• 0 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 19th, 2023
  • rudyharrelson@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Male birth control breakthrough safely switches off fit sperm for a while
    3·
    5 months ago

    Not that guy, but I have one kid who I love to bits. Got a vasectomy when he was 2 years old cause we would explode if we had a second kid, lol. One is enough for us. We’ve been incredibly fortunate so we decided we didn’t need any more surprises.

    The doc who did mine was a military vet who went into urology after serving. I remember reading the pamphlet on the operation and it said the vasectomy only took 15 minutes. I asked him, “It only takes 15 minutes??” and he responded, “Eight.”

    I like a good speedrun as much as the next guy, but I told him to take his sweet time lol. Ain’t in no rush, doc.

    Recovery was super chill. Couldn’t roughhouse with my son for a week or two, and that’s about it. I’ve got some fun titanium clamps chilling in my junk now, so that’s fun. I’m basically Wolverine.

  • rudyharrelson@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•MIT Students Stole $25 Million In Seconds By Exploiting ETH Blockchain Bug, DOJ Says
    2·
    6 months ago

    I would prefer for crypto to be gone. Based on my understanding of blockchain, I don’t see how it can be used as currency ever. Blockchains can be extremely useful, just not as currency.

    Hm, my understanding was that blockchain was the technology that handles the distributed ledger rather than the currency itself. Blockchain seems useful to a point in this realm, but is, like we both know, extremely energy inefficient and unsustainable.

    The only thing you can really do about stolen tokens is have some authority de-list them and re-issue new token to the victim. That’s hardly a solution. It also extremely centralizes control, which runs antithetical to the purported benefits of crypto.

    No arguments here. Though I think there could be better solutions out aside from using some centralized authority to delist stolen tokens. Blacklisting certain wallet IDs could be a crowd-sourced project, much like how blocklists for adblockers are largely community-driven.

    Crypto also doesn’t take power away from institutions. […]

    Gotta disagree with “crypto doesn’t take power away from institutions”. Exactly as you said, if institutions leverage their pre-existing power in the crypto space, it becomes centralized because a small pool of wealthy players control the majority of the currency. The currency itself is not centralized, but it can be exploited by bad actors who wish to manipulate its value (or just profit off of it, either way). If existing institutions weren’t using their massively accumulated wealth to affect the crypto space, they would be losing power over the people who decided to avail themselves of it and bypass conventional banks. I consider this a weakness in cryptocurrency that needs to be addressed, but is this weakness any different from any other currency?

    Crypto is also incredibly power inefficient. Even with proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work, it is still factors less efficient than normal FIAT transactions, and as of yet I see no solution to that. One may pop up in some hypothetical future, but I have no faith in that.

    Zero arguments from me. It’s an environmental disaster.

    Additionally, crypto will also always reward those who engage with it disingenuously, as it is not linked to one’s real identity and, again, is inflexible and impossible to truly regulate. In a mass-adoption scenario, scammers would become enormously more successful.

    Depends on how you intereact with crypto. In the US, most states require crypto brokers to verify the identity of those trading on their platforms. No different from opening a checking account with a bank. Sure, one could get into crypto anonymously but it’s considerably harder. Some crypto ATMs exist, but I think virtually all of them have cameras and require you to show photo ID to use them (at least in the US).

    Most importantly, crypto is a digital asset whose store of value is implicitly tied to the belief that it can be sold for FIAT. It is almost exclusively a speculative vehicle, and always had been since its inception. Actual crypto purchases are disincentivized by how slow, inefficient, unwieldy, and volatile it is. Not to mention high transaction fees for the most popular coins. It is also deflationary, meaning one is disincentivized from spending it, which is extremely bad for the economy in a mass-adoption scenario. Gentle inflation is one of the core principles underpinning our economy. Having currency also be an asset that appreciates in value is objectively a bad thing.

    I disagree that it’s been a speculative vehicle since its inception. It’s undeniably a speculative investment now, and has been for years, but when it first started out, it was basically worthless and adopted by a handful of businesses who were understandably pissed off after the 2008 market crash. People naturally speculated as to whether or not it would take off, and I think it’s unfortunate that it became a speculative investment by those who weren’t really interested in its use as a currency.

    I’m no economist, but I don’t see much difference between “crypto’s value is implicitly tied to the belief that it can be sold for FIAT” and “FIAT’s value is implicitly tied to the belief that the issuing government values it”

    I feel like I could keep going for a while but hopefully you at least understand why I feel this way now lol.

    Oh believe me, none of this is news to me. I just wanted to see what you thought. I’ve found the cryptocurrency conversation interesting as the years have passed and enjoy asking people for their thoughts when they appear to be engaging in good faith. Most people I see are very unpleasantly hardline for or against crypto and don’t care to take time to discuss any of the nuance.

  • rudyharrelson@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•MIT Students Stole $25 Million In Seconds By Exploiting ETH Blockchain Bug, DOJ Says
    1·
    6 months ago

    I’m curious if you would prefer crypto disappear entirely, or if you would prefer it be properly regulated so it has all the same, or greater, protections so that it can be part of the economy without being as risky for consumers.

    I can only assume the early internet had little to no consumer protections on purchases (compared to the protections they have today, that is), but I could be wrong on that. Laws and regulations tend to always lag behind technology.

    I like the idea of taking power away from big banks. Crypto is no silver bullet, but I’d like to think it could get there one day. But since capitalism always protects itself, I doubt any wealthy lobbies are going to be asking congress to pass common sense regulation for a currency that takes power away from institutional banks.

  • rudyharrelson@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•First human brain implant malfunctioned, Neuralink says
    5·
    6 months ago

    Why

    Why not? Nothing wrong with research and development as long as everyone participating in the test is an informed, consenting adult IMO. The advancements could make current accessibility tech even better. For one reason or another, a quadriplegic person decided they were willing to take the risk, so maybe they consider current accessibility tech for quadriplegics to be insufficient and wanted to try for something better?

    Please dude I promise you this is near universally hated by disabled people 😭

    Well damn, I didn’t know.

  • rudyharrelson@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•How do you handle family requests that you disagree with?
    5·
    6 months ago

    I migrated from Plex to Jellyfin maybe a year and a half ago and haven’t looked back. Great user experience and works so well out of the box IMO. Good Android app, too. Works with Chromecast, too (though I’ve been trying to ditch Chromecast in favor of just a laptop connected to the TV via HDMI).

    I started digitizing old home movies that were on VHS and created a “Home Movies” library for my family; none of us had watched them in ages since none of us have a VCR anymore, lol. Great mother’s/father’s day gift for one’s parent if you’ve got the time and equipment. It’s nice having the whole family able to easily stream our home movies.

  • rudyharrelson@kbin.socialtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Is your job fulfilling?
    5·
    6 months ago

    I’m between jobs for the first time in my adult life at the moment. My last gig lasted nearly 10 years and it was a wild ride. I found it fulfilling for a time, but I eventually got promoted to a position I wasn’t wholly satisfied with.

    I started off at the very bottom rung, doing tech support for customers on the phone/chat/email. I was great at it and got promoted quickly to higher ranks of support, and eventually wound up managing the floor of tech support agents. Those were some of the best days of my life. Halcyon days.

    Every day was like a really low-stakes episode of House, where in the course of helping agents solve technical issues for customers, eventually we’d encounter one really inexplicable, difficult, borderline impossible problem that nobody had ever seen before, so me and my team’s brightest would walk and talk while hypothesizing and figuring out our next move.

    After a year or two of managing the floor, I got promoted to a position where I was ultimately a code monkey. Then Covid happened, and my job became fully remote for 4 years straight. Which was great! It allowed me to do my work and also spend way, way more time with my infant son during his early formative years. I got incredibly lucky in spite of the pandemic. But over time, the burnout grew to the point where I knew I needed to find something else to do with my career.

    I’m lucky enough to have enough in savings that I can take a bit of time to reflect and think about what I might want to do going forward with my admittedly limited credentials.

  • rudyharrelson@kbin.socialtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's your opinion about the future of cryptocurrencies?
    68·
    9 months ago

    I’d actually be curious to see the comparison between the power consumption/ecological impact of physical money and digital banking systems vs crypto. I assume the latter is way worse because the proof-of-work model is painfully inefficient and literally just a waste of energy (proof-of-stake is better but still wasteful), but I’d be interested to see actual numbers for comparison. Is crypto twice as bad? Or ten times? Or even worse?

    Just thinking of all the things traditional money and banks require (just for the US):

    • Growing and harvesting cotton and flax for paper bills (and manufacturing linen from the flax plant)
    • Physical buildings need to be constructed to hold money, so all the materials required to build a bank need to be manufactured and then constructed in many places all over the country
    • Mining and then refining and forging gold and silver bars for places like Fort Knox
    • Power consumption from all the banks’ servers that handle all of the digital wiring of money all over the world
    • Mining copper/nickel/zinc/manganese for minting coins, and then the manufacturing process to mint them
    • Fuel consumption moving physical money from place to place

    Prolly more stuff I’m not thinking of. I wonder if any studies have been done to add it all up. At least a lot of the stuff traditional money requires creates jobs, too. Farmers, construction workers, miners, etc.