AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

Relevant xkcd:

Most places will only accept metal items if they’re a certain size, which most allen keys almost certainly won’t meet.

For example, it looks like Seattle, (which has some of the best recycling system rates and practices in America) will only accept metal tools or scrap metal larger than 3 inches. Anything smaller than that can damage the machines they use for recycling, get diverted into the landfill stream because it can’t be sorted out, and/or slow down or stop the recycling process for other materials because it needs to be filtered out before it can make its way into the machinery that can’t handle small parts.

However, they do have drop-off options, which can take scrap of any size. So the choice is either throw it in the recycling bin and potentially damage or slow down the recycling machinery, or stash them away until you have enough to justify going to a drop-off.

Not that I’m aware of, just because studies haven’t even been considered for long enough to have lasted any entire lifetime, to my knowledge.

However, a many have been going for decades at this point, and there’s some great summaries of the findings over these expansive timeframes from the Stanford Basic Income Lab where they have a map and many other resources.

The conclusions seem to remain consistent, across studies lasting anywhere from one-time payments, to months, years, or decades, and I think that the conclusions, while not set in stone, seem to be quite comprehensively backed up to the point that if they were deployed at a larger scale, it would probably show similar outcomes.

I think the key reason this was seen as not being terribly offensive was the fact that women are disproportionately more likely than men to be on the receiving end of tons of different negative consequences when dating, thus to a degree justifying them having more of a safe space where their comfort and safety is prioritized.

However I think a lot of people are also recognizing now that such an app has lots of downsides that come as a result of that kind of structure, like false allegations being given too much legitimacy, high amounts of sensitive data storage, negative interactions being blown out of proportion, etc. I also think that this is yet another signature case of “private market solution to systemic problem” that only kind of addresses the symptoms, but not the actual causes of these issues that are rooted more in our societal standards and expectations of the genders, upbringing, depictions in media, etc.

This feels most likely to me.

Meta doesn’t exactly want to taint their brand image with purely sexual content being generated by their base models, so it’s probably for either content classification, and/or the also likely fine-tuning of their LLMs and other generative models in reverse - that is to say, fine tuning them to not create content that is like what they’re then being fed.

“It’s such a big issue that I’m going to do absolutely nothing as a parent to stop it from happening!”

• These people, probably

Every accusation is a confession.

Doesn’t protect against:

• Social engineering
• Contract code vulnerabilities
• Untrustworthy/Compromised controlling stakes in that escrow, whether they be people or autonomous systems
• False reversal claims made against the escrow

It has the same possible issues for your financial sovereignty as a regular, centralized financial institution, plus technical issues with the way the underlying infrastructure is built.

Technically true, but chains nowadays aren’t really vulnerable to that same kind of attack just due to their sheer scale and diversification of controlling stakes compared to what they used to be, so I wouldn’t consider it a particularly relevant issue today.

There’s a lot of things that have helped me, so I guess I’ll just dump some of that here.

First of all, make sure that you keeping up to date is deliberate, and consensual. News should not unconsensually cram itself into your eyeballs. Try out an RSS reader to keep what would be newsletter subscriptions or social media feed scrolling for the news in one single app that isn’t part of your other online activities, or keep relevant news sites bookmarked rather than followed or subscribed to.

When you feel you want to be more informed about what’s currently going on, you can then chose to be so without it happening at times you’re not ready for it.

Eliminate redundant media. So much of the media we consume isn’t truly new to us, whether that’s following people you already agree with then just liking all their posts, or reading news articles about something you already know about, just because they drop a very tiny morsel of additional information in there, burying the lead, so you have to constantly come back again and again to be truly up to date.

If you’re reading an article, watching a video, or scrolling social media, and you realize that what you’re reading is something you already know, that should be a sign to stop and take a break for a while, so the news cycle can progress further, rather than you very closely following its every little step. This is something that can take some mental training before you eventually get it down, so just try to be more aware of what you’re consuming when you consume it.

A lot of the news we see can also be something that, while technically interesting or engaging, simply doesn’t matter to us or our ability to impact others around us. Like how a TV station might show you a sad story about someone who had something bad happen to them at some time in some random small town you’ve never heard of. Sure, it’s news, but do you really need to know about that? Is that keeping you sane and energized for what comes next?

And speaking of being energized: do shit. If you care about politics and there’s a local rally or protest march, go to it. If you have a local rights organization that does outreach work, volunteer. If you can phonebank for a political candidate you like, make a few phone calls in your spare time.

I particularly like this quote from Joan Baez, which is “Action is the antidote to despair.” Even if you have a healthy diet of media consumption, are up to date without feeling overwhelmed, and are generally a well-informed individual, you can always still feel that nagging feeling that things aren’t changing.

You’ve done everything you can to know what’s going on, and yet what’s going on isn’t getting any better. There’s no point being informed if it doesn’t help you, your community, or the world at all, so when you’re able to, do literally anything you can to make even the smallest difference using what you know. If someone says something you don’t agree with politically, ask them why they believe that and use what you just learned from current events to back up your opinion. Who knows, they might change their mind.

I was ecstatic when Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in NYC, but I was even happier because after I’d informed myself about the race, his policy positions, and what prior mayors had done so terribly wrong, I had phonebanked for him, and was in a small way, somewhat responsible for that success. And can you guess how much less despair I feel when I see things in the world imploding around all of us now?

Doing anything can make you understand how much of an impact you can have just as an individual, and that makes any bad news infinitely less damaging to your mental health. That said, don’t feel bad when you can’t, we’re all people, and we have our limits and responsibilities.

And even without all that, the best advice I can give you is to just be aware of scale. We live in an age where problems well outside our control are something we’re aware of all the time. If something is a problem, sure, be aware of it, but don’t beat yourself up over how little you’re capable of doing as an individual. It’s like when recycling was proposed as a responsibility of individuals rather than corporations, and now people feel bad for throwing out the plastic waste that the corporations made.

Don’t doomscroll, reduce pointless media, take action where you can, and don’t beat yourself up when things don’t change overnight. Just do what you can. You’ve got this.

I would say the verdict is a solid yes.

(Post for anyone interested in reading more on their own)

As someone who used to be (but no longer is) into crypto: These statements are all technically accurate to some degree, but are missing extremely important nuance.

The stablecoins part is accurate. Most purchases made in crypto are with stablecoins.

What’s missing here is the fact that these stablecoins are issued and controlled by private companies, or would be influenced by them otherwise. For example, Circle issues USDC, one of the most popular dollar stablecoins. (as well as EURC for Euros)

Circle holds real dollars in real bank accounts to back USDC. Circle can also freeze your balance and blacklist addresses, because they don’t want their banks to stop working with them. That’s it. They can unilaterally stop you from using your USDC.

Other mechanisms for keeping a stablecoin at $1, such as algorithmic pegs, failed spectacularly many times, the most famous of which being the Terra disaster.

Some other stablecoins use centralized coins as backing to then issue new coins. (e.g. 1 STABLECOIN is backed by 1 USDC, and can be exchanged freely) These coins could then be in trouble if they’re used enough for fraud, and Circle just blocks the coin itself from exchanging between itself and USDC to maintain the peg, making it worthless. This is an inherent risk. You either use a centralized platform less accountable than card companies, or you use a third party backed by that centralized asset that could face peg issues.

As for the inefficiency, it’s actually true that PoW is being phased out by most chains other than Bitcoin for PoS, which is incredibly energy efficient by comparison. Truly, it’s actually just pretty energy efficient. This isn’t missing much nuance, though you could argue that the financial mechanisms used by the systems running on top of a PoS consensus mechanisms are still complex in their own right.

For the fraud part, this is only half accurate. Fraud in crypto has been on the rise, and while it’s maintained itself at a level lower than credit card fraud, this is also because of the limited scope in which crypto operates. If crypto were to be used in more situations like credit cards are, then there would be more opportunities to be defrauded in the first place.

The majority of activity in crypto operates within speculative markets, protocols offering yield farming and staking, liquidity pooling, vote bribing, and an untold number of other mechanisms that exist. As such, scammers are mostly limited to tricking people in the field of investments.

If crypto was also used to pay your bills, for your purchases at the store, for every rideshare and food delivery app, and to pay friends back for dinner, then the scope of fraud becomes much larger.

Crypto does not have less fraud because it is fundamentally better at preventing it, crypto has less fraud because it’s used in less circumstances.

(There is also an argument to be made that many investments in crypto that don’t work out because of rugpulls, failed promises, unaccountable DAO leaders, etc, aren’t counted in fraud statistics, and that the number should be much higher)

Now, finally, as for regulation, it’s true that crypto has seen much more regulation than it used to have, but it’s only getting a bit stronger, and is nowhere near the sheer quantity of regulations that financial corporations have to follow, though some are technically not necessary for crypto as most crypto is already transparent via the blockchain’s very structure, and thus doesn’t require some of the transparency regulations corporations often follow.

Crypto still lags far behind, and there’s a degree to which it physically can’t be regulated in the first place. For example, you can’t regulate how the Uniswap exchange handles user funds, because the code for Uniswap has already been immutably deployed to its respective chains.

If a system is built on rejecting authority, there will always be a degree to which justifiable authority that could protect people becomes impossible by its very nature.

I’m not wholly against any possible use of crypto. If someone being, say, censored by payment processors is able to use crypto to send money home to their family, or pay for a thing the corporations currently deem to not be nice for their brand image, that’s all well and fine.

But as a whole, crypto is nowhere near being more beneficial than harmful.

I used to be one of the people firmly on the “someone can decide legitimate interactions are harmful, thus they should not ever exist” side of the argument, and I think this is certainly a good way of putting it.

For a lot of people heavily into crypto, they see the drawbacks of the existing system, but instead of pushing for reform and legal changes, they try technological abolition of the entire mechanism altogether, without then realizing the tradeoffs that brings (e.g. how a lot of people will go “it’s instant! Sellers don’t have to worry about chargebacks! Nobody can take away your money from you!” yet don’t think about how that also means a scammer taking your money is a permanent loss you can never reverse. (or if they do think about it, will argue that risk can be reduced to a point it is less harmful than the alternative, centralized companies)

I don’t deny crypto can be useful sometimes, or even be more beneficial when the centralized companies do eventually do something bad and people need an alternative payment mechanism, but I think a lot of people into crypto overestimate how beneficial it truly is compared to the tradeoffs.

sellers are not going to lower prices based on payment method

Mullvad actually does this for their VPN service, which I think is great. For a VPN company that doesn’t want to store identifiers about you, taking crypto makes sense because that also doesn’t necessarily have identifiers about you attached that they could read or be required to store, unlike a card that requires your name, address, and card number.

Other than that though, no larger companies are going to do anything of the sort, let alone be likely to even implement it as a payment method to begin with. Tons of additional technical complexity for little to no benefit.

It’s also a heck of a lot quicker to process, (effectively instant) and works even on holidays.

And of course, banks like Bank of America, Capital One, and tons of other financial institutions simply refuse to use it, because that would mean spending money on changing their infrastructure, and making it more convenient for people to also use accounts outside of theirs.

Seriously, it’s been ages, and they’ve refused to use it at all, even though it’s purely a financial and technical upside for every user once it’s implemented.

Thank you for providing an actually high quality and accurate summary. I hate the way these headlines always obscure things or make them sound like they’re some magic new thing that we just found out too, so it’s nice to just hear it straight.

But that’s the thing: GrapheneOS doesn’t exist to “escape google,” it exists to give people privacy.

If it were designed to escape google, they wouldn’t create a re-implementation of Google Play Services that you can optionally install for apps that need it and regularly maintain it with every OS update.

GrapheneOS doesn’t remove Google services because “Google specifically bad,” they remove Google services because they spy on you without consent, and GrapheneOS is meant to prevent spying.

Hell, if any ROM wanted to get away from Google, basing itself on Android, the thing developed by Google would then be the problem, and they would be better off trying to make an independent Linux distro.

It fundamentally makes sense for GrapheneOS to work on Google hardware first, because Google controls not just the hardware supply chain of the phones, but also the software supply chain. (AOSP)

Supporting, say, Samsung phones, would then mean not just, to a degree, relying on Google via AOSP, but also Samsung’s hardware. Android-based ROMs can’t really benefit from trying to get away from a particular company, because it’s either Google, or Google + Phone Manufacturer that they then have to deal with. (not to mention the fact that Pixels run the best with stock android and are simply the most feasible device for a small development team to support with the lowest possible costs)

Not whatsoever.

Practically any mining software would allow you to change a pool whenever you felt like it, and making a script that just goes “oh, x.x.x.x isn’t responding anymore, I should point my hashrate to y.y.y.y now” is… not hard, to say the least.

I also love this diagram from Scientific American since even from a glance I think a lot of open-minded people will get an immediate understanding that it’s at the very least complex, even if they aren’t willing to spend a long time engaging with any discussion around it.

That depends on how you interpret people as either being or not being ignorant.

If you judge it solely based on how much time is spent consuming digital media, then people would be less ignorant considering that number has more than doubled since 2008. (doesn’t take into account things like print media, but I doubt people were spending at least 3 hours reading print media every single day, then switched a whole at least 3 hours of that over to digital media)

If you base it on the amount of social relationships they have with diverse groups of people that could lead them to be less ignorant about the world around themselves, then we’ve trended towards being more ignorant in that regard, because while people are more likely to have at least 4 close friends now, they’re less likely to have a wide network (10+) by nearly 3X less.

There’s also the fact that ignorance doesn’t necessarily mean “bliss” in all circumstances.

For example, people are more likely to feel satisfied waiting for a bus (or anything, really) if they’re provided an predictable, but longer estimated arrival time, compared to an unpredictable, but shorter arrival time (to an extent). In that case, the ignorance actually makes people less happy with the experience, even if it still resulted in a faster travel time than the known alternative.

The saying “ignorance is bliss” primarily applies to ignorance of problems within one’s life or society as a whole. If someone’s not aware of the atrocities committed by their government overseas, they’ll feel less stress or anger when voting or thinking of what the future might hold. If you were told you would die in exactly 24 hours, you’d probably spend more of that 24 hours worrying than simply living normally, and would be comparably less happy at the end as a result.

It’s hard to pin down any one reason in particular, but if we want to know why people are so unhappy, maybe we should reassess how ignorant people are in the first place, and what exactly they are ignorant about.

See, there’s a trend we can see with overall dissatisfaction, and it’s heavily tied to economic factors. The more wealth and economic disparity there is in a nation, the less happy the people there seem to be. (See: the World Happiness Report)

Coincidentally, places like the US are some of the most unhappy in the developed world, and also have high levels of wealth inequality

The same WHR report even shows that the density of social connections helps a lot with making people happier. (pg. 142-144) Remember the figure I brought up before about people having smaller social networks?

I can’t even begin to break down every single possible factor that’s making people unhappy, but from reports like the WHR, I think it’s clear that a lot of the things that affect people’s happiness are things that are hard to be ignorant of.

You can probably count up about how many friends you have, know about how wealthy you are, and feel dissatisfied, even if you’re the type of person that doesn’t care about politics, which is one of the largest drivers of dissatisfaction in people who are actually aware.

Remember that people are now consuming much more politics-related media nowadays, and you’ve got a lot of people who are:

• keenly aware of their own personal problems that they simply can’t be ignorant of
• tuned in to conflicts and political drama that may not even affect them, or anyone if it’s entirely political posturing
• severely economically disadvantaged, while being repeatedly shown the lives of those with substantially more than them as a goal to aspire to (think hustle culture)

And don’t even get me started on how much the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to be alone and confront their own internal problems that they were previously ignorant of.

To boil this all down to something a bit more coherent: (apologies for the long rambling)

People aren’t necessarily ignorant of the things that can cause dissatisfaction, EVEN IF they’re ignorant of larger, important issues with the world, or even smaller issues that could still impact them. We are now more connected, economically unequal, and isolated than we have been in the past, and that will take its toll no matter how ignorant you are.