I've managed to kick all social media except Github. That for me is the most difficult if you want to collaborate on software projects.
No, I don't consider hacker-news to be social media, rather a news aggregator with a message board. Although, I would frequent here less probably if I was on other social media.
That perspective also helps to understand the position that any call for radical climate action must be a weaponization of competing economies to weaken the leader of the pack. So it is very bad framing. Do the work cheaper, better, and at scale. By doing it more efficiently you win. Oh, and of course you'll be more innovative too.
In some cases, I’d argue it might ironically be a worse metric. Case in point, a large AI adjacent firm like NVIDIA - or even OpenAI - that is both “creating gdp”, but also worsening stuff. I’d say a farmer farming in a sustainable way might have a near 0 gdp compared to Sama, but environmentally is much better.
Agree that not all gdp is equal or beneficial. However, I think most people would be remiss to the idea of giving up on science and technology and a return to the agricultural era.
Agree, to clarify, I’m specifically skeptical of the US GDP as much of it seems of a very bubble-like and speculative nature. Tesla (stock) pre NVIDIA was probably the poster boy for the longest of times.
GDP doesn't differentiate between good and bad things and for climate change it would be border line circular because natural disasters like floods and hurricanes are "good" for the GDP (reconstruction effort is a net positive, destruction itself is not subtracted).
Yeah at it's core a blockchain based cryptocurrency is a consensus system and decentralised resource market where the resource in question is space in the blocks within some time bound and verifiable proof of the time and state they were accepted in.
That core feature of "providing a total ordering for state changes and events with formal trust bounds" turns out to have a lot of potential uses.
Now of course truly providing correct timestamps or really any clock mechanism in a trustless way turns out to be massively difficult. And not just in a blockchain but really in any decentralised/distributed system. It's a famously unsolved problem.
There's some research[1] on how to go about providing a "global time"/"global clock" for cryptocurrencies without external trust assumptions but it's extraordinarily academic and most if not all systems just assume trusted time within some bound and hope for the best.
In a sense, a POW blockchain such as bitcoin can convey global time/global clock if all participants understand the average block propagation is 10 "minutes"? Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter but converges to 10 minutes in aggregate.
Over great distances this breaks down given limits on the speeds of transmition (speed of light), however, if transmission was instantaneous (quantum entanglement?), that would solve the dilemma of what does "now" mean light-years away given our relativistic idea of time between here and there.
Oh yeah. Sorry I misspoke a bit. I should have said that global time/clocks are an unsolved problem in non-proof-of-work systems.
Proof of work does a decent job approximating a monotonic clock but that only works when you are expending obscene amounts of energy on a global scale. And like you said it breaks down over longer distances (however luckily we don't have to deal with that too much now).
But in any non-PoW system, a "trustless" global clock is extremely non-trivial.
Thats because POW solves the Byzantine Generals problem as I understand it. Before POW, that problem was intractable (extremeley non-trivial). Its always lammented that so much energy is needed to solve the problem, although that seems to be the nature of the problem. Maybe time and energy are inexorably linked.
Well it's a bit more complex than that but the two are certainly linked given that POW is framed in the context of time complexity of the problem and the adjusting difficulty is just an equation to approximate a clock from the rate of solutions produced for a problem of a given time complexity with an approximate X amount of available resources.
Generally, yes. But remember that there are difficulty adjustments, and it's conceivable that there are two chains, one being a bit shorter but with higher difficulty, and that can have precedence over the longer but easier one. The point is that you want the chain embodying most work, no matter how long.
(And note that a) the difficulty is included in the header that gets hashed, and b) it is easy to check that the block conforms to the specified difficulty.)
That's why "heavier-chain-rule" would be a better name than "longest-chain-rule", strictly speaking.
Dumping excess energy into something like Bitcoin mining is an interesting way to spend excess green energy that would otherwise fizzle. Mining Bitcoin is sort of ideal for this type of situation because it doesn't matter the frequency/time/duration for which you mine Bitcoin, and the coins can be quickly liquidated to recapture revenue.
Even of we agree it's a good idea most likely this doesn't make financial sense.
Crypto minimg hardware costs a lot of momey upfront, getting outdated fast and to make profit it must run 24/7 which is obviously impossible when there is no energy excess.
You don't need to run it 24/7 to make a profit because the energy is essentially free or stranded, therefore the only cost is that of the equipment. I think the amount here is more than enough to pay for a few SHA256 specific CPUs attached.
That would work if the energy was actually free. Instead, since it is a single market, as soon as curtailment kicks in you do not get the energy for free anymore, you get it for the price you pay for the gas plants that replace the wind generation which can't be transmitted.
This also doesn't change if you consume all the energy at the place where it is produced, since you still need to supplement the normal load with gas. There's only two ways out of this: split the markets, or build transmission.
Texas does this. They have lots of deals with data centers to consume additional base load where they basically get load shed first in the summer. Presumably these crypto miners are happy with the arrangement or they wouldn’t have entered into it.
> However there are lots of very pro-Russia Bulgarians (hard to explain after everything that has happened, but still..),
Here is an excerpt from wiki which explains why some in Bulgaria are still "pro-russia":
"The Western European Enlightenment in the 18th century influenced the initiation of a national awakening of Bulgaria.[63] It restored national consciousness and provided an ideological basis for the liberation struggle, resulting in the 1876 April Uprising. Up to 30,000 Bulgarians were killed as Ottoman authorities put down the rebellion. The massacres prompted the Great Powers to take action.[73] They convened the Constantinople Conference in 1876, but their decisions were rejected by the Ottomans. This allowed the Russian Empire to seek a military solution without risking confrontation with other Great Powers, as had happened in the Crimean War.[73] In 1877, Russia declared war on the Ottomans and defeated them with the help of Bulgarian rebels, particularly during the crucial Battle of Shipka Pass which secured Russian control over the main road to Constantinople"
It's an irrational love-hate relationship which is essential to the history of the modern Bulgarian state and creates the internal political divisions between "rusophiles" and "rusophobes". As a young nation (in modern terms) that has never been through the Enlightenment, we don't have our own political and intellectual traditions, and much of politics is perceived as orbiting around a superpower, be it Russia, continental Europe, or the USA.
Your answer is only part of the truth. Though Russia had lots of welwishers in Bulgaria, the heavy indoctrination happened during the communist rule 1945-1989. Many people whose best years were during this period are still alive and many are disappointed by the failures of the post 1989 governments. The topic is complex and filled in with lots of propaganda, so I won't get into disputes, just giving additional context.
Agreed 100%. You'll find that sentiments towards Russia vary greatly depending on how old people are. Pro-Russia attitudes are aging out. I'm OK with that.
Now we've got a generation of youth coming to power who get their world view from social media and thus see reality objectively.
"view from social media and thus see reality objectively."
It all seemed fair until this fragment. Nothing about social media is objectively true. The advantage of social media (hopefully) is that's you're exposed to people from a variety of cultures so that you can choose who's subjective truths to believe in. It's better than powerful single voices influencing the ignorant using mass media though.
Maybe not clear from my comment, but I'd say that many of the new generations are also disappointed by the post-communist governments, so you can't blame it all on the retirees.
The thing is though, right after liberation, the Russians started shitting the bed by sending incompetent fools (did Tsarist Russia even have anything else?) to Bulgaria to rule. Then they sponsored multiple coups against the first Prince of Bulgaria who they thought was a German puppet based on his origins, without even bothering to ask him. Then they sabotaged Bulgaria's unification and defence against Serbia efforts by abandoning the army. Then after a successful (in ousting the prince, but not in anything else because again, the people running it were as incompetent as it could be) coup, he was asked to return but he thought the only way he could would be with Russia's acceptance, which the Russia didn't give. Then Russia, for some weird reason only their incompetence can explain, refused to recognise the regency council looking for a new head of state (which first went to them expecting them to nominate a Russian prince).
I could go on, but basically Russia's goodwill was spent in the first few decades of them incompetently and arrogantly bumbling around and making it extremely hard for the young optimistic nation which was really looking towards Russia as the big helpful brother and desperately needed help to survive.
Today you can also add 50 years of imposed socialism, which had its ups and downs (massive industrial, education, sport advancements) but was imposed and kept with tanks, and Russia's aggressive and imperialist foreign policy which directly results in tens of thousands of deaths. Why the fuck would anyone still think Russia is the good guys? This can only come out of blatant misunderstanding of history.
The thing about history is that it's never about a single event...
While Russia may have had some influence in the events at the end of the 19th century, they are also responsible for Bulgaria's abrupt transition from monarchy to a soviet country in the 1940s. Bulgaria was a soviet country until 1990… which is a very long time of persistent atrocities and brainwashing.
The “Russian occupation” of the hearts and minds of boomers who are still alive today is difficult to shake.
> The “Russian occupation” of the hearts and minds of boomers who are still alive today is difficult to shake.
Which isn't to say that most "non-brainwashed" millennials and Gen-Z'ers are at all trying to be objective about that historical period. For them it's only prison camps, state surveillance and shortages and queues. Nothing like an accelerated industrialisation and modernisation in a few decades, transitioning from a backwards agrarian rural society to a well-educated population and reaching western-like levels of human development in the 1980s.
