“I miss the curiosity and learning!”

I feel like I’m learning at a faster rate than ever with LLMs. Do you specifically mean curiosity and learning as a social phenomenon?

I feel like LLMs help me learn more widely, but for depth I still have to just buckle down and do stuff myself.

"If the code is confusing, then the code is bad and no amount of comments will ever change that."

I've worked on a lot of terrible legacy code in my career and I'm very thankful for the comments that others have left. This is becoming less necessary now that LLMs can explain a project, but comments have historically been a godsend in bad code.

It’s not Taylor Swift who is hurt by this, it’s the solo creatives who cannot afford other mechanisms (e.g. trademark enforcement) to protect their work.

Trademark != copyright: trademark is attributing indies whenever their work appears (which is very doable), copyright is preventing others from seeing or reshowing their work (even with attribution). Copyright is about protecting their sales, which are practically nonexistent, hence (because it has big downsides) why it should be abolished.

You have to explicitly legally defend trademark, that's completely our of reach for someone who sells knitting patterns on Etsy. OTOH, DMCA can (and does) work for that group.

I also dislike US IP law but I think it needs to be improved with nuance. What you propose is survivable for big IP owners but would wipe out swaths of small business owners.

It seems like you really only know about how the affects people who make music and TV.

What about illustrators who license their work? Knitters and crocheters who create patterns? There are countless people who sell creative output on a license-basis which would no longer exist in a world without copyright.

Already people who make visual art are demotivated by AI, follow literally any visual artist on Instagram and you’ll see this. Taking away copyright would make that look tiny in comparison.

> Knitters and crocheters who create patterns?

Wow, is that a thing? If you're willing to share, I'd love to hear more about these vocations and how they make money.

People who are well-versed in fields like fashion will create original designs which include yarn requirements, needle size, measurements, stitch instructions, construction steps, etc etc and sell them in online marketplaces like Etsy or Revelry.

Oh, I'm familiar with that; I thought that the parent meant that there are people who make money directly from the copyright on the patterns rather than the artifacts they sell. Are there?

Yes, that’s correct. There are people who make money directly from the copyright on the patterns. The parent commenter means that the people referenced are selling the patterns, not the garments.

Is this some kind of trick question or am I just misunderstanding your reply?

As far as I know they sell the patterns, not the finished knitted artifact. Aspiring knitters buy them to enjoy knitting. The physical representation of the pattern isn't worth anything (just a piece of paper), what you're buying is a license to use their intellectual property, so I'd say they're making money from copyright.

Sorry, yes, I genuinely took a long time to understand, and this then took me on quite the rabbit hole, thanks, to you and the others on the thread.

Search "knitting patterns".

What does making money have to do with creating art?

Do you only care about professional artists or something? Amateur artists deserve legal protection for their artwork too :/

That person clearly doesn't know any people who make art.

Why do they need 70+ years to recoup enough to make their efforts worthwhile?

A kid who grows up watching $favorite-show can never produce derivative works of that show within their lifetime.

There’s bluebubbles which runs a server on a Mac and syncs your messages that way.

Its derivative OpenBubbles doesn't, though

It’s been 18 years and there are still no useful blockchain projects that go beyond trading and speculation. It hasn’t even produced a compelling currency, <2% of households use it for goods and services. I have no idea how or why anyone is still hanging on.

Buying drugs.

And even when it's not drugs, I sometimes use it to pay for things online because Visa randomly doesn't want me to use my Visa card for unknown reasons.

How would you anonymously pay for a VPN or donate to whistleblowers or get cash from an ATM without having to identify yourself? What is your backup plan to pay bills when your bank account is frozen by identity theft (can take months to resolve)?

Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless.

> How would you anonymously pay for a VPN or donate to whistleblowers or get cash from an ATM without having to identify yourself?

"Anonymously paying for VPN" seems a bit ironic given that almost all VPN users then immediately proceed to completely deanonymize themselves towards the VPN by accessing it from their (not anonymous) home Internet connection and/or to access sites that deanonymize them. Add to that the fact that most blockchains are very much public, and I couldn't think of a better way than crypto to deanonymize my entire payment and Internet usage profile in one go if I tried.

I do agree that payer (not necessarily payee) anonymity is really important and most existing payment methods fall short of what's arguably the absolute minimum in a non-surveillance state.

Still, this seems like a problem largely orthogonal to crypto. It's possible to build a payer-anonymous payment system based on regular centralized databases just fine, see e.g. GNU Taler.

> What is your backup plan to pay bills when your bank account is frozen by identity theft (can take months to resolve)?

Mine is to live in a jurisdiction where banks aren't allowed to get away with stuff like that (and where "identity theft" is not really a thing because knowing a 9-digit number and maybe having a photo of somebody's driver's license is not considered a valid KYC method), but I realize that this is not an option for nearly everybody in the world, and I do see some value of crypto as a forcing function in those.

What about inflation that eats your savings? Can your bank solve this?

> Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless.

I didn’t say it was useless, it seems to have a niche value to speculators and investors.

All of the examples you gave either don’t matter to 99% of everyone (“hey mom, how do you donate to whistleblowers”) or isn’t the most practical way to do a thing. E.g. bank account-related fraud is vanishingly small (the vast majority is credit card-related); in the US it affects ~10k people per year. Is the average person more likely to lose their savings to fraud or lose a crypto wallet due to human error?

I did not say it was ready for the average person yet. It took over a hundred years to build our fiat systems and it may take as long to fully replace them. But for technical people that need privacy, the types of people that use tor, it is an invaluable tool, today, for which no viable alternatives exist. The actual cypherpunk crowd using it as intended for privacy and sovereignty absolutely exists. The noise of the traders and grifters just drowns it out.

Also I have legitimately purchased things in person all over the world with bitcoin, including at major department stores. A great way to meet the rare actual cypherpunks though are places that are crypto first, like the pubkey bar in NYC.

I do not trade, and have no interest in trading.

Decentralized payments will be as easy as paypal soon with Silent Payments allowing you to pay someone by email -> dns -> private one time use address, all automatically.

> It hasn’t even produced a compelling currency

It has produced Monero which absolutely is that currency. Now if only we could get people to actually use it.

You don't want people to actually use it because like all cryptocurrency it's got quite limited maximum throughput. The problem is worse than usual with Monero - because it's so secure, no data can ever be proven to be unused, so no data can ever be removed from the blockchain.

All of that can be solved or worked around. The much bigger problem is that it's a bit "too anonymous" to ever be tolerated even in most democracies, for better or worse.

I think the only thing that stands a chance is something that partially anonymizes one party to the transaction but not the other, or something that can deanonymize a given transaction only by very publicly and verifiably "breaking glass".

The government would just break glass on every transaction because what would you do about it?

Fortunately, not all governments have completely normalized warrantless wiretaps yet. I think requiring a court order and retroactive notification of suspects whose privacy has been invaded is a good model.

I'd rather have my money work in a way that allows that than in the current status quo, i.e. a complete lack of privacy for anything other than cash (which has different issues and doesn't work so well online).

What will you do when they break glass on every transaction and don't do that?

Or when Lithuania breaks glass on every transaction and sends the data to the FBI, like what they did with Anom?

I would regulate value of currency. To be beneficial for few get more rich.

I don’t think anyone in these comments expects to get something for nothing, it’s that MITMing your payload is something that feels like a betrayal of trust unless you are crystal clear that you’re doing it. Considering how many people in these comments are surprised by this, it seems like Cloudflare hasn’t been crystal clear.

> Seems reasonable to me

Only if they make it clear what they’re taking in return.

It seems like almost no one in these comments was aware of this, they announced it but that announcement apparently didn’t reach most free customers. Cloudflare can do what they want, but now a bunch of people (myself included) trust them less and are less excited to recommend their paid products.

I think you’re misunderstanding the fat acceptance movement. It’s about separating the illness from the person, not about obesity health. In our society it would be impossible to be unaware that obesity is unhealthy.

People go out of their way to be mean to fat people. The fat acceptance movement is essentially “please don’t do that”.

It’s both. There is a very vocal contingent who insist that obesity is not unhealthy.

There are people who claim that, yes, but that’s not broadly what the movement is about.

Every philosophy or movement has outliers that misinterpret and act outside of the bounds of that movement and we understand that those outliers don’t represent the group; yet people always look to those outliers with the fat acceptance movement — the fat acceptance movement is not given the benefit of the doubt like others are.

To me that implies that there is underlying bias.

You are doubtless correct that there is bias. (Literally your stated purpose of the movement is to counter this bias.) But with that said, these voices may be outliers, but they are by far the loudest. I’ve seen people claim that “obese” is a slur. I’ve heard more people claim that health is unrelated to weight more than I’ve heard people say that fat people deserve good healthcare.

From my vantage point the movement has largely been co-opted by extremists who want to pretend that obesity is not a health problem.

There are several studies now showing that symptoms reported by overweight patients are taken less seriously by medical professionals, it’s not just a matter of people “being nice”. It’s actually providing a lower standard of care.

I should clarify that my doctor explicitly lied to me (found out by requesting my medical file after moving) to shock me on purpose because of his own fifth grade understanding of psychology.

Whether patients make good choices is completely independent from whether doctors provide everyone with equal quality of care.

Specifically, doctors are less likely to investigate issues that can be explained by obesity than they are in non-fat people.

For example, if you have high blood pressure and you are a normal weight your doctor will probably look into underlying conditions that can cause high blood pressure. Being overweight is an independent risk factor for high blood pressure but it doesn’t reduce the likelihood of the other risk factors. Doctors are less likely to look into an underlying cause for high blood pressure if you are overweight.

Doctors are probably also less likely to look for other causes of chronic cough in smokers.

In general doctors are looking for the most obvious potential causes of a health problem. If someone on high dose anabolic steroids went to the doctor with him blood pressure, the doctor would probably tell them to cut out the steroids as the obvious answer rather than exploring other reasons the patient’s blood pressure might be high.