everyone. But I think having it as a good option alongside driving, walking, and cycling is just good city planning.