I know Jay IRL and can attest to her being a very good person, and I have strong faith in her ability to be a competent leader for Bluesky and to deliver on the project's potential.
Just an anecdote but I wanted to contribute it. A big reason I ended my Twitter involvement and switched to Bluesky is simply because I expect them to succeed and replace it, indifferent of the ideological alignment of either platform.
Bluesky has a really neat approach to composable moderation. You can subscribe to one of the many labellers and decide how you want your feed to be moderated. e.g. to hide US Politics https://bsky.app/profile/uspol.bluesky.bot or spoilers https://bsky.app/profile/mod.shawn.party or transphobia https://bsky.app/profile/asukafield.xyz. I haven't used any of these, so I can't attest to their quality, but it's a unique approach. Personally, I subscribed to one that hides the engagement-farm follow bots that works.
Of course the other part is Bluesky's PDS (the 'instance' hosting content for those who sign up on bsky.app) - they're free to moderate their infrastructure however they see fit. You might find yourself banned from there, but you can always host your own PDS and still be followable on bluesky.
One of my favorite design decisions in Bluesky is that you can set any label from any labeler to off, warn, or hide, including @moderation.bsky.app. If you think that labeler applies the "Intolerance" label incorrectly, just turn it off.
Yeah, I like that too. Technically there’s a lot of really great design decisions that were made, but I’ve seen people take screenshots of the app and crying “censorship!” not understanding it’s a setting that can be changed or that a different client could be implemented against aproto.
I don’t think they’re wrong either based on past precedent and their mental model of how most social networks work.
I’d propose that Bsky instead asks the user if they want to view the content or block it, allowing them to change the setting right then and there (and not have to dig), instead of outright saying “Intolerant” and making them jump through hoops every time they want to view it.
I think anyone who wants to make a social thing popular with a mainstream audience is strongly incentivized to ensure that newcomers don't encounter Nazi shit. I think most of us know the parable of the Nazi bar.
Of course anyone who wants to stick around should eventually learn a bit about how the moderation works so they can decide what they want to see and what they don't.
There’s a huge gap between “nazi shit” and bad satire. I don’t think the content being labeled as “Intolerant” is funny, but I do care about how history rhymes.
Reddit hit a decent balance by calling it “NSFW” and letting people change the setting as they encounter it.
I think I wasn't clear enough. Bluesky has a strong incentive to hide extremist content by default, but I do not claim their moderation service applies the intolerance label correctly.
I think 'intolerant' is good enough. I know I am intolerant/insensitive on some stuff and I would accept that a post I would make mocking animal death (not proud but I did that) to be flagged as intolerant or whatever. Honestly it's often low-brow anyway, nothing of value is lost.
I think they are wrong. We are fleeing X because a lot of right winger's mental model for appropriate political discussion with liberals is mostly mean trollish harassment, purposefully putting people down and trying to make people feel bad so they can "drink liberal tears". It's not good faith counterpoints. Avoiding that is not censorship of ideas.
> The design of IPv6 was intentionally very conservative. To a first level of approximation IPv6 is simply “IPv4 with bigger addresses”.
I don't agree with this take. I think it's actually quite a bit more complex, and this is a large part of the reason adoption has been slow. In retrospect, I think it would have been better off in practice to just literally extend the size of IPv4 addresses, and make it as simple as converting all IPv4 systems to hold a larger address.
I feel like the hard part there is actually accessing all the IPv4 systems to change how they handle addresses. I don't know the full scope of difference, but I feel like once you can do a software update to all of your devices, the cost of increased complexity in protocol would be relatively constant between a minimal and actual v6. You are just pushing different data through the update.
It's hard not to be a little coy when you helped build something that usually takes an empire to build with some bad code and a few hundred loosely affiliated weirdos on the internet. I still don't think most laypeople (or honestly most people in the "crypto" space) really understand the significance of what was invented with Bitcoin.
The genesis block has a message from a relatively obscure British newspaper in it (The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks). Not something I would expect a frontier Canadian in their 20s to be sourcing from.
That and various other evidence (coding style, british-english spelling) has suggested to me for a long time that it's an older gentleman from the UK, likely with an academic background in economics or related distributed systems. I don't know either way, but it seems borderline libel to suggest without much more substantial evidence that it's Peter Todd.
The Times is not an obscure paper, but if you'd like some fodder: the headline Satoshi used is from the print edition rather than the online edition which was different.
That said, Satoshi was clearly extremely diligent in concealing their identity, and so they may well have purposefully decided to use a headline that they wouldn't have had ordinary access too-- when someone is trying to conceal themselves it creates an environment which is hostile to logical reasoning. Any point which could point one direction might instead point the opposite or in a random direction.
Satoshi connected to IRC from a residential IP address in Los Angeles in 2009. So there was a point in time where all it would have taken was a subpoena to find him. Now those records probably don't exist. Unless that was a Tor exit or one of those socks5 proxy type services. I remember there was an archive of the Tor consensus files going back really far that I can no longer find, so it'd be possible to check if it was.
> Satoshi connected to IRC from a residential IP address in Los Angeles in 2009.
Maybe, that claim is pretty speculative and shouldn't be repeated as established fact.
I agree with the rest of your points, though there were a lot of proxies other than tor. In particular, there were well known forums you could post on to get private proxies -- often used for kinda shady astroturfing and similar. So excluding tor alone isn't sufficient. Tor wouldn't have been as useful for Satoshi's bitcoin usage because he couldn't run a node over it that accepted inbound connections.
I spent quite a bit of time with Peter Todd in the very early Bitcoin days. I really enjoyed our conversations back then, I have no idea what he is up to now. My gut feeling is that he is probably not Satoshi Nakamoto. Adam Back is a far more likely suspect, particularly for his British english, which Satoshi wrote in.
+1 to Adam Back. Who is more likely to build ontop of some obscure code base called "Hash Cash"? Some random people that trolled the same forums or the original creator of it?
Imo this "secret" is known by many people as I have seen so many censorship and misdirection campaigns throughout the years if people mention Adam being the one.
Him being Satoshi also makes bitcoin core seem more legitimate. He can guide his creation without being formally known as satoshi.
It is obvious. Especially if you have ever been a solo dev for an extended period of time (like adam was)
There is a ton more evidence but seems like no one really wants to dig into Adam.
Adam literally stopped updating hash cash and a year later Bitcoin is released... check his website on archive.org.
Its ok. I like that there is still conversation as to who it is. It gives protection to him since there likely wont be anything concrete (if hopefully he was slick enough)
Indeed there's really nothing positive to be had from coming out as Satoshi at this point regardless of who it is. Criminals and governments will be falling over each other to try to get their take.
One addendum here: If I was personally Satoshi, I would come back and try to convince everyone to switch to proof of stake instead of proof of work and then subsequently disappear again. If you need a non-politicized reason why (something other than climate change), just go with my joke one of solving one of the outcomes of Fermi's Paradox (distant civilizations don't send signals because all energy is used to mine cryptocurrencies).
Proof of stake doesn't solve the problem bitcoin set out to solve.
A proof of stake system is essentially just a rehash on the earlier centralized digital cash systems where a quorum of key holders engage in a consensus that determines further updates to the system (including the set of keys allowed to authorize further updates).
We didn't need Satoshi to come up with that, that idea was already known.
I don't follow your reasoning. It seems to me that at an abstract level, Satoshi set out to solve the problem of government meddling in currencies by creating a distributed digital currency not managed by a governmental agency with a predictable and well documented amount of money supply growth. Whether it uses a PoW or PoS approach seems irrelevant to that goal? PoS can lead to centralization if larger stakeholders have more influence over the network, but the same problem applies to PoW as well, and the large miners' substantial influence on Bitcoin development politics feels more like corporatism than distributed consensus. I haven't really been following things lately, but Ethereum seems to be transitioning to PoS as a distributed system just fine?
Neither approach seems perfect, the important difference to me is that one approach, sans some technological advance like fusion energy, presents a major ecological problem that has existential risks for humanity.
List of states: California, District of Columbia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, Washington
The article implies that the emulator project lead may have received some sort of monetary compensation from Nintendo as part of the agreement. It would be interesting to verify that, because it feels like something quite new if they tried that tactic and it worked.
The article also implies that emulator projects are legal, but given that modern systems likely use encryption as part of their privacy prevention process, I'm not so sure about that anymore (see the DeCSS fiasco).
If so, that would open the door to various offensive legal tactics, primarily a similar legal claim as used against Google in maintaining a monopoly. It would require establishing that the relevant market is Switch game hardware, but we've seen evidence that the courts will accept such market definitions, e.g. Apple/iPhone.
The man that spent his time on an overpriced takeover and subsequent ruining of Twitter instead of spending that time with the children he abandoned is a cautionary tale of wasted time, not a sage to be mined for wisdom.
Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds instead of wasting that time gaming an algorithm on a platform he paid too much for to become the leading proprietor of authoritarian-conservative junk posting.
If anyone thinks he doesn't have enough time for that, go over to Twitter and look at what he's doing with that time he doesn't have right now.
> Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds
His life might be richer, but I don't think he would get more done. I do think he is a cautionary tale, but there are also many insights to be gained.
You shouldn't optimize your life for output, but for those moments when you do want to optimize your output it makes sense to glean from those who are very good at it.
Is being an avoidant parent a precondition to being a successful executive? My direct anecdotal experience with successful executives is quite the opposite.
I really think we're giving him far too much credit to assume this is all an intentional time-saving life hack to improve his ability to optimize his output for some planet-saving goal (which his most recent work, frankly, has not been).
> Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds
The people I know who satisfy that definition don't generally get shit done. The ones who do are outliers; i.e. so rare that you may as well judge them to be a rounding error.
My only takeaway from this exchange is you're jealous the man had the money to just go and buy Mysterious Twitter X and do with it as he wants, instead of complaining about it like the rest of us.
His pleasures, accomplishments, fears, and compulsions.
A personality and a lifestyle that drives away everyone except acquaintances and employees.
The kind of insecurity that causes a person to gravely insult a someone who risked their life, many times over, to save the lives of strangers half a world from their home because they dismissed your media ploy in public.
The kind of personality that is so addicted to attention that despite repeated public embarrassments that would make most people rethink their actions, they reform their own worldview in order to blame society instead of rightfully feeling ashamed.
A person who has a compulsion to make money constantly when there is no longer any purpose to do so -- to the point where they use guest appearances on comedy shows to pump and dump novelty crypto coins in order to make a few more pennies.
Does that sound like a happy, content person? If anyone is jealous of that life just so that they can have the fame then all I can say is that there is ever an opportunity where one of us can grab that for themselves, please -- be my guest.
> The kind of insecurity that causes a person to gravely insult a someone who risked their life, many times over, to save the lives of strangers half a world from their home because they dismissed your media ploy in public.
Called him a pedophile no less. He didn't win the libel case in court, but he certainly deserved to.
The actual story of the cave rescue and the highly specialized cave divers that pulled it off is quite incredible, I highly recommend seeing it as it happens in The Rescue. The documentary takes the high ground and doesn't mention the Musk fiasco, but without directly doing so, also lays waste to how impossible the submarine idea was: https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-rescue
It is funny how much criticism you are taking for saying things that are obviously true.
Yes, Musk's personal life is a mess and noone would enjoy being him.
That can be true at the same time as his business philosophy effectively pushes forward multiple businesses more quickly than their competitors. That can even be true while his businesses are run in ways that most of us would find unacceptable.
It's worth pointing out here that SpaceX's current product development practices and Boeing's current product development practices is a bit of a false dichotomy. We could also, for example, consider how Boeing did things a few decades ago.
One particular reason I don't like this false dichotomy is that SpaceX's approach has negative externalities that aren't getting enough attention because everybody's so starstruck by all the fancy rockets. There's a reason the FAA and EPA are starting to pressure SpaceX about the environmental and social impact of their way of doing business. Maybe next OSHA can get on them for the high workplace injury rate. You're not actually doing things more cheaply if what you're really doing is hiding costs that would belong on your balance sheet by surreptitiously foisting them onto the public with the help of corrupt politicians.
(Ostensible libertarians, pay extra attention to those last six words.)
I received one of these notifications this morning and promptly ignored it. I had to laugh because it was about this repo specifically: https://github.com/kyledrake/theftcoinjs
It's already there. I've been trying, and failing, to convince my wife that we don't need a $7,000 "real" diamond for a ring she wants, and that a <$1000 lab-created diamond is better. Not only is it cheaper, but it's likely less flawed and doesn't support a company with unethical practices.
She is convinced that she nonetheless needs the $7,000 one or at least a used "real" diamond for reasons I cannot comprehend.
Natural diamonds are not especially rare. The entire reason they are overvalued in society is due to an extremely successful and ongoing marketing campaign combined with a monopoly that allows for extreme market manipulation.
Your wife is concerned with that social value. The actual physical qualities of the stones aren't really that important. Social status is.
The value of real diamonds is in signalling how much money you're able and willing to burn. That's why their pricing makes no sense, and why the more expensive it is, the better.
Think of it like this: what's the surest, simplest, and most reliable way of proving to people that you're wealthy? It's taking a good chunk of your cash - like, in the order of monthly living expenses of people around you - and setting it on fire. Or spending it on something just as useless - like a diamond ring, or that romantic trip across Europe.
That's why jewelry with obvious resale value doesn't work as well, nor does anything that can be seen as investment or an utility purchase: the signal only works if you're wasting money on a vanity purchase - one large enough to show that you either have more money than you know what to do with, or at least that you care so much about recipient that you're willing to sacrifice a meaningful chunk of your wealth on a gesture.
Of course few will say this out loud, or even think about this explicitly. Diamonds, engagement rings, and all the other staples of romance are in big part a status game that people learn to play from childhood, so to most, those things feel like something natural to do.
There really is no ethical or moral defense for natural diamond mining. When presented with the human and environmental impact, one’s response is pretty informative of their character and motivations.
A big part of diamonds is marketing. That if you are not putting one month’s salary away for that special stone then you are not strongly committed to marriage.
My wife was pragmatic. I said we could put $5k on a stone that has no intrinsic value or $5k on FNILX at time of marriage and take a blast of vacation one year later when it’s turned into ~$5500.
She chose vacation and we had a blast in Europe. Good vibes per dollar spent is where it’s at.
Just an anecdote but I wanted to contribute it. A big reason I ended my Twitter involvement and switched to Bluesky is simply because I expect them to succeed and replace it, indifferent of the ideological alignment of either platform.
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