Except they already made Oracle handle all that and they can easily legislate privacy protections without banning TikTok entirely. And, again, it is my right as a citizen to install whatever app I want even if it is spying on me, just like the rest of my apps do. I could film every second of my life and put it up on Facebook or a personal website and the Chinese government could watch it and there’s not a damned thing the US government can do about it.

Yes. And I have experienced this on dishwashers that don’t have filters as well.

Hot take: there is no food safety reason to replace a sponge if it’s still good at removing food from dishes. If you remove the food source, and the soap removes whatever is living on the dish, whatever is left over will die due to lack of nutrients and water. It’s why in food safety courses you are taught that dishes have to dry completely. Even a sponge which has been used once will be depositing “new” pathogens onto the dish. Stuff is gonna live in the sponge. The sponge doesn’t kill pathogens. Removal, soap, and desiccation do. The sponge’s job is almost purely mechanical.

I would be interested in this as a user and as a dev for OSS projects. I currently donate to a few projects via OpenCollective, Github sponsors, etc. A few options:

• Users vote on how the money is spent, perhaps in proportion to how much they have donated over time. I think this is the simplest model that prevents self-dealing and accurately transmits user interest. You could use a quadratic funding model to better represent user interest instead of just giving the most vote weight to the users with the most money. On the other hand, assigning vote weight based on donations over time incentivizes users to donate more and keep donating (stopping a recurring donation could result in loss of vote weight and help redistribute vote weight as users become less active). You could also do a hybrid model: 50% is assigned according to vote weight based on total donations, 50% is assigned based on quadratic funding.
• Developers vote on how the money is spent. I don’t know how to allocate vote weight here. Devs should also submit a list of downstream libraries which would receive donations. (or is it upstream?).
• User and developers both vote on how it is spent. Vote weight could be distributed however, for example, 50% to users 50% to devs.

This kind of a system would be very possible to implement as a DAO, there are templates out there for making an organization like this. You could use BTC or ETH, both support DAOs. The benefit there is that since no single entity holds the money, no single entity has to file taxes and claim that money as income. It also automates the voting process and solves the issue of users having to trust a single person or organization to hold and distribute the funds. Making a DAO on Bitcoin lightning could reduce tx fees to less than a penny per donation.

You could also incorporate it as a non-profit depending on your jurisdiction. Many organizations like the Linux foundation have pursued this route, look at what things they have tried and what has worked. Also just a link to leave here for your research, I’m not suggesting you use this, I’m just saying it’s relevant interesting thinking in this area: https://blog.obyte.org/kivach-cascading-donations-for-github-repositories-2b175bdbff77

Other relevant links/research for you: https://github.com/Resolvr-io and https://nostrocket.org/About

Also research Gitcoin, they have used quadratic funding to fund a number of OSS web3 projects in a similar manner to what you’re proposing. I have participated in a few of their funding rounds as a donor and a recipient. Their interface is a mess but the concept is cool.

On the other hand, Snapchat absolutely should be liable for its recommendation algorithms’ actions.

Should they though? The algorithm can be as simple as “show me the user with the most liked posts”. Even the best design algorithm is going to make suggestions that users connect with sex offenders because the algorithm has no idea who is a sex offender. Unless snapchat has received an abuse report of some kind of actively monitors all accounts all the time, they have no way to know this user is dangerous. Even if they did monitor the accounts, they won’t know the user is dangerous until they do something dangerous. Even if they are doing something dangerous, it may not be obvious from their messages and photos that they are doing something dangerous. An online predator asking a 12 year old to meet them somewhere looks an awful lot like a family member asking the same thing assuming there’s not something sexually suggestive in the message. And requiring that level of monitoring is extremely expensive and invasive. It means only big companies with teams of lawyers can run online social media services. You can say goodbye to fediverse in that case, along with any expectation of privacy you or anybody else can have online. And then, well, hello turnkey fascism to the next politician who gets in power and wants to stifle dissent.

Kids being hurt is bad. We should work to build a society where it happens less often. We shouldn’t sacrifice free, private speech in exchange or relegate speech only to the biggest, most corporate, most surveilled platforms. Because kids will still get hurt, and we’ll just be here with that many fewer liberties. Let’s not forget that the US federal government has a list of known child sex offenders in the form of Epstein’s client list and yet none of them are in prison. I don’t believe that giving the government more control and surveillance over online speech is going to somehow solve this problem. In fact, it will make it harder to hold those rich, well-connected, child rapist fucks accountable because it will make dissent more dangerous to engage in.

The fact that Linux lacks a decent system-level backup tool with a GUI is kind of a mind boggler for me. The best one I’ve found which gets close to this is timeshift. File-level backups can’t restore your whole system state and users shouldn’t be expected to remember or manually export their package lists and god knows what else. I have subsisted on file-only backups but it’s really not great as a solution. Disks fail, and when they do, you inevitably have to reinstall the entire OS. It’s a mess. RAID1 could theoretically prevent this, but no distro makes it easy to boot from a RAID1 setup.

Backing up the entire filesystem is not a technically complex thing, there are plenty of command-line tools to do this and some filesystems even support this concept via snapshots etc. But this has yet to be put into a useful practice for end users.

It could be “bolted on” to the side, some people are working on that, but there are some very basic premises where they differ which make it difficult (such as an AP account being tied to an instance whereas a nostr account is not). It’s like asking “can email be intergrated with discord”. Well, yes, kinda, but it’s not going to be as smooth as if they used the same underlying protocol in the first place.

Damnit you’re right

I believe so, yes.

Background:

• In Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/ActivityPub, your identity is tied to your instance. So if your instance shuts down, you lose all your posts/followers/followees/subscriptions/DMs
• In Nostr, your identity is your public key so your relay can shut down and everything is fine since your identity isn’t tied to your relay/instance.
• BlueSky’s proposed solution to this is to have your username be yourname@somedomainyouown.com. Which requires buying a domain name, which are limited resources, costs >$10 per year, and requires manually configuring DNS records which is not fun.

Glad you liked it :)

Good for who? Where does value move when your currency is reduced in value by an expansion in the supply? To regular people? No. Lower and middle class people are the ones who have the most cash, they have a higher ratio of cash to net worth than rich people who can put their money into assets. They have an emergency fund. They are saving up to become property owners.

Humanity survived and grew total economic output for millennia before inflationary paper currency came around. Inflationary paper currency is a relatively recent phenomenon. I’m not saying we should go back to the gold standard, but that ended in 1971. That’s pretty recent.

If you live in a hyperinflation environment, you will spend your money on anything because it’s better than holding onto that money and see it become worthless. It might seem silly to own 12 blenders, but buying yet another blender is a better investment than simply sitting on your money for a month in Turkey. At least a blender can blend and maybe be re-sold at a later date. That effect still happens in mildly inflationary economies: we are incentivized to buy goods and services we don’t need because the alternative is just slowly watching our money lose value. This is not a great incentive to have baked into our financial system when we live on a planet with finite resources.

On the other hand, if your money is expected to retain or gain value, somebody has to really convince you to part with it. Does that mean products are built to last? Built more repairable or sustainable? Perhaps. You will still buy things of course, everybody needs stuff, but at least the incentive is trending in the right direction instead of towards needless consumption.

What if:

• Our government didn’t have the ability to print money? What if going to war meant raising taxes?
• We took the control of the money supply out of their hands and instead used free and open source software to create money and move it around?
• Our economy wasn’t predicated on a target 2-3% inflation rate? What if you were not incentivized to spend your money because it’s just losing value every day you don’t spend it? How might our consumption/production patterns change? How might that impact sustainability?
• The government couldn’t move money from the 99% to the 1% every time a bank needed to be bailed out? What if they didn’t print away all the value of money you earned? What if when the economy grew, the value of your money increased just as it would naturally if somebody wasn’t printing away the difference?

How might the world look different?

Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

Don’t try openshot next, it’s even worse.

Taking your example of Wikipedia, if the service suffers from a wave of trolls, as it exists today, it can roll back the changes. With a blockchain? That’s significantly harder, especially if useful edits happened in the meantime.

I’m not convinced we need a Wikipedia that runs on blockchain, but for the sake of it being an interesting question, I’ll answer it. Firstly, having a revision history is not bad. If you go to any wikipedia page, you can see most of the edits made, even those made by trolls, and the moderation decisions around those edits. This is good for transparency. When a user visits wikipedia, they see the “authoritative version” of that page, but the revision history is available to them if they want to read it. So with blockchain, you can roll back changes by changing which set of data is the “authoritative version” and you can have revision history, they are both important features.

There are a few types of data that are so harmful we can’t have them, even in the revision history. For this kind of problem, we reduce immutability (as referenced before by using pointers instead of storing data on-chain), or we can prevent that data from being put into the chain in the first place. An example of a way to do this is to require that every new block (every revision to a wikipedia page) be approved by a set of users who have reputation >x. Maybe that means a moderator has to sign off, or 10 regular users with at least one approved edit, you can set the threshold however you like and assign reputation however you’d like. As a user’s reputation is recorded on the blockchain, any node can easily verify their reputation amount.

Supposing this Wiki doesn’t store any of the content, then the endpoints become the targets, which beats the whole purpose of the blockchain resilience/immutability. An endpoint that can’t be reached is useless, one that has been compromised is even worse. You can trust the blockchain, but not the endpoint. And if the endpoint is where the “real stuff” is at anyway, why even bother with a blockchain?

The purpose of the blockchain in this wikipedia example is to:

• Establish a single authoritative version of wikipedia that the entire globe can see and submit edits to (unlike a federated version where you have multiple versions of wikipedia hosted different places). This is “single authoritative copy administered by people you can’t trust to be good actors” is the essential problem blockchain solves.
• Censorship resistance or resistance to “attackers” may not be an important thing for a wikipedia clone. Resistance to attack depends on your threat model, who the attackers are, what kind of resources they have, how you can resist those attacks, etc. Right now, Wikipedia is a single centralized entity and has done quite a good job at resisting attacks aimed to force them to make editorial decisions they don’t want to (mostly because of their reliance on the protections provided by the US legal system. If that system collapsed for some reason, their attack resistance might drop significantly). So if we clone wikipedia and make it decentralized, I think one could increase that security, but I’m not convinced that’s needed in the first place.
• It doesn’t matter if the data is ultimately stored at some endpoint, the blockchain is less about storage of data and more about arranging the data in order and establishing a single authoritative copy. It’s the medium through with users administer the data.
• “You can’t trust the endpoint”, this is true but maybe not in a way that matters. It’s true that the endpoint can send you bad information, but you can verify if the information is good or bad based on a cryptographic hash from the blockchain. Endpoints can have a reputational score on-chain and if they aren’t doing their job properly, they can cease being used as an endpoint at all. There could be multiple endpoints for any given piece of data for redundancy and to protect against a scenario where an end point, maliciously or not, becomes unreliable. Also, there are decentralized data storage options out there with varying degrees of usefulness for this application: torrents, IPFS, Filecoin, jstor, etc.

Immutability is not bad, there are some situations you want immutability. For example, to secure voting systems, you may want to be able to write on the chain that “precinct 156 reported votes x/y/z in this quantity” so that if anybody comes along and tampers with those numbers later on, you can point to the chain and say “no see, actually, these are the real original numbers that the precinct published”. The precinct could lie about their numbers of course and publish bad numbers to the chain, blockchain doesn’t protect against that (unless the votes themselves are recorded on the chain by the individual voter), but the blockchain protects against those numbers changing in the future or another party incorrectly claiming they are a/b/c when they are actually x/y/z. That’s a situation where immutability helps. Same with financial transactions. If you sent somebody money, you want a record of that (a receipt) if they later claim you never sent it to them. Examples of records which have a high degree of immutability that people use in everyday life are: court records, census data, house deeds, etc.

Blockchains usually have some degree of immutability but from a technical perspective they don’t necessarily have to. If we’re talking about data storage, you don’t have to store the data itself on the chain, the chain data can just “point to” off-chain data which you can take down or modify at will.

An example of a scenario where this could work is: you have a blockchain for coordinating the sharing of medical information between different parties. You, as a user, have an account on this blockchain. The only data stored on chain is a list of parties and who you have authorized to receive your medical data along with a pointer to a file storage system like Amazon AWS which contains your medical data in encrypted format. You can add or revoke authorization at any time by changing how that data is encrypted. Whoever you gave authorization to prior may have made a copy of the data at that point in time, but you can block them from accessing new data you put out. When Amazon AWS gets a request to transfer a copy of your data to a new party, they can check the blockchain to see if that party is authorized to receive it.

The benefit of such a system would be that:

• Your medical records are yours and stored in your own data storage system over which you have complete control.
• You can choose to share it with parties like insurance providers or researchers who need large medical data sets to comb through.
• You could set this control at a very granular level or grant access to all your data.
• Your data becomes portable between insurance providers and your insurance provider can’t make your life difficult by refusing to export data to your new one.

If you are talking about something like openauth (where you sign into some random website using your Google account) yes, but your base identity is still tied to Google. So if Google goes down, you lose your google account, and you also lose your account at every other website you logged in to using your google account.

If you are meaning transfer your account from google to say office365, this is possible but there’s a few problems:

• If your instance shuts down without doing this, you lose everything
• How does your instance choose which instance to transfer it to? What if users don’t like that choice?
• Transferring means sharing your login credentials with the new instance.
• Your “username” that you share and post online for people to follow you has changed. It’s no longer user@instance but user@newinstance. Some kind of a redirect could be setup I suppose.

Some of these problems are solvable with some changes to the AP code. Some of them are not, at least not without a rewrite of the entire AP structure. Nostr sidesteps all these issues by simply not having your username tied to an instance in the first place.

I looked in their FAQ but couldn’t find an answer. It looks like they support ticketing for events. I assume users can claim tickets. Is there a payment method built in as well, if so, what is it?

Thanks for the link! Checking this out now