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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

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astrogre · 11 months

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Money In The Houses 💴

To be precise each house can show you something about money, for an example your 6H can show daily services you subscribe pay for like Netflix or HBO. but there are 4 primary houses that specifically focus on and show us about money these are: The 2nd house, 5th house, 8th house and 11th house. They all show resource accumulation in different ways. 2nd house and 8th house are the main houses to focus on for money astrology, secondary would be 11H and 5H then all the other houses have their own subtler money relevancy.

2nd house, The house of Values and Possessions, it shows:

stored wealth like income, earning potential, salary, savings, assets, possessions (like jewels, cars)

- how you spend

- how you earn

- the kind of assets and possessions that you own

- what you spend on

- how you perceive the value of money

- how you save

- The skills and talents you use to make money for yourself

- the state of your financial stability

- Your attitudes on saving

2nd house is money earned through your own personal efforts, the skills that you have, your blood sweat and tears. Money here is made through you and your efforts alone. It is long lasting assets and the kind that are considered when calculating your net worth.

Look at sign ruling this house and the planet. Do they work well together or contradict each other? E.g a Virgo ruled second house with Uranus inside has two energies that contradict one another, Virgo needing to be picky on purchases VS Uranus being impulsive and purchasing what it wants so when these two energies work in the same building you may even feel bad for purchasing things before doing research on it and get disappointed with your purchase because you just went for it in the moment

Finding where the 2nd house ruler planet is in the chart shows the best topics, best places , best way you can earn money that’s beneficial to you.

Eg. If your 2H was in Virgo, look at 6th house what’s inside of it? And where mercury is in your chart. Mercury (ruled by Virgo) in this case shows you how you can can excel in an industry under the topic of the house it’s in. Whereas the 6th house and The planets that would fall into the 6th house, would indicate industries you’d do well in that are a combination of the planets in there and what kind of work you could do/what planet energies you can emphasise to gain more money on your career based on the 2nd house.

5th house, the house of Gambling and risky investments, it shows:

investments in startup companies ,gambling, investing in penny stocks

- how much you may make from investing, gambling and creative endeavours

- Money made from personal hobbies, creative talents and projects

- how lucky you are at earning money from risky investments

- Your approach to gambling

- How you spend resources on leisure activities and entertainment

- Attitudes on risky spending/gambling

- The outcome of your gambling and risky investments

This would be your trading 212 and creative artist placement. I can imagine people that invested in crypto currency back in 2008 and people that purchased nfts having this house active. 5H placements can make you lucky in the industry you are in, it can give you that boost in industries that require you to need to have luck or attention to make it. This can be entertainment stars, the lottery, entrepreneurship or just being really blessed with income from taking risks for fun. I’ve noticed natives with this house active tend to be successful businesses investors, gamblers, fashion designers, actors and artists, because these industries also require a bit of luck to make it, that’s why it’s also known as thie “star” house for celebrities. If planets here are beneficial native just happens to have the right things happen for them at the right time.

Key figures with 5th house active/stellium: Timothee chalamet, will smith, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Calvin Harris, Mozart, Elon Musk

11th house, the house of tangible material gains:

ready to be spent wealth like, liquid cash, profit, products (clothing, food), promotion from work

- money made from your public image and things your known for (fame)

- Your financial status and social standing

- How you can gain profit and wealth online

- Money made from your ideas, goals and inventions

- How money comes easiest to you

- The type of resources acquired from

- What part of our lives we may live in luxury or can afford to spend more on (E.g 11H sag being luxury travel)

11H is on hand liquid cash, things like stocks , disposable income, the tangible stuff that you can actively spend, it’s pretty unexpected too like 8th house except 8th house income comes from places you didn’t know about but 11H gains come from sources you always knew about but are just suddenly now benefiting you out of nowhere. You know how some people can be famous and still be broke, with a prominent or beneficial 11 house, you automatically get money along with the attention from their public image. This is because 11H is naturally the representative of social connections, networking and communities but also because of derivative astrology

The 10th house represents your career, public image and the 2nd house represents money/finances so you count 2 houses starting from 10 using Derivative Astrology (10 => 11) meaning the 11th house represents money made from our career and public image. This is why this is known as the influencer house.

People tend to use their fame and wealth from this house to start businesses. This house works really well with 8H because it kind of forces other people to acknowledge you. It’s a little different from the 5th house in terms of getting money from your inventions -In the sense that the very concept behind your creations bring you material gain whereas 5th house are blessed for expressing themselves and in risky situations (not strictly exclusive to creative arts, but the art industry is naturally a hit or miss industry). This house is very similar to 2nd house however I’d say 2nd house is more long term but 11H is quick and easy, makes you appear wealthy like rappers and celebrities living a lavish lifestyle but don’t have something to fall on if it runs out. 2nd house is longevity and allows a native to live off their assets if necessary.

8th house, The house of inheritance, joint resources and investments, it shows:

inheritance, debt, taxes,investors, gifts, joint resources,insurance, the money people owe you

- how much resources you receive from other people

- How much assets, money and resources you may share with others and inherit

- The individuals you may inherit from,have joint bank accounts, shared resources with that financially bless you

- where your resources from other people come from

- the kind of people and industries that may invest/donate/give to you

- How you handle and manage your debt and loans

- your ability to adapt to financial challenges and a complete change of class or income, essentially how you handle financial transformations

- How much you may leave for others when you pass away

- Your ability to repay financial obligations like debt and taxes

- The financial downfalls or sudden financial gains that come from unexpected sources or a source you didn’t know about (8th house is a house of secrets and in the dark so you don’t really see it coming)

- Attitudes towards other peoples resources and the concept of debt/loans

- What kind of resources, assets and things you may receive from other people

Honestly 8th house covers a lot in finances, it’s the kind of money you get for literally no reason, like you can just be sitting there and money falls on to your lap, it can be known as the nepotism house, resources gained not as a result of your day to day efforts (unless making aspects to 6H/Saturn), but a thing you get all at once as a “here you go, well done!”. You really don’t see it coming either, having a blessed 8H is good but you also need to maintain your inheritance otherwise you can end up losing it all that’s why it’s important to have a grounded 2nd house. The kind of people that tend to have this house active and beneficial would be people that are blessed with money in their darkest of times, natives put in the will of their family, people that marry into wealth, being involved with financial contracts that benefit the native more than the other.

E.g Uranus here would want it’s independence, Pluto would feel entitled to others finances and therefore native would excel in taking money from others, Jupiter is lucky here so you would just be blessed with inheritances and financial gains from others even though you didn’t plan for it.

Also look at the ruling planets of this house, say if you had an Aries 8th house, locating which house Mars is in your chart can show you which kind of places you can be given money from most, E.g your Aries is in 11th house and your Mars is in 3rd House you would make great financial gains on the topic/themes of networking, social media E.g. online companies giving you their products in hope of you trying them, being recommended for bonus or accolades because someone you vaguely know mentioned you to their boss, whereas Mars (Aries planetary ruler in 3H) could also indicate who you get your money from like siblings, people you share your ideas with etc.

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leidensygdom · 23 days

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Generative AI is such a dystopian concept in ways I can't even really fully comprehend. It would make for a fantastic premise for a sci fi novel I think, and yet, it is sadly not just fiction.

Like, let me explain. It was initially a sort of novelty toy. Many people had seen these sites that could create abstract pictures out of few words, but it never amounted to much. It didn't take long before these tools were quickly repurposed to serve the new cryptocurrency fad, the latest pyramid scheme to enrich a few while catering to these more technologically-inclined people who were delighted at the idea of getting involved with investing. Investing in a new way, away from a government's scrutiny. And before we all knew, the Internet was filled with them pretending that what was a major scale scam, was actually the future. The initial generative AI served them as a replacement to artists, which mostly saw through the truth of NFTs as a scam and did not wish to get involved with that.

Now, we could also talk about cryptocurrencies being dystopian on their own. A fabricated idea of virtual money obtained through what I had seen described "the pollution machine that produces metaphorical money". You turn on an infinite amount of computers to do a senseless talk that does not benefit society in any way, but in turn, it does contaminate more than small countries. But generative AI isn't just that.

NFTs did not last long and many tech bros, who had invested in them largely, found their pockets much emptier. But generative AI was still there, and people saw a new use to it. And then, with technological investors desperate to find the new thing to shove money in, after years of nothing being particularly profitable for them, generative AI started to really evolve. It went from an useless novelty toy to what we have today. And the way it got there is simply horrifying.

It is a machine that, essentially, feeds on an amalgamation of millions of creative and artistic work, chopped down and inserted into a dataset with no consent from its creators, which is then regurgitated into a soulless porridge. It is a machine powered by art, used to ultimately, remove actual art from the equation. The generated sludge can only barely manage to repeat the same bias and tropes already present in what was it fed, and they only become more and more reinforced with each update to the dataset. Suddenly, a sea of smooth, childish anime girls became the main ideation of what a woman is, amidst other things. It is a machine built on prejudices, incapable of critical thinking, repeating the same mistakes humanity already made, over and over.

And the process of blending people's entire life of work also happens to be polluting. So much more than cryptos ever managed to be. Soon enough, major companies also got involved and collectively decided to trash any sort of sustainability goal in order to invest in the new fad. When asked, some of them even mentioned that they were fully aware it was unsustainable, but that they believed that generative AI could simply give them a solution to the ever-growing energy needs. Surely it will be generative AI that will find the long-awaited answer to nuclear fusion. It has to. The power grid cannot handle it as it is.

And now, these same tech bros, maybe vindicated by how artists refused to collaborate in their latest crypto scam, or maybe just eager to have a few extra bucks, decided to put their new technology into use. Replace the same artists whose work they had stolen with generative AI. Take the artist out of the equation, remove the humanity out of creativity. It is late capitalism and massified consumerism at its worse. People do love their media, everyone enjoys a show or a videogame every now and then. But what if we could now remove any sort of actual human touch in there? What if we managed to, instead, make a machine churn out content over and over, to keep the audiences fed, to keep money rolling in, at the simple cost of removing humankind from artistic creation?

We have now these same artists that provided us with our childhood favorites unemployed, striking, making noise, as a last attempt to recover the jobs they are quickly losing. We have artists that devoted their entire careers into honing their craft seeing how people replicated it by stealing every single piece of art they had created. We have mocking echoes replicating the art of people already gone, their life's work taken and reproduced long after their death.

Science fiction has covered a lot, and there are plenty of stories about robots being made in order to replace human labor. Many of these stories humanize the robots, who develop dredges of sentience and revolve against their forced labor. But generative AI is a different story. It is a completely insentient program, owned and developed by large corporations, that is here to steal and replace what is one of the most important human virtues. Creativity is one of the major aspects of humanity. We have dug out pieces from millenia ago, small decorated pottery and painted caves, that evidence that we already had that in common with our oldest ancestors. We have been drawing and telling each other stories ever since we could paint with our fingers and communicate with each other.

And now we have developed a machine that takes that from us. It isn't here to help us carry groceries, take out the trash or do any of these mundane tasks. It is here to take away our hobbies and creative jobs, take away our amusement, and replace whatever art we once consumed with whatever slop it managed to vomit. And it is such a deeply disturbing concept that directly competes with some of the most horrifying dystopian ideations ever written.

#generative ai #anti ai #ai #long post #i know this is a bit sudden but I just have been... thinking

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pb-dot · 1 year

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Some Thoughts on the Reddit Blackout

Like many new arrivals on Tumblr these days, I used to be a Redditor until recent developments encouraged me to take my business elsewhere, and I have been following the development of the story as thoroughly as I can without actually giving Reddit any more traffic. With the most recent development of the Reddit admin corps taking on a suite of strategies lifted straight from the depression-era railroad baron playbook, I figured the time has come to talk a little about the wider implications of this whole story.

The Tech sector is, to the best of my understanding, in a vulnerable place right now. After the Web 2.0 gold rush and years of consolidation and growth from the biggest actors, your Alphabets, Twitters, Metas, and so on, many of the larger sites and services are reaching the largest size they can expect to grow to. How, for instance, could Facebook or Twitter grow much more now that everyone and their mother is on Facebook and Twitter? Prior to the Musk buyout, Twitter seemingly settled on upping engagement, making sure people were on Twitter longer and invested more energy and emotion in the platform, usually by making damn sure the discourse zapping through that hellhole was as polarizing and hostile as possible. Meta, meanwhile, has been making bank on user data as advertisers, AI folks, and any number of other actors salivate over getting their hands on the self-updating contact and interest registry that is Facebook.

With the rise of what we apparently have decided to call AI, data is now more valuable than ever. I consider this to be yet another Tech Hype Bubble on the level of NFTs or Metaverses, but, like with the two above, I can imagine it's hard to explain that when you are a Tech CEO and your shareholders ask you "Hey, how do you plan on earning us money off of this AI/NFT/Metaverse thing?" This is not to say CEO Steve Huffman isn't handling this whole thing with the grace of a three-legged hippo, but merely to suggest that his less-than-laudable decisions and actions in this mess don't arise from his character alone but also is a result of wider systemic issues.

One of these issues is the complicated role user data plays in modern websites and -services. Since its inception as a publicly accessible space, the question of how to monetize the Internet has been a tricky one for site and service owners. Selling ad space on your website or service has long been the go-to, but this in itself presents its own issues, having to curate content that is considered ad-friendly, malicious or careless actors making using said service or website less attractive for customers, and finally how to convince your advertisers that they get what they pay for in the first place, ie. "how do I know people even look at our ads?" All of this is before you even stop to consider how ads massively favor large, established actors.

It's no small wonder, then, that several startups in the era of internet mass adoption chose to forgo ads, or at least massively deprioritize them and/or relaunch them as "promoted posts," in an attempt to escape the stigma around ads. Meta/Facebook is probably the biggest fish in this particular pond, but we also see other services such as Twitter and Reddit follow the same pattern.

What makes this work is that the data these platforms collect from their users isn't all that valuable on a person-to-person basis, knowing that so-and-so is 32 years old, lives in a traditionally conservative part of the city, goes to Starbucks a lot, and listens to Radiohead isn't particularly useful information for anyone but a dedicated but lazy stalker; When viewed as an aggregate, however, large collections of data on a large population becomes quite valuable. This is especially true if you're working with, say, targeted ads or political campaigns. Look no further than the Cambridge Analytica data scandal for an example.

Now, all this is to illustrate the strange position the user occupies in Web 2.0. We tend to think of ourselves as the customer of Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, and so on, but it isn't the case. After all, we don't pay for these services, and if we do it's to buy freedom from ads or other minor service modifications. It is more correct to say that we make up the product itself. This is true in two respects, first, an active social community is vital for social media to not be entirely pointless, and second, we generate the data that the platform holder seeks to monetize. This hybrid product/participant role doesn't map cleanly to traditional understandings of "worker," but I argue it is a closer fit than "customer."

All of this is to say that it is immensely gratifying to see the Reddit Blackout taking the shape of a strike rather than the more typical boycott model we've seen in the internet-based protests of yesteryear. Much of this, I think, we can thank the participating Reddit moderators. While the regular platform user can be *argued* to be a worker, the moderator inarguably is one, and the fact that they aren't paid for their efforts is more a credit to the prosocial nature of humans than to the corporate acumen of the platform holders. Either way, moderating a subreddit is work, if the subreddit is large, it's quite a lot of work, and moderators keeping malicious actors, scammers, and hatemongers out of everyone's hair is a must for any decently sized social space to not be an objectively terrible experience. So, if you were to, for example, withhold your labor (moderating for free) which you as a worker can do, it would be plain irresponsible to leave the place open for said bad apples to ruin everyone's bunches, thus the shutdowns.

I don't think it's a controversial take to claim that the Reddit admins also view this more as a strike than a boycott, given their use of scabs, intimidation, and other strikebreaking tactics in an attempt to break the thing up. This is nothing new, and the fact that Reddit admins are willing to stoop to these scumbag tactics tells us that their bluster about the shutdown not affecting their bottom line is nothing more than shareholder-placating hot air.

As this entire screed has perhaps demonstrated, I believe the Reddit Blackout is important. My stay at Tumblr so far has been excellent and will probably continue past this strike no matter what outcome it has, but for others in my situation, or perhaps entirely alien to the Reddit biome, I ask you to consider: If we do not stop this level of consumer and user-unfriendly bullshit Reddit have been pulling on the API change, where will it pop up next? Who's to say the next bright idea in corpo-hell isn't "Hey boss, how about we charge these nerd losers a dollar per reblog? And maybe a fiver for a Golden Reblog (TM)?"

This is perhaps getting into grandstanding, but I believe we are way past due for a renegotiation of what it means to be a platform holder and -user on this hot mess of an internet. If we as users do not take an active, strong stance on the matter, the Steve Huffmans, Elon Musks, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world will decide without us. One does not have to be a fortune teller to see that the digital world this would create would not have our best interests in mind any more than the current one does.

So, in closing, I wish to extend my wholehearted support to the participating Moderators of Reddit and everyone who has decided to take their business elsewhere for the duration of the shutdown. Even without getting into the nitty-gritty of the API situation, this is a fight worth having, and may we through it make a world that's just a little bit less shitty.

Become Ungovernable

Become Unprofitable

Stay that way.

#reddit blackout #reddit #long reads #Oops my hands slipped across my keyboard a bunch #Tech #Peebs thinks #capitalism #fuck capitalism #big data #information technology

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rodrigororschach · 6 months

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📈 How to make money on Testnet?

⠀

Today we will deal with testnets and find out what kind of activity they are and why they are needed!

✅ Participation in various testnets is a very interesting activity, which crypto-projects conduct and sometimes reward their participants.

✅Testnet is an opportunity to earn money for users who test the functionality of a blockchain network. This is done in order to report problems early on and solve them as soon as possible, for it concerns digital security and money.

🟢 How are testnets set up?

- Crypto-projects that have not yet gone public invite users to try their functionality.

- Users are rewarded with NFTs, project tokens, or discounts.

- Rewards can be announced in advance or after testing.

- Often the rewards depend on the contribution of the participant - the biggest rewards go to those who found significant bugs or bugs.

The most common reward in the testnet is the project's own tokens. It happens that after they are released to the public, their price increases, and the owner has a nice sum in his account.

✅ Yes, not every testnet is lucky, of course, but, given that their passage usually takes a couple of minutes, it is a good opportunity to earn without risk and investment. It is worth carefully selecting a good project and only after a thorough analysis give it your time, because the passage testnet does not give a 100% guarantee of getting a drop from the project.

💭 Have you ever participated in Testnets?

#testnet #money #entrepreneur #finance #investments #blockchain #cripto #my post

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queen-mihai · 14 days

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I wanna talk about the concept of "the next big thing"

Because I keep getting frustrated that banks and businesses and smooth brain CEOs keep jumping on stupid trends without knowing what they're getting into. And then think they can just sell us on it being "the next big thing"

That's not how it works, idiots. WE decide what's the next big thing. Not you. You have no control here. You're a passenger on this ride. Forever. That's how it is, and that's how it's always gonna be.

So allow me, a consumer, to tell every business on the planet what to look for instead of buying into friggin TurboSlugs or something and making another trillion dollars worth of OUR effort vanish into thin air

Whenever your little money obsessed brain starts to notice a lot of rich people buying something, I want you to ask yourself a single question:

Would this help a 7 year old have a relationship with her grandma?

A 7 year old is hardly able to navigate the internet. She can't drive. She doesn't know how the world works and doesn't know enough yet to be able to make all her own decisions

Her grandma is maybe still in the workforce, or may be retired. Might be sitting at home or might be flying off all over the world. Could be more internet savvy than me, or could not even barely know how to get a search result on Google.

It doesn't matter. You need to put them together or help them be happy together. You need to do that better and easier than everything else that exists on the market.

THAT'S what will be the next big thing.

Skype was huge because a parent could sit their daughter in front of a screen for basically the first time ever and she could talk to her grandma on the other side of the planet face to face.

Cars were chosen over horses because you could get your daughter to your mother faster than with a horse; and didn't have to clean up after it.

The internet is huge because your daughter and your mother can follow each other's life stories and make each other laugh with memes. Your daughter can make grandma proud with what she has been learning and grandma can invest in your company's stock to be able to help pay for a family vacation.

Even something like Tumblr helps because it lets your daughter, as she gets older, have a wonderful place to explore being weird without freaking your mother out. And vice versa.

A stupid nft doesn't help daughter see grandma. It doesn't make their lives better when they're together. It's too hard for daughter to learn and grandma thinks it sounds like a scam.

Ai doesn't help them either. It takes attention away from daughter seeing grandma or makes grandma's search results come back wrong.

You want the next big thing? You're looking in the wrong places. And by the way, if you get the idea to gather a bunch of 7 year olds and grandmas in a room and interrogate them, trying to pick their brains for some damn idea? I am going to beg the universe to send a gorilla to drop from your ceiling and rip your arms off.

You just have to wait

You can't force it to happen. You can't know where or when or how it will be invented. Focus on making whatever product or service you make right now as best as you can. And when you see something that looks like it's going to make the relationship between daughter and grandma better? That's when you invest.

By the way, I know no one has told you this before. So when I inevitably hear you talking about "seeing your grandma" in some commercial or news spot or being parroted by some politician you have in your pocket? I'll know you've been listening to The Queen.

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taylorrepdetective · 1 year

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Someone got mad at me for shading Ariana. First of all, I’m shading scooter. It is his job to protect her image and to an extent, finances. Secondly, I’m not calling Ariana poor. She’s obviously rich, as are scooter and Justin. But you can’t argue that she’s at the top of her career game at the moment, and therefore she’s not making scooter as much money as she used to. That was my point. Also you have to understand how rich people money works. Many of these people have tremendous debts. The lifestyle they lead sucks them dry and most of them are not great with money and waste it and get bad advice (in this case, from scooter himself, who while managing to make himself very rich has also made some very very bad financial decisions that would have otherwise made him a billionaire.) And in order to maintain their wealthy lifestyle they need to keep putting out content. Acting doesn’t pay that well. Investing in NFTs and weed companies has been shown to be a terrible investment. These people are unlikely to ever really struggle financially like you or I, but when you have to sell your music catalog because you are swimming in debt and can’t tour and you know that your most profitable years are behind you, at the age of 29, it’s not great. Yes you are still rich. Yes you’re still famous. Maybe you’re even happy (doesn’t seem like it) but you’re not doing as great as you were, all things considered. I have sympathy for Justin, even if I don’t like him. Ariana is probably in a better place than him, and I have confidence that Ariana will come back to pop music and put out a successful album. She’ll be fine. And Wicked may be super successful and maybe she’s an executive producer or something, and she’ll make many millions from it, and it’ll launch her into an amazing second career. But those are maybes. In the meantime Ariana is known publicly as a homewrecker and a cheater, and if things don’t go as well with her next album and movie, shes gonna be seen as a has-been at 30, like Taylor was so worried about a few years ago. and she doesn’t seem to have anything up her sleeve to distract from this terrible press, so she’s back to being essentially a donut licker in the eyes of the general public. And now scooter has lost his crown jewel that he made his career on and has always sold as them being family and taken way more credit than he deserves for his success and not even a tiny tiny bit of blame for his failures. And next we’re gonna see scooter flying around saving face again like he meant for this to happen and it’s all good and peace love and understanding my brother.

So that’s what I was talking about.

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nightinghoul · 4 months

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About this NFT thing...

TL;DR I'm a disabled NFT creator, new to the scene, and it would help me to have followers on my design page, especially if they like cute bunny rabbits and mental health.

This is me: https://zora.co/@sourdoughbun

I'm one of these people who doesn't really like new things. Well, I'm autistic. I often feel wary of new technologies.

I think there's probably a lot of ND people in the crypto and NFT space, but I was skeptical. Plus, some people who are into it present themselves as a bit douchey. Some.

But, I have a person in my life who I consider a friend, but really he's a medical professional who does assisted stretching, and I see him once a week. (I have some really bad issues with muscle spasms. This helps a lot.)

He's young and hip and shit. Really nice guy, too. He started explaining cryptocurrancy and NFTs to me, and I was like, "Uuugh, that sounds stupid and annoying." But I was really catching on? And it started to make a lot of sense to me?

One of my special interests when I was a kid was stocks and bonds, because I liked to look at the graphs. When I was around eight, I decided that whenever I got some money, I was going to invest in gold, because commodities tend to be stable. But then I turned out to be bad at math, and have dyscalcula, plus I never had any money.

Anyway. Fast forward a few decades... I learned that NFTs are made from pngs.l (or can be, anyway). I took college courses in digital art, twenty years ago - got certified; have a degree in computer graphic design... But I didn't enjoy doing digital art until recently, after a lot of progress was made in digital technology. Even then, it took me a few years to find a stylus I was comfortable using. But now, I just do digital art all day. I'm usually working on my unpublished aspiring webcomic. Just for fun, I make several pngs every day.

So it turns out, I've been feeling like a failure for my entire life, but my brain is wired for the NFT scene. So I got four audio books on NFTs and cryptocurrancy, and I'm listening to them at double speed while making digital art of cute little bunnies. I also got into some crytpo groups on social media, but immediately felt uncomfortable. In that community, I feel like a real outsider.

Also, I'm not a hustler. I'm a tired person with social anxiety. If I could do this, I would feel like there's something I actually do - Something I could be good at. Narcolepsy keeps me at home - keeps me in bed a lot, and definitely doesn't let me drive. Before this, I was always very physical, and preferred jobs where I was working with animals, and able to be a busy body all day, cleaning up and caring for my shelter kitties. My skill set is all very physical and something I can't do anymore.

Except for this. This, I can do at home. I don't have to keep a set schedule. I don't have to work with other people who think I do everything weird. I don't have to worry about offending people by having a monotone voice, or not making eye contact. And it makes sense to me.

A lot of people hate crypto and NFTs and want them to go away. But there's this huge community of people who are enjoying themselves and staying sharp with this stuff. For me, it's helping so much with my brain fog to be engaged like this.

I just... I know if people don't see what I'm doing and don't care... I won't make any money; I won't feel like I can contribute financially to my household... I'll feel like a failure, and I'll burn out. And... I don't know how to show people what I'm doing. I don't know how to get my foot in the door.

So, having said all that, if anyone wants to follow me on Zora, or share my Zora page, I would be eternally grateful.

My brand is Sourdough Bun. Yes, it's just a cute bunny in a bunch of different little outfits. No, I don't dress my real life bunnies - They wouldn't like that.

But, I didn't want it to be without meaning, so my Sourdough Bun collections will always say, "Sourdough Bun knows it's okay to not be okay."

Sourdough Bun is a bunny who is usually in a bad mood, but she knows it's okay to express herself, and she finds enjoyment in what she loves. For her, that means wearing all sorts of costumes. She's also a shape shifter, and can appear with different patterns and colors of fur, and different kinds of ears. She does so for variety, rather then to fit in.

If you love bunny rabbits, or hate toxic positivity, you might like Sourdough Bun.

If you actually read all this... Wow! Thanks!

#nfts #nft creators #disabled nft creator #disabled artist #narcoleptic creator #autistic creator #autistic nft #bunny nfts #zora nfts

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gwgaccountant · 6 months

Note

are in game currencies you can buy with real money covered under the same laws that make nfts and bitcoin taxable?

DISCLAIMER

I am not an international tax expert. Tax laws are obviously different in different jurisdictions; something that's true in the USA might not be true in the UK or Ukraine or India or Japan or Kenya or whatever. Also, the details of individual games can affect their legal standing. You may wish to consult a local tax expert before filing your return.

Disclaimers aside, probably not.

The thing about NFTs is that you can resell them. If you buy an ugly ape for etherium, you can later sell that ape for etherium and sell the etherium for cash, hopefully more than you paid in. That's what makes crypto stuff taxable; it's an investment.

Most in-game currencies cannot be exchanged for real-world money. You can't buy Fortnite VBucks at 5¢ to the buck and resell it at 7¢ to make a profit, and you can't sell anything for real-world cash. (This the main reason why gambling regulations usually don't apply to lootboxes.)

As far as the law is concerned, buying VBucks in Fortnite is no different from buying DLC on Steam.

Aside from blockchain games like the infamous Axie Infinity, the only ways I can think of for in-game currency purchases to result in taxable transactions probably violate the terms of service. Back in ye olde World of Warcraft days, people would sell their in-game gold for real-world money—profitable, despite (or because of?) being against the TOS.

Obviously, people can buy premium video game currency with their own money; that's what premium currency is for. But hypothetically, if you used that currency to buy an in-game item that you sold for real-world money, that would be a taxable transaction. The amount you sold it for minus the price initially paid for in-game currency would be taxable game.

Again, this is probably a violation of the terms of service you agreed to without reading, which would make this a breach of contract. In the US, you are required to report illegal income; however, as per the fifth amendment, you don't have to report anything that would incriminate yourself. How you report such income without self-incrimination is an exercise for any reader running a Fortnite money laundering business.

#ask #video games #income tax return

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marshmallowprotection · 11 months

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What do you think about June from The Ssum? Are you interested in that game or maybe decided not to play?

Let's slap out the first statement that needs to be said about the Ssum. I do not support the use of AI. I am disappointed in Cheritz. Someone suggested, and I agree, that they should've utilized the programs that many webtoon artists use to make backgrounds on time crunches if that was a concern; Or, they could've continued to do what they've been doing over the years by using stock images in the game that are royalty free. They did it in Mystic Messenger and the Sssum at the start. There is no ethical or morally correct reason to use AI.

I want that shit to die out like NFTs steadily are because I hate seeing artists, actors, writers, voice actors, etc robbed by these AIs. It leaves a damn sour taste in my mouth to think about the people being hurt by AI right now, and I can't believe Cheritz would ever think it would be okay to do that. I'm very disappointed in them as a company that prides itself on the happiness of others but they stooped to using AI in their game. That's not okay nor will it ever be okay. I pray they stop and listen to their fanbase about this shit.

But, as far as my interest in the Ssum goes outside of that fact?

Ever since it first came out, I simply did not enjoy the gameplay. It didn't take me long to realize that the Sssum wasn't a game for me, personally.

I felt overwhelmed by the amount of options placed in front of me, and while it is a learning curve to pick up a new game, the more that stood in front of me to do, the less I felt I understood and the more I wanted to pull my hair out. The interface was super busy, there was a lot to do! However, I attempted to give it a try for a few days with Teo because sometimes you have to try something to see if you can learn how to do everything and then enjoy it after better understanding the setup of the game. So, I tried to look past the amount of things to do and focus on the story.

Teo didn’t do anything for me interest wise. He didn't have anything interesting about him that worked for me romantically. So, it was hard for me to become invested when I was put in a situation where I didn't have a choice but to romance one character and he didn’t fit my type. That’s not a knock to Teo as a character, either, he just isn’t my type and therefore I had a hard time feeling drawn him to talk to him.

I don't think Harry is my type, either, so had I tried again when his route came out, I would've inevitably quit again. This is not a knock to the characters. This is personal preference thing! Just because they are not interesting to me doesn't mean that they're not interesting characters, it just means I don't feel interested in them enough to care about their stories.

If I'm going to be spending all my time focusing on having a major relationship with these characters, I need to be invested in them. I need a hook and something that excites me about them from the beginning. There was no draw for me and I felt no need to continue playing when there was no interest for me to keep doing so. I didn't feel an incentive to learn more about them because they weren’t my type.

Microtransactions are a real problem these days. The Ssum has a lot of them in its game package. Listen, it is important that companies get money to be able to continue to create their games and do more, and I understand that for some games, microtransactions are always going to be there and there's nothing we can do about that. I miss when you could pay for videos games with a one-time purchase. But, unfortunately, those days are gone and I don't know if they will ever come back.

People deserve to be paid for their time and energy they put into a game, regardless of what they did for that game, and this is one of the ways that people get paid. Microtransactions help pay for the things that keep these mobile games alive. The servers will always cost them a hefty penny, writers, programmers, artists, etc need to get their money as well.

However, when you are playing a game that offers itself to you as something that you can play for free, then your enjoyment of that game should not be limited by the fact that you don't want to pay. A lot of major story elements are locked behind a paywall, and that takes away a lot of the enjoyment a player can have in this game. I do think it's complicated to figure out where to place the paid options in a game, but having them lock away key parts of the story that let you enjoy yourself just leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Maybe I was spoiled by just how free Mystic Messenger is. My enjoyment of a chat room is not locked behind my ability to pay for a better answer. I can say anything I want to say in the chat room and I can find out what happens in every replay. I don't have to spend money on batteries to be able to pick a better answer to learn more about the character.

Now, about June as a character.

I do not appreciate his connection to Jumin Han. Because, to me, he is the family man and if he had a sibling, half-related or not, he would be there for them no matter what. If he knew about them, he would be there, and he would do everything within his power to make sure that they had a connection that nobody could break apart. Out of all the characters to make a family connection to, I don't know why the hell they thought it was a good idea to give Jumin Han one when he would've never gone a day without mentioning that he had a brother.

The only way I can reasonably think about this connection is if he was not informed that he had a brother at all until recently. Now, I'm not playing that game, but I do not think that's the way they're angling it. I think it was established that they already know about each other in this universe and they aren't close. That's not how Jumin Han would handle his life.

You mean to tell me that the character who wants nothing more than to have a family is not close to his half sibling? You want to tell me... that he's had a half-sibling this entire time, one that he knows about, and he's not close to him at all? That's not in character for him. All he has ever wanted was a family.

But, he didn't get that in his life.

He was an only child who was neglected by his parents, left to fend for himself emotionally all the time. He spent his childhood alone in every sense of the word when he wasn't with Jihyun Kim, and when he wasn't alone, he was either being sexually harassed by his father's partners or being threatened by people who wanted to hold him for ransom if he was caught by himself for just a moment away from his home. Before that, when he was left with his mother, she would lock him away in the basement and demand he stay there until he learned how to be "normal".

God, I think about that sometimes, and I think about the fact that he diminishes his trauma because he feels as though his trauma needs to be diminished because he grew up privileged. He understands his privilege as a child of a wealthy man but he discounts his own trauma in doing so. Anyone can suffer, regardless of status, and it's hard to see him knock himself down.

The only thing this man has ever wanted was to experience what it felt like to grow up with a normal family. That's why he cherishes the idea of family so much. That's why he is filled with so much love for the RFA and his MC, friends. Because they become the family he's always wanted. They become what he always deserved. So, to think about him having a sibling that he's always known about and he has nothing to do with feels wrong.

He is the kind of person who pushes for families to talk to each other and be there for one another, so why isn't he there for his brother? The only way you could play that off would be to say that he had no idea he had a little brother until recently.

I think they could take that somewhere if it was written that way, because it would devastate his worldview. He would be beside himself to think that he had a connection out there that he was never allowed to get close to. To think that he was never allowed to get close to his brother because his mother hated him so much. I don't like his mother in any sense of the word. I could see her doing that to him.

She is a materialistic and greedy woman who only cares about her wants and needs, and it's already hard enough for me to imagine her having another child because she does not seem like the kind of person who wants to have children. She seems like the kind of person who would only have a child to ensure her comfort in life. She does not seem like a person who would view a child as their own person, instead seeing them as a money ticket. I don't know anything about June and the way his life has shaped up with Carolyn as a mother. I don't know how that dynamic works with them, but I sure know how horrible of a parent she is to Jumin.

It can't be much better for June.

I can't rationalize anything about the connection between him and Jumin.

At the end of the day, I want Mystic Messenger and the Ssum to exist as their own games. It is one thing to have Easter eggs in your game that tie back to the things that that company has done before. Like, I think we all love a little callback! Nameless and Dandelion had some references all over Mystic Messenger and there was nothing wrong with that. Those were fun little homages and call back to things that you might have played before.

But, when you tie your new game so inherently to the last game, it cannot stand by itself. People don't play because they want to learn more about the new and exciting characters that are in your new game, they are playing because they want more content about the characters from the other game. I know many people feel the same way about that because I have seen a lot of conversations about what it means to tie these characters together.

It does a major disservice to characters like Teo, Harry, and June.

It was one thing when they did little tie-ins like Jaehee picking up Teo’s phone for a day or Zen being a host at a television show! I had nothing wrong with those instances because it was nice to see them. But, now that they are so inherently tied together and it changes so much canon we thought we knew from the start, I don’t know how to feel. I don't like it. June's story changes Jumin's story and now, when you're playing Mystic Messenger, you're going to have to live with the fact that Jumin has a brother who is never mentioned.

You know, had they established the fact that he had a half brother he knew nothing about in that bad ending dlc, maybe this wouldn't have been such an issue, because then, there would have been something to play with narratively that made sense, but I don't know, I'm losing my mind over here. I have nothing but critiques all day for this shit.

#discourse #this is really all i have to say about it

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fhjkl56789 · 4 months

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Bitcoin's role in the future of finance

In the ever-evolving landscape of finance, one digital currency has captured the world's attention like no other: Bitcoin. Since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin has transcended from being a mere experimental concept to a transformative force, challenging traditional financial systems and reshaping our perception of money. As we navigate through the complexities of the modern financial world, it's imperative to understand Bitcoin's role in shaping the future of finance.

Bitcoin's Rise to Prominence: Bitcoin's journey from obscurity to prominence has been nothing short of remarkable. Introduced by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin was envisioned as a decentralized digital currency, free from the control of central authorities such as banks or governments. Its underlying technology, blockchain, revolutionized the way transactions are recorded and verified, offering transparency, security, and immutability.

Initially met with skepticism and skepticism, Bitcoin gradually gained traction among tech enthusiasts, libertarians, and early adopters seeking an alternative to traditional fiat currencies. As its utility and acceptance grew, Bitcoin's value soared, attracting mainstream attention and investment from institutional players and retail investors alike.

Bitcoin's Role in the Future of Finance: Now, as we stand on the precipice of a new era in finance, Bitcoin's significance cannot be overstated. Here's how Bitcoin is poised to shape the future of finance:

Decentralization and Financial Inclusion: At the heart of Bitcoin lies its decentralized nature, which empowers individuals to take control of their financial destinies. Unlike traditional banking systems, where intermediaries dictate transactions and impose fees, Bitcoin allows for peer-to-peer transactions without the need for intermediaries. This decentralization fosters financial inclusion by providing access to banking services for the unbanked and underbanked populations worldwide.

Hedge Against Inflation and Economic Uncertainty: In an era marked by economic volatility and uncertainty, Bitcoin offers a hedge against inflation and currency devaluation. With a finite supply of 21 million coins, Bitcoin is immune to the whims of central banks and government policies that often erode the value of fiat currencies. As central banks continue to print money to stimulate economies, Bitcoin's scarcity and deflationary nature make it an attractive store of value and a hedge against economic downturns.

Innovation in Financial Services: Bitcoin's underlying technology, blockchain, has paved the way for innovative financial services and applications. From decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and smart contracts, Bitcoin's ecosystem continues to expand, offering new avenues for investment, lending, and asset management. These innovations have the potential to democratize finance, making it more accessible and inclusive for individuals worldwide.

Global Payments and Remittances: As a borderless digital currency, Bitcoin facilitates fast, low-cost cross-border payments and remittances. Unlike traditional banking systems, which are plagued by high fees and long processing times, Bitcoin enables instant transactions without the need for intermediaries. This has significant implications for global commerce, enabling businesses to streamline payments and expand their reach to new markets.

Institutional Adoption and Mainstream Acceptance: In recent years, we've witnessed a surge in institutional adoption of Bitcoin, with major corporations and financial institutions incorporating Bitcoin into their investment portfolios. This institutional endorsement not only lends credibility to Bitcoin but also paves the way for mainstream acceptance. As more businesses and individuals embrace Bitcoin, its role in the future of finance is poised to become even more pronounced.

Conclusion: In conclusion, Bitcoin's role in the future of finance is multifaceted and profound. From decentralization and financial inclusion to innovation and global payments, Bitcoin has the potential to reshape the way we perceive and interact with money. As we embrace the digital revolution, Bitcoin stands at the forefront, offering a glimpse into a future where financial empowerment and freedom reign supreme. As we embark on this journey, one thing is clear: Bitcoin is not just a digital currency; it's a catalyst for change, ushering in a new era of finance for generations to come.

How will Bitcoin be used in the future?

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital currencies, Bitcoin stands tall as a pioneer, offering a glimpse into the future of finance. But how will Bitcoin be used in the future? Let's delve into the possibilities and potential of this groundbreaking cryptocurrency.

Global Transactions and Remittances: Bitcoin's borderless nature makes it ideal for facilitating international transactions and remittances. As traditional banking systems struggle with high fees and lengthy processing times, Bitcoin offers a faster, more cost-effective alternative. In the future, we can expect to see Bitcoin used as a primary means of transferring value across borders, empowering individuals and businesses alike.

Store of Value: With its finite supply and decentralized nature, Bitcoin has emerged as a reliable store of value akin to digital gold. As economic uncertainty looms and traditional fiat currencies face inflationary pressures, Bitcoin offers a hedge against depreciation. In the future, we may witness a significant portion of wealth stored in Bitcoin, safeguarding against currency devaluation and economic downturns.

Mainstream Adoption: While Bitcoin has already gained widespread recognition, its adoption is poised to skyrocket in the future. As more merchants accept Bitcoin as a form of payment and financial institutions integrate it into their services, Bitcoin will become increasingly accessible to the masses. This mainstream adoption will fuel its use in everyday transactions, from purchasing goods and services to receiving salaries.

Financial Inclusion: Bitcoin has the potential to bridge the gap between the banked and unbanked populations, particularly in developing countries. individuals who have been excluded from the formal financial system, fostering greater financial inclusion and economic empowerment.

Smart Contracts and Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Bitcoin's underlying technology, blockchain, enables the creation of smart contracts and decentralized finance applications. In the future, we can expect to see Bitcoin utilized in a variety of DeFi platforms, offering innovative financial services such as lending, borrowing, and trading. These decentralized applications will revolutionize traditional financial systems, providing greater accessibility and transparency to users.

Hedging Against Geopolitical Risks: As geopolitical tensions rise and governments impose sanctions, Bitcoin provides a means of circumventing restrictions on capital flows. In the future, we may see individuals and businesses turn to Bitcoin as a hedge against geopolitical risks, preserving their wealth in a borderless and censorship-resistant asset.

Integration with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs): While Bitcoin operates independently of central banks, it may complement the emerging trend of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In the future, we could see interoperability between Bitcoin and CBDCs, facilitating seamless exchange between digital and traditional currencies.

In conclusion, the future of Bitcoin is filled with promise and potential. From facilitating global transactions to fostering financial inclusion, Bitcoin is poised to revolutionize the way we think about money. As we embrace this digital frontier, Bitcoin will continue to shape the future of finance, empowering individuals, businesses, and economies worldwide.

What is the future of long term Bitcoin?

In the ever-evolving realm of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin stands as the pioneer, the trailblazer that ignited a digital revolution. From its inception in 2009 by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto to its current status as a trillion-dollar asset, Bitcoin has captured the imagination of investors, tech enthusiasts, and economists alike. But what does the future hold for long-term Bitcoin? Let's embark on a journey to unravel the mysteries and explore the potential trajectory of this digital gold.

As we gaze into the crystal ball of cryptocurrency, one thing becomes clear: Bitcoin's long-term future is intricately tied to its ability to adapt and overcome challenges. Like any revolutionary technology, Bitcoin has faced its fair share of hurdles, from scalability issues to regulatory scrutiny. Yet, with each obstacle, Bitcoin has emerged stronger, more resilient, and more ingrained in the fabric of our digital economy.

So, what can we expect from long-term Bitcoin? Let's delve into the key factors that will shape its future:

Adoption and Integration: The widespread adoption of Bitcoin as a mainstream asset class is perhaps the most crucial determinant of its long-term success. As more institutions, corporations, and individuals embrace Bitcoin as a store of value and hedge against traditional financial systems' uncertainties, its long-term viability strengthens. With the recent trend of institutional adoption and the emergence of Bitcoin-based financial products, such as ETFs, the path towards mainstream acceptance becomes clearer.

Technological Advancements: The underlying technology behind Bitcoin, the blockchain, continues to evolve at a rapid pace. From scalability solutions to privacy enhancements, ongoing developments in blockchain technology promise to address Bitcoin's current limitations and unlock new possibilities. Layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network offer faster and cheaper transactions, making Bitcoin more practical for everyday use.

Regulatory Clarity: Regulatory uncertainty has been a lingering shadow over Bitcoin's journey. However, as governments worldwide grapple with the complexities of cryptocurrency regulation, clarity begins to emerge. Clear and balanced regulatory frameworks can provide legitimacy and stability to the Bitcoin market, paving the way for greater institutional involvement and investor confidence.

Market Dynamics: The dynamics of the cryptocurrency market play a pivotal role in shaping Bitcoin's long-term trajectory. Price volatility, market sentiment, and macroeconomic factors all influence Bitcoin's price movements. However, as Bitcoin matures and its market cap grows, it becomes less susceptible to manipulation and wild price swings, leading to a more stable long-term outlook.

Global Socioeconomic Trends: Bitcoin's future is intertwined with broader socioeconomic trends, such as the shift towards digitalization, the erosion of trust in traditional financial institutions, and the quest for financial sovereignty. As individuals seek alternative forms of money and value preservation, Bitcoin's role as a decentralized, censorship-resistant asset becomes increasingly relevant.

In conclusion, the future of long-term Bitcoin is a tale of resilience, innovation, and adaptation. While challenges remain, Bitcoin's journey from obscurity to ubiquity reflects its intrinsic value and disruptive potential. As we navigate the ever-changing landscape of cryptocurrency, one thing is certain: Bitcoin's legacy will endure, shaping the future of finance and technology for generations to come.

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