I know… But the point is, he’s stuck there.

He had 2 choices:

• Play ball and swear his oath and suck up a little to the godfather and live happily ever after
• Kick up a stink against Putin and find himself falling out of a closed window (or, best case, being deported and spending his days in a max security prison).

It’s not really like “free will” applies here :)

Whatever the lawyer said is just the minimum required decorum IMO. Just politics. The oath is probably simply required to get the passport.

Putin got to get one-over on the US and Snowden got to stay out of prison (well, in reality a really huge prison but still…). It’s a marriage of convenience.

Does he really? I think it’s more like he got stuck there on his way to Ecuador and now he has no alternative but to “like” Putin :P

After all his plan was never to stay in Russia.

Ideally, I think a social platform should lure radicalizing agents, then expose them to de-radicalizing ones, without exposing everyone else. Might be a hard task to achieve, but worth it.

You really think this works? I don’t. I just see them souring the atmosphere for everyone and attracting more mainstream users to their views.

We’ve seen in Holland how this worked out. The nazi party leader (who chanted “Less Moroccans”) won the elections by a landslide a month ago. There is a real danger of disenchanted mainstreamers being attracted to nazi propaganda in droves. We’re stuck with them now for 4 years (unless they manage to collapse on their own, which I do hope).

It depends a lot on the instance IMO. I didn’t like the attitude at lemmy.ml but I like it here at beehaw. I’m very left-leaning, progressive and LGBTQ+ friendly.

Lemmy.ml and lemmy.world are more right-leaning as far as I can see.

There’s a lot of empirical claims surrounding this topic, and I’m unaware who really has good evidence for them. The Substack guy e.g. is claiming that banning or demonetising would not “solve the problem” – how do we really know?

Well it depends what you define as “the problem”.

If you define it as Nazis existing per se, banning them does not “solve the problem” of nazis existing. They will just go elsewhere. A whole world war was not enough to get rid of them.

However, allowing them on mainstream platforms does make their views more prevalent to mainstream users and some might fall for their propaganda similar to the way people get attracted to the Qanon nonsense. So if you define the problem as “Nazis gaining attention” then yeah sure. It certainly does “solve the problem” to some degree. And I think this is the main problem these days (even in the Netherlands which is a fairly down to earth country, the fascists gained 24% of the votes in the last election!)

However however you define “the problem” making money off nazi propaganda is just simply very very bad form. And will lead to many mainstream users bugging out, and rightly so.

Substack started so well… It was looking like the new Medium (after medium totally enshittified). But the discovery was never very good there, and now this. Nope. Not going to blog there.

I wonder if Snowden still supports them.

450? I’m pretty sure all of them are now available. Some may not work fully but at least they are there.

This would be amazing for DeX as well yes. It’s the one remaining reason for using Chrome.

They are working on it. They finally introduced full passwordless Webauthn on Linux and Mac about 5 versions ago. This work was part of the preparations for passkeys. It’s coming.

There was a firefox dev who explained a bit about all this somewhere in a comment thread on hacker news but I forgot to favourite or bookmark it :(

I recommend this one instead: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean-d/

It can do a few more tricks that the blocklists on their own can’t.

The extension which is more fully-featured than just a blocklist is now available again: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean-d/

Trust me, they’re working on ways to prevent that too as we speak.

It’s like going to a concert without paying the entrance fee. Sure it’s not a big deal if only one person does it, but the concert couldn’t even happen if everyone acted like this

That’s a systemic problem, something I wouldn’t personally care about. The “system” is just so horribly screwed up and skewed against us that I just no longer care if it works or not.

If you want to morally justify piracy then start with the ridiculous earnings and monopolies of big media companies, or the fact that they will just remove your access to media you “bought”. Piracy is like stealing, but sometimes stealing is the right thing to do.

This rubs me the wrong way too, yes. Though I’m really beyond moral justifications, I just stopped caring.

Yeah those 2 are exactly the ones I pay for too. Games in particular (I buy most books but not all).

But video content, nope :P

What if you were never going to buy it?

The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.

The origins of most of all western countries’ wealth comes from theft, full stop.

More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do.

That’s only the case for pre-Bluray release content. Most of it was just captured from rips, Amazon Prime or Netflix.

Well, Google firebase notifications do. Either Google play or something comparable like MicroG. It’s possible to run them another way too but not many app backends support that.

But yes my complaint is exactly that this app requires google.

I see. But in the limit case where just everybody decided BTC is nonsense and stopped transacting entirely, while mining could continue, eventually it would die out, right?

Probably, yes. But it’s important to realise that bitcoin started as a payment system. Meaning lots of daily transactions would be done. These days it’s used more for speculation, as a value storage system and for transferring to other coins. Which implies a lot less transactions.

Everybody basically has already decided that BTC is nonsense for payments and stopped using it for that. This is exactly why the transactions have so much “overhead” because so few transactions are compared to so much mining.

So in a sense, do transactions not drive the need for mining? If that’s the case, the connection isn’t directly casual so much as one of complicity. Does that make sense or am I still barking up the wrong tree with this way of thinking?

Not really, no. Miners mine as an investment. The whole payment system community has already been taken over by other systems which are much better suited for that, like Etherium, which has proof of stake for low overhead, fast transaction time and smart contracts. Or Monero, which hides the identity better so it’s more common in the purchasing of certain illicit substances.

The BTC community reacted with lightning but it was too little too late to solve this usecase. The BCH (bitcoin cash) fork was also motivated by this as far as I understand, because the miners were opposed to any changes to facilitate easier payments and lower transaction costs. But this is more hearsay I have to admit, I’m not a cryptobro and not fully into this.

So now BTC is less like a “bank” and more like a “goldmine”. That’s how you should see it. Even though gold is a useful material, most investors that buy gold don’t buy it with the intention to ever sell it to a factory making connectors or whatever. They just buy it because it’s scarce and the price keeps going up, and people assign value to it.

Bitcoin is in the same position now. It has value because people decide it has value. This is not really related to its potential use as a payment system. Miners (the ones who control the bitcoin stack now) are not even interested in its use for that purpose and seem to actively block enhancements to make that easier. Though transactions are still necessary for trading between investors, it’s much much less in volume than it would be if people were still using it to pay for stuff in shops.

But anyway, going back to my original point: Articles like the link here that claim that Bitcoin is a really shitty payment system are kinda stating the obvious. It’s practically speaking not a payment system anymore even though it technically could be used as such.

It’s a funny thing you mention. We were told to block chat.openai.com recently by our CTO who was afraid of data leaks of internal information. Not a bad idea honestly.

But one of my colleagues made a salient point… In that case we should do the same with Google Translate, we’ve been sending them gazillions of gigabytes of internal emails and other sensitive stuff. And it’s also a company we also don’t have any formal business or data management contract (GDPR!) with?

“Just block ChatGPT” was the answer, but it was certainly a good point. This is the thing about hypes. It makes people think things are ‘special’ cases when in fact they are not. Google probably has a LOT more visibility on our company than OpenAI.

Also they are worried about the MS version of ChatGPT because it’s “not as good” (uuh it’s literally the same engine) and also have data concerns even though we do have data management contracts with them and they put it black on white that they’re not using our data for any kind of model training.

Firing all your staff tends to make that happen :)