Have to disagree with point 1, often this is what artists are doing. More strictly in the music part (literally playing others songs), less strictly in the drawing part. But copying, incorporating and developing are some of the core foundations of art.
"Jumping off a building is actually just flying if you don't worry about the landing. We should remember, the problem of landing isn't specific to jumping at all."
And IMO, more than the scale, it's the immature bragging of being totally better than the old stuff. That said this aspect is not only in crypto, it's in the era.. lots of internet thingies are touted that way, your bluetooth connected balance that is not accurate and will fail in 6 monthes.
Sure, that was not the point of my post. It seems that most people have reacted to this half-sentence, I think the technical discussion would have been far more interesting for this forum, especially when it comes to applications outside of blockchains. I could list more examples where substantial losses to real clients (of "normal" businesses) could have been avoided if there was a better way of proving simple facts like bank balances to auditors (it's in fact partly related to my work).
The current process basically looks like this: an auditor will ask the bank to confirm that client X has such and such balance with them. Of course, the bank needs to be sure that the auditor is actually who they claim they are, so they get in touch with their client to confirm that they can tell the auditor their balance. Since this is a bit tricky if the auditor doesn't have a direct line of communication with the bank already, it is often facilitated by the client directly asking the bank to issue a balance confirmation to the auditor, and that's an entry point for impersonation attacks (in an overly simplified manner, that's also what happened at Wirecard). We probably don't need the exact fancy machinery of Merkle sum trees and zero knowledge proofs outlined in the OP, we also don't want to bring in blockchains, but I was wondering whether we could use some of those ideas to make the audit process for normal firms a bit safer.
Still remember when I pulled out my money out of Bittrex 2 hours before they shut down for half a year. Had a funny feeling and still can't explain, congrats to your intuiton.
You can't explain your own thoughts and actions??? I'm sorry, but that's part of makes a valuable team mate or partner. This is not fundamentally human, this is trained behaviour. I am very well capable of expressing my thougts and explaining actions resulting from these thoughts.
Can you explain why you had a thought, however? And how many levels deep? Only as many as someone cares to ask, I'd wager.
You have developed the capability of explaining your actions as resulting from your thoughts, because there is someone on the other side who is ready to accept and evaluate your explanations.
Others have no such affordance, so their brains get trained in prejudices and superstitions indead. Even if an explanation of an action is given in good faith and accepted by the recipient, it can still be factually incorrect.
Private Prisons make this to increase their "customers", or the funds the receive.
Do you believe that homeless shelters would like to increase homelessness, or are in competition with private prisons for persons ending up in their facility?
Maybe get some first hand information on something before wishing to blow it up because someone told you it's bad? Never understood people taking joy and having fun watching others work get ripped apart.
Huh? Just because I don't use twitter doesn't mean that it's a foreign website to me. It's basically impossible to completely avoid interacting with it. Tweets are embedded everywhere, twitter threads get screenshotted and shared on reddit or in youtube videos and every now and again there's an interesting submission on hn that links directly to twitter.
I really don't need to use it regularly to know that it's filled with endless "hot takes" designed to aggravate instead of inviting meaningful discussion.
The way twitter works actively promotes negativity, which is precisely why I don't use it.
Also, I didn't never use it, I left the platform because of the above mentioned reasons.
I'm aware that twitter provides plenty of value for plenty of people and that it is very possible to curate your twitter experience in a way that avoids most of the negativity. But if twitter blows up there will be alternatives where the same people can derive the same value from.
And in the meantime I will absolutely enjoy a billionaire megalomaniac getting fleeced because he couldn't control is impulses.
I mean, if you just browse website picking out hot-takes and negativity from twitter, maybe it's not twitter that is the drain, but the websites that you visit that amplify those people.
I use twitter a lot to stay up to date on tech and follower developers. Your feed is what you make it, and if you curate it to only follow decent people you don't have to read all of the arguments and politics that happen on other parts of the site.
Society has been worse off since it got popular, it's a sewer spewing garbage at us in small chunks. I for one wish it implodes and cannot wait for that day. I don't care who built it, who owns it or how much it is worth on paper. It needs to go. And tiktok too, its the twitter for video. Cannot understand how any rational person can defend either one. Probably because attention span got destroyed so cannot remember life without it.
Everyone moans about centralization and screams "The internet is dead / the internet is 5 companies".... well if it implodes, maybe people will start writing proper blogs/arguments/documentation again and not try to make everything digestible in 15 seconds by the dumbest persons.
I wish that twitter will ban all politics/politicians off of it and push science topics instead. Ever since politicians hopped onto twitter, it's been a nightmare to be exposed to their thinking patterns and lies.
I don't/won' get joy from these platforms disappearing...it would be relief.
You are saying that we should prohibit large group gatherings, because they are "unnatural" and "unhealthy" yet provide not a single source or even definition what a large group is supposed to be. Quite grandiose and all encompassing statement to be not backed up by even a single mentioned source.
None of the links concludes that interactions with groups above the size of the dunbar number are detremental. None of this says that large gatherings are "unnatural" and certainly does not provide arguments why we should not allow gatherings or interactions beyond a certain point of people involved. It states that there is a certain number we can actively and comfortably manage, but nothing about the quite wide reaching things you postulated.
Another idea is to prohibit mega-websites that comprise thousands of pages with content generated for free by distinct users from (a) using metadata generated from access to those pages or (b) serving advertising on those pages. Generally, prohibit rent-seeking by websites that delegate ongoing content generation to users on a large scale.
