more limited risk

Doubt

Really interesting article. The general idea seems to be that people having their access to banking shut down has been a real problem for a long time, and is most commonly imposed on marginalized groups, but people don’t realize it’s going on, and the people on the right making noise about this issue ignore where the bulk of the problem is.

This is sometimes how I feel when I appear on the ‘anti-mainstream’ ‘free thought’ media outlets. They want to hear about the financial censorship of the Freedom Convoy, but they don’t want to hear about restrictions on Aboriginal payments. This hints to a skew in their freedom of thought, and it’s certainly not open-minded. When they approach me, they’re trying to recruit that mercenary side of me who is nominally prepared to defend their narrow free thinking, but this poses an ethical dilemma, because their selective curation of what examples of payments censorship they’re prepared to ask about or listen to amounts to a silent form of censorship in itself. Selectively hearing, and amplifying, one set of injured voices - the Truckers - can be very similar to blocking another set out.

Firstly, yes, it’s very important to fight the general principle of payments censorship (and, by extension, to protect the cash system that provides a buffer agai nst it). Secondly, I must inform them that the actual chances of payments censorship being used against them is smaller than the chances of it being used against refugees, migrants, the homeless, or sex workers, who face recent real-world cases of financial censorship.

This makes sense to me, we could continue to develop and use important technologies while at the same time setting things up so their externalities are part of their cost and companies have financial reasons to work to reduce the impact.

There’s no way that would work either, they can just store the full edit history and auto-curate as needed.

Do you mean the attack only works against people with a split tunnel setup?

Not quite what the article says:

When apps run on Linux there’s a setting that minimizes the effects, but even then TunnelVision can be used to exploit a side channel that can be used to de-anonymize destination traffic and perform targeted denial-of-service attacks. Network firewalls can also be configured to deny inbound and outbound traffic to and from the physical interface. This remedy is problematic for two reasons: (1) a VPN user connecting to an untrusted network has no ability to control the firewall and (2) it opens the same side channel present with the Linux mitigation.

Unlimited free distribution of copyrighted media is something I’m all for, but that’s a really tall order in terms of political capital for getting the law changed, a few protests aren’t going to do it, basically every elected official would strongly oppose it, you’d have to replace them all first.

The way blocking works on Reddit is awful and is frequently abused, so I’d rather not see Lemmy go in that direction.

At least local LLMs are getting better

For the most part yeah, it’s just a novelty. The feeling of presence is pretty cool though, like the sense that someone is standing close to you. I feel like most VR porn is not taking advantage of the medium very well, might be better if it wasn’t trying to be an outright sex simulation.

We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”

We believe everything good is downstream of growth.

So Techno-Optimism is just a minor flavor of Neoliberalism I guess?

Didn’t SBF do this shit too? I wonder how widespread in various industries it is to basically have to take performance enhancing amphetamines just to keep up.

I went through the instructions with the removing other extensions and resetting things and pasting filters etc. multiple times but it kept breaking, ended up switching to FreeTube. Maybe they’ve got it by now but I’m going to wait until it all shakes out more, too much hassle.

Plus if you read the article, you can’t tell how it works overall just because it works for you, because YouTube is treating different groups of users differently here.

It keeps breaking on FF too tho

That seems like “business” more than technology

A large portion of AI art out there is made with Stable Diffusion, which can be run locally for free, and has a robust ecosystem of hobbyist trained models, LoRAs, etc. There are also somewhat competitive freely available LLM models.

Most attacks on AI that I see function as protectionism, where the biggest companies will end up being fine, but the people trying to do their own thing are the ones to be locked out.

I would like AI models to remain free and actually published as files instead of paywalled services

Again, probably some of it is real, and that’s the segment people who made money dealt with. I think of it as a sort of gambling; your acquaintance won a gambling game, someone else lost. Possibly there were some overly wealthy people buying them for status, or maybe that’s just a myth. But the point is, most NFTs themselves aren’t part of that at all, were never a part of any real market, so doing analysis on them is going to be misleading.

While rent control isn’t a solution, I don’t think it’s ever intended to be one

The rhetoric I see around it paints it as a solution, and there are people who say with full sincerity that supply and demand is capitalist propaganda.

renoviction, the act of using a renovation as an excuse to evict people and charge more for the same thing

This whole dynamic is only surface level. The excuse doesn’t matter; if the whole market can get those prices, it’s because of the number/means of people seeking housing vs the supply. It will happen with or without an excuse to smooth things over. There are plenty of very run-down places in high demand low supply areas that cost huge amounts without any such aesthetic justification.

I don’t think rent control would prevent development of new housing either, as landlords aren’t the only folks who buy properties, even though it’s almost financially impossible to buy a house in certain inflated markets these days no matter who you are.

It demonstrably has prevented and does prevent the development of new housing, among other market distortions, and afaik this is one of the few things economists broadly agree on. To your point, maybe it would be possible that over time, eventually, all rental apartments would be converted into condos etc. as a market response to rent control. But given the demand specifically for rentals (for which there is then artificially reduced incentive to meet), and the difficulty you mention for most people actually buying a home outright, it’s easy to see why in practice there will be an extended, possibly indefinite, period where housing supply will be suppressed by the policy. One reason it could end up indefinite is that homeowners as a voting class have an incentive to protect the value of their properties, and that often means passing regulations that in practice constrain housing supply. When most voters are renters, this is less of a problem.

The way I see it, looking at housing markets as being “inflated”, as if the prices were the result of some trick of greedly landlords, is completely wrong and missing the bigger picture. Real estate is a wealth asset, a store of wealth, and all of those are skyrocketing in dollar terms beyond official measures of inflation, as part of a process of wealth being transferred away from the majority of the population and the value/negotiating power of labor declining. If people only look at their personal situations and false ideas of what prices “should” be and what is subjectively “fair”, they miss this bigger picture and overlook solutions that could actually work.

Which, in the case of housing, is more housing.

A better question would be, did anyone ever even buy them to begin with?

This means that 79% of all NFT collections – otherwise known as almost 4 out of every 5 – have remained unsold.

That is, most of the NFTs included in the OP statistic were listed for sale by their creators, and never recorded a sale. Another important detail is that even for the ones that did record sales, there’s no real way of knowing if those sales were real. You can easily make another crypto wallet and buy an NFT from yourself. For more elaborate wash trading, you can find someone with an established wallet to collude with. There are obvious reasons to do this too; building up a history of increasing sale prices could potentially dupe someone into thinking an NFT is a good investment, or you could launder money by selling an NFT to a ‘dirty’ wallet you also control.

Probably some portion of the market was “real”, but the volume is almost certainly much lower than anyone is reporting. Statistics like what the OP article is quoting are just about totally meaningless.