kalverra

Agreed it's crazy, but it's a good political move. Everyone agrees we should ban it, but no one wants the blame because you'll have a huge amount of teenagers and young adults who will blindly hate you for it. So if you're the one who isn't in charge of the hard-but-good decision (or in Trump's case, if you don't particularly give much of a shit about it anyway) it's easy to just pick the most politically advantageous side.

Nate Silver did a nice write up on the probability and implications of all this here: https://open.substack.com/pub/natesilver/p/why-the-political...

When Biden passes this bill (which he said he would), I can only assume Dems will lose a large part of the younger voting demographic. If jot now, then 4 years from now. Because no chance in hell is China selling this thing, and Trump is already talking about how much he loves TikTok now.

Chainlink has solved this. Worth taking a look if you're still interested in this sort of thing.

I'm late to the party, but CGP Grey has an excellent video detailing the flaws of how SSNs are utilized.

https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus?si=KzjB2v3bimLE79Ny

He does do that from time to time. Most of his stuff is pretty deep in the weeds and decision trees of specific Ethereum implementations (e.g. this article), but occasionally he'll have one that's more legible to a wider audience. I think his essay on blockchain voting is a great example. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/25/voting2.html

Vitalik's audience is primarily people who are deep into blockchains and Ethereum. Plenty of good content is out there for freshman level info, he's more for your senior year.

Unless it's some shitcoin with 0 trading volume, no chance. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and plenty of other currencies handle that volume daily with no issue.

I was expecting something like advice to avoid distraction, but found the author just as distracted as I constantly am. Not only by his own admission, but the piece itself just weaves in and out of his main point, taking as many detours as the characters in the novel he describes do.

His ultimate point seems to be that distraction should be viewed more as play rather than an impediment to work. I can agree with this conceptually, but wish I could get my inner monologue and capitalism to as well.

Pretty much. Essays are a great medium for this style, I think of them like a curated conversation almost. You've organized your thoughts in a way that you could present them to a friend in polite conversation; you're trying to convey a point without the need to be pretentious or serious in order for it to be respected. Publications like the New Yorker and the Atlantic are a good place to find lots of high quality ones. Many authors also publish their essay collections as books, my favorite being "Consider the Lobster" by DFW.

As a WVU grad who grew up there: ya, pretty much. Outside of some select towns and cities, WV is poor as shit, and it's only getting worse. Lots of abandoned towns, homelessness, and very few jobs. Even when coal mining was big, it wasn't exactly a thriving area. The movie October Sky is a great rendition of what it was like in the 50s, the coal company owned everything, and was the only source for anyone's income. Now imagine that 70 years later with all the coal companies gone, and tons of painkillers.

Its a very sad state, anyone I knew with half a brain who grew up there wanted nothing but to leave. Even those in good situations were all looking to move far away after college.

This is sad to see as a WVU CS grad. WVU is pretty much the only place to go outside of Marshall and some teeny tiny schools if you're in WV.

I suspect a lot of this has to do with bad management by Gee and admin bloat, but the state is poor as shit. Most talented students go to WVU on scholarship, and get the fuck out of the state ASAP. It can't be easy to keep a state school funded when nearly every graduate of that school's #1 goal is to bail out of the state.

My freshman year at WVU was the year Gee took over as president. That was definitely his thing to ingratiate himself to the students. The whole frost couple weeks he would go up and down frat row, and through all the big house parties and shake hands, pose for pictures, etc. He quickly got this vibe as the "cool dad" with his cute bow ties. This won the student body over easily, so we were confused when our professors were really bummed about it. Apparently word gets around on your management style and spending habits.

The dude ripped through money he didn't have, hired a ton of bloat, and is now cutting staff in nearly all the programs I held dear.

PG has some real bangers, unfortunately this is not one of them. Feels like he's just sucking himself (and a couple YC peeps) off the whole time without providing a whole lot of insight.

Not specifically computers, but if you want a very deep dive into the creation of the internet (including some bits about the earliest computers) The Dream Machine is a great, and extensive look at the history of the internet through the lens of J.C.R. Licklider's life. It was rather mind blowing to me in various ways, one of the big ones being that it seems a lot of early computer pioneers weren't only mathematicians and physicists, but also psychologists.

In the case of Celsius, this seems like one of those a case of starting with good intentions, but quickly turning into fraud city in desperate attempts to keep the boat afloat.

For the more run-of-the-mill crypto scammers, there's a combination of over-confidence that no one can touch them, or will bother to come after them. Or they just don't even think that far. For a lot of the bullshit influencer pump and dumps, the worst that's happened has been ZachXBT or Coffeezilla exposing your bullshit. Which is a good thing, but the influencer just pops back up with another get rich quick scheme in a couple months for a new group of rubes.

Boy oh boy, made a couple big oofs in this one: http://thebear.org/essays2.html#anchor506009

Called global warming, hole in the ozone, and "your car causes smog" as grand modern myths, while also proclaiming himself "predisposed towards the preservation of our environment".

Well part of the issue is that there are a lot of RCs (Research Chemicals) that dealers often try to pass off as LSD, but are really slight tweaks on the chemical. They tend to be much easier and cheaper to make, so the street market is flooded with them (25i-NBOME is quite prolific). This can be a bit dangerous as there have been some (admittedly anecdotal) horror stories with people using these.

As for real LSD, it's insanely potent, and even a single batch can yield thousands, hundreds of thousands of doses. So you could probably stay pretty mobile while producing large amounts, assuming access to proper ingredients and equipment. See above our fellow polyglot genius who was hauling ass all over the country and supplying most of Rock and Roll with it.

> Grateful Dead soundman Owsley “Bear” Stanley synthesized “the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street

This is pretty crazy. LSD isn't Meth, you can't just grab a couple things from Home Depot and get to work in your bathroom. LSD requires some expensive, hard to obtain ingredients, equipment, and usually a decent amount of experience as a chemist. How did a sound engineer get this shit to work?

From his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley

> When he was fifteen, Owsley spent fifteen months as a voluntary psychiatric patient in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.[10] Without having graduated high school, he was admitted to the University of Virginia, where he studied engineering for a year. Despite maintaining a 3.4 grade point average with minimal effort, he dropped out because of his disinclination for slide rules and mechanical drawing. Despite his dearth of formal education, he secured a position as a test engineer with Rocketdyne in Los Angeles; in this capacity, he worked on the SM-64 Navaho supersonic cruise missile. In June 1956, he enlisted in the United States Air Force as an electronics specialist, serving for 18 months (including stints at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Edwards Air Force Base's Rocket Engine Test Facility) before being discharged in 1958. During his service, he secured an amateur radio license and a general radiotelephone operator license.

> Later, inspired by a 1958 performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, he studied ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a time as a professional dancer.

He then went on to set up LSD labs all over North America, sell drugs to the Beatles, and eventually tried to sell LSD to Chelsea Clinton. Quite a character.

> My understanding is that they use NFTs on the Ethereum chain for authentication

Your understanding is imperfect. You use your private key on Ethereum to authenticate, not an NFT. It does seem like certain NFTs gate access to different parts of the site.

> NFTs are still wildly damaging to the ecosystem, with how much electricity they demand

Not really anymore. As others have pointed out, the switch to PoS massively reduced Ethereum's energy demands, by ~99.5%. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/04/26/ethereums-lifetime-...

> Their sole purpose is to be traded as chits in a series of wealth extractions, until some unfortunate sucker is left holding the bag on a worthless blob of data that (rightfully) nobody wants.

Ya, unfortunately the space is rife with grifters and hype in weird places, but that doesn't seem relevant to this specific project though.

> So I believe it is a reasonable assumption that it is in this form so the creators can get in on the scam-o-sphere that is Ethereum/NFT.

Or they're trying to make something legit within this space. The Internet's early use cases were largely a bunch of scams and over-hyped projects that failed miserably. That didn't exactly hold for long though.

I went to WVU where we have still actively use the PRT system built in the 70s. It's the school's main system of transport, and when it worked, it was pretty great. When I was there, it was infamously unreliable, but supposedly that's improved a lot lately. I do often miss it, and wonder why more places don't implement something similar.

This is great! I enjoyed the breakdown of the ATS logic you use. Did you look at how others like Lever use ATS and replicate that? Or was this a green field build?

They're referring to DMCA compliance. Basically, if you're hosting a site where people can post videos, images, text, etc. You have to accept the possibility that someone will try and post every Disney movie in full on there. And you need to have a plan to deal with it, as you'll be receiving a lot of DMCA take down notices from companies that don't want their copyrighted shit on your site.

I suspect you're a little too early in the process to have to consider that, but it's worth thinking about if things start going well.

I'm confused why people hold him in any esteem. Is it just because he's a maverick? Cause you can find better ones. It's like when people mourned John McAfee like he was some great martyr; there are better rebels to attach your affection to.

Well that's a real bummer, one of my top 3 authors, and the only one that was still alive.