641–650 of 924 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, I just got more depressed every time.
I like to think of it as a dark tunnel with light at the end. Helps me bear with the depression. But somedays it just feels imposssible to see the light, I gotta agree.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What this line of reasoning seems to be missing is that society seems to be getting worse largely because of software.
Seems to and getting worse are two different islands. Things are better than ever for all progressive issues. More people are living healthier and wealthier than ever. Crime, wars are all down. How is software making society worse?
By fragmenting the cognitive capacities of regular human beings.
By letting hatred and insanity reach a global audience.
By diverting countless person-hours of intelligent labor towards largely useless endeavours.
By becoming an opaque intermediary to an increasing fraction of all social interactions.
All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…
Since the invention of money our economy hasn't changed in essence, but a lot of cruft has been built on top of the basic underlying principle.
All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…
Centralization of money is "evil" because it sooner or later you're going to find yourself on the list of undesirables. When you do, centralization (and the technology that goes with it) makes it as easy as flicking a switch to economically banish you.
This seems to be the case with any control system, whether centralized or not. The difference is in the failure mode. Decentralized systems start failing earlier, but do so in a more gradual way. Centralized ones fail later, but much more abruptly and all-at-once. So it's really the question of which one you prefer.
Personally, I still believe that decentralized approach is preferable in that regard. Centralization gives the illusion that everything is a-okay (because things work!) even when the crash is already inevitable and in motion; then when it actually happens, it's a massive disruption all around. OTOH when bits and pieces start falling off in a decentralized system, it's readily obvious that a fix is needed, but there's still plenty of time to design and implement it; and, furthermore, since most of the system is still intact, it doesn't need to be recovered.
The other advantage of decentralization is that it's more politically viable to fix things in a more localized way. Fixes to centralized systems necessarily have to be centralized themselves, but that also means that you need a lot of buy-in from everybody affected to enact them. In areas where consensus is not established, this often means that problems in centralized systems don't get fixed at all, either because many people don't believe the issue at hand to be problematic, or because they can't agree on what the root cause it. In a decentralized system, local consensus is all that is needed to fix (or at least mitigate) an issue locally.
Some argue that this latter part is actually a deficiency because people end up fixing their own localized problems, instead of coming up with a single centralized solution that fixes it once and for all. But this assumes that such a single centralized solution always (or at least usually) exists and its implementation is viable - which is not at all obvious to me.
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> That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. Interestingly, he also mentions that central economic planning doesn't work (although I am not so sure I completely agree with that thesis), but this sounds very similar to Cybersyn's design.
Central panning doesn't scale because of limits to economic knowledge and calculation. You can't possibly know enough about what everyone needs or wants in an economy. Even if you did, calculating resource allocation based on that is NP.
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Micropayments have been suggested since Internet was young, but now that's available on top of the right cryptocurrent (eg SOL). Whether that's actually a model people want (vs saying they want) remains to be seen, but Substack seems to be doing well enough for their writers. 3 cents from each of 100,000 likes on Twitter/Insta/tt starts to add up for those with a large enough following to make several of those a mont…
Micropayments are an interesting topic. I don't want to pay 5 cents per article I read, I'd much rather pay $10 a month for unlimited articles, even if I end up paying more than I would with the first scheme just because with the first one, I make a decision to spend money with every click. I know there are projects trying to streamline this, but it really should be as close to the UX of the latter as possible, pay a…
All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…
Then you're listening to the wrong people. The world's currencies are being weaponized against other countries and against citizens. It's a project decades in the making. You may not feel part of that yet, but if you express any opinion in public you may. Centralization of money is "evil" because it sooner or later you're going to find yourself on the list of undesirables. When you do, centralization (and the technol…
There are lots of reasons to want a decentralised currency system or at least one not run by nation states but Bitcoin is a terrible example of one with so many flaws, and 'defi' and 'crypto' is plagued by hucksters and scams. I'd rather the devil I know at this point thanks (inflation and monetary repression) vs outright fraud and shills.
The example of an invisible hierarchy being not paying your "AWS bill" is straight up weird. If the entirety of a system is on AWS (and paid by a single account!), then it's not really decentralized now is it? In fact the whole post is weirdly biased towards the paradigm of centralized systems while claiming to talk about decentralization. Only boring-ass "web scale" businesses need to "pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers". Grassroots self-hosted P2P communication - aka the original and everpresent Internet punk dream - does not.
I agree that the community which has grown around purported solutions to these problems doesn't seem poised to bear much fruit relative to the level of excitement. There is definitely some insight in this post and we're never going to change things without questioning assumptions to see where they lead, in many different paradigms. But I feel this post's train of thought would have produced much richer results if it had spent more time pondering before trying to synthesize a sweeping summary.
[0] The simplistic rules championed by many capital-L "Libertarians" and other cryptofascists are likely a setup for failure, but the general desire for individual liberty versus centralized authority is not.