I think from ground water trace elements like lead are more likely. In my experience when I've been in places where groundwater was the household source via electronic pump, it's always been a case where you weren't supposed to drink it. And either had a reverse osmosis machine near by to use to fill bottles, or you just relied on store bought bottled water for drinking and cooking.
It would be interesting if in your cases it was high deuterium water though. It's not something I ever considered really.
Of course when straight groundwater is your best or only option, that's a hell of a lot better than having no source of plausibly safe water available. I've drank lake water where we would just disinfect it with a few drops of bleach for a couple of weeks when on trips. But was always told that this is a short term solution for convenience.
Neat. For some reason I find it satisfying to read an example like that where there's actual real tangible work being done with immediate and obvious benefits.
Do you get security updates though? I stopped getting them in Dec 2019. Forcing my hand to move over to a phone with Android 9 that gets quarterly security updates still(on March 2021 now I think). I realize this is a manufacturer/carrier thing as far as I know, and I'd like to go back to a nice clean debloated 8.1 or whatever. But I feel like I'm dragged kicking and screaming along the path of forced obsolescence just skimming over the security stuff that apparently I'm never going to get if I don't upgrade phones.
Honestly it's just really annoying. I've toyed around with Lineage and such but at some point it seems it got a lot harder to do things on a lot of models and carrier configs. It seems you need to really research exactly what phone model is open enough and has enough people graciously doing open source work to support updates and such outside of the manufacturer and carrier.
Let's at least try to preserve this gem accurately for future archaeologists. It should make it easier for future humans to wrap their heads around why we are in the state we're in.
Yeah, this is almost certainly not the case any way you want to frame the question and define a 'bit being mined'.
You'd really have to twist some strange language to attribute distributed global computation to SV because they may own or have invented certain technologies to even begin to argue that.
Just think of how expensive SV is in general. It doesn't make sense.
Proposition Joe had the connect on lockdown with the eastside and westside working together pumping out 15 million doses. Until young Marlo came in and put a stop to that. The game is the game, vaccines or not.
We already do that ourselves naturally as an organism, as does the environment around us.
A simple synthetic cell is so far off from the myriad of potentially deadly cellular organisms(or even deadly malformed protein chains) that already exist and evolve right this instant that it's not worth a second thought in the context of "organisms that can kill us" for now.
I believe it was in Montreal that there was a study attempted for something like a Human Sexuality postgrad study, that needed to collect a certain sample size of males who had never consumed internet pornography(or something to that effect), that had to be abandoned due to complete failure to find subjects who met the criteria.
I'd imagine it would be not quite as hard to find caffeine naive subjects for a caffeine study, but not by much.
> Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell.
Proof of Stake as a theory and concept is probably almost 10 years old at this point. And as an actual real-money-in-production blockchain Proof of Stake will actually be 10 years old in the next couple of years or so.
I wish I could confidently remember specific names and dates here, but on bitcointalk I remember SunnyKing coding and launching a real in production a PoS coin almost 10 years ago now...I want to say it was something like "NuCoin" but I could be off on the name there. I do speicifically remember he made Primecoin which was an alternative PoW function based on discovering the world's highest prime numbers(kind of cool, which is why I remember it I guess) after he was done with his initial PoS coin. He(SunnyKing) was also endlessly trolled and mocked due to the theoretical threat PoS posed to those invested in Bitcoin and other PoW coins like Litecoin at the time.
There was also a larger PoS coin called NXT from that era(again, almost 10 years ago, 2013 maybe?) that I suppose never really caught on, perhaps it was technically flawed?
There were lots of legitimate criticisms of PoS regarding whether or not it was a truly viable decentralized consensus mechanism. And I don't claim to after the answer to whether or not it is, or was sufficiently viable. But historically there was also lots of trolling and suppression from people trying to protect their investments.
It apparently may be finally getting its time, given PoS as a technology seems to have only recently become a mainstream topic of interest, despite how old the tech and theories themselves are. Perhaps that's just because the problems were only recently solved?
But regardless, I find it funny how much play PoS gets these days now that mainstream media is reporting on how PoW mining as a whole is using more power than many nation states, as if there was any other path for PoW to scale given its fundamental design.
> The honest students get the knowledge and connections with their peers.
A lot of the honest students are too young and naive to realize the weight and importance of this though. Sometimes it takes a while before the harsh reality of how the world works sets in. When you've done well thus far just being a smart, honest, hard worker I suspect many believe that he world just continues to function in the way it has since they we're high-achieving children. Once the veil is lifted you end up with a lot of jaded adults.
Not saying they don't bear any responsibility for thinking the world is one giant meritocracy, and not being more skeptical of society. But still, it can be a bit sad to see some genuinely good people get torn down as they grow up and get pushed aside despite following what they were thought 'the right path' was.
It's weird for me to read HN and see people speak of PoS as some kind of new cutting edge technology. Maybe some of the issues with it may or have may not been solved but it is so damn old now that it's 2021.
Like the first live real money implementation of a PoS chain was done by SunnyKing back in like...I want to say 2012, but maybe 2013. SunnyKing was the same guy who went on to make the somewhat interesting PoW function via finding largest prime numbers(arguably somewhat useful PoW, certainly more than double SHA-256), Primecoin.
Then in a larger scale there was NXT which was like 2013-2014ish, full PoS.
I don't care about the merits of these particular chains, but PoS was one of the earliest innovations in blockchain tech. The lineage was roughly something like:
0. All the centralised pre-Bitcoin cypherpunk digital currency stuff from the mailing list like Bitgold, Chaumian ecash whatever.
1. Bitcoin
2. Namecoin(decentralized DNS)
3. Feathercoin/Litecoin(Bitcoin with 0.25 block target time and 4x total coins), arguably shouldn't be on the list for 'innovation' but Litecoin is successful(at some point they changed the PoW work function to scrypt so I guess it counts, there were other scam coins around this time too doing the same thing. So I don't necessarily mean Litecoin was 'third place' overall, just that it ended up rising from the pile of shit).
4. Different forms of PoW functions. ie Litecoin doing scrypt so people could still use their ATI Radeon 4xxx to mine and not order ASICs from shady companies), Cryptonight stuff maybe(lies about it being 'developed on the darknet for years and being related that cicada thing' before and such, hard to make an accurate timeline for that one(ended up forked off as Monero, possibly post-PoS tech)).
5. PoS, 2012-2014ish. Probably didn't come before different PoW functions but it might have switched with #4's place, hard to remember the exact timelines, but people were trolling and making fun of PoS ever since it was theorized. Probably because a true fully realized PoS that is superior to PoW is a threat to the massive investments one must put behind PoW systems, which also becomes the root of their 'nothing at stake' arguments against PoS, which certainly had merit back then with early PoS implementations. I wonder if those truly got solved.
This was all like 2014 at the latest. Very old stuff but crypto is full of sales snakes(not targeted at you at all) who try to sell other peoples old open source tech as new modern innovations. It's a familiar pattern. People sold Bitcoin as private and anonymous for years...like way too long.
I'm imagining now there will be a point when PoS is 10+ years old and people will acting like it's the newest thing on the block still.
I find it so hard to believe that everyone at Facebook is just shocked now to learn the realities of what they do. Their naivety and ignorance would have to be off the charts for it to be genuine.
It would be interesting if in your cases it was high deuterium water though. It's not something I ever considered really.
Of course when straight groundwater is your best or only option, that's a hell of a lot better than having no source of plausibly safe water available. I've drank lake water where we would just disinfect it with a few drops of bleach for a couple of weeks when on trips. But was always told that this is a short term solution for convenience.