It’s, I think, sort of true that the Civil War wasn’t always going to necessarily mean the end of slavery if the north won.
It started as a war to keep the union together, and initially a lot of people in the north thought that it would end quickly and that the states would return to the union and give up their rebellion.
However, as time went on and the losses started to pile up, it became clear to Lincoln and the other northern leaders that a war with this much bloodshed must end the slavery debate for good. That is why Lincoln ultimately wrote and delivered the Emancipation Proclamation.
But it’s a point that’s splitting a lot of hairs and very nuanced, because the Civil War started when pro-slavery states seceded from the union because they were afraid that a president elected without consent from any of the southern states might move to eliminate slavery…so summarily, the Civil War was definitely about slavery from beginning to end.
The unsexy use cases for NFTs (using them for things that are currently traded or otherwise transferred digitally with manual, disconnected, and/or opaque back-ends) is likely the one that will endure, just like everything else.
Who is actually or supposedly will be in the future using them for this purpose?
Digital scarcity is in and of itself kind of a niche concept.
The stock market may be in a bubble, but regular stock investments aren’t the same as investing in crypto no matter how much the crypto bros insist it is. Stocks are shares of actual companies that (typically) make things, and they also produce dividends.
All that said, I think the end of QE “forever” is a thing that the C-levels of big companies are still trying to get over. I think it’s much more difficult to find retail investor interest in a market where benchmark rates exceed inflation, and it looks like the AI hype juice is starting to run out.
I could see that being a use case if it weren’t for how much the underlying technology sucks ass. Blockchains spend too much time doing their silly little trust-less security nonsense dance to be able to perform at the scale needed by systems that will sell…say…Taylor Swift concert tickets.
Yeah and rent-seeking is the only real big business left in town besides personalized advertising.
No way a rent-seeking opportunity this great isn’t going to be gobbled up by the existing players and instead given up for free so that they can use new, poorly performing, expensive technology instead.
There’s no business incentive to allow a second-hand digital games market, and there’s no regulation to force them to provide one. It’s pretty much that simple.
NFTs won’t solve this, and even if there was a mandated way to sell “used” digital games (a concept that’s actually pretty bizarre when you think about it) it would not be through NFTs or block chain, because the underlying technology is slow and costs a shit ton to run. Unless you’re producing a coin on the side, there’s also no simple mechanism to offload the costs of running it.
Yeah and they only make bank because they sit in the middle of the transactions as the trusted third party.
The only way to possibly make NFTs work for Steam would be for them to also start up a side business of “SteamCoin” currency, because the only way to offload the enormous costs of running a blockchain network at scale is to have miners and nodes running the network for their own gains.
And even then, they’d lose autonomy over their own business and it would likely be slower in terms of transactions per second for normal customers.
It’s a losing proposition pretty much all around. The only way that an existing company with an adequately equipped IT department would transition to this is if they were forced to by law…and I don’t see that happening ever.
Why does Amazon think that someone who spent $50 on a shop vac is now in the market for a $700 Dyson?
Because their “algorithms” suck. Their “ML/AI” recommendation engine garbage sucks ass. I have no idea why publications or companies think this is in any way a better form of advertising than just…recommending things related to what you’re watching / reading / listening to…but hey…I guess it at least allows them to spy on everything you ever do anywhere on the Internet and then try to join that up to what you do in real life through phone data, so the ends justify the means I guess.
EDIT: In addition to it sucking, it’s largely irrelevant and likely prevents some sales from occurring. If I’m listening to a lot of a certain rock band…I’d likely want to know if they’re touring and may be unaware of that fact…but nah, gotta push people to buy another vacuum or whatever instead.
This is a flawless plan, especially since they pinky swore that they wouldn’t keep around the information you put into the black box AI. So we’re all safe!
Doubtful, I opened up a privacy tab and typed this and received it as the first, non-paraphrased result.
The paraphrased result was correct, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is doing onesy, twosy patches when notable examples of it being completely full of AI bullshit arise.
Slavery in the U.S. was a huge economic force, one that a certain contingent (the very wealthy) never got over losing. The next best thing was to create whole groups of people who are desperate enough to work for almost nothing. That’s what we have in this country now. And it works best if those people are constantly putting out more children. That keeps them even more stuck and more desperate, and it keeps a steady supply of cheap labor coming.
In my experience the only difference between a certain kind of right-wing “libertarian” person and a slavery apologist is just the amount of time you’ve spent arguing with them. Their arguments (pro-child marriage, anti-abortion, anti-minimum wage) end up converging at “well, in some cases it’s /more/ expensive to provide people room and board than it would be to pay them in cash”.
Went to a restaurant in LA today and when I got the check I noticed that it was a bit higher than it should be. Then I noticed this 18% service charge. So… We, as customers, need to help pay for their servers instead of the owners paying their servers a living wage. And on top of that they have suggested tip. I called bs on...
They aren’t doing that because nobody can do the math in their head to figure out what the actual cost of the menu items will be. Much better (for them) to hit you up with a charge at the end and blindside you with percentage surcharges.
It’s alarmingly frequent in California and should be fucking illegal.
It has nothing to do with the cost of re-printing menus, because they have to do that anyway to put the legalese on there about the percentage surcharges.
Yeah I mean the supermarket isn’t a bargain either.
The only real “deals” I get nowadays are from Costco, and you still wind up spending multiple hundreds of dollars you just get more for your money that way.
A California Superior Court judge arrested last week has now been charged with killing his wife in front of their adult son at their home. Court filings reveal the judge had over 47 weapons and 26,000 rounds of ammunition in his home.
Yeah because having so many guns you literally have a gun on your ankle while also being a belligerent drunk doesn’t prime you more for murder the next time you “lose it”.
Guns make murder literally child’s play. If he wasn’t such an ammo sexual he may have slapped his wife and gotten beaten up by his son and landed in the drunk tank, but because a gun was easier and more available his first round of reported domestic violence was lethal.
Thing I don’t get is where people are finding this sense of community. I understand that it’s rough to feel like you belong in America, but are red pill Internet communities really enough for some people to give them a sense of belonging? Every Internet “community” I’ve ever been a part of just feels like a bunch of strangers arguing about things and trying to pile into some ranking order.
They’re already in conflict everywhere. Infrastructure for cars robs public transit infrastructure blind in lots of government budgets. The only public transit category potentially benefiting from car infrastructure is buses, which are arguably the worst form of public transit to begin with, and still also require additional dedicated infrastructure to get any better (e.g. dedicated bus lanes).
“Self-driving” cars obviously require car infrastructure which already steals from public transit budgets both federally and locally, but if we add government emphasis on this technology and start to develop specific infrastructure for “self-driving” cars (walled off routes, communications appliances, etc.) then they’ll start taking even more of the budget.
And all of this for something that’s arguably much more braindead and useless and consuming of R&D dollars than the obviously more efficient, already technically possible forms of transit that could be built or expanded upon today.
And there’s almost no way a modern (feudalistic) car company will allow you to use your car this way to earn money.
The corporate masters are already not so keen on paying you when you are actually driving the thing. Do you really think they’ll let you in on the racket?
I consider it close to going to school for engineering or design and winding up being the guy in charge of making airplane seats ever smaller and more uncomfortable.
You’re 100% right. For years Firefox was really the only game in town that was competitive with IE. Even Mac OS had a “IE for Mac OS” because otherwise the Internet (mostly) wouldn’t work on a Mac.
By the time Chrome was released, Google basically had to explain why they were creating their own browser given that IE, Firefox, Safari, and other browsers (WebKit was a fork of KHTML from KDE) were already available. At the time, they justified it with performance enhancements and a different process model for Chrome. There was a good case to be made and Chrome was indeed faster when it was launched.
It’s pretty obvious at this point that the only business model available for Google and most of the other big tech companies is to hoover up your data and use it for the presentation of ads. If I were a more of a conspiracy believer (or even thought that Google had some foresight), I would think that the only reason Google launched Chrome was to eventually do away with ad blockers.
DRM is easy to evade by those that want to evade it. I read something on mastodon the other day that was saying some cheater hackers are using direct hardware connections to their machines to cheat.
DRM makes it difficult for Joe six pack to easily pirate, use an ad-blocker, not use one of big brother’s approved devices to get a paltry boner from watching Milf Island on Peacock, but it does nothing to people with the ways and means to get around these things…those evasive maneuvers are often illegal though.
DRM is a malignant technology just by its very nature, and this has been fought about for decades. But it’s just simply not tenable to protect the content that is being replicated on demand by a customer paying for its replication from being replicated to others.
Seriously, think about how stupid the above is for a minute.
The term AI has been rebranded multiple times, but the latest usage is definitely a marketing term used to boost investor sentiment.
Investors are falling for it too. It’s funny because I think they were finally coming to realize the broken promises of untold wealth to be gained via tech’s early offerings, and starting to realize that their business model is pretty limited (surveillance capitalism with the end goal of ad tech… Which is why Google is willing to end the open web to stop adblockers), and then conveniently “GenAI” is elevated to prominence as what we call “AI” and everyone loses their minds again with fantasy instead of asking how this thing could possibly make any money.
Will I get the free version of this thing to reword “fuck you” in a passive aggressive, more corporate friendly way so I can send off an email to the company? Sure. Will I subscribe to a service that provides that capability? Fuck no.
I do have to say though that I think a lot of programmers appear to have a type of writer’s block that I just don’t understand, and perhaps the only money generating method for these things other than continuing to push ads may be their purchase as corporate tools. I think the integrations, though faddy and obvious, will be the first things to sail out the door when someone gets the bill, because the APIs often bill via token and these piles of garbage require quite a bit of token to be exchanged to come to any kind of satisfactory result.
EDIT: I wanted to add two things:
I think it’s funny that you used the “sound and fury” quote in regards to an article written about ChatGPT because that’s largely what I think ChatGPT is…
I find it hilarious that the first, obvious money making application of ChatGPT is to generate junky bullshit websites that undermine the ad-tech business models of the major tech companies…which is a thing we’re already seeing.
But that doesn’t mean that rent is “predatory” except in the cases of long time owners hiking rates when their costs have stayed the same. The reality is that rent is closely related to the current cost of buying at any given time.
Not all landlords are predatory maybe, but at least in this city the overwhelming majority of them are. They’re also like a half dozen corporations that hold most of the apartment buildings. They raise their rates dramatically like clockwork even though I’m in California and we have Prop 13 which holds their tax raises to very low percentage increases yearly.
I would say that for the most part, yes, it has a relationship to what it would cost to buy the same property…but it’s location dependent. You can’t (for the most part) buy an apartment here. It’s almost certainly the case (I’m only not 100% sure because a lot of the apartment complex holding companies are private) that they have low rate mortgages or no mortgages at all on the buildings, and they charge more and more as time goes forward despite their costs not really increasing.
We’re entering a neo-feudalistic economy and while yes, again, there’s some relation to the cost…a lot of it is just straight up greed.
It made you more rich on paper, but the reality is that you aren’t in the same boat as landlords. The reason is that if you live in your property in order to realize the profit on it you’ll have to sell it and move somewhere less expensive (i.e. somewhere likely less desirable).
Prices in real estate going up only really benefits real estate tycoons, the local government (depending upon location), and other side players in the market (e.g. real estate agents). For the rest of us, if you sell it just means that you have to turn around and buy in a more expensive market. Also (depending upon location, California properties aren’t completely re-assessed for taxes until they change hands) it hikes your taxes.
As a single property owner in California, I’m rooting for prices to drop so I can upgrade and still pay the same amount of taxes (or less).
Masculine Policy: The GOP’s Plan To Outlaw ‘Porn’ And Suspend The First Amendment (www.techdirt.com)
The American civil war wasn’t about slavery. (lemmy.ca)
A key feature of NFTs has completely broken / Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid. Not so much anymore. (www.theverge.com)
Buyers of Bored Ape NFTs sue after digital apes turn out to be bad investment (arstechnica.com)
We're monsters (lemmy.world)
"Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product? (lemmy.one)
I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a “sponsored recommendation”....
xkcd #743: Infrastructures (lem.trashbrain.org)
Title text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going....
Google search is over (mastodon.social)
Via @rodhilton...
Girl, 13, gives birth after she was raped and denied abortion in Mississippi (www.theguardian.com)
The nearest abortion clinic – in Chicago – was too far away and too expensive for her mother to provide her with the procedure
higher wages for the servers... by the customers. Fnbs (lemmy.world)
Went to a restaurant in LA today and when I got the check I noticed that it was a bit higher than it should be. Then I noticed this 18% service charge. So… We, as customers, need to help pay for their servers instead of the owners paying their servers a living wage. And on top of that they have suggested tip. I called bs on...
intermission (lemmy.world)
ChatGPT In Trouble: OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024, AI bot costs company $700,000 every day (www.firstpost.com)
Repost from HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37109394
AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble (futurism.com)
As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
California judge charged with killing wife had 47 guns, 26,000 rounds of ammunition: Court documents (abcnews.go.com)
A California Superior Court judge arrested last week has now been charged with killing his wife in front of their adult son at their home. Court filings reveal the judge had over 47 weapons and 26,000 rounds of ammunition in his home.
How do I explain to a person that the "red pill mentality" is stupid?
This is a genuine question, as every time I have an argument about this with someone they bring a point so utterly stupid that it leaves me stumped…
California just opened the floodgates for self-driving cars (www.washingtonpost.com)
In a pivotal moment for the autonomous transportation industry, California chose to expand one of the biggest test cases for the technology.
Bots are better than humans at cracking ‘Are you a robot?’ Captcha tests, study finds (www.independent.co.uk)
Google's Web DRM is Worse than I Thought... (www.youtube.com)
This video as a text article: blog.nicco.love/google-drms-the-web/
Posting my favorite memes (lemm.ee)
Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence (karawynn.substack.com)
Yes! This is a brilliant explanation of why language use is not the same as intelligence, and why LLMs like chatGPT are not intelligence. At all.
'Renters Are Struggling': Economists Back Tenant-Led Push for Federal Rent Control (www.commondreams.org)