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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

711–720 of 924 posts

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the entire platform (gmail, etc) is funded by ads, then removing the ads destroys the platform. In that space, advertising is a necessary evil, and the best we can do it try to make it less onerous. But if you're supporting your platform by any other means, you can just go without ads entirely. And DeFi is all about finding ways to support things that you like without giving untrustworthy middle men like Google or…

Advertising clearly wont "go die in a fire", no matter how frictionless the payments are. There was a conversation on hacker news just a few days ago about 'smart' TVs all getting ads, spying on the user, etc. This is an example where people do have a way to pay for TVs (no need for microtransactions, TVs cost hundreds of dollars already!). But the TV makers have decided they can make more money by adding Ads, so why…

Frictionless payments are a relatively small part of it. The bigger part is figuring out who needs to be paid for what.

Consider gitcoin, for instance. Yeah, it processes payments, but more importantly it tracks developer reputation, user donations, and facilitates aggregate decision making (re: voting on how to spend the money).

Are you saying that eventually, the users will vote to have ads included in their open source software? I think not. It's only when somebody is able to exploit a privileged position as owner-of-the-medium that you get greed-driven service degradation like that. But we're learning how to build ownerless mediums. Whatever problems they have, I don't think they'll be the same-old middleman problems that we're used to.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising clearly wont "go die in a fire", no matter how frictionless the payments are. There was a conversation on hacker news just a few days ago about 'smart' TVs all getting ads, spying on the user, etc. This is an example where people do have a way to pay for TVs (no need for microtransactions, TVs cost hundreds of dollars already!). But the TV makers have decided they can make more money by adding Ads, so why…

>This happened with cable TV too. You pay for the TV already, as a subscription even, why do you also get Ads? Drives me batshit that amazon does this on Prime. Play the fucking film you bastards

Too bad we can't just fork a copy without ads and use that instead.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#713
post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly don’t think DeFi is, at its heart, anti-regulation. I do think a lot of early proponents are armchair anarchists, but that’s just the scene . I think it’s anti corruption/abuse of power by institutions too large to fail—often due to lack of meaningful regulatory political power, across the board. (You’ll probably easily find people playing with web3 dns also advocating for personal data regulations, for examp…

Today there was a crypto hack that cost over 110 million because the website's cloudflare key was hacked/leaked apparently. With 0 regulation and no recourse built into crypto, one poor soul lost 50.8 million in 900 bitcoins. You're not going to replace people problems with tech. Period.

> You're not going to replace people problems with tech. Period.

Sadly, there will always be people who benefit from misattribution of a people problem to tech.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

I've heard the streetlight one before but I also like "when you're a hammer, then every problem is a nail". I hadn't thought of it this way though perhaps I had felt it. It feels like this is the dream for AR/VR - to create a software defined reality that you can escape to.

The new AR/VR reality will become as shitty as the current one and assuredly do it much faster.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the continual raising awareness of problems is a key part of progress.

No, technical progress is key part of progress. Most innovators are not driven by the constant complaints of other people.

So protesting is useless, and necessity is not the mother of invention?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the analogy, but in many cases the societal ills that defi is trying to solve were caused by software in the first place (e.g. internet advertising as a democracy-eroder). Also, the protectors of the status-quo are putting a lot of software people to work in protecting that status quo, so tempting them to the other side means compatibility with their skillset. Lastly, anyone who would overturn the status quo m…

I get where defi is coming from, and the regulations are onerous, but also those regulations were hard-fought for, and came about on the backs of real problems for real people, often by being exploited by people most accurately described as conmen. Caveat emptor, sure, but on the way from "investing your play money" to someone close to retirement's 401k, there's a much bigger pitfall. The "battles" are shaping up to…

Folks very quickly forget that regulations are written in blood.

You know what other kinds of regulations are onerous? Everything aviation related. Every corner of aviation. And yet we're not clamoring to deregulate aviation because the consequences are so clear and self-evident.

Regulations are generally there for a reason. If they aren't, they need to be amended, we don't need to make our own money, except for blackjack and hookers.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without either party re-consenting to the new agreement This can also happen time with non-marriage contracts, which is why prudent drafters include severability clauses

> prudent drafters include severability clauses yes, but we dont get to draft the law/contract that is marriage -- that's done by law makers. IIRC even a pre/postnup cannot contradict law.

No contract can contradict the law, so marriage is not unique there. Employment and purchasing are examples of other contract areas governed by shifting laws, that can be changed without any of the parties renegotiating terms.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just trying to be pragmatic that one side doesnt seem to be willing to cede any ground, we could just simply move the fight elsewhere. it is both equal rights if "everyone/anyone can get married" or "no one can because it's not defined" (in the eyes of the government). If people aren't willing to accept the 2nd case then I'm guessing they dont actually want equal rights so much as public(governmental) recognition…

Yeah I'm saying it's not pragmatic, it's the opposite of pragmatic. Of course people want governmental recognition, many hetero married couples want it and already rely on it. Gay couples also want equal rights on top of that. They want both. This is cutting the proverbial baby in half and redefining the legal institution so no one gets what they want, that will go well in a democracy /s

I think what seems really off is just that we've legislated a single concrete version of something instead of it's abstraction (a person capable of making good choices). It makes sense to give people a way to indicate they intend to give a person legal rights, but it doesn't make sense to imply (by the concrete choice of "marriage") that it's basically going to be a person that you're having sex with, or monogamous with, or that they're of a certain set of sexual pairings (ie heterosexual)... And before you suggest it's not about monogamy, see that in many states have laws around adultery and fault/no-fault divorce...

I should be able to extend the same set of privileges (like can make decisions for me if I am unable to) to my grandmother, or roommate, neighbor, priest, or whomever I choose. It makes little sense how we've constrained the solution w/o adding any value by those constraints. This maybe just the software engineer in me, but we've codified the concrete instead of the abstraction.

This is actually something of high importance to single people too -- something like 30-40% of households are single person and do not have a simple way to elect a person who can make legal decisions for them besides a relatively expensive and difficult power of attorney... So I see it as win:win:win to distill todays "marriage" into a legal common ground and give that right to _all_ people. Then anyone, gay or otherwise, can claim "marriage" because there will not be a legal definition (kind of like "natural" in food labelling). Christians wont be able to claim a monopoly on an undefined term.

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