Backed by $1 in the legacy banking system

Yes, other memecoins used to also be pegged to the dollar, but they lost their peg, like TerraUSD and Tether.

which represents exactly $1.

Until it doesn’t.

It’s no different than a number in your banks database, except it’s in your custody, like cash.

And it’s not a real currency, it’s a memecoin.

Is your bank’s database a currency?

No, my bank’s database is a database, it refers to a currency that is real because it is accepted for paying taxes, fines, etc.

but I’m happy to teach you about the industry if you’re interested

There’s nothing you could teach that would be valuable to learn. You seem to be in on the grift, looking for another person to get in on the pyramid scheme. Good luck with that, but I’m not interested.

Like a number in the database at your bank. No different than that.

Except that my bank stores dollars, not memecoins.

Are you saying that is a different concept than usdc

Yes, because “USDC” isn’t a currency.

USDC is absolutely a token on many different ledgers that represents a currency.

No, it is a speculative investment. If it were a currency it would be something people were using to buy things, accepting for selling things, using to pay taxes and fines, using to invest in something else, etc.

It’s not a currency, it’s at best some kind of intermediate thing used to buy even more speculative “investments”.

The customer was using cloudflare IP addresses, which is causing a knock-on effect for the rest of cloudflare’s customers and putting cloudflare as a business themselves at risk.

Right, so sales should not be involved in any way.

The alternative was for the customer to use their own IP addresses as cloudflare advised .

Again, sales should not have been involved in any way.

I’m not sure what you think ‘Business development’ teams do but I certainly wouldn’t be expecting engineering advice from them.

They are at least not identical to sales. They work with sales, but there’s at least some engineering component of the job. In this case if you were told you were meeting with the business development team, you’d expect that there would be talk about an engineering solution to the problem. Not just paying cloudflare more money.

I’m 100% on the side of CF.

100%?

We scheduled a call with their “Business Development” department. Turns out the meeting was with their Sales team,

…

So we scheduled another call, now with their “Trust and Safety” team. But it turns out, we were actually talking to Sales again.

This is the part that’s ridiculous to me. If CloudFlare thinks they’re violating TOS that’s fine. If they’re willing to let them continue with their business as-is as long as they pay more? That’s fine. But, scheduling calls with one group and it turns out it’s actually CloudFlare’s sales team on the phone, that’s ridiculous.

And most of that history tells us why it’s a good idea to democratize currency.

No… that history tells us that currency only exists when there’s a state / religion in control. There’s no reason for currency without a state / religion. Not only would it not work, it’s also unnecessary.

Decentralized currencies were in place

Uh huh… like when?

The difference is that medicine, as a concept, is useful.

Interestingly, for a currency to actually be useful, there needs to be a demand for it, something that you can only pay for in that currency. For real currencies that is normally taxes. England only accepts taxes paid in pounds, so there’s a demand for pounds from every person who has to pay taxes in England. For crypto, extortion is basically the only source of demand.

Sure, occasionally there are places that accept both real currencies and crypto currencies, but for legit businesses almost none of the revenue comes from the crypto side. But, for ransomware, etc. the hackers only accept crypto. That means there’s a demand for crypto, which means that it has some value.

I actually considered a non-governmental, community regulated currency as a pretty good idea.

That goes against the entire history of currencies. Every successful currency in history has been controlled by either the state or a religion (which was effectively state-like).

I don’t know what their motivation is, but I definitely hope they protect the identity of the voice actress. If her name gets out, it’s basically guaranteed her life would suck for a while.

If she’s like 99% of actors, she’s someone just struggling to get work, who’s lucky if she can afford to rent an apartment without roommates. If her name got out, she’s almost certainly have to deal with death threats, stalkers, etc. Rich celebrities can deal with that kind of attention because they have the money to hire security people, PR people, lawyers, etc. Some random voice actor is not going to have those resources.

Can you imagine how happy this makes China?

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit

So, if Stack Overflow generates text based on any answer (or question) in Stack Overflow’s DB, it must credit the person whose text it adapted.

Good luck with that…

Chat GPT generates plausible auto-complete text. If it has been trained on saying “this case was reported to your local law enforcement agency”, those are the kinds of words it might spit out.

throes

We need to talk about data as a physical object.

We need to admit that it isn’t and that that’s a terrible metaphor.

It’s still saved on disks somewhere, whether they’re a traditional HDD or a modern SSD.

Yes, often multiple copies are saved. Sometimes it is aggregated with other data, sometimes not. Making a new copy is insanely cheap, and, under the hood, even when just moving the data from the hard drive to the computer’s memory, a copy is made automatically. There’s no way to avoid copying the data.

But, to make it clear, “data” is basically “ideas”, and you can’t really treat ideas as objects. For thousands of years the idea that you could control ideas was ridiculous. You could control the physical object that an idea was expressed on, but if someone took their own time and copied it, that was a new object and the person who made the original had no claim on it.

Copyright, and its evil friends, is a relatively new concept where the government grants a temporary monopoly on the expression of an idea. Stealing the physical object on which the idea is printed is one thing. But, now you can get in trouble for “stealing” the idea. That’s what you’re talking about with stealing “data”, is that what you’re supposedly “stealing” is information.

But, of course it’s not theft. When you copy an idea without permission, the person with the original doesn’t lose it, they just lose control over a copy of that information.

Treating ideas, data, etc. as physical objects just never works because ideas can be copied without the original person losing anything. This is different from physical objects where my taking it necessarily means that you no longer have it.

In other words, data was always as physical as words on the page of a book.

Not at all, because each copy of a book is its own physical object. Copying a book is difficult and requires its own printing press. Even a low-fidelity copy like a photocopy requires a photocopy machine, ink and paper. Copying data is essentially free. When copying a book required a printing press, you could sort-of pretend that ideas were objects because copying was so burdensome. But, with digital data it’s clearly ridiculous. That doesn’t mean you can’t have laws about data (i.e. information), it just means that those laws care going to have to be completely different from laws about physical objects.

Why did we accept the change in how ownership worked simply because of a change of storage medium?

Because copying is essentially free. It’s no longer an object, it’s information.

But, having said that, the storage medium isn’t a major issue. The real question is when did people start accepting that you could treat ideas as objects. Stealing a book out of someone’s backpack and photocopying a book are completely different crimes. In one case, the person no longer has the object. In the second case, they still have it, but they don’t have control over the copies of it.

Talking about data as if it’s an object or something you can own is a red herring. The real issue is privacy.

For instance, say you use a period tracker app, that is owned by an non-profit, trying to use the data to better understand women’s hormone changes so that they can get better medical care. Great! Ok, now what happens if that non-profit goes bankrupt and as part of the bankruptcy proceedings sells its data to Meta or Google so that it can afford to make payroll. Well shit, your data is now owned by them, and you’re out of luck.

A privacy rule handles that situation better. You can give the company access to your private data, and then revoke that access later. If your data is something they own, they can use it however they like. But, if you own your own privacy, it doesn’t matter if the period tracker app gets bought out or goes bankrupt or whatever. The data they have isn’t something they own and can sell, it’s private data that they had temporary access to.

That’s like saying “Watch my new TV show, it’s better than the other shows because our scripts are printed on an Epson printer!”

Quantum computers aren’t fast, they’re very slow.

Eventually, if things keep progressing, they’ll be able to do certain things like factoring primes faster than conventional computers. But, the clock rate will probably always be abysmal.

Kindles too. You can jailbreak them and get a shell. They’re so much more useful when they’re jailbroken. They can read multiple other formats, they can get books from a fileserver on your local network, the jailbroken reader app is better, etc.