fabio

RL_Dane, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

Dear @mozilla
Please, please, please put the RSS indicator back in Firefox.

People need to know about this technology which empowers users over greedy, controlling corporations.

Update: As many have pointed out, you can use @thunderbird as an RSS feed reader, and there are many #firefox add-ons to restore the RSS indicator (one of which I'm already using). But my point is that Firefox needs to lean into RSS as an answer to all the crap that is the modern web, and help educate users about it

owa, 3 months ago to random

Apple will break Web Apps (PWAs) in the EU within the next week ‼️

In order to stop them, we need evidence from you that the harm they are choosing to inflict on EU businesses and consumers is real and significant.

👇👇 Please fill in our NEW more detailed survey: https://forms.gle/oD8chWN1oQzN6s5aA

drewdevault, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

Quick FOSS legal literacy quiz

Imagine the following situation: your project is MIT licensed. Someone takes the whole project and white-labels it (changes the name), then sells it commercially without providing the source code or sharing any of the sales revenue with you. They include "Copyright <your name>" and a copy of the MIT license in the "about" page of the software.

Is this allowed?

fabio, 3 months ago to Bulgaria

I’m not sure who’s to blame in the #EU for giving up to the lobbying efforts of #Apple and #Microsoft (I can’t think of anything short of public official corruption behind the last minute reversal of the #DMA definition of “gatekeeper” for the two most valuable companies in the world), but these are some consequences of this decision:

1. If Apple isn’t labelled as a gatekeeper when it comes to #iMessage (an app used by 1.3B people), then they won’t have to comply and open up their walled garden to 3rd-party clients, while, for example, Messenger and WhatsApp will have to.
2. If Microsoft isn’t labelled as a gatekeeper when it comes to #Edge (a piece of software installed as the default browser on an OS used by at least 1.5B people), then they’ll be free to keep rewriting https:// URLs as microsoft-edge:https:// just for the sake of intercepting everything and breaking compatibility, they’ll no longer have to provide browser selection pop-ups on fresh Windows installations, and they can keep opening all the web views and PWA on Windows devices in their own browser without providing alternatives - while, for example, Chrome and Safari will have to comply.

Shame on the EU for bending to them. Shame on these companies. Shame on their filthy lobbying efforts. Shame on everybody who uses their products.

The DMA and the “gatekeeper” definition was supposed to be the proof that these companies are now run by responsible adults. Being a “gatekeeper” is the acknowledgment that you are running platforms used by billions, and with great power comes great responsibility - towards society, towards the rules of the open market, towards your own competitors.

My employer might be included on the list soon as well, and I’m more than happy to comply. Large tech companies like ours have enjoyed lavish profits and outrageous market shares and ignored anti-competition laws for too long: now it’s time to prove that we’re all grown ups who want to play by the rules.

Instead, Apple and Microsoft have unleashed their overpaid legal counsels and lobbying crews, who have engaged in a pathetic dance to gaslight Brussels officials, and force them to say that one of the largest messaging platforms and one of the most used browser in the world, run by the two companies with the highest evaluation in the world, for some reason are not expected to play by the rules written for everyone else.

Shame on them, and shame on the childish selfish sociopaths who run them.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/14/apple_microsoft_dma_exemptions

fabio, 4 months ago to Youtube

So many interesting insights in this research.

First, the technique used by these researchers to find out the actual number of videos hosted on #YouTube is definitely unorthodox (and inefficient), but it worked. Since Google won’t provide these numbers, and relying on traditional crawling techniques is likely to bring to the surface only videos that enough people have already interacted with, researchers have run an algorithm on a bunch of supercomupters that simply brute forced all the possible combinations of YouTube ID strings, and kept track of the requests that didn’t end up with a 404.

Second, even a conservative estimate of the number of videos on the platform is massive. 14 billion. Or nearly two videos for each human alive. With an unfathomably long tail.

To dig more in detail, videos with 10,000 or more views account for nearly 94% of the site’s traffic overall, but less than 4% of total uploads - a quite extreme version of the 80-20 rule. About 5% of videos have no views at all, almost 75% have no comments, and even more have no likes.

This sheds an interesting light on what YouTube actually is. Not a product that should be monetized at all costs, but a collective memory of basically all the media content that the human race has created in the past two decades. It’s vital infrastructure that should require no entry barriers, and it should be treated as such.

Most of the minutes of videos stored on YouTube’s servers aren’t from MrBeast, Veritasium or Tom Scott. They are from church services, weddings, condo-board meetings, graduation ceremonies, school lectures, and all other things that humans record and want to save on a permanent storage - for themselves, their families, their co-workers, their friends or their classmates. With absolutely no intention of monetization, wider reach, or whatever stinky corporate metrics YouTube PMs are obsessed with.

When you store most of the media content that our whole species created in the past two decades, you have a strong duty of making it accessible to everyone, all the time, with the smallest amount of friction and UX disruption. And that’s exactly the opposite of what Google has been doing lately.

I don’t see a use-case where we should keep publishing to YouTube, unless you are a professional creator with some actual following there. It should never be used for storing things to be shared only with a small circle, and even less as a permanent storage of your memories. Google can’t be trusted, and yet we’ve donated them all of our creations of the past 20 years, thinking that they’ll take care of them forever - remember the “unlimited storage, forever” promise made by GMail back in the day?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/how-many-videos-youtube-research/677250/

fabio, 1 month ago to Ukraine

Putin’s strategy eventually paid off.

Russian sources mentioned many times that it was just a matter of time before the easily distracted Western countries shifted their attention somewhere else - and when that happened nothing would have prevented #Ukraine’s capitulation.

And this is, indeed, what’s happening now.

The Russian army is reaping successes on a daily basis, while Ukraine has even run out of missiles to defend their own infrastructure.

In the meantime, plans to provide more weapons to Ukraine are stuck both in Europe and in the US, while pro-Russia puppets get elected all over the place.

Shame on us for not taking more care of our own values.

https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-updates-kyiv-ran-out-of-missiles-to-defend-plant/live-68835067

fabio, 1 month ago to beeper

How do you feel about #Beeper, #Automattic and Automattic acquiring Beeper?

TBH credit is due where credit is due. Nobody can predict the real intentions of a company, least of all engineers, but Beeper has from day 1 built its product on top of #Matrix, it has made it much easier to install and configure messaging bridges (even to those less likely to go through the hassle of configuring a full Synapse server and install bridges with huge configuration files), and it has challenged Apple head-to-head with the iMessage bridge.

I feel that Beeper joining forces with Automattic will give the company both:

1. Stronger shoulders to defend themselves from lawsuits coming from the likes of Apple and anybody who has made it their business mission to oppose inter-operability as long as they can - Apple can’t simply take down a Github repo with a snap of their fingers if that Github repo is owned by the same company that also owns Wordpress, at least not without a lengthy legal battle on the blueprint of Epic v Apple. Moreover, sclerotic corporate scum with an outdated business model like Apple will just never understand how big of a favour they do to small companies like Beeper when they attack them. Beeper was in beta until recently. Then it got a lot of attention after Apple declared war to its iMessage bridge. Consequence: the largest company on earth suddenly put a relatively small product like Beeper under the spotlight, its user-base went up by an order of magnitude or so within a short time frame, they rushed their way out of beta, and now Automattic is acquiring them. There’s no better publicity than an aggressive rent-seeking parasite waging war against your product.
2. More opportunities to sit at a table with the likes of Google, Meta etc. and get them to actually build the open alternatives together, instead of reverse engineering their closed garden and play and endless catch-up game with them.

The timing of this announcement is also perfect, as the EU’s #DMA is just about to make inter-operability a requirement for messaging gatekeepers - and Beeper seems to be eager to capitalize on its opportunity of being at the right place at the right time.

Let’s keep an eye on how this product develops. I see a lot of potential for growth, and I’ll be looking for all the signals of early-exit/lock-in/enshittification.

https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-joining-automattic/

fabio, 10 days ago to random

I’ve just had to debunk some more pseudoscience garbage shared by my mother on Facebook. The only reason why I still use that platform every now and then is just to make sure that my family doesn’t go completely off the basket case tangent with conspiracy bullshit.

This time, after chemtrails, vaccines that cause autism, Covid intentionally spread by the government, climate change that doesn’t exist, new world order secretely decided in Davos, freemasons and Jews ruling the world, gender theory pushed by a cult of paedophiles, and Putin and Trump as the only saviours, it was the time for the landing on the moon that didn’t happen.

The arguments used by the guy (“there are no signs of the source code that was used by the Apollo missions and the lunar module didn’t have enough thrust to take off”) could be dismantled with a simple Github link and a quick round of the Tsiokovsky rocket equation.

But the original post had hundreds of reshares, while my response didn’t get a single reaction. And my mother, who quit school at the age of 12 and has no clue of what either specific impulse nor escape velocity are, didn’t understand anything of my explanation anyway, and tomorrow she’ll probably just reshare some more bullshit that she wants to believe in.

Does anyone have family members or close friends who are also stuck in this vicious conspiracy cycle that apparently can’t be broken with any efforts of reasoning? How do you cope with that? It is becoming utterly depressing from my side. The conspiracy-inclined side of social media has features that resemble too much those of a cult. I’ve fought to take my family out of a cult years ago, just to see them plunge into another one. The time required to debunk bullshit is high, while the time to reshare it basically zero, and I feel like it’s a war I can’t win. Wondering if there’s a way out that doesn’t end up affecting our own mental health even more.

fabio, 2 months ago to Roku

This is getting really out of hand.

I knew that 23AndMe’s data leak and consequent forced #arbitration agreement would have set a dangerous precedent.

In the past months, more and more companies have forced their users into private arbitration agreements to avoid lawsuits and class actions.

But few have gone as far as #Roku - the device gets completely disabled until the user accepts the new arbitration rules.

Like in previous cases, it’s opt-out rather than opt-in, opt-out requests must be mailed on physical paper to the company itself (but I guess that a fax, a telegram or some smoke signals may work as well), and the opt-out window only lasts a few days. This has become a common pattern - when you don’t want somebody to do something, you just increase the friction of the process to nearly ridiculous levels.

Legislators ought to act fast. The right of suing an offender and call them accountable in front of the law is a fundamental democratic right just like voting. Forced arbitration processes are a denial of our fundamental democratic rights. And we’re letting a bunch of companies be above the law by simply dropping an updated T&Cs email in our box.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/03/04/2120246/roku-disables-devices-until-users-agree-to-new-arbitration-rules

fabio, 1 month ago to twitter

The cesspit formerly known as #Twitter has reached such a point of no return that journalists can be kicked out of it for criticizing its sociopath owner, but the sociopath owner will fight with all of his power to ensure that the live stream of a murder won’t be taken down because “freedom of speech”.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/23/australia_x_terror_video_takedown/

fabio, 4 months ago to random

An applause to #NextCloud for being the first tech company to take a clear stance against identity/exclusionary politics and fascism, and for inviting all other tech companies to join their appeal.

When fascists are back in town, you can't just throw around your generic talk about inclusion and diversity.

You also need to clearly point out who is at risk, what are the risks, and who are the fascists.

Tech shapes our world. So nobody needs tech companies that don't take positions or responsibilities in how they shape it.

https://nextcloud.com/blog/statement-nextcloud-stands-for-an-open-and-free-society/

fabio, 2 months ago to threads

I’ve had some quite passionate (euphemism) discussions in the past couple of days with people who accused me of “throwing minorities under the bus” or “allowing Meta to scoop up everybody’s posts” just because I’ve temporarily decided not to defederate #Threads from my personal Akkoma instance.

What’s interesting is that some of those accusations came from people who, in some cases, had their profiles fully public and searchable, on instances with webfinger enabled and without authenticated API constraints.

Their posts are already available on any search engine, searchable on Mastodon, their profiles can already be enumerated via API, and, even if their instance blocks another one, users on the blocked instance may still be able to see their content (especially if reshared/quoted) through unauthenticated API calls. But yeah, they think that the problem is with my tiny personal instance not defederating what they don’t like.

I’ve got the impression that there’s a lot of confusion on the #Fediverse on how to customize the #visibility and #privacy of your content, and how to make sure that only those you wish will ever be able to see it.

In order to prevent pointless retaliatory blocks/defederations towards instances whose only fault is not to block what others want them to block, and in order to prevent the Fediverse to splinter into small islands along totally arbitrary fracture lines on the basis of unfounded beliefs about how it works, I’ve put together a sequence of steps to check if your profile and your content are really private and sealed from unauthorized access (if that’s what you wish) - thanks to @gruff for the suggestion, and thanks to @evan for validating some of my assumptions.

@Gargron you’re welcome to validate my hypothesis about how AUTHORIZED_FETCH and DISALLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_API_ACCESS work on Mastodon - I knew about AUTHORIZED_FETCH before, but I see that its functionality is now split on two environment variables, and I’m not sure if both instance A and instance B need to have it enabled to prevent content leak towards blocked instances from reshares/quotes.

cc @fediverse @privacy

fabio, 3 months ago to random

A stark reminder that progress doesn't happen by itself. It's not a necessary consequence of our human activities. We won't make it to the stars (or any other planet in our solar system, or our moon, or even our own orbit) without thousands of brilliant scientists and engineers squeezing their brains on unfathomably difficult problems in order to achieve these moonshots, lavishly paid by publicly funded programs that ensure that they can focus on doing things the right way without worrying about budget.

There's a reason why Voyager probes were launched 45 years ago, and they're still transmitting data from the edge of our solar system, and we've never managed to replicate that effort.

There's a reason why nobody has set foot on the moon in nearly 50 years, and lately we're even struggling to land probes on it.

There's a reason why many talks about space exploration nowadays involve billionaires launched in dick-shaped rockets to take selfies in low orbit, commercial plans to dig water or rubble on asteroids, and even a glorious institution like NASA has to rely on a fascist megalomaniac lunatic in order to launch its payloads in orbit, because the shuttle program was unceremoniously shut down, and even our space station is on its way towards being unceremoniously retired with no alternatives.

We sent people to the moon with the combined power of a couple of Commodore 64, and probes to the edge of our cosmic neighborhood that were equipped with 16KB of RAM each.

Imagine what we could do with today's technology and computing power, if only we put science and ingenuity back at the center of our scientific talks, if only space agencies were properly funded (not only when they have to compete with a major foreign power), and if only we tried to keep the filthy hands, shortsightedness and irrationality of our rotten capitalist economy away from space exploration.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/01/lessons_from_the_voyager_probes/

fabio, 3 months ago to Matrix

I wish that #Matrix (and #Synapse) were better designed.

It has become among the most popular open messaging protocols, but it remains a scalability nightmare.

It's literally the Blockchain of messaging. Its current state is given by the sum of the whole chain of events received since t=0. It's a brittle append-only ledger, and any modifications you do to it are very likely to break it.

Do you have a huge 100GB database and you want to clean up old stuff? Sorry, you can't. There are some non-official solutions for compacting the events, but they're all likely to break your db - and none worked so far in my case.

Do you have users on your instance that entered a busy room on matrix.org? Then you'll get all the join/leave events of that busy room on your db, with no way of deleting them, and nothing to do unless your users exit those rooms.

Did you start your instance by toying with the default SQLite backend, and now that it's become big you want to move to Postgres? Sorry, no official guides provided, only unofficial procedures scattered across a bunch of blogs.

Do you want to change the name of your server? Sorry, you can't. All the events are tightly coupled to your server name. The advised solution is to simply start a new instance.

Such a rigid and brittle implementation shouldn't have become an open de facto standard without much questioning about its poor design decisions.

At the very least, some official tools must be provided to enable admins to compact events. If the size of the database is guaranteed to increase indefinitely, then entry barriers against self-hosting are only going to increase.

fabio, 3 months ago to apple

#Apple: "If some developers don't want to abide to our store's exploitative rules, they're always free to release their apps as PWAs".

Also Apple: "We're killing PWAs overnight with no notice and no migration plan, from now on they'll just open in a Safari window, and we're going to break their access to notifications and storage. Btw, we're only going to break them in the EU".

The Register used the right term for this act: malicious compliance. Or retaliation against the DMA for forcing them not to be jerks, I guess.

I've followed antitrust rulings in the EU since the early times of Internet Explorer. And I've never, ever seen a company being as uncooperative, retaliatory and invested in aggressive lobbying as Apple. It really makes you wonder whether all the worst sociopaths in the world just decided to go and work for the same employer.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/08/apple_web_apps_eu/

fabio, 2 months ago to random

Me: “After a long consideration, I’ve decided not to defederate Threads from my personal instance, because the benefits of being able to reach out to my friends and relatives using the open tools that I’m contributing to build and run outweigh the risks, but I’ll keep an eye on it, I may reserve the right to block Threads later, and I respect and understand those who prefer to block them instead“.

Easily triggered strangers: “You self-entitled privileged cis tech bro, you are not doing enough to protect vulnerable minorities from the fascist harassers in the world out there, I hope you die from a gut infection“.

So much for “the Fediverse is an open place that embraces diversity and mutual respect where everybody should feel safe”.

fabio, 2 months ago to random

If a free #VPN sounds too good to be true, it’s usually because it is.

Free VPN services that actually turn your device into a zombie proxy:

• Lite VPN
• Blaze Stride
• Byte Blade VPN
• All CaptainDroid apps
• Fast Fly VPN
• Fast Fox VPN
• Fast Line VPN
• Oko VPN
• Quick Flow VPN
• Sample VPN
• Secure Thunder
• Shine Secure
• Speed Surf
• Swift Shield VPN
• Turbo Track VPN
• Turbo Tunnel VPN
• Yellow Flash VPN
• VPN Ultra
• Run VPN

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/free-vpn-apps-on-google-play-turned-android-phones-into-proxies/

fabio, 2 months ago to fediverse

A #Fediverse #tip that I’ve only discovered recently (and from what I see is not very used yet): #groups through Guppe.

While full-blown groups aren’t supported yet (at least not on any ActivityPub implementations I know of), you can join/create groups on the fly by following @some-group@a.gup.pe.

If the group already exists, you’ll join it. Otherwise, it’ll be created.

Then just tag @some-group@a.gup.pe in a post that you want to submit to a group, and it’ll be broadcast to anyone who follows the Guppe account.

The source code is here.

fabio, 1 month ago to bitwarden

Just migrated from #Bitwarden to #Vaultwarden.

Same API, same features, same UI, and support for other DBs than MSSQL.

One single stand-alone application vs. Bitwarden’s 10 Docker containers. 70MB of RAM vs. 2GB. 3MB of db storage vs. 300MB.

Why was a password manager supposed to take so many resources in the first place? Just because it runs on a Microsoft-only stack and on .NET’s inefficient VM? Just because somebody thought that it was a good idea to separate everything into different containers (even icons and 2fa are modeled as separate services in Bitwarden)?

It reminds me of my recent migration from Mastodon to Akkoma. I got more features, 5GB of RAM freed up and 300GB of storage freed up almost overnight.

Writing and running inefficient software that pointlessly consumes all the resources available on a machine should be a crime in a world with limited resources.

It makes me think of how much shitty bloated software like @bitwarden, probably based on awfully inefficient languages and frameworks like Java, Ruby on Rails and .NET, is running out there, pointlessly sucking up resources for doing simple jobs that could easily be done with 99% less resources.

Today’s developers, spoiled by IDEs, powerful machines, docker-compose and shortsighted “just throw more RAM at the problem” approaches, have forgotten how to write efficient software. Time for them to learn how to write good efficient software again. Software doesn’t eat the world. Only shitty software built on shitty framework does.

fabio, 20 days ago to llm

A study that confirms what I’ve been suspecting for a while: fine-tuning a #LLM with new knowledge increases its tendency to hallucinate.

If the new knowledge wasn’t provided in the original training set, then the model has to shift its weights from their previous optimal state to a new state that has to accommodate both the previous and new knowledge - and it may not necessarily be optimal.

Without a new validation round against the whole previous cross-validation and test sets, that’s just likely to increase the chances for the model to go off the tangent.

#AI #ML @ai

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05904

fabio, 5 days ago to history

#Platypush 1.0 is out!

It’s been 10 months and 1049 commits since the latest release of Platypush, 7 years since the first commit, and 10 years since the first release of its ancestor, https://github.com/blacklight/evesp.

The past few months have been quite hectic and I have nearly rewritten the whole codebase, but I feel like the software is now at a stage where it’s mature and stable enough to be used by a larger audience.

The changelog is quite big, but it doesn’t even cover all the changes, as many integrations have been completely rewritten.

The biggest (breaking) change is the merge between plugins and backends. Now, except for those integrations that actually listen for messages and execute them (like HTTP and Redis), all the other integrations are plugins. This greatly simplifies the configuration and removes a lot of confusion for new users.

The Docker support has been greatly improved too. There are now officially supported multi-arch images for Alpine, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, an official docker-compose.yml file, and both the platydock and platyvenv utilities have been almost completely rewritten to seamlessly automate the creation and configuration of containers and virtual environments (respectively) starting from a single config.yaml.

And the Python API has become much simpler and consistent. No more __init__.py files that the user had to manually create in each subfolder of scripts, just drop a .py file with your automation in the scripts dir and it’ll be picked up. Moreover, the most common imports are now available on top level as well, and there’s no more need to create procedures/hooks/crons with varargs:

from platypush import run, when
from platypush.events.sun import SunsetEvent

@when(SunsetEvent)
def sunset_lights_on():
  run('light.hue.on')

There’s also a revamped documentation portal, which now includes both the wiki and the plugin reference.

Most of the integrations have been rewritten at different degrees, and in the process many bugs have been squashed, many features added and many APIs updated to be more consistent, so make sure to check the documentation pages of your integrations in order to migrate.

And if you have more requests or questions, feel free to open a ticket, a PR or ask on the Lemmy server.

https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Platypush-1.0-is-out

fabio, 3 months ago to Palestine

Pro #Palestine protest in front of my office today.

I've been stuck inside of the office for a few hours together with my wife and kid, as they also came visiting today.

But I couldn't sympathize more with the protesters.

I've raised ethical questions many times about our choice of doing business with hotels and apartments that stand on stolen lands.

I asked the management several times why we are contributing to stealing revenue away from Palestinians and moving it to those who have been illegally occupying their lands for decades, in violation of many UN resolutions.

I asked several times why we severed our business links with Crimea after Russia illegally occupied it, but people on our website can still still book their holidays on occupied Palestinian territories.

I asked how can we say that we stand so much for diversity, inclusion and justice, while we remain horribly silent on what's happening in the Middle East - maybe gay people are a bit "more equal" than Palestinians, or maybe it's just because initiatives like the gay pride give much more visibility and it's considered less controversial than standing with Muslim people who are dying under the Israeli bombs amid the deafening silence of the West?

All I got back was either silence, or answers along the lines of "the company won't change its position unless it affects its bottom line".

Well, I hope that a few dozens of angry protesters, and their calls for boycotting #Booking, will affect our bottom line and our public image much more than I could do.

For the first time, while we were all trapped inside of our office, I heard some of my colleagues discussing if what Israel is doing is fair - that's usually considered a highly political topic that should be avoided in professional settings. Did it really take a bunch of university students trapping us inside for a couple of hours to wake up and realize that there's a whole world out our shiny bubble, that with great power comes great responsibility, that where and with whom we do business impacts the real world, and that when you're so big you can't afford to just leave politics out, because everything you do at large scale is political?

And I would also like to call out our management for the poor management of the issue.

They blocked all the doors of the office and let nobody in or out for hours.

I asked to walk out and stand in solidarity with the protesters, to no avail. I wrote on our social platform that we should be allowed to have a forum to discuss these issues and bring our message, as employees, to the management, just for my comment to be removed and comments on the original post about the protest being blocked.

If you feel like boycotting Booking after this, I feel your point and I fully understand you. I'd do the same if I wasn't working for them. I wish we had better ways, as employees, to get even our own voices heard.

fabio, 3 months ago to Texas

Lee Bratcher: remember this name.

He’s the president of the #Texas #Blockchain Council.

He and his association are those who lobbied hard for halting a program to monitor how much energy miners actually consume in the State - not even to ban, restrict or tax mining: he managed to halt even a monitoring program, to understand how much energy these activities are subtracting from a grid funded by everybody’s taxes.

While ordinary citizens are increasingly asked to save energy both during heatwaves and blizzards, #Bitcoin miners won’t give up a single inch when it comes to their alleged right of burning energy to figure out which string has a hash with a certain number of leading zeros - just because a perverse system of financial incentives disguised as a cryptocurrency has decided that this inefficient waste of resources matters more than people consuming energy to heat/light their homes.

When Bratcher talks, you can immediately recognize the sociopath redneck cowboy talking points. The plan for measuring how much energy miners consume is part of a “politically motivated campaign“ from Biden and his administration (not a legitimate attempt of getting transparency into the consumption of shared resources), “an attack against legitimate American businesses seeking to make the lives of bitcoin miners, their employees, and their communities too difficult“ (if they feel like their consumption of energy is justified and proportionate then why measuring it would threaten businesses and those who work there?) and an “attack against personal freedom“ (what about the principle that your freedom ends where somebody else’s freedom begins?).

Proof-of-work has no place in a world with limited resources. It was a good proof-of-concept 15 years ago, and we should have never allowed a whole business model to be built around it. Unfortunately, a tiny but very loud minority who has built their fortunes around this unsustainable business model are now trying to convince us that it’s their right to waste everybody’s energy, and that we should thank them for defending everybody’s freedom.

Remember the names of these folks next time you are asked to reduce your consumption of electricity. And tell your kids about them too - they’ll probably outlive us and inherit a planet that will be more hostile towards life, and they need to know whose fault it was if our planet ended up like that.

https://links.fabiomanganiello.com/share/65defa6698e1a1.81014727

fabio, 2 months ago to random

Conservatives' approach to solving difficult problems: sign a law that makes the problem illegal, and the problem will solve by itself.

https://www.axios.com/local/miami/2024/03/20/florida-law-desantis-homeless-camps-public-sleeping