If you had that system, and I was Elon Musk's kids, I would feel entirely justified in paying half the taxes society expects me to pay. Let's see if that logic works both ways.
Actually, yes, I do think that netflix could do their job much cheaper. I use putflix, which uses put.io for $0.99 per month. Better quality streaming than netflix, no forced ads, and they can make it work for $1. Maybe it's the model where my monthly subscription pays for their entire catalog that's broken. Maybe it should just be a la carte licensing.
Either way, until the industry lets me pay directly to the org that literally made the movie, I'll just pirate.
I do want to pay the artists that make the films. I think the most viable way to do this is via cryptocurrency associated with social media accounts, and then validate ownership by having owners post a magic validation link. This way I can send artists money and it's on them to go get it if they want it.
putflix is criminal theft. They pay nothing to people who make movies. You can drive the cost to zero by downloading torrents directly from pirate bay.
If you did want to pay the artists then you would pay for netflix of rent/buy from a number of places (amazon video, youtube, apple).
Your cryptocurrency fantasy is just a way to rationalize stealing.
> rent/buy from a number of places (amazon video, youtube, apple).
It's just "rent", there's no buy option from any of these people, no matter what their site says. If they can revoke your ownership at any time, for any reason, then you don't own it. And if you don't own it, then you're not buying it.
I get the motivation to not pay these crooks, and instead pay the actual people that made the movie direct.
> Proton only has access to your IP and device ID, not your data.
I like Proton. I use Proton.
However, the problem with proton is that if you access your email via a web browser, there's nothing stopping protonmail (to my knowledge) from reading your email from within their webapp via JS. This type of attack could be targeted at the behest of authorities.
So, actually, Proton COULD read your email (IFF you use webmail).
>So, actually, Proton COULD read your email (IFF you use webmail).
The authorities can also read your self-hosted email if they had a warrant to search your house. Even if you enable FDE they can do a cold boot attack.
Simple solution: put your server inside of a cabinet or enclosure that immediately powers it off if opened with a hidden micro switch. Additionally, write a little udev rule to immediately power off if any new USB device is connected or Ethernet is unplugged.
Is even that needed? Nothing e2ee about the emails you receive normally, they could just read them right away if they really wanted to. And that is to say nothing about the metadata.
https://github.com/rustledger/rustledger I'm building a Rust implementation of Beancount, the double-entry bookkeeping language. It covers the full Beancount syntax, all the booking methods, a BQL query engine, plugins (including rust and python). It works as both a CLI tool and a Rust library, and it compiles to WebAssembly too.
https://github.com/rustledger/rustfava This is a fork of Fava, the web UI that Beancount users know and love, but with the Python parser swapped out for rustledger running as WebAssembly. I packaged it up as a native desktop app using Tauri, so you just double-click to open your ledger files with no terminal or Python needed. It also works via Docker, PyPI, and Nix if that's more your thing.
https://github.com/rustledger/pta-standards I started this project to create proper formal specifications for plain text accounting formats, covering Beancount, Ledger, and hledger. It includes EBNF/ABNF grammars, JSON Schema and Protobuf AST definitions, tree-sitter grammars, Alloy models for invariants, and conformance test suites. The idea is to make it possible for anyone to build a correct, interoperable PTA implementation without reverse-engineering existing tools.
https://github.com/robcohen/peervault This is an Obsidian plugin that lets you sync your vaults directly between your devices over P2P connections, no central server involved. Has S3 fallback if you want. It uses Loro CRDTs so concurrent edits merge cleanly, and Iroh compiled to WASM handles the networking with NAT traversal and end-to-end encryption. Until iroh-docs or iroh-willow comes out with WASM support, this seems to be the best solution for obsidian syncing.
Interesting. I like the idea of reprinting classics to all look identical as a way of designing a library. Would be interesting to select a set of books for your kid, have them printed, and just put them in their room. I wonder if any startups are doing this.
Personally, I find it odd to have interactions with anyone just based of transactionality. I want to interact with people because I have relationships with them. I've always found it hard to figure out exactly how nice to be with someone you don't know. I don't think this is a maladjustment on my part, I think you probably shouldn't be overly nice to people before you establish trust with them... and that takes time.
The problem I have with being vegetarian is that you can't prove that it's actually healthier, because the current state of dietary science is pretty poor.
Even if you could, you would also need to explain all of the evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't.
What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now). If you had the answer, and it was clear a diet consisting of vegetables causes reduction in physical size, then I have to ask:
Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are?
'What if' is pointless. What if vegetarianism makes you stronger than eating meat? What if it increases your IQ by 20 points or makes you live 200 years? What if you can code faster drinking rare pygmy tree sap or the blood of certain albino poison toads?
> you can't prove that it's actually healthier, because the current state of dietary science is pretty poor.
Almost every decision in life must be made without proof, but with evidence and judgment. We know a lot about nutrition, and a lot of evidence points toward health benefits in eating more vegetables and less meat. We can also see lots of vegetarians in our communities and they don't seem sickly or shorter, etc. - we also see elite athletes in public who are vegetarians.
> a diet consisting of vegetables
Vegetarianim is much more than vegetables; it's everything but meat - legumes (generally beans), vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts - plus eggs and cheese. Vegans cut out the latter two items.
> What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now).
Where?
> evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't.
What problems? How does diet affect evolution? We'll lose our hunting muscles over the next 500,000 years? Remember humans haven't changed much biologically in 200,000+ years.
We don't need uncited, selective data. It would be relatively easy to directly measure the relationship between vegetarianism and height.
Also, height is determined early in life. Many people become vegetarian in adulthood. Becoming vegetarian at 30 won't affect your height, I'm pretty sure.
>Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are?
As someone who eats meat, that's probably one of the worse arguments against vegetarianism/veganism I've heard. If eating animals is immoral, sure why not? If pillaging your neighbors makes your society better off, do you think a good objection to "maybe we shouldn't pillage our neighbors" is "Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are"?
The logical entailment is eventually your lineage will be wiped out on some timescale if they cannot compete. I guess this argument in null and void if you believe violence is obsolete.
Do you want your kids to have colon cancer or heart disease because there is pretty strong evidence to suggest red meat contributes to these. And there's much stronger evidence for that than there is that suggests that vegetarian kids will be shorter and physically weaker (in fact I don't think there is much good evidence at all suggesting that).
This isn't, and has never been a hard problem. Just pay for people's attention. People you follow don't have to pay, and make that transitive. Penalize people in your network who propagate spam by increasing the cost to get your attention.
If a scammer, advertiser, or some other form of spammer can get a payout just 1% of the time, they will be willing to pay much more than the average person posting the average tweet.
If you make everything explicitly transactional, you will be left with only people trying to make a profit.
Penis enlargement spam is worth like $0.00000001 per message. Any number higher than that makes them lose money. The real problem is that nobody will post on a social media network where you have to pay to post.
Twitter is thronging with blue-check spambots. This idea has been comprehensively disproven. People will pay to spam you.
In fact, judging by the Exodus of non-scammers, only scammers will pay to send you their messages—which makes sense, since they're the ones who expect to turn a profit.
You did not understand what my original post suggested.
I'm not suggesting people pay to be certified.
If a spammer wants to pay me $20 to see their message, I am happy to see it.
Would you be willing to see an ad for $1000? A million? Sure no one would pay it, but you can set whatever limit you want.
No one would want this? Again I don't think you understand what I am proposing.
It isn't a a system that selects exclusively for ads. It selects for people you know, then people they know, and so on, and fades out how often posts show up the further away you get. If someone pays more, then more people will see their message in their network as it compensates people for their attention, starting with the people who value their attention the least.
No one would want this? You think people don't want to get paid for their attention? This is essentially what a job is.
Micropayments are actually a huge problem, which is a big reason why no one has ever successfully implemented what you're suggesting on any large scale. Email spam is a major problem, and has been almost since its inception, yet the only effective solutions have been the ones that increased centralization and made it harder and harder to run your own email server. And even with all of these modern solutions, a LOT of compute is burned by every single MTA to filter out the spam that goes through for their users based on content filtering.
And this disregards the simple fact that the only people willing to pay to have their words seen are people who are getting more money out of this - i.e. spammers (and yes, advertising in general, including "influencers", is spam in my book).
Do the outbound rules of other participants include microtransactions?
And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.
If you've got great content, I would just follow you. Or someone I follow would follow you, and through the network it would lead to discovery. I want your content, so unless you charge for it, nobody's paying anyone.
If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee. I'd be free to choose to set that up as a part of my ingestion algorithm. Or maybe my peers do it, and if they "upvote" the content, I see it.
If my peers start acting poorly and sending spam, I can flag disinterest and my algorithm can naturally start deboosting that part of the network.
With such systems-level control, we should be able to build really excellent tooling, optimization, and statistical monitoring.
Also, since all publications are digitally signed, your content wouldn't have to be routed to me through your node at all. You could in fact never connect to the swarm and I could still read your content if you publish it to a peer that has distribution.
> If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee.
Nice in theory. In practice spammers will plant malware to steal microtransaction money from random people and push paid content down your throat for almost nothing.
When you propose a novel model that will fix all the current problems, the first thing you need to think is how a bad actor would exploit it.
I don't agree. I think the chief problem with advertising is that it is extremely repetitive. I'm not, in principle, opposed to being informed about new things relevant to my interests existing. In a world that is completely oversaturated with content, it is hard to gain traction on something new with word-of-mouth alone, even if it is of very high quality. There is a point to being informed about something existing for the first time (maybe I'll use it), and there is a reason why people would have to pay to make use of that informational system (the barrier to entry is necessary to make the new thing stand out in the ocean of garbage).
Advertising is never going to inform you - it is by definition about persuasion, not information. An advertisement is always designed to try to convince you to buy a different product than you would rationally choose yourself. Even a seller in a physical market telling you their tomatoes are very sweet and juicy is simply trying to get you to buy: they have no idea, and don't care, if their tomatoes really are sweet and juicy (and definitely not sweeter and juicier than all the others tomatoes in the market), they just think you're more likely to buy from them if you hear that.
> An advertisement is always designed to try to convince you to buy a different product than you would rationally choose yourself.
Perhaps you could consider toning down the absolutism. This is true in many or most cases, but certainly not all cases. Let's take, for example, video games. I can afford to purchase any game that interests me, and do. However, I often go several months between new game purchases, because I am not aware of any games that interest me that I do not already own. An advertisement for a game does not need to convince me to purchase it over an alternative product, it simply needs to make me aware of its existence and broadly convey what the game is about so that I will know whether it matches my specific game interests closely enough to investigate further.
Particularly in the modern world of hyper-specialised interests, it's quite easy to get into a niche of a hobby where you have found and already purchased all of the things you are aware of. As another example, there are hyper-specific novel genres where there are at most a couple of dozen entries in that genre and you are able to read every single entry in it. You are still interested in that genre, and will likely purchase anything else in it, should you become aware of it. Enter the benevolent advertisement, which makes you aware of its existence in a mutually beneficial way wherein you get more of the content you are interested in consuming and the creator gets money.
> An advertisement for a game does not need to convince me to purchase it over an alternative product, it simply needs to make me aware of its existence and broadly convey what the game is about so that I will know whether it matches my specific game interests closely enough to investigate further.
I agree that it does not need to do more than inform you - but that doesn't mean it won't do more. Please show me a single advertisement for a game that doesn't use bombastic language, show highly selective graphics, or appeal to a sense of nostalgia. I for one haven't seen one, even ones for the niche indie games I respect the most. Sure, not all commercials are equally deceitful, but they are all meant to be persuasive more than informative.
I don't exactly go around saving advertisements, but plainly informational ones do exist here and there. Off of memory, an example of an indie game trailer I think is well-made is that of Wargroove[1]. It's a simple and clear clip reel of gameplay showing off a variety of content and features, and if I recall correctly, advertisements for it were simply smaller slices of the trailer. I think there's nothing offensive about advertisements like this existing (although, that said, the number of times I wish to see such an advertisement is still exactly once).
I will grant you that this type of advertisement is indeed benign (though if I were really really really nitpicky, I could claim that the pace of gameplay shown in the trailer is probably not indicative of how you'd play the actual game, and I'm not sure if the music is part of the game soundtrack).
Still, I think this is such a tiny minority of real advertisment that it's barely worth mentioning. For example, here is a trailer for the original The Binding of Isaac, which (while being an interesting piece of art in itself, which many ads are) is stil clearly not just meant to inform consumers about the game, but instead is meant to sell a certain image of the game that it may or may not invoke in you:
I'd also note that advertisments for artistic products such as games are some of the most ambiguous about the line between informative and persuasive, as the "feel" (atmosphere, tone, persuasive storytelling etc) of the final product is an intrinsic part of its value in a way that is not relevant for, say, produce, or consumer goods. It could be argued, for example, that the Story trailer for Elden Ring captures a real and important part of the appeal of that game, despite it including 0 details about the gameplay, and despite it being entirely original footage and dialog that is not in any way part of the game itself. The same ambiguity doesn't exist about an ad showing the glamorous lifestyle of someone who gets a mobile phone plan from company X, in contrast.
Ah yes, the sybil attack.
This is why establishing an identity is useful, and worthwhile. An identity with no proof is likely not a real person, and therefore has little value in being advertised to.
If you're a real person, then yes, it is valuable to show you things.
Want to know how I'm right? Because fingerprinting browsers and tracking people is how we establish that they are real in the current advertising world. Advertisers pay for that. Thus it has value.
How would this happen? Jets are significantly more maneuverable than anything else in the sky. The military could, you know, pilot the plane so it does not hit anything.
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