So the main complaint is that Pixelfed clients don’t display posts without images even if one has followed the poster? And thinks it incentivizes creation of using multiple accounts/apps when a single one to interact with ActivityPub would be better? That seems like a fair thing to criticize but it seems a little dramatic to paint it as entertainment killing communication.

So then we would tell the alien we use base 21?

I don’t want to make accounts on lots of sites and search all of them every time I buy something, so I think of it like a convenience fee if the way an ebay package is wrapped implies the seller arbitraged it from elsewhere.

I don’t know how much has changed since I was doing it, but the main trick was to get the tasks associated with academic studies that were typically higher paid, by using a sniping bot to grab it before others could. So that way you get paid around minimum wage instead of a small fraction of that (if you also cheat by doing multiple tasks simultaneously and hiding it). Though tbh the situation is probably worse now since there have been all those funding cuts to academia.

I looked up some stuff about Argentina’s financial crisis since you mentioned it before, and it looks like they actually did something a bit like what I’m talking about, directly appropriating the valuable assets they could in an effort to keep being able to function:

In addition to the corralito, the Ministry of Economy dictated the pesificación; all bank accounts denominated in dollars would be converted to pesos at an official rate. Deposits would be converted at 1.40 ARS per dollar and debt was converted on 1 to 1 basis.[69]

There’s some indication that this also applied to financial products:

As noted above, a number of U.S. investors have filed ICSID arbitration claims against the government of Argentina. Most of these investors consider the January 2002 pesification of dollar-denominated contracts, and/or the ex post facto prohibition on contracts linked to foreign inflation indices, to be an effective expropriation of their investments

I can’t specifically confirm this included gold held on paper, but I think it probably would have.

As for the plausibility of this sort of thing happening in the US, in addition to the actions of Roosevelt mentioned by @diablexical@sh.itjust.works, the main trigger for Nixon abandoning the gold convertibility of US dollars was France attempting to physically withdraw the gold they had stored in US banks, which they didn’t want to allow.

I think what they’re saying is that in a hyperinflation scenario, it is an option for the government to seize the physical gold backing the financial products people hold in order to continue paying to run the government now that fiat is worthless and they are having trouble with that.

Gold you have buried in your basement, they will have to work a little harder to get.

There’s at least some difference between “have been” and “this is currently likely to happen”, since if it’s known then it would have been fixed. I’ve gotten viruses before from just visiting websites but it was decades ago and there’s no way the same method would work now.

Ramble about something for long enough that people should be able to tell is how I do it.

Sounds like an additional reason to be doing it in a way where participants can’t be debanked by payments middlemen

Part of the headache here is that this situation inherently props up a few monopolistic platforms, rather than allowing people to use whatever payment system is available in their own countries. Some of this can be worked around using cryptocurrencies – famously, the Mitra project leverages Monero for this very purpose, although I’m told it now can accept other forms of payment as well.

Hell yeah, I didn’t know about Mitra. It sounds like it’s a Patreon esque kind of deal with what the payments part is for.

That kind of painting seems more likely to come alive

Quickly and effortlessly get some music playing that can act as a backdrop for your real activity such as working, driving, cooking, hosting friends, etc. Keep it rolling indefinitely.

“Discover” new music by statistical means based on your average tastes.

This is the main thing I want out of music software tbh.

I think for some people the only way they can think of to help is attempting to bully someone over the internet, and it ends up applying to whoever happens to be around that disagrees with them, even though that makes zero sense as a strategy.

I think maybe they wouldn’t if they are trying to scale their operations to scanning through millions of sites and your site is just one of them

If there’s one person who knows their applied zk proofs, it’s that guy.

There are some pretty strong arguments that even zk proof is a flawed way of preserving privacy though, in a variety of ways. It prevents pseudonymity by enabling one-user-one-account, and it leaves users vulnerable to being coerced to reveal their full online activities by handing over cryptographic keys.

We can’t afford to make any of this. We don’t have the money for the compute required or to pay for the lawyers to make the law work for us

I don’t think this is entirely true; yeah, large foundational models have training costs that are beyond the reach of individuals, but plenty can be done that is not, or can be done by a relatively small organization. I can’t find a direct price estimate for Apertus, and it looks like they used their own hardware, but it’s mentioned they used ten million gpu hours, and GH200 gpus; I found a source online claiming a rental cost of $1.50 per hour for that hardware, so I think the cost of training this could be loosely estimated to be something around 20 million dollars.

That is a lot of money if you are one person, but it’s an order of magnitude smaller than the settlements of billions of dollars being paid so far by the biggest AI companies for their hasty unauthorized use of copyrighted materials. It’s easy to see how copyright and legal costs could potentially be the bottleneck here preventing smaller actors from participating.

It should benefit the people, so it needs to change. It needs to be “expanded” (I wouldn’t call it that, rather “modified” but I’ll use your word) in that it currently only protects the wealthy and binds the poor. It should be the opposite.

How would that even work though? Yes, copyright currently favors the wealthy, but that’s because the whole concept of applying property rights to ideas inherently favors the wealthy. I can’t imagine how it could be the opposite even in theory, but in practice, it seems clear that any legislation codifying limitations on use and compensation for AI training will be drafted by lobbyists of large corporate rightsholders, at the obvious expense of everyone with an interest in free public ownership and use of AI technology.

But we can’t afford to pay. I don’t think open models like the one in the OP article would be developed and released for free to the public if there was a complex process of paying billions of dollars to rightsholders in order to do so. That sort of model would favor a monopoly of centralized services run only by the biggest companies.

but the kinds of people who grape others generally don’t feel shame

I think this is probably not true.

the primary tool society uses to respond to grape, assault, prison, ostracizing or murder is, so like, so what is there less shame?

Those tools aren’t equally available to everyone, they are expressions of power, which some people have access to more than others.

It’s definitely glossing over some stuff, like when it talks about the unwillingness of neighbors to trade with them and chalking it up to “burned bridges”, I imagine the aggressive US sanctions they’ve been under played a big role there.