Kbelicius (u/Kbelicius)

Kbelicius commented on Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach techradar.com/vpn/vpn-pri... · Posted by u/donohoe

miroljub · 6 days ago

The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech. Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.

> That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.

Read my comment again. The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy. It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...

Kbelicius · 6 days ago

> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech.

This doesn't mean anything in isolation.

> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.

Do we know each other?

> The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy.

No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.

> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.

I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?

Kbelicius commented on Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach techradar.com/vpn/vpn-pri... · Posted by u/donohoe

miroljub · 6 days ago

I don't understand why you got heavily downvoted.

Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.

You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.

And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.

Kbelicius · 6 days ago

> I don't understand why you got heavily downvoted.

Because his post contributes nothing to the discussion.

> Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.

What makes it the fastest?

> You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.

Don't know about you but I'd rather be arrested for posting something in EU then be disappeared in any of the countries that you mentioned.

> And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.

That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.

Kbelicius commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

OneDeuxTriSeiGo · 16 days ago

I outlined it over in another comment[1] so I'm not gonna copy it all over but the point isn't to eliminate all trust. The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.

You are taking all the implicit trust, lowering it into explicit trust assumptions, and formalising who is allowed to make what decisions when, what happens when they do, and how the other parties are permitted to respond.

You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.

And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.

TLDR: It's low trust automation + formalising implicit assumptions into explicit ones.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46181371#46192445

Kbelicius · 15 days ago

Clicked the link but ctrl+f doesn't find any posts by you.

> The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.

That is also the point of laws and contracts as we have them today. How does, explicitly, blockchain improve on that?

> You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.

What implicit assumptions aren't removed by laws and contracts as we have them today that are removed by blockchain and smart contracts?

> And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.

Without any examples of what is being automated, how and what it is that is made buttery smooth... you really aren't saying anything here. Can you expound on any of those claims?

TLDR: By what you said the only thing that blockchains and smart contracts bring is a new medium to write contracts on.

Kbelicius commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

npoc · 16 days ago

The purposes of money are:

- store of value

- unit of account (a measuring stick for value)

- medium of exchange

Allowing the financial system to inflate the money supply destroys two of those fundamental qualities. The fact it can additionally charge interest on the money funnels the stolen value into its hands.

Interest on money loaned out is the only incentive required for putting money to "productive uses". Nothing about hard money affects that. In fact inflation only causes the people at the top of the pyramid to hoard all of the economic value instead. They are buying up and hoarding the entire world with the wealth they are taking from the people.

Kbelicius · 16 days ago

Bitcoin was envisioned by its creator to be used as a currency. To buy and sell stuff using it. If you ask today what is bitcoin you'll be told that it is a store of value. The purpose of money is not to be a store of value. It can be, but that is not its purpose which the case of bitcoin clearly illustrates.

> Interest on money loaned out is the only incentive required for putting money to "productive uses".

And what is the incentive to loan money in your system?

Kbelicius commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

gobip · 16 days ago

Yes, it's called an oracle on the blockchain.

Kbelicius · 16 days ago

So blockchain requires trust in third parties. What is the point of it then?

Kbelicius commented on Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months pcpartpicker.com/trends/p... · Posted by u/zekrioca

sophrosyne42 · 20 days ago

The high prices ("price gouging") perform a social function because some cannot afford it; they prioritize what matters to them more, and ram is left available to those who absolutely require it. Trying to get around that by forcing prices below the market price simple encourages scalping behaviors. If prices are below the market price, but at the market price you would prefer the cash in your pocket over the ram stick, then you have every reason to sell it higher than you bought it because people are willing to buy it. It is those willing to buy it that are the main culprit in establishing the true price.

In reality, it is almost never a true binary of "afford" or "cannot afford" like critics of surge pricing make it out to be; people evaluate the price according to their circumstance and make a trade off. It is because of these decisions, the state of demand, that surge pricing is possible, not because of the machinations of evil price scalpers. That is why manufacturers couldn't lower prices even if they wanted to; gpu msrp being a great example of gpu vendors being caught between consumer ignorance about economics and the facts of reality that gpus are scarce enough to warrant higher prices.

Kbelicius · 20 days ago

> The high prices ("price gouging") perform a social function because some cannot afford it; they prioritize what matters to them more, and ram is left available to those who absolutely require it.

This is not true at all. It isn't left available to those who absolutely need it but to those who can pay for it. Those are two very different things.

Kbelicius commented on SmartTube Compromised aftvnews.com/smarttubes-o... · Posted by u/akersten

breakingcups · 23 days ago

The official announcement is very sparse on details. If the developer doesn't know how his digital signature (and update infrastructure?) was compromised, how does switching to a new signature help? It could get compromised in the exact same way.

Kbelicius · 23 days ago

The article linked here brings some more details, but also, the official statement doesn't use the word "compromised". If it did, well it would be a statement with different meaning than the one that was released for us to read.

Kbelicius commented on SmartTube Compromised aftvnews.com/smarttubes-o... · Posted by u/akersten

NaomiLehman · 23 days ago

YouTube wouldn't exist as a public service. there would be no incentive to make videos

Kbelicius · 23 days ago

Why wouldn't there be incentives? If you are thinking monetary then the existence of youtube disproves your statement.

Kbelicius commented on An Economy of AI Agents arxiv.org/abs/2509.01063... · Posted by u/nerder92

mewpmewp2 · a month ago

Define runtime then.

> If your system receives 1000 requests per second, does it keep writing code while processing every request, on per request basis? I hope you understand what run time means.

With enough scale it could, however it really depends on the use case, right? If we are considering Claude Code for instance, it probably receives more than 1000+ requests per second and in many of those cases it is probably writing code or writing tool calls etc.

Or take Perplexity for example. If you ask it to calculate a large number, it will use Python to do that.

If I ask Perplexity to simulate investment for 100 years, 4% return, putting aside $50 each month, it will use Python to write code, calculate that and then when I ask it to give me a chart it will also use python to create the image.

Kbelicius · a month ago

> Define runtime then.

From GP: "But you don't use AI to define rules on the fly."

Neither Claude nor Perplexity change the rules they work by on the request to request basis. Code that Claude outputs isn't the code the Claude runs on and Perplexity did not on its own decide to create python scripts because other ways it was calculating large sums did not work well. Those tools work within the given rule set, they do not independently change those rules if the request warrants it.

Kbelicius commented on Valve is about to win the console generation xeiaso.net/blog/2025/valv... · Posted by u/moonleay

rkangel · a month ago

There's a circular opportunity though - if the SteamOS market share gets anywhere, then it might become worth it for these developers to support anti-cheat on the that platform. Some systems (notably BattleEye) actually have Linux support, they just need to enable it, but there's no incentive for them to do so.

Kbelicius · a month ago

> Some systems (notably BattleEye) actually have Linux support, they just need to enable it, but there's no incentive for them to do so.

This isn't really true. As GP said, there isn't a kernel level anti cheat for linux. You can switch a flick on BattleEye to run on linux but it wont be a kernel level as it is on windows. So there is an incentive for them to not turn it on because it simply is the worse version than the windows one. As far as I know even on windows you get cheats even if it is kernel level. Meaning, allowing linux you'd probably be flooded with cheaters if you already get them on windows.