makeasnek

makeasnek , 1 day ago

They want to ban porn in the entire country, it's all a part of #project2025. They also want to ban abortions. And being gay in public. And completely break the separation of church and state. Don't sit this election out. https://defeatproject2025.org/

makeasnek , 1 day ago

Banning porn nationwide is part of Project 2025's plan. defeatproject2025.org

makeasnek , 19 hours ago

In the ground, very deep, forever, for not nearly as much money as you might think. It takes up very, very little space. It's not green liquid that can spill, it's pieces of glass.

makeasnek , 19 hours ago

I'd love to see more nuclear power generation. Nuclear power is the densest form of power on earth, it's safer than even renewables and doesn't have the huge e-waste or energy storage problems that come with it. It's very, very safe even compared to windmills depending on where you draw the box. I have never met anybody who actually understands nuclear power safety or waste disposal who is against it. At best, they say "renewables are currently cheaper so let's focus there" but they're not like "Nuclear is bad".

makeasnek OP , 2 days ago

How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

makeasnek , 1 day ago

*Veracrypt, Truecrypt is no longer maintained

makeasnek OP , 2 days ago

How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

makeasnek , 2 days ago

How to contact your MEP https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

makeasnek , 2 days ago

!boinc join a movement of people donating their spare CPU time to medical research

makeasnek , 1 day ago

Many of the BOINC projects these days don't have screensavers unfortunately. But World Community Grid and Rosetta@home have decent ones.

makeasnek , 1 day ago

It's done off-chain because on-chain would be expensive and slow. On-chain takes 10 min and $1.50-$15 in fees depending on the day. Lightning takes < 1 second for < 1 penny in fees.

Lightning transactions are secured by the base chain, so you're not at risk of losing any funds. The transaction data is "off-chain" because there's no reason for it to be "on-chain".

makeasnek OP , 3 days ago

These laws are being passed by politicians who generally don't understand technology. What they will achieve is a reduction in privacy and liberty for every citizen in the EU and easier methods to clamp down on dissent. Just because it's not technically perfect or difficult to implement fully doesn't mean it's not a threat. It's one step closer totalitarianism, and what's stopping totalitarianism is everyday people, one step at a time, battling it back.

makeasnek , 9 days ago

Disagree with this one, voters should have the final say in who is electable. If there's an 85 year old out there who can convince 51% of the electorate to vote for them in the primaries, go for it. This rule will become a problem if life expectancy continues to increase at the rate it has the past 50 years, with AI and some major changes in genetics, we are poised to solve a lot of causes of death in our lifetime, which means longer life expectancy.

makeasnek , 9 days ago

Or because they're just genuinely well received by the public. One of my reps has been in public service for decades and I actually like most of his positions. The longer you are in office, in theory, the better you will understand the legislative system and be able to push issues your constituents want. If you do, you keep getting re-elected, if you don't, you don't.

Regardless, this is a problem of FPTP and the primary system not age. Primaries select for who is considered the "most electable" not the candidate "most want". Fix that system, and age is not an issue. Or if more people who don't like 80 year olds participated in the primaries this would also be less of an issue. But they don't, they just complain about the "lesser of two evils" choice even though they had a "lesser of 10 evils choice" and chose not to participate in it.

makeasnek , 8 days ago

I would work full time on contributing code and development efforts to !boinc , which is a software used by scientists to distribute massive computational workloads to the computers of volunteers for processing. All sorts of medical, physics, and math research gets done through it.

makeasnek , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

Downvote me all you want but I'd buy $15 of Bitcoin then wait a few years. So far I have been immensely happy with every single one of my BTC purchases and I don't think that's going to change any time soon. Whatever amount I buy now will be the same % of the total supply (21 million coins) in 5 or 10 years time which is more than I can say about pretty much anything else.

makeasnek , 10 days ago

Link without paywall: https://archive.is/TvS0F

makeasnek , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

Programming. Challenging and creative in a way that is different than art & music but still somehow similar. I find it almost relaxing sometimes. Python is a great first language and you can go from no knowledge whatsoever to a working program that does something genuinely useful in an hour, like scraping a website and showing you some data from it. Mastery takes years.

If you genuinely enjoy programming, you can legitimately change the world with your knowledge. There are tons of open source projects out there which benefit humanity yet don't have enough development talent. It's one thing to volunteer your time and see a good outcome from it, it's another to volunteer your time to build a system which guarantees good outcomes for many people over long time periods and get to see that system grow and get used by people.

makeasnek , 11 days ago

It would be nice to have a decentralized or federated buy/sell platform that replaces craigslist. Facebook marketplace has absolutely eaten craigslist for lunch, and I hate that I have to use it to sell stuff, but there are few viable alternatives for local sales.

eBay is great until you want to sell a $300 iPhone and don't want to mess with buyer return fraud which is rampant on that platform (and most custodial payment services like PayPal). I don't sell anything on eBay for over >$100, got burned too many times.

makeasnek , 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

Many of these regulations will make it harder for humanity to share in the benefit of AI. The corps currently involved in AI development have made some pushes for regulation. You don't normally see corps do that, so that raises some questions. Why? Answer: They want to stamp out competition.

You know who has no trouble complying with and/or bending large, burdensome regulations? Huge megacorps. You know who does have trouble complying with them though? Small startups & open source initiatives.

makeasnek OP , 14 days ago

Increasing the money supply, all other things equal, decreases the value of the currency. It's that simple. The price, or value of the currency is the net of supply and demand for that currency. Same demand, higher supply, lower value per unit.

This link argues inflation is more complicated than that, which I agree with in my opening sentence, inflation has many causes. Of course it's more complicated than that. But that doesn't change the underlying basic reality that inflating the supply on its own reduces the value of the money. Supply and demand is simple, unpacking which % of the 10% inflation experienced in an economy is caused by money printing or push-pull or supply chain disruptions is a more complex and possibly impossible to fully answer question.

makeasnek , 14 days ago

I'm glad to finally see this cockroach serve time for something but it unnerves me a bit that his something is ignoring a congressional subponea. We are given the fifth for a reason, I remember when this exact same subpoena power was directed against suspected communists during the red scare. And when republicans have used it in their numerous BS "house investigations" into everything from Fauci to Hunter's laptop. Some of those lib subponea recipients rightfully told them to kick rocks because the investigations were stupid.

And when grand juries (a different kind of subponea power) have been used as fishing expeditions to disrupt activist groups, or target Wikileaks. Pushing a world where you can be forced to testify to the government is questionable imo. Giving people immunity and forcing them to testify isn't a great solution either, as that information can still be used to further tyranny even if you cannot personally be charged with what you say. Our ability to refuse to cooperate is an important check on tyrrany, that's why we have the 5th in the first place.

makeasnek , 14 days ago

Inflation is caused by inflationary currency. Any other inflation caused by supply chain issues, corporate greed, lack of market competition, etc is just added on top of that. Fiat inflationary currency is a rather new invention in terms of the human timeline. They aim for 2-3% inflation in “good years”. Central banks are not to be trusted.

Think of it: in the last 50 years, everything has gotten cheaper to produce thanks to increasing mechanization, outsourcing to cheap labor/low regulation countries, and extremely efficient supply chains. Yet so many things “costs more” than it did 50 years ago. Even basics like bread. How is that the case? Shouldn’t it cost less? Where is that “extra efficiency” going if not to lower prices? The answer: bread is the same value it’s always been, the money has gotten less valuable. This is how they keep working class people running on a treadmill, never able to achieve economic mobility.

Inflationary currency devalues the currency you worked hard to earn by increasing the supply. It hits the middle class the worst because they have more of their net wealth in cash, often in the form of emergency funds, savings, and putting together enough money for a down payment on a home. Rich people have their money in assets which aren’t harmed by currency inflation. Poor people live hand to mouth. If you want to identify the causes of increasing wealth disparity, the inability of people to save money is a major one.

makeasnek , 15 days ago

Very excited to see this, and to be able to follow BlueSky and Mastodon users from my nostr app

makeasnek OP , 14 days ago

They may have not, who knows. If they're using the donations to buy arms from other countries, BTC may well be the easiest way to move those funds. Hryvnia isn't exactly a popular currency for international trade and moving money in/out of Ukraine is difficult. Banks see it as a place with many counterparty risks and low liquidity, many banks won't even let you wire money there for that reason.

If they did convert them, they probably used an exchange of some kind and converted it to whatever currency they need to buy whatever it is they want to buy. Either USD/EUR or the currency of the country they're buying from (Lira if they are buying Bayraktar drones). Somebody more knowledgeable in chain analytics than me could probably figure out which exchange they used.

makeasnek OP , 15 days ago

I'm not super worried, but I did buy a few extra groceries. We do not have the public trust in public health agencies to manage a pandemic. I still wear N95s at the store, I have more boosters than my entire social circle combined, and I don't trust a damned thing the CDC says at this point. I "followed the science" and trust scientists. But I don't trust the CDC and If I don't, why would anybody else?

I remember them telling us covid was low risk, that it would be contained, and not to panic. That masks didn't work, that there was no reason to buy them. And that it wasn't airborne despite evidence piling up for months. I remember the Surgeon General going on tv and telling us to wrap a t-shirt over our face as an effective mask. They took years to update their mask guidance, last I checked they still suggest surgical masks despite N95s being widely available and vastly more effective.

I remember them turning down millions of tests from the WHO so they could release their own, only to release tests that did not work and had to be recalled. That costs us weeks when days mattered. I remember the FDA going after a scientist in Seattle who offered free covid tests against FDA policy, threatening any scientist who dared to offer free local covid testing when CDC had a backlog measured in weeks. In fact, I remember the CDC fumbling at basically every possible point in the pandemic's trajectory from day 1 until present day where they release boosters right after the peak of infections, after everybody has already gone back to school and everybody's gotten sick, and when the boosters do arrive not only are they late and meaningless, they are an entire strain behind.

I remember them publishing "studies" with such poor scientific rigor that my 5th grade science project would blow them out of the water. One in particular the CDC used to prove masks work, which they absolutely do, and they went on a whole media tour touting this study, was a case study with two hairdressers. One hairdresser wore a mask and one didn't. The one who wore masks didn't infect any patients, while the maskless one did. Except this proved nothing at all because on average, most people are not infectious. Even if neither of them wore masks, it was a completely expected result. Absolute hot garbage science from the agency that is supposed to be the best at it in the world.

Fuck 'em all, that entire agency needs to be replaced.

makeasnek OP , 15 days ago

arious far-right groups basically created the framework for their anti-science actions with the COVID pandemic and various anti-vaxx groups that existed before it. Therefore they will double down in their efforts to resist any kinds of mitigation efforts because of “freedom” and “do not comply”. Hell, many of them are buying raw milk in hopes of “gaining immunity” and of course “owning the libs”!

That was a "viable" strategy for a disease with a 1% mortality rate. H5N1 is expected to be much higher AFAICT. And there is some solid analysis showing that this particular form of owning the libs resulted in some swung elections.

makeasnek , 15 days ago

Honestly this applies to a lot of people in civic service. Not rich politicians, but the people trying to run your local or state government. Often the races are uncontested, because they literally can't find even one other person who wants the job. Some of them are incompetent or pursue these jobs for power-seeking reasons, but many of them have their hearts in the right place and want to give back to their community, often while fighting ridiculous red tape at one end while contending with threats and harassment from citizens at the other. And the pay is often terrible. My local city council positions would qualify you for food stamps/EBT.

makeasnek OP , 17 days ago

It's always the same bullshit when they want to take away your rights:

• "Protect the children"
• "Foreign influence" or "spies"
• "Misinformation"
• "Stop Terrorism"

makeasnek OP , 12 days ago

I would love for lightning to scale the network, but I’m worried that it won’t.

It already has significantly scaled the network and it's made Bitcoin viable again for microtransactions etc. There's still a lot of room to grow there. Look at what Nostr is doing with it, it's very cool. It will probably not be the only scaling tech, there can be different tech for different purposes and that is fine too. Ark, for example, is also very promising and solves the annoying UX problem of "needing inbound liquidity to accept a payment" in Lightning.

but I know many people have been disappointed by it.

When it first came out it was very hard to use. It's much better now, all of that complexity has been abstracted away by modern wallets and they continue to get easier to use.

makeasnek , 15 days ago

We need decentralized, federated search. I remember YaCy from years ago was attempting this. Anybody know if there's anybody actively working on this?

makeasnek , 15 days ago

Interesting thanks I'll take a look!

makeasnek , 16 days ago (edited 16 days ago)

Same thing whenever you see articles about Bitcoin's energy use. Or the energy usage of any tech service/product:

• For some reason blames the product or service people are using, not politicians for failing for decades to invest in renewable energy.
• No contextual information (how much does the remittance industry use? How much energy does SWIFT, IBAN, or printing paper money use)? How efficiently do these systems actually use energy?
• No mention of the many useful things it does with that energy or why it uses energy in the way it does. (Send money across the globe in under a second for under a penny in fees to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet) (low fees available on Bitcoin lightning)
• No mention that most of that energy comes from renewables or how being a "buyer of last resort" for energy actually helps build out renewable grids since grid operators can guarantee whatever energy capacity they provision will be bought. Doesn't even look at energy mix and demand curves.

Just ragebait tailored to their readers who already have strong negative opinions about this asset class but not about bonds or stocks or other asset classes for some reason. Even though Bitcoin has kept all its promises for 15 years in a row, never been hacked, never experienced an hour of downtime, or bank holiday, and never had its value printed away by an ever increasing supply (supply is capped at 21 million coins).