Yes, and that's like arguing that spaces between words is syntactic distraction. It's clearly not, more syntax rules can make a language simpler to understand (for both humans and computers).
It's fine, you can still get the same feeling and experience working on mobile computing.
User-respecting mobile OSes and hardware are still as unusable as the desktop Linux of 20 years ago, the incumbents are not helping at all, and the stakes are even higher (users get their freedom violated 24/7 instead of only when they sit down to their desktop).
As if relying on Paypal by itself wasn't enough of a nightmare, imagine relying on Paypal directly linked to crypto stuff. Or is the value proposition here that Tilia somehow have a deal with Paypal to keep their users accounts open?
Valid point which I expected to come up, but the difference is that AFAIK exfiltrating precise data with such a setup would be challenging, while the software stack is so messy that it's orders of magnitude easier to stealthily compromise.
Sometimes I briefly get out of my bubble and realize that the vast majority of the world population - even the first, highly educated world - still trusts their entire digital lives to a black box controlled by either 1 of 2 US companies.
I mean, the fact that we have a widely available alternative makes the picture slightly less bleak, but still. How many politically-inclined persons rave endlessly about freedom and sovereignty while making no effort on such an important front? The Linux usage numbers are so far from where they should be.
You are both going around my very simple argument that these mind-blowingly huge piles of money poured into crypto scams, don't undermine the undeniable reality of crypto that is not a scam.
Yes, people pouring their savings in tulips, fake railroad companies, and beanie babies is absurd. Does it follow that tulips, railroad companies, and baby plushies are scams and criminal in nature? The grifters and their victims moved on, and the underlying objects of speculation seem to exist and do their respective jobs just fine now.
Crypto is doing its job just fine of being a trustless and permissionless way of transferring value. It doesn't care if grifters hype, pump, and dump its tokens. The few actual decentralized networks in existence just keep running and securing their immutable ledgers. The few actual peer-to-peer researchers and developers keep improving them.
> Simply owning digital tokens is not a real world usage of those tokens, full stop.
It's as much real world usage, as people owning stocks and precious metals is.
> I can fully accept that 5-25% of a countries population is gullible enough to buy cryptocurrency.
In many countries, it's the 75% of the population saving in their local fiat currency that are the gullible ones. I know we all love United States Dollars, but in many local economies, there aren't enough of them to go around. Acquiring, storing and transacting with cryptocurrencies can be easier, and more secure and discrete than going to your local black market USD dealer and stashing stacks of bills under your mattress.
If anything, crypto at least seems to indirectly put food on your table, articbull. I would find it hard to believe you don't get any compensation from religiously covering every HN comment sections about crypto with misinformation. Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation.
Here are some stats for any passerby who might be convinced to think crypto really has ~zero non-criminal usage [1]. Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.
You are right. From reading the article, Neal Stephenson doesn't criticize cryptocurrency in itself. His whole criticism is about integrating it inside the universe of games.
I don't agree with your opinion that item transferability is necessarily silly, though. I was happy to be able to sell the rare Dota 2 items I accumulated after playing it for a couple years. It was never a central motivation for playing, but the transferability didn't detract from the experience in any way. It just made for some nice pocket change when all was said and done.
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Meta remark: It's pretty sad that one of the only HN comments correctly pointing out the disconnect between the article title, the HN knee-jerk reactions, and the actual content of the article, seems about to be downvoted to oblivion. The article is barely 3 paragraphs. Is it too much to ask to read it, before jumping in with the same tired crypto takes as every link to crypto-related resources on HN gets?
The "Wolf of Wall Street" types and various "crypto-bros" didn't "ruin it for everyone". They tarnished the connotation of the word "cryptocurrency", and wasted a lot of people of a lot of money. But their work has been mostly orthogonal to the real work on decentralized networks being done.
> The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld
This conclusion doesn't follow, neither logically nor empirically. [1] The exact opposite actually happened: we went from the vast majority of the volume being a darknet market, to most volume being saving/speculation and non-criminal e-commerce settlements.
Are they really that pitiful compared to the global average? I think that in the English-speaking tech sphere we are just too inclined to compare to the US. But compared to the rest of the world, and outside of a few small low-tax hubs (Singapore, UAE, etc), they're quite in line with the rest of the job market.
(I do think we're getting fleeced in absolute terms, but that's nothing specific to the tech industry)
Precisely. People are struggling to internalize how much wealth inequality (both local and global) has shot up in recent years, and instead blame the symptoms of this inequality as if they're the cause.
The woes Portuguese people are feeling now have been felt by the citizens of many countries before. Most of Europe considers its "first world" status as some kind of inherent property. You just need to look outside of Europe to Asia and Africa to see what's going to happen.
The problem is not about the broadcast capabilities, they already support RSS.
The problem is about their content censoring. I don't reckon Automattic reversed the "sexually explicit" purge initiated by Yahoo. I'm not interested in a social network that censors ~30% [1] of the global art production. For now Twitter is the better place for relatively free content sharing.
[1]: Number pulled out of my hat, but the human nude being the most popular drawing subject ever, I wouldn't be surprised if this is close to reality.
Happy to be be proven wrong as I haven't used this specific service, but the quality of Zoho mail-related offerings is so laughingly bad that I wouldn't touch any of their other products.
Tumblr was very close to the perfect social media network. It's a shame it succumbed to corporate greed after the Yahoo acquisition. I really hope someone manages to recreate it as a decentralized protocol
What doesn't work well about mouse scroll wheel on Linux?
Its behavior is very similar to MacOS, in that it sends scroll events even to unfocused windows.
The term DAO as it's used now is orthogonal to blockchain and crypto.
It's mostly a term to describe codified governance/community systems. There may be point systems implemented via crypto tokens, but in the vast majority of cases those would be better implemented on centralized ledgers since there's someone with centralized control over either the token issuance, the communication channels, or other essential resources.
If they were developed now, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia would be considered DAOs.