binibus (u/binibus) - Readit News

binibus commented on The Ethereum merge is done coindesk.com/tech/2022/09... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

jqpabc123 · 3 years ago

But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right?

Don't look now but "decentralization" and "power to the people" are already gone in the crypto market.

Blockchain is a novel accounting system. But has any organization *ever* derived any real power from an accounting system? Are Google and Apple and Amazon market leaders because of a novel accounting system? I don't think so.

In a capitalist system, real power is derived from marketplace control. Accounting is just a way of keeping score.

Likewise, in the crypto market, Binance has now consolidated it's power position as marketplace leader and has effectively become the "central bank" of crypto with the power to mint it's own currency (Tether and BUSD) and use it to manipulate the marketplace at will. In a brazen demonstration of their power, they plan to crush other stable coins by simply replacing them with their own.

https://fortune.com/2022/09/06/binance-moves-against-rival-s...

What are "the people" going to do about this? What does blockchain have to do with this? Not a damn thing.

Power to the Binance! They are now driving the crypto bus and everyone else is just along for the ride.

binibus · 3 years ago

> What are "the people" going to do about this? What does blockchain have to do with this? Not a damn thing.

You have Coinbase, Kucoin, Gateio, Crypto.com, Kraken, Bitfinex, Uniswap, Sushiswap, Pancakeswap, ...

Competition is also a form of decentralization.

binibus commented on Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth Before Ours? scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/andsoitis

kadoban · 4 years ago

> I looked back into the science-fiction literature to try to find the earliest example of a story featuring a nonhuman industrial civilization on Earth. The earliest I could find was in a Doctor Who episode.“

> That 1970 episode of the classic TV series involves the present-day discovery of “Silurians” [...]

That can't possibly be the first example of that concept in sci-fi, can it? Nothing against Doctor Who, just seems unlikely. Trying to think through the early sci-fi I've heard of or read though and I'm not coming up with anything with that concept.

binibus · 4 years ago

Maybe some Lovecraft's tales (?). There are several advanced civilizations predating humans, but I can't pin down if some evolved strictly on earth.

binibus commented on YOLOv7: Trainable Bag-of-Freebies arxiv.org/abs/2207.02696... · Posted by u/groar

anewpersonality · 4 years ago

We should stop calling it YOLO after the creator quit machine learning.

binibus · 4 years ago

Why? For me at this point YOLO means a family of detectors that in a single pass propose a bounding box per pixel and filters them with some clustering algorithm. When I see YOLOfoo I know what kind of architecture to expect. A more descriptive name like YOLO-tricks instead of YOLOvX would be nice though.

binibus commented on 'On a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200M people’ theguardian.com/culture/2... · Posted by u/chunkyslink

myshpa · 4 years ago

> I find your take on alternative forms of agriculture a little too optimistic.

I've read a lot about alternative agriculture systems and methods. Maybe that's where my optimism comes from.

> the figure of 75% it is not that simple

I know that 75% is not so simple. But meat industry needs cca 75% of the agriculture land and meat is produced mostly by feeding the animals seeds and vegetable oils, so ... yes, it's a guess, but if we'll account for other stuff, like antibiotics ...

> conformed by not edible material that would have to be produced anyway

The ruminants supply a fraction of our nutritional needs, so I would argue, that we don't need them and that we can switch to more sustainable (less land expensive) sources of food. I would return that "non-edible" areas into forests for wildlife/biodiversity, which they were previously and which could even reverse our climate/extinction events currently happening.

Other non-consumable material could be composted and/or left in the fields as a mulch. Exposed soil kills microbes/fungi in the soil.

> Would you pass a law banning having children

No, I would not, because I now know that there is better way.

That population is still growing is a result of our exploitation of poor countries, poverty, a lack of education, and our religious and governmental practices. As we see in western countries, the developed and educated countries have a tendency to stabilize their population.

So the current growth will stop on its own, in time. But we have to make sure that we set the correct example for the new billions, or we'll together eat the Earth dry, till nothing than deserts will remain.

binibus · 4 years ago

> No, I would not, because I now know that there is better way

So if there wasn't a better way you'll do it?

binibus commented on 'On a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200M people’ theguardian.com/culture/2... · Posted by u/chunkyslink

myshpa · 4 years ago

> They are unnecessary. Humanity lived thousands of years without them.

Totally agree.

Cca 75% of pesticides/herbicides are used for meat & dairy production (we need 75% of agriculture land for it).

> They harm billions of animals.

And they harm people, too. Pesticide bioaccumulation in milk has been linked to Parkinson's disease, for example.

> But not using them would condemn us to a subsistence economy.

I'm not sure that's true.

There is a lot of regenerative agriculture styles not needing pesticides/herbicides. Current agriculture practices are oriented on mass scale and low prices - when you modify that need, you can have much greater yields, but have to change your way of thinking about it.

One example (sorry, have to return to work process). We've all seen the large fields of wheat, so large, you can see the earth curvature. And not a single tree in sight.

If you remove all the nature, tile it, seed large swaths of land with a monoculture, you remove a place for wildlife to live in.

Without predators (foxes, owls) your crop gets all eaten by mice, which overpopulate easily. So you have to use pesticides (which we then eat in our food & drink in our water).

If you have a monoculture, then bugs easily propagate and there is nothing to stop them and you'll have a large loses. But if you stop planting monoculture (maybe alternating rows of crops with rows of trees, and some bushes & flowers between them), bugs will have harder time to infect whole harvest and there is enough natural predators from the bug world to take care of them.

Biodiversity is the key.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/ - The Biggest Little Farm, sustainable farm on 200 acres outside of Los Angeles talks in some lengths about this] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/07/secret-w...] [https://www.agricology.co.uk/field/farmer-profiles/iain-tolh... - a single person from previous article]

binibus · 4 years ago

I find your take on alternative forms of agriculture a little too optimistic. Even with rotation and biodiversity famines and plagues were common before the use of pesticides. Our technology and knowledge are better now but even with that, I doubt that we could sustain the current population. Not in a way as predictable as now for sure. And for the figure of 75% it is not that simple. A considerable part of the crops consumed by meat production are conformed by not edible material that would have to be produced anyway. Material that ruminants can magically transform into food.

But for the sake of the argument let's say you are right. I'm not as interested in the pesticides example as in knowing how much are you willing to sacrifice in order to follow that logic. Let me rephrase my question then.

- Having more than 2 kids per couple is unnecessary (even less than that for some time).

- Each extra human consumes resources necessarily damaging the animals and the earth.

Would you pass a law banning having children whenever the birth rate surpasses 2?

binibus commented on 'On a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200M people’ theguardian.com/culture/2... · Posted by u/chunkyslink

myshpa · 4 years ago

Please see SEASPIRACY if you have a chance.

Eating fish is not sustainable. Overfishing and by-catch is a real problem (already more than 90% of sharks are exterminated), and in near future the seas could be totally devoid of life (except for jellyfish).

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspiracy ]

> The argument for full veganism has to be that animals are people

I don't agree.

(1) We shouldn’t be cruel to animals, i.e. we shouldn’t harm animals unnecessarily.

(2) The consumption of animal products harms animals and Earth.

(3) The consumption of animal products is unnecessary.

(4) Therefore, we shouldn’t consume animal products.

binibus · 4 years ago

How do you fit pesticides in that framework of thought?

- They are unnecessary. Humanity lived thousands of years without them.

- They harm billions of animals.

- But not using them would condemn us to a subsistence economy.

Edit: though for thought lmao

binibus commented on If Programming Languages Were Futurama Characters netmeister.org/blog/futur... · Posted by u/zdw

kstenerud · 4 years ago

Wouldn't that be Flexo?

Not as well known as Bender, but just as capable. In fact, probably more capable according to those who know him, but it's so close that hardly anyone cares.

Tends to get flattened when people try mixing his work with existing Bender work. The two just don't go well together.

binibus · 4 years ago

I like it. It matches so well.

binibus commented on If Programming Languages Were Futurama Characters netmeister.org/blog/futur... · Posted by u/zdw

wincy · 4 years ago

Okay so which programming language is the robot devil?

binibus · 4 years ago

Zsh. Is evil but not as much as Bender.

binibus commented on On anti-crypto toxicity blog.mollywhite.net/anti-... · Posted by u/chalst

igorkraw · 4 years ago

It's really not that hard. Libertarians, minarchists and "anarcho-capitalists" take one of the things which inherently need a state to uphold it (private property) and use it as the conceptual foundation of their social order - while not liking "the state". All other anarchists don't and hence get labeled as "left". That's the main difference, and the reason why "anarcho-capitalist" is inherently paradoxical.

There is also another conversation to be had about minarchist/libertarian ideas basically wanting to remove all the good bits of the state (creating public goods, giving weaker participants of a system protection, internalising externalities via regulation etc.) but keeping the bad parts (police and military with their massive potential for rent seeking and state capturing of money pots, not to speak about violence and abuse).

binibus · 4 years ago

Hi, minarchist here. You are almost right in the distinction between right and left anarchism being about private property. But it's a little more profound. The main difference radicates in the conception of legitimate power. For a right anarchist, power is illegitimate only when it's carried out through violence. Meanwhile, for a left anarchist almost any power hierarchy is illegitimate in itself. To the extent that private property could give rise to power hierarchies, a left anarchist will reject it. But it's only a particular case derived from the core belief.

> "anarcho-capitalist" is inherently paradoxical

Well, anarcho-capitalists believe that there are ways to provide property rights outside the state. As a minarchist, I'm skeptical about it, but if you believe it there's no paradox.

On the other hand, I do find deeply paradoxical the left anarchist stance on rejecting capitalism but also (AFAIK) reject any means to stop its emergence in society.

> There is also another conversation to be had about minarchist/libertarian ideas basically wanting to remove all the good bits of the state [...] but keeping the bad parts

As a minarchist, I strive for reducing the weight of the state as much as humanly possible. Justice, defense, and a minimal social security net are the only services I can't think how to provide without the state. If you think these are the bad parts I'd love to hear a viable alternative, maybe you can make me fully anarcho-capitalist ;).