blacklight

blacklight, 9 months ago to random

Texas' grid operator just spent $31.7M in the middle of a heat wave and energy shortage.

No, not to provide fresh shelter to the homeless. Nor to install booths with free fresh water. Nor to increase the number of public spaces (outside of shopping malls) where people can gather, instead of burning energy to keep their homes cool 24/7. Nor to boost its investments in renewables and pivot away from the oil that it keeps digging.

No, the government just gave that money away to Riot Platform (a business that runs a bunch of Bitcoin mining servers) to convince them to turn off their energy-hungry machines, so everybody else can also use energy to keep themselves cool. Btw, that's more than twice the mining profit that they make in one month.

Let that sink in. Even a life-threatening heatwave can't get miners to behave cooperatively and turn off their machines, whose only purpose is as pointless as randomly guessing a number whose SHA256 hash satisfies a certain arbitrary numeric constraint - and they skim some profits out of these pointless puzzles just because someone decided that putting up a system with such perverse financial incentives was a good idea.

In order to get them to behave as someone who's not a complete selfish sociopath and evolutionary failure, the government had to compensate them (by a 2x factor) for the losses that they would make by temporarily turning off their gamgling den, while everybody else will probably just get a regular rolling blackout without any compensation.

I guess that today's capitalism is that system where it's actually ok for the government to spend public money - as long as that money goes to those who need it the least and create the least amount of net value.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-riot-texas-power-grid/

erlend, 10 months ago to fediversenews

Several years in the making, GitLab is now very actively implementing #ActivityPub! 🙌

https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247

The end-goal is to support AP for merge requests (aka pull requests), meaning git.alice.dev can send an MR to gitlab.com/Bob/project.git

First bite-sized todo on the implementation path there is ‘subscribe to project releases’.

Smart move by GitLab; through ActivityPub they’re getting a distributed version of GitHub’s social layer.

@fediversenews #fediverse #GitHub #git

blacklight, 11 months ago to random

Do you remember when audio cassettes were seen as tools for piracy? When the industry used to drill in our brains the idea that if we were recording stuff from the radio to a cassette we were killing music as an art?

Guess what? Musicians actually loved the idea, they even released cassettes with a blank B side so you could record anything you liked on it.

And millions of kids who recorded their favourite songs or radio shows in the 1980s and early 1990s didn't kill the music.

On the contrary, the music industry itself ended up killing the music, by forcing artists to "play it safe" and repeat the same formulas again and again, so the cigar smoking capitalists wouldn't take too many risks on their investment into the new boyband.

"Don't do that, or you'll kill X" most likely won't kill X as a form of art, nor the artists. It'll just hurt those who have no interest in X as a form of art, who make profit out of somebody else's talent, and who want to have nobody pushing them to take new risk to modernize the industry.

For us, music is a form of art and communication. For them, it's just another mean of making money.

Piracy was, is and will always be a civic right.

https://www.openculture.com/2023/07/home-taping-is-killing-music-when-the-music-industry-waged-war-on-the-cassette-tape.html