Dan_Felder

Dan_Felder t1_jedi79l wrote

Genres are just words we use to describe a common style of book, movie, game, etc.

New genres pop up all the time and they will forever for this reason, because of the combinatorial complexity of possible narrative and setting elements.

The LITRPG has been surging for a while now, soon we'll be getting LLM-Romace or similar with the ChatGPT craze.

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Dan_Felder t1_ja52fy8 wrote

Okay, I'll break it down for you.

Most of the modern Peterson-style "discourse" exists to provide a pseudo-intellectual justification for the feelings his audience already has.

Many people grew up doing a lot of messed up stuff without thinking about it, because everyone around them was doing it too. It just seemed normal at the time.

Now the same behavior they've done is being called out and this makes them feel bad. They don't like feeling bad, so they pay someone to tell them they aren't actually bad - they want to hear that they're good people and the people calling out similar behavior are just oversensitive kids and "wokes" that are overreacting to harmless workplace banter.

This is why you absolutely have pre-existing beliefs due to the culture you grew up in. Everyone does. Many of the kids that threw rocks at black children attending the first integrated schools are still alive today. Their kids don't want to think of their parents as bad guys either (hence why so many parents are trying to stop schools from teaching about the history of racism - because it makes thanksgiving uncomfortable when grandpa was one of the people that threw the rocks).

Our brains are extremely prone to cognitive biases based on a number of factors, especially how we're presented information. It's just science. Good books on that topic are "The Undoing Project" and "Predictably Irrational".

The former is an engaging read about how our brains can make flawed judgments in even seemingly simple, objective situations (like judging how well basketball players perform in a team tryout) and how two unlikely geniuses spawned a rethinking of basically every industry.

The second is an example of various studies that showed how even highly intelligent humans reliably make irrational decisions due to various cognitive biases.

For example, people exposed to a $4 price first for a new type of luxury candy bar tend to think it's worth $4, and balk when asked if they'd pay $5. People exposed to the $5 price first tend to think it's worth $5 instead. This is how impactful a small difference in how you're introduced to the world can affect your perceptions of even something that should be simple.

How you've grown up to this point will massively impact your perceptions on many, many things.

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Dan_Felder t1_ja4x7ns wrote

If you’re looking for something to confirm your pre-existing beliefs and tell you they’re correct, you’ll find no shortage of people willing to take your money to provide this service.

You shouldn’t be looking for books on the importance of tradition for example, that’s just a conclusion in search of an argument.

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Dan_Felder t1_j2c959m wrote

Yes, the Producer was almost awesome in the wonderful Covid special episode where he got to almost pull one over on Brad - but they were too committed to the joke about him being pathetic. It's not fun to watch pathetic characters.

Most of the best series that get stronger over time show you new depths to their characters, new reasons to admire or respect them. Even Kevin and Gary/Jerry from the office and parks and rec specifically - two characters that exist to be mocked for incompetence - are frequently shown to be talented and exceptional in various areas that aren't their main job. When a character is pathetic solely to be pathetic, there's nowhere to go and it isn't that fun to watch.

He worked in season 1 because he wasn't pathetic so much as delusional about others respecting him. He allowed himself to be pushed around. That was why his fighting-game sharking in the covid episode was so satisfying, he was playing into the underestimation. It'd be cool if he WAS skilled at many things but was a nice, conflict-adverse guy that rarely felt the need to show it or had been promoted out of the areas he was most skilled in due to previous excellence.

The "let's mock him for being undatable" episode in particular was just painful. The guy is an average-looking wealthy tech executive at a powerful company. He's kind and respectful to others; he repeatedly puts himself on the line to protect the creative ambitions of his team, he does it again for the benefit of his workers during contract negotiations. You're telling me he's incapable of getting a date with any human woman?

It's just absurdly mean-spirited for the sake of being mean-spirited. I don't want to watch that.

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Dan_Felder t1_j2bdz4a wrote

Covid hurt the second season a lot, but in general it changed from having some likable characters dealing with the insanity of an over-the-top game company to just a bunch of unlikable insane people being jerks to eachother.

Season 1 is about Poppi being undervalued and Ian growing to share the spotlight with her. Season 2 shows that Poppi was a nightmare once she got power.

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Dan_Felder t1_j1f8dw4 wrote

>Oh so you just don't have a general understanding of decentralization or perhaps even mesh technolo--

The stuff you just posted is super basic. I just don't have the arrogance to dig into an academic paper on a specific argument for a use case and analyze it against the technical and security risks of other forms of securing data in an industry I've never worked in, one which has a lot of complex and difficult-to-foresee incentives, limitations, etc. There's too big an information black hole for me to feel comfortable making a judgment about the various competing cases here in the practical world of solving real world problems more efficiently than other problems.

I've seen enough people confidently asserting blockchain will replace every industry and pretty much nothing but wild failure - even in the things they were *specifically* designed for; securing transactions and protecting artists. Both have been calamitous failures, as the inventor of the tech admitted to.

I have also already said that backing up data without governing transactions is a possible use case and may have special interest for governments, since there is no need to reverse transactions or deal with the other downstream problems when you're just collecting data - and I already said that decentralized models have use cases.

I doubt it's efficient to do this with exsiting government records vs other options for securing them, but it's possible that highly sensitive intelligence data that is building new networks from the ground-up anyway makes sense to use them. However, I don't know enough about the internal incentives, programs, day to day work, alternative models, etc to make a clear value judgment and don't pretend I do.

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Dan_Felder t1_j1f2an4 wrote

I don't know enough about the tech to evaluate this, but one of the weaknesses of blockchain from a security standpoint is that you inherently spread the information in more places so all the computers can check it. I have doubts it's genuinely the best way to keep information anonymous vs other forms of decentralization. Again, I don't know enough about this situation, but I find it amusing how the two major aspects of Blockchain people often push are the "transparency" on the one hand and "total lack of transparency" on the other.

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Dan_Felder t1_j1f1q39 wrote

>Actually I kinda did mention multiple but it seems that you want to get stuck up on viewing this from a financial only perspective.

Nope, it's just that I'm giving examples of automated processes that already exist without the blockchain, and using finance as an example is an easy one.

You have unfortunately not provided use cases in detail for most of your use cases, which means I can't trust they're actually solutions to real problems requiring blockchain. You'd need to explain the "how" and demonstrate that it's better than alternatives with a convincing case. If you're worried about walls of text, I suggest writing more substance as generalized claims without specifics are not useful or convincing.

I can easily believe peer-to-peer communication has applications in certain industries, it's been used for a long time, but I doubt these require blockchain. If the goal is increased efficiency, blockchain generally slows everything down by definition. If the goal is simply "decentralization" then you can do it more easily without blockchain in most applications. I doubt firetrucks have a big need for "trustless" algorithm decision making.

I feel like I've covered the nonsense of the NFT aspect of this before, so I won't do so again in detail - but NFTs do nothing meaningful to protect artists. In fact, rightclick save into minting an NFT linking to the same image is a common way NFTs increased the amount of art theft going on.

I also find it's weird that you keep complaining about me responding to the financial use cases and keep providing me financial use cases - as this UN link is just a restatement of "blockchain creates trustless decentralized immunatable records of ownership". Like your examples of royalties and automated trading, this comes back around to finance and the problems with phishing and fraud are still massive here.

I actually think the UN has reason to be interested in blockchain because they often deal with one of my few usecases I do see as relevant: which is they deal with disputes between countries and political/financial powers where there's no higher governing authority to appeal to. The idea of a blockchain handling some of these issues for them would make them happy. However, the problems persist with the power dynamics as they always do and I've covered elseqhere in my posts. Won't keep restating them.

Creating backups to backups to backups of government records is already doable without blockchain tech as well and not relevant for most industries. It's also one of my few use-cases I consider semi-valid. The BIG problem here is that the expense of migrating all the existing data to a blockchain based solution is so inefficient and risks a lot of problems compared ot just saving and printing more backups.

Migrating data infrastructures is a pretty colossal endeavor and the rewards would have to be gigantic to justify it. Some governments will do it even if inefficient of course because it can enrich benefactors.

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Dan_Felder t1_j1c4t1g wrote

I'm passing over the first chunk because it doesn't give any concrete specific use cases. While you may be alluding to a real one, I've heard enough "this totally fixes X problem" when it actually doesn't once you get to specifics. For example:

>In addition, to some degree I actually don't think your point about where the vulnerabilities is, is in fact a negative towards blockchain[...] we can then begin to work on fixing on the social side of it rather than solely worrying about the technology side.

If you're trying to stop your house flooding when it rains, you shouldn't worry too much about making the door-seams watertight as long as there's a gigantic hole in your roof. The point is that the added 'security' offered by blockchain in most cases is not meaningfully making anything more secure, because there are massive vulnerabilities either way that are exploited far more often.

It's actually worse than that though, because the unique characteristics of the blockchain actually make things worse for phishing - since blockchain has a much harder time reverting fraudulent transactions, and the lack of a human layer right now makes it harder to spot fraud in progress too. So it's like ripping more material OFF the roof in order to board up the doorseams. Senseless way to keep the rain out.

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>To be honest though most companies I have intereacted with more at the moment prefer to focus around the automation of data side and the decentralization of data as they see that as necessary for their next generation of operation due to limitations they have encountered within centeralized systems.

Sounds like you believe you have a lot of examples of limitations encountered within centralized systems that are best solved by decentralized systems that require blockchain. Mind listing your best one?

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>It is fine if you don't want to use it, but to say it has no usage is much more simply appealing to your own normalization around the technology you are used to using.

I say it has no use cases because no one has ever been able to articulate a meaningful use case that can't be done better or cheaper without it. There are some extremely narrow use cases but nothing close to what the blockchain pushers claim. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of usecases I've ever heard anyone suggest that seem to require blockchain or are more efficient with blockchain.

The problem is that a blockchain ledger is just fundamentally a bigger, slower, less efficient version of a normal ledger. That's why there are no usecases.

Removing the "trusted central authority" is an illusion. While control of the network can be spread out to people that pay for the computing power or tokens, you can also do this via "buying voting shares". Buying equity in a bank is not a new idea.

It is extremely difficult to make the transactions truly irreversible and the ledgers impossible to fork or rollback without... well... Removing the ability for people to fix problems or roll back fraud. Which is FAR more common a problem and harder to handle within official channels than a centralized authority going rogue and ignoring its shareholders or fiduciary responsibilities under the law.

"The system is bad" is not a sales pitch to replace it with a worse, less efficient, more fraud-prone system.

>While the most default smart contract functions in such a way that every time the token is sent it executes a percentage back to the original minter, other contracts are in fact programmed to execute different aspects and be automated around other aspects within a system.

Yes, for example the automated algorithims of High Frequency Trading firms are monumnetally complex and execute in microseconds. The problem with this argument is that saying "programming has use cases" is not an argument for blockchain. Blockchain requires programming, programming doesn't require blockchain.

The same flawed argument is made in the NFT space, when people start talking about being able to sell digital assets to other players for real money being a use case; when people have been doing that for over a decade already in various games.

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Dan_Felder t1_j1bc25u wrote

>That is basically in many ways to some degree have a technology that facilitates assets through a public ledger and that has a consensus mechanism that can solve byzantine-general based problem especially on a decentralized network. That would be the more simplistic aspect of a blockchain though I am kinda pressuring it down a bit

Yes, this is a new way to do stuff we already do - the thing about reinventing wheels is that you need to explain why the new wheels are better, faster, or cheaper than the old wheels. A LOT better because getting people to switch standards is wildly expensive, even on something as simple as the keyboard layout. I'm sure you know that Dvorak hasn't really caught on despite the current layout being intentionally inefficient.

>but it isn't about how you get discounts and instead how do you automate those aspects internally and systematically.

Sounds like you're talking about smart contracts. If so, these are just computer programs that do stuff for all intents and purposes. They are also highly exploitable and lead to a lot of the hacks we know about. This is likely to only get more vulnerable when AI assistants can analyze them for vulnerabilities more efficiently. In general though, nothing about blockchain tech is necessary for an automated process to happen absent human decision makers based on a program. High-frequency traders have been doing this on the actual stockmarket for a while now. It's also just how computer programs work in general.

>For example, you likely imagine that a NFT is just the picture however internally an NFT is a token and a smart contract and it can be attached to things beyond a picture such as other forms of data.

NFTs are not pictures, NFTs are tokens that represent links to places on a ledger. They are similar to digital redemption codes we've seen for digital purchases for years now, the only meaningful difference is that they link to something on a blockchain database instead of a normal one.

>With the most default smart contract you can automate that a percentage of what was spent will automatically be sent to the original minter without that needing to be stored longterm or accessible yet also still transparent through the ledger.

Good example of the "we can already do this". Automated royalty payments are nothing new.

>One example a company in a ecosystem I am working on uses it for that goes against the grain is for creating the direction of creating open fertility access through enabling people to automate where their fertility data will go yet also then have that itself enable access to it.

Another good example of "we can already do this". This is just about automated computer programs, nothing unique to a blockchain.

>Another form is stacking pools where a trustless system is built towards decentralized distribution of assets without one person needing to be holding the money.

This always sounds nice in theory but in reality you almost always expose more vulnerabilities than you eliminate - because there needs to be a remedy to undo mistakes or mitigate hacking/fraud. That's why we see so many of these "trustless" systems being taken for all their assets or NFTs being stolen through the more common points of vulnerablity - such as phishing attempts or exploiting the new vulnerabilities introduced by relying on smart contracts in the first place (the very name 'smart contract' makes it sound new - in general it's just a rebranded trading algorithm).

>Often you may not even know you will be interesting with blockchain and in fact 81 out of the top 100 companies are already building blockchain related projects.

Naturally, it's been a free way to boost quarterly results. Some companies just changed their name to include the word "crypto" and so on and saw a boom. Many of them are also foolish enough to believe the snake oil salesman. What's fascinating to me is how so many companies can be building blockchain and NFT projects and similar, and yet can find so few meaningful use cases.

>However more complexity in systems such as advanced airmobility there are unique niches that groups such as NASA identify with specifically the need for increased decentralization.

What are these unique niches that demand decentralization, and how exactly does the blockchain deliver on these niches better?

TLDR: You listed a bunch of use cases for automated computer programs, mostly trading algorithms. These are neither new nor unique to blockchain ledgers.

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Dan_Felder t1_j1b2whl wrote

>Except there are a lot of different business beyond this using web3. Blockchain didn't need a usecase.

Okay, please list any use cases please of what blockchain can do that can't be done better, cheaper, or faster without it. I'm very used to hearing people claim there are lots of use cases but it usually comes down to a few variations on, "what if we required owning a token to get discounts on stuff we already sell anyway?"

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Dan_Felder t1_j19lzaf wrote

A lot more of the world will make sense to you if you stop assuming people are playing 4D chess.

Blockchain has had a staggering amount of time, money, and brainpower invested into finding any meaningful usecases for it, and nothing meaningful has materialized. People will claim an endless list of use cases but once you get downt o specifics of things blockchain can do that can't be done better or cheaper without it, they all shrivel up or are based on empty air. I've spoken to endless blockchain-pumpers, a bunch have tried to recruit me to their companies.

It's not a secret they have no use cases, that's why the new wave after the crypto crashes has been to say "hey customers care about utility now, we should... find some?"

Blockchain was just a digital snakeoil, and I mean that nearly literally - as it was sold as a cure-all that would mysteriously disrupt every industry. It was a classic Ponzi scheme mixed with a speculator boom/bust cycle - incredibly predictable.

The concept of a "metaverse" is almost impossible to debunk because it's an ooze - it shifts to endless definitions because when you nail them down outside the VR or AR component they sound like like World of Warcraft and Second Life, and that's not "new" so it's not cool enough to get them excited.

Will VR and AR have some future applications? Sure, of course. But people pitching a "metaverse" as a new version of the internet are talking about experiencing the internet as a VR experience and that's just really, really bad as a user experience.

The genuinely "disrupt everything" tech is going to happen due to LLM work like ChatGPT because all of software is trying to tell a computer what to do. Computers can display infinite possible digital experiences, but they need to know what to display. LLMs allow people to instruct a computer through natural language rather than fine-tuned tools to get to the basics, and if a computer can export other things into natural language the tools can talk to eachother... Which has inane potential.

That is the most likely thing that leads to a real "web 3.0".

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Dan_Felder t1_j17r02p wrote

What substance?

Blockchain has nothing to do with this. Blockchain just needed a usecase and Metaverse needed some explanation about what leap in tech had made it possible all of a sudden, and so "web3" was born by combing the two scams.

Only generative AI makes virtual worlds on that scale remotely possible, and it IS the far more exciting thing.

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