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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • developers have figured out it’s more profitable to build fewer expensive properties than a large number of affordable ones

    You’re right about this part, but you need to ask why is this the case. It’s due to (among other things) over regulation and a stifling of home building.

    Most cities in North America make it very expensive and difficult to build. Zoning laws means there are only a few places they can build densely, and red tape increases the cost of building. This has caused a huge mismatch of supply and demand for housing in cities. So of course in that environment, what is most profitable is to cater to the wealthy.

    If developers could build faster than demand was growing, they would satisfy the wealthy demands and then move on to less profitable middle and lower income housing.

    This is how all markets work in this context. Electric cars were initially only made for the wealthy, because those sales were the only ones that could be profitable for the emerging technology. Now that the tech has improved and the wealthy demand is satisfied, it has come down to middle class prices




  • I’m not a big fan of karma either, I definitely don’t want to see it baked into the core protocol. However with this implementation, it doesn’t seem to harmful as most users won’t have it.

    I would also love to see some experimentation with different methods of assigning karma on the fediverse. The Community Notes algorithm from twitter is very interesting as it boosts answers that have support across many groups of users. It’s an attempt to encourage answers that reach across divides, instead of ones that foster echo chambers.

    Let a million experimental flowers bloom!





  • Obviously if the state doesn’t enforce the titles they’re useless. Sure if the president of a corrupt country decided he wants your house he’s gonna get it. But a DLT would prevent lower level corruption that relies on the benefit of the doubt.

    If a corrupt official uses their access to change the PDF title of your house to be in his name, he could take that to court to take your house from you. A ledger would prevent that change from happening, or at least leave a permanent record of the change



  • AFAIK if you don’t trust the server and want to know exactly what code was run by it, there are only two options: a smart contract blockchain, or ZK Proofs (which came out of blockchain research)

    It’s a social technology. It allows outsiders to validate that the election tally code was run correctly. Elections are run every day on the Ethereum blockchain often that has financial implications for the voters. It doesn’t mean they never get hacked, but it certainly gives the users more visibility and trust in their vote than a centralized black box



  • Not a fair comparison. Bank databases have been running since the 70s on code that has barely changed in that time. They’ve been battle tested for decades, so it’s unlikely a new exploit is going to be easy to find.

    On the other hand, if you wanted to run an election on a centralized database, think about what that means. All the votes need to go to 1 server somewhere, which will tell us all who won the election. A server that is run by an IT team who will have root access and could be phished, or bribed, or threatened. A server that only gets a real-world test once every few years.

    Users have no idea if their vote is in the database, if it’s correct, if it got counted in the final vote or not.

    Don’t get me wrong, I don’t trust the current crop of DLT tech more than the pen and paper method, but at least it’s more transparent than a centralized system


  • There are lots of knee-jerk reactions because people saw the word “blockchain” in the title. It’s as intellectually lazy as the shills who refuse to criticize the crypto industry for its shady parts

    This just sounds like a decentralized Slack, with a blockchain to ensure all nodes have the same data. The details are sparse, but this sounds like a proof of authority system to achieve consensus between authorized nodes in the network. No cryptocurrency involved. It’s just using blockchain as a consensus algorithm between decentralized nodes(which is what it was designed for).

    It doesn’t say, but since their target demo seems to be enterprises, my guess is that the idea would be companies run their own node in the network, which would allow a high degree of security and be interoperable with other enterprises.

    “But you could use a federated system…”

    I’m all for the growth of the fediverse, but it still has many problems. If you’re running a large enterprise that needs a guarantee that all your messages are synced, in the right order, and nothing has been removed later, a proof-of-authority blockchain is a better system than something federated






  • I don’t think it’s naive to think that there is an existential risk from AI. Yes, LLMs are not sentient and I don’t think ChatGPT is Skynet, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if we could create an entity that is generally intelligent, has goals, and is orders of magnitude smarter than humans that is cannot be controlled. And that poses a risk if its interests come into conflict with ours

    Global mega-corps are already a kind of AI. They’re generally intelligent actors that find creative solutions to problems and work to advance their own interests, often at the expense of humanity, despite attempts to reign them in. A true AGI might be like a super-powered corporation, that can have it’s big decision meetings every second instead of once a week

    However, I am also concerned with global regulation of this stuff because if state actors are the only ones allowed to have AI, that could get dystopian very quickly as well so… 🤷‍♂️


  • doylio@lemmy.caOPtoFediverse@lemmy.mlStaked deposit to ensure good behaviour
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    1 year ago

    I would think the admins would make slashing decisions

    It’s important that slashed funds are destroyed, not sent to anyone in particular. This ensures there is no way to profit by slashing unfairly. A malevolent admin could decide to start slashing for no reason, but they’d ruin their own server eventually as users left.

    There may also be ways to curtail the admin’s slashing power (ex: require 2 or of 3 admins to slash, or limited number of slashes per day) which could also be programmed into the contracts

    And even in the worst case where an admin goes rogue and slashes the entire server, you’re just out $10. It’s not the end of the world