more limited risk

Doubt

“We immediately began to sink, they saw that… They heard us all screaming, and yet they still left us,” he told the BBC.

"The first child who died was my cousin’s son… After that it was one by one. Another child, another child, then my cousin himself disappeared. By the morning seven or eight children had died.

It replied that its staff worked “tirelessly with the utmost professionalism, a strong sense of responsibility and respect for human life and fundamental rights”, adding that they were “in full compliance with the country’s international obligations”

…

I used to write that kind of stuff for a living when I was really poor and scraping by, it paid by the word and so low that you could realistically only crack minimum wage if you kept typing continuously and didn’t stop to think or do any research.

Microsoft hasn’t detailed ESU pricing for consumers yet, but the company did previously reveal it will offer these extended updates to consumers for the first time ever

They’re actually gonna make us pirate security updates huh

Really interesting article. The general idea seems to be that people having their access to banking shut down has been a real problem for a long time, and is most commonly imposed on marginalized groups, but people don’t realize it’s going on, and the people on the right making noise about this issue ignore where the bulk of the problem is.

This is sometimes how I feel when I appear on the ‘anti-mainstream’ ‘free thought’ media outlets. They want to hear about the financial censorship of the Freedom Convoy, but they don’t want to hear about restrictions on Aboriginal payments. This hints to a skew in their freedom of thought, and it’s certainly not open-minded. When they approach me, they’re trying to recruit that mercenary side of me who is nominally prepared to defend their narrow free thinking, but this poses an ethical dilemma, because their selective curation of what examples of payments censorship they’re prepared to ask about or listen to amounts to a silent form of censorship in itself. Selectively hearing, and amplifying, one set of injured voices - the Truckers - can be very similar to blocking another set out.

Firstly, yes, it’s very important to fight the general principle of payments censorship (and, by extension, to protect the cash system that provides a buffer agai nst it). Secondly, I must inform them that the actual chances of payments censorship being used against them is smaller than the chances of it being used against refugees, migrants, the homeless, or sex workers, who face recent real-world cases of financial censorship.

I think framing this as “refusing” to use AI is kind of weird. They believe in doing things the traditional way, great, I think games that use all hand-drawn nondigital art are also cool for going against the grain like that, and making a point of supporting artists is laudable, but it isn’t like anyone is trying to force them not to.

The person who predicted 70% chance of AI doom is Daniel Kokotajlo, who quit OpenAI because of it not taking this seriously enough. The quote you have there is a statement by OpenAI, not by Kokotajlo, this is all explicit in the article. The idea that this guy is motivated by trying to do marketing for OpenAI is just wrong, the article links to some of his extensive commentary where he is advocating for more government oversight specifically of OpenAI and other big companies instead of the favorable regulations that company is pushing for. The idea that his belief in existential risk is disingenuous also doesn’t make sense, it’s clear that he and other people concerned about this take it very seriously.

Well I haven’t played in years, but I strongly suspect that exceptionally low ratio of female voices I referred to was not just because the game itself does not appeal to women.

you can’t withdraw it from their ecosystem

They changed that a while ago

So, you’re saying that if I use Coinbase, I could withdraw the keys and have full custody over it after I buy it? Then where’s the custodial catch that I always hear about with Coinbase?

Yes. Idk what specific criticisms you’re referring to but probably just related to how it is a centralized exchange, which does have some genuine drawbacks like reduced privacy, for instance they don’t sell Monero or other privacy coins. The reason I also mentioned Kraken is that it is the only fiat gateway exchange that does sell Monero, with other ones if you want to be private you would have to first buy some non-private crypto, then send to a crypto to crypto exchange to buy a privacy coin and go from there. Also there are a lot of people that just buy crypto on Coinbase and never withdraw it, so for them it’s custodial all the way.

This doesn’t really address what I’m talking about. I can personally handle people saying mean things to me (though can’t say anyone in an online game ever threatened to rape me), but what I have a problem with is people I might like to interact with being driven out and the space becoming increasingly concentrated with people I don’t like very much.

I think a lot of people on hearing this sort of thing once or twice will shut off the game and never play again. To me it seems like a similar kind of situation to a website like a Lemmy instance that removes all the csam spam that gets posted, but not fast enough that most people never see it. In that situation you can’t tell users “just report and block”, there is still a big problem and there is no one that can take responsibility for it other than the people operating the service.

I played thousands of games of Dota 2, and in that time I heard a woman speak probably like 5 times total, which honestly is very understandable on their part, but still unfortunate. Would be nice to play online games that are not de-facto filtering out everyone who isn’t willing to tolerate being periodically subjected to verbal abuse, especially when it’s extreme forms of verbal abuse.

If you are comfortable with PayPal you can buy crypto from them afaik, though I am fairly sure you will have to provide additional KYC info than name and credit card, most of the cryptocurrency community obviously hates KYC and there would absolutely be centralized non-KYC options for buying crypto if it wasn’t blatantly illegal to offer that.

isn’t Coinbase custodial? I will not use custodial exchanges

That’s totally fair but consider that if your intention is to purchase crypto and immediately withdraw it to a personal wallet, there are zero practical drawbacks to an exchange being custodial because they are only holding your crypto in custody for the brief period of time between when you click the buy button and when you click the withdraw button. A DEX with escrow is going to be less custodial than that, but I would call it still a little bit custodial, since even if the escrow person doesn’t have the option to take your crypto for themselves they could still potentially collude with the seller and send it back to them, which means there is a brief window when the crypto you have purchased is not truly under your personal control. You can have a crypto to crypto dex be perfectly non-custodial (ie. Uniswap), but you can’t have a fiat to crypto exchange be perfectly non-custodial.

The reason they need it is because of the law making it illegal for them not to collect it, though that doesn’t make it any less of a barrier that they have no choice. I would say at this point Coinbase and Kraken are at least as reputable as something like PayPal/Venmo (which I think you can actually also buy crypto from); iirc Coinbase is a publicly traded corporation, has various licenses with governments to operate, is handling custody for major financial institutions now that some crypto ETFs have been approved, it’s not like the early days of crypto where even the biggest exchanges had little real claim to legitimacy.

As for difficulty of using DEX for non KYC trades, I have heard a lot of anecdotes about that confirming your experience that it does not work well. However I would keep an eye on it, there’s significant recent changes with the shutdown of LocalMonero, the launch of Haveno, progress in the development of atomic swaps. I expect that it’s going to improve significantly in usability for the average person, so long as there aren’t major efforts by governments to criminalize it.

It’s annoying but you have to do that kind of stuff to open a bank account or get a new credit card too

This makes sense to me, we could continue to develop and use important technologies while at the same time setting things up so their externalities are part of their cost and companies have financial reasons to work to reduce the impact.

No, I used Monero, transactions aren’t visible. You are right that blockchains are public and there is a lot of mineable data in cryptocurrency generally, but the point is that it is possible to have a system of digital payments with all the privacy properties of physical cash.

I kind of wouldn’t want a government spying on me with this either, but it would be somewhat of an improvement over both the government and companies spying on me with it.

Cash works, but not for online purchases. I pay for a VPN subscription anonymously with a cryptocurrency wallet app, it’s at least as convenient as using PayPal, and unlike PayPal I can be sure there isn’t a middleman collecting/selling my transaction data for ads or whatever else. This is a solution that works and exists right now. I know a lot of people really don’t like cryptocurrency, but I’d also be ok with some other system that satisfies the same requirements.

To solve the problem instead by regulating payment providers, to begin with you would have to convince governments that are largely in the pockets of these companies to act against them. You would have to get these people to craft a set of laws telling them, “hey, this information you’ve collected that is on the computers you own and control, don’t look at it ok? Also don’t do anything with it unless we say it’s ok.” and then, somehow, actually enforce that. It’s taking a system basically made to centrally collect and control information, and hoping that people with an obvious interest in using it for that purpose will play along with retrofitting it to prevent privacy violations. To me this seems like planning for failure when you can instead just use a system that doesn’t involve trusting a company with this info to begin with.

It wouldn’t have to be illegal if we transitioned to a decentralized and anonymous payments system that doesn’t involve the likes of PayPal

The good thing about nano is that it has clear instructions for how to close it right there immediately in front of you