I don’t like it. I might be able to get on board with read-access to my brain (especially if I end up paralyzed or something) if I felt the tech was secure enough, but I’d be very worried about abuse of write access (writing in loyalty to the community party, for example)
I tried to hide my identity as much as possible when I made the account. This included using a pseudo-random email address, fake name, fake address, and (unfortunately) fake birthday, as all of those things could be used as foreign keys to try to match my identity
It asks for your birthday to delete/access your data, but I used a fake one when I signed up…
And any really unscrupulous actors will just setup their own encryption…
I learned the basics of CS from this course online 7 years ago and it lead to a great career as a software dev. Hat’s off to the whole CS50 team for creating such an incredible resource and making it available for free!
Picking words at random from a dictionary would not be very compute intensive, the content doesn’t need to be sensical
I don’t like it
It’s anti-tech propaganda. The same is happening with crypto. Certain groups don’t like it, so they try to convince the public that it is bad for the environment so it will be banned
This isn’t a good situation, but I also don’t like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not “valuable” uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.
Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.
Humanity:
It seems to be a lightweight alternative to Mastodon that is easier for individuals to run on a private server
Yes, of all the problems in the healthcare system, the problem of letting AI help patients diagnose their own problems is definitely top of the list /s
That would be great! And I’m sure there are people doing it. And if 2.3% of the US Power grid were dedicated to that I’m sure some people would be upset about it too
My basic point is I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with Bitcoin miners using energy, even though this is a narrative that is very popular now. There are plenty of other valid criticisms of Bitcoin, but I don’t think this one stands up to scrutiny.
I would love if this were an option, but it’s not. The current battery technologies don’t have the scale for grid level storage capacity. The only grid scale storage solution that is really being done is to build very expensive infrastructure that moves water between two dams of different heights, and building more of those doesn’t seem politically likely at the moment
The reality is that there is much a whole bunch of excess energy supply that is produced because power plants can’t cycle up and down with demand. So they have to keep producing at peak demand 24/7 (there is some nuances based on the type of power plant, NatGas is faster to turn on/off, but this is broadly true)
I have my qualms with Bitcoin. As a currency it has significant transaction speed problems, and potential security ones after a couple more halvenings. But I don’t see a problem if Bitcoin miners want to pay energy producers to use energy that would be produced anyway and earn the producers nothing.
I agree with everything you’ve said
Pretty much the only things Bitcoin has on Ethereum today is a better brand and Lindy effect
Oh yeah there are many criticisms of Bitcoin one can make, I just don’t think the energy one is very convincing if you think about it a bit
It does NOT fucking matter if it’s “”“”““waste””“”“” energy
Sounds like you don’t actually care about the energy use, you just hate this for moral reasons. Using excess energy has zero externalities
I’ve always found this argument against crypto to be a bad one. The headline will say something like “Crypto mining uses XYZ total energy” and we’re supposed to infer that this means crypto is polluting a lot. But it doesn’t say how much pollution there actually was. For economic reasons, these miners often use cheap excess energy that would have been produced anyway or green tech. Not all of it obviously, but that level of nuance is missing.
Also, we don’t make the same moral arguments against other energy uses. Air conditioners use more energy than Bitcoin mining does, but we don’t go around saying the government should ban people from using AC.
There are legitimate problems with crypto, but this one never convinced me
Tbf, most money nowadays doesn’t physically exist nowadays. Only a tiny fraction of the “money” that is out there has a physical instantiation. Most of it is just numbers in bank servers
This is definitely a scam. I guess it was inevitable these would come to lemmy, but it’s still a shame