It’s not “brain melting”. Even watching the internet go from “this is super neat, and way cool” (For nerds) to “Well, it’s ALL going through enshittification now” wasn’t “brain melting”, it’s just what happens under capitalism.
Going from seeing nothing but possibilities when I heard about some new device or software coming out to dreading what they are going to remove or break has been one of the most depressing parts about my life.
He’ll, I was looking to replace my 10 year old mouse last weekend and couldn’t find one that was equivalent or better. I even asked people who were more into computer shit than me and I felt like I was taking crazy pills reading their responses. I ended up just fixing the problem myself rather than replacing it.
I have been looking for just the right mouse for ages and the market for mouses (mice?) is terrible. I’ve been looking for a 5 button mouse that supports bluetooth (reliability) and I am actually so frustrated with what the options are. They are either massively over engineered, huge, expensive paper weights or cheap, super light, cheap junk I can crush with my weak feminine hands. I have ranged from top of the line hundred dollar gaming one to junky light weight 10 dollar ones and I am still looking. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Us millennials basically had the internet to ourselves for like 15 years.
The only reason we’re still on it is chasing that high even though it’s gone
Nobody is expected to understand crypto. Same with the stock market and generally the economy. If it was simple and see thru you couldn’t run this many scams.
Same with the stock market and generally the economy.
Okay, you can tap the breaks on that one. There’s a book from 1949 called “The Intelligent Investor” that’s been the benchmark for savvy stock market analysis for generations. Hardly the only one (although a lot of the newer stuff is just variations on the core themes). Understanding price-to-earnings, market share, debt-to-asset ratios, and marginal return gets you a long way towards consistent middle-of-the-road long term safe returns.
Same with The Economy. Get a copy of Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century and you will have a firm grasp of macro-economic models and trends by the end of it. You’ll get a core understanding of the difference between short-term investment returns and long term value creation. You’ll get an idea for the broad reasoning behind different public policies and their impact on the broad growth and development trends seen over the last 500 years.
There’s no need to mystify markets or economic systems. In the same way that a modern physician has a generally firm grasp of the human body (without knowing how every single cell is going to behave or every single genetic variant of human is going to respond to a given treatment), a modern business analyst has a generally firm grasp of their industrial or market focus.
Even crypto is something people can broadly understand as a modern iteration of a privatized experiment in currency manipulation. The thing about crypto is akin to understanding how a casino works. Analyzing the system doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to profit from it. Its like analyzing a grizzly bear with a plan to engage it in a boxing match. The best analysts will tell you “You’re going to get horrible mauled if you interact with this thing, stay away.”
If it was simple and see thru you couldn’t run this many scams.
The scams aren’t a product of (lack of) transparency so much as they are the result of misinformation and market manipulation.
You’ve got a guy in a big wagon with a bullhorn selling “Better Than Aspirin!” for $10/pill right outside a pharmacy selling aspirin for $3/bottle in a bottom shelf at the back of the store. The moral of this isn’t “Nobody will ever understand pharmaceuticals”. It is that there’s is a great deal of money in capturing people’s attention and then lying to them.
In the same way that a modern physician has a generally firm grasp of the human body (without knowing how every single cell is going to behave or every single genetic variant of human is going to respond to a given treatment)
But the cells existed before us and we are simply trying to understand them.
We created the economic system and now we make conflicting theories about how it behaves.
Now people wait in line for Pokemon cards. 🤔
I understand crypto… and it is utter shit.
People used to enjoy anime and MST3k episodes on fifth generation VHS copies. Crypto is worse than that.
People used to enjoy anime and MST3k episodes on fifth generation VHS copies.
As a general rule, I prefer getting torrent links from friends in a Discord stream over huffing it over to a Blockbuster and hoping their single copy of “My Neighbor Totoro” isn’t checked out. You can make the case for a better brighter tech future.
Just don’t put half your paycheck into “TotoroCoin” because its trending on pump.fun
MST3K was great, and anime is good.
You know why vhs quality degraded with every generation of copy? It wasn’t an accident or a technical problem, it was deliberate.
They want to discourge people from copying their tapes, so there was a mechanism in the VCR to actually cause some drop in quality when you taped something.
This is why TV tapings of a movie would never be as good as buying/renting the same movie from a store. Even if you used a virgin tape.
No, it was really a technical issue. Analog signals are very prone to noise, and noise is cumulative. Even the best recording heads are going to pick up stray magnetic fields, and of course you get the typical cosmic ray noise hitting the recording tape and head, and then there’s noise in power lines that also contribute to the noise.
Basically, what you don’t get to hear anymore causes it: Tune an older radio to somewhere between stations. The static exists all the time. If it didn’t, it would just be no noise at all, rather than static. Same with older, analog TVs: You see snow and hear static. That’s all environmental noise, which will impact analog recording medium. Even the source side of the house gets that noise introduced. That’s what Signal-to-noise ratio means: How much signal, vs how much noise exists.
So, dupe of a dupe of a dupe… All recording noise.
It’s also quality of the tape and how we used it. You could buy a tape and use it for 2, 4, or 6 hours with a tradeoff in quality. Blank tapes were rather expensive, so we all used 6 hours and then copied from there.
Commercially produced VHS tapes also tended to be higher quality than blank tapes, unless you went out of your way to buy the quality ones.
And it still happens even with digital technology. If you, say, rotate a .jpg file a few thousand times, the image will start to degrade as it doesn’t perfectly copy over everything and the very slight losses start to add up.
Somewhat different issue there. JPEG compression is lossy. It doesn’t happen on a BMP. Though you can probably link the two up with underlying information theory.
However the original quality was so shit you don’t really notice.
Prior to true HD home media we really didn’t know any better. I grew up in Dubai and the Disney Aladdin film was actually banned there, but not before some pirated copies came out. That pirated tape was really poor quality but I didn’t notice or care. Seeing the 1080p, however, totally blew my mind.
Goddamn I’m not that elder! But also true
1990 time for Guru
i remember standing in line for dvds. we were hacking regionlocked discs before nft was just a scammer’s wet dream. we were moulded by early modern technology.
Crypto? Yes, I know what a pyrimid scheme is.
Who is expecting them to understand cryptography?
A yes the RS encryption, public key, private key …
I vaguely remember
- Fuck you
- Who the fuck do you think you are?
- crypto is a fucking scam
Crypto isn’t a scam. It’s a fantastic way to protect yourself online and HTTPS has been a game changer. Crypto currency is a scam though.
So people who 35years old are elder now.
Get back in the lounger grandpa
I can’t. I have to work to afford food and shelter until I die.
I’m 37, I’m not old!
Yes.
Fuck, I’m considered an ELDER now?
By someone old enough to not just be a dad, but identify so much that it’s their username. Fuck this kid. I’m not old. Just getting fat, bald, slow, dumb… oh wait… maybe they’re into something 🥹 😭
Dispense your wisdom, o my elder. I’m just a nineties boy, what do I know of the world before ?
I was born i 85. Not much more wisdom I can give I’m afraid. I am a tech early adopter and a coder so I understand crypto it’s just too volatile a market for me to care about. Wish I had invested in Bitcoin when someone asked me if I wanted to in 2012 though. Mostly my driving force for new tech adoption was my gaming habit. I had a colecovision, NES, Genesis, Playstation, Playstation 2, and all the systems from the next gen onward once I had job money.
Your elders refers to people older than you, not necessarily elderly people
Fr. I just turned 40. Give me my senior discount card.
Yeha I turn 40 at the end of the year. Over the hill buddies.
The shift was 9/11 happening and everything that happened after.
For the US maybe. For my area it was the Russians finally going home and now they want to come back
Before 1990?.. fuck you… I have kids born before 1990… elder my ass … I probably understand crypto better than you do…
I’m not bitter. Not at all.
…Dad? Haha I’m about to hit 40 and shitcoins are my brainy boomer dad’s hobby.
Ok. Before you get mad. Do you think you are a normal representative of your age group?
If you walk into a room of people you don’t know but who are all likely born within +/-5yrs of you, would you expect to be able to talk about crypto with any sophistication and at least half would be able to follow?
If not, then the generalization is true even if it doesn’t apply to you specifically.
To be fair, us elders had grifts and money laundering too, so crypto is nothing functionally new.
No hate, but this is exactly proving the point of the meme. There’s so many new concepts and paradigms, each so complex and constantly evolving, that we need to rely on familiar comparisons that strip away the true identities of the subject. And I think this is true for pretty much every everyone in this information (bombardment) age, myself included.
People tend to forget that cryptocurrencies are based on cryptography, and were founded on the dream of building a decentralized system, built by the people, free from “big player” censorship and influence, in the wake of the 2008 crisis. If you are on the Fediverse, I guess you share that dream. But then the finance “bros” started coming in and badabing badabang now it’s another asset you trade through your bank like stocks or gold. Then came the NFTs and yes, somehow “crypto” evolved into being the prime speculation and scamming vector.
And the same goes on for every news topic. “Trump!” “Gaza!” “AI!” “Climate!”. Our brains try to reduce these mind-melting concepts hitting us all the time to simplified good/bad or us/them categorizations. And we’re left utterly unable to actually tackle and act upon anything at all.
No, no one is forgetting they’re built on cryptography. It just doesn’t matter. The underlying technology of a thing doesn’t have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
You don’t care what your car is made of as long as it has good fuel efficiency and crash rating. Steel ceramic and aluminum are just tools to that end.Research into cryptocurrency started long before 2008. Academics and odd crypto enthusiasts have been working on it since the 80s.
The intent from the beginning has been a mix of curiosity, paranoia, and buying drugs.
Bitcoin was hardly a “for the people” project. It was initially used almost entirely for black market purchases, largely via silk road. “The people” did not give a fuck about perfect anonymous digital cash. It solved a problem that most people didn’t and still don’t have.
The adoption order was: Math nerds > drug lords > finance > small investors. It’s still not actually adopted as currency by people.
When you create a thing for the purpose of making monetary transactions untraceable, and your first major users are all using it to hide where their money came from from the government, it’s really fair to say that you created a money laundering tool.Bitcoin wasn’t taken over by finance people, they’re the reason it didn’t taper out like previous cryptocurrencies, which either fizzled or were shutdown for being nuggets of financial crime.
It’s really not proving much of anything. These new “concepts” and “paradigms” are nothing more than buzzwords thrown onto old concepts. Every scam is a scam that’s been done before even if there’s a new layer of glittery wrapping paper over it. Who’re you trying to convince more, the potential suckers or yourself?
I keep saying that humanity’s toys do evolve spectacularly while humans are still working on the same basic impulses they’ve been dealing with for millennia.
Trump is a petty conman who does everything in his power to consolidate as much power in himself as he possibly can so that he can funnel as much money to himself and his gang as he can. That’s not new. The environment he’s doing in may be more complex, or differently set up than in previous iterations, but the core is depressingly mundane.
Gaza is just people hating people and other people supporting different sides while all sides give each other more reasons to hate each other perpetually, some more war-crimey, some less so. Tragic, quagmired to hell and back, but not groundbreaking in and of itself.
As for AI, the framework is the usual capitalists trying to convince everybody that their new best revolutionary thing is a word sorting machine that can sort very, very many words now very fast. Trying to cash in on the hype is the eternal constant, the occasion this time is a very sophisticated chatbot/image generator based on all the materials the inventors could get away with stealing.
And climate stuff is just this generation of capitalists stripping the planet for parts while they can get away with it. The scale is bigger, but vulture capitalism is also not even remotely new.
Just like the principle of singular attributability of data via the blockchain is a fancy way of assigning stuff to one recipient. We’ve had approaches to this before. This time the blockchain’s ledger system is the big new anchor for the human element, which will invariably at first be either grifters or people who wanna bash in other people’s heads with it.
