> A friend argued to me that crypto is "A Terrible Thing" because its just used to fuel the (illegal) narcotics industry.
That's a good thing, though.
Jokes aside, as a person who loves crypto technologically and agrees with the more cipherpunk roots of bitcoin, I have not seen anyone serious use crypto for anything other than drugs or small transactions, just for the sake of it. People usually just seems to hoard the stuff, which is incredibly stupid since the main value proposition of crypto is being able to transact it. I almost respect the people buying drugs with it more, since they at least use cryptocurrency, rather than just speculating in its value to fuel their gambling addiction.
> a person who loves crypto technologically and agrees with the more cipherpunk roots of bitcoin
Yep, that'd be me too. What gets my blood pressure rising is the sheer amount of coins & tokens available now all of which, bar perhaps a tiny fraction, seem to have no value proposition other than "number go up". To me, NFTs are the nadir of this concept. I struggle to imagine a legitimate use case for any crypto that doesn't involve rapid, frictionless transacting.
For example, there are a couple of fantastic services, like "Cauldron DEX" or "BCHBull" (no affiliation) - smart contracts which allow for trustless swapping of tokens. The concept is genius and the execution here seems very good (to me, non cryptographer) but, again, what can I do with these tokens or coins I've traded except trade them later for some other token or coin?
BCHBull seems to allow exposure to commodities and some fiat currencies - that makes it comparable I suppose to actual currency or commodity speculation which has been going on for centuries. One might still argue "what can I do with all this gold except trade it later for oil?" but, well, that seems to be a weaker criticism.
Agreed, but unironically. US tobacco consumption is at a historic low, while people are dying from an opioid epidemic and fentanyl contamination, and somehow the War on Drugs is nearly unquestioned as good policy? Prosecuting people for making poor health choices is such an extreme and frankly insane idea.
Let's go back to selling Bayer Heroin™ at pharmacies, with sensible regulations. That would better position us to minimize narcotic use over the long term, while also making it safer, and defunding the cartels while we're at it. In the meantime, if someone is going to do drugs, I'm all for them using cryptocurrency to make the process as safe as it can be given the circumstances.
Just use Nix/Home Manager on Ubuntu or something instead of NixOS. You get, by far, most of the reproducibility and none of the NixOS issues. NixOS feels more like a great server environment, but not that good of a DE.
I don't think I agree with that. You don't get the system snapshotting, and you can't make your root filesystem tmpfs if you just use Ubuntu + Home Manager.
I think a lot of the nix people are overly puritan when it comes to using Nix. Everything must be reproducible, etc. I have found my perfect sweetspot by abandoning NixOS and instead using home-manager + PopOS. That way, if something doesn't work on Nix, I'll just look up the ubuntu guide, BUT i still get by far most of the reproducibility of Nix and the massive package set.
What is the point here? Sure, tolerance is a peace treaty and certainly not everything should be tolerated. But what does the author argue is a violation? They say "nazis", but who defines what that is? That's vague and ripe for abuse.
This question seems to suggest that there is some external or higher referee for this peace treaty. There isn't. The real cop was inside you all along.
Lots of things can be violations, like using highly motivating, low information communication like Rush Limbaugh or Tucker Carlson.
The response to a violation is also a violation - aka an escalation. There is not a bright line between peace and war. War is a failure of negotiation. People lose faith in negotiation when they feel they are unrepresented or that the other side is cheating.
The greater point is, faith in negotiation is very valuable, but easy to destroy.
Author here, NixOS is not for the faint of heart, not even on a server. With that said, if you understand it well, it is much easier in my opinion. It's a lot like typed languages, harder to get stuff done, but much more solid after the fact.
Well, because the AI already knows how the Germans looked in WW2, the "problem" is the censoring in place. If you removed the censoring from the algorithm, then it would generate the accurate images you asked for.
Not advocating removing all censorship on these models, but if you actually need WW2 images for some project, say a Youtube video, getting a bunch of images of black people with Stahlhelm's isn't really ideal. Just imagine a serious-styled amateur Youtube WW2 documentary using AI-images here and there, but almost all of the German army consists of minorities, it really sets the wrong tone! There is a sweet spot for this sort of thing.
> because the AI already knows how the Germans looked in WW2
Does it? I had thought it was supposed to be generating these, not retrieving them?
(in which case I would find it unremarkable if it had encoded Picture(Nazi) = head(human) + hat(Stalhelm) instead of going all the way to Picture(Nazi) = head(human.melanin(low)) + hat(Stahlhelm); see cousin comment about 6-fingered hands vs. Hox conservation)
But maybe I'm biased because I've mainly tried to get AI to do coding and math, and my usual results have been exactly along these lines: the general shape might be almost there, but the details never match up.
That's a good thing, though.
Jokes aside, as a person who loves crypto technologically and agrees with the more cipherpunk roots of bitcoin, I have not seen anyone serious use crypto for anything other than drugs or small transactions, just for the sake of it. People usually just seems to hoard the stuff, which is incredibly stupid since the main value proposition of crypto is being able to transact it. I almost respect the people buying drugs with it more, since they at least use cryptocurrency, rather than just speculating in its value to fuel their gambling addiction.