I'm kind of a middle ground person, perhaps leaning slightly 'against' rather than 'for', over predominantly environmental concerns. I've distanced myself from crypto since I learned what the chinese were up to, and since china is putting a stop to that now (allegedly?), and the rest of crypto seems to be quietly moving in a PoS direction, recently reintroduced myself.
Most of the objections I have, other than the climate concern involve valuation, stability vs. valuation, etc.
Because I have some experience in the open source virtual worlds arena, and because 15m square plot of decentraland just sold for over 2 million $US, I decided to make a personal investigation of decentraland and it's relationship to ethereum. I went into this quite optimistic and hopeful, because I enjoy such things. What I found, however, was no cause for joy.
Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic. In any case, as I said before elsewhere, they have fallen victim to the touch of Midas: Their various holdings became extremely overvalued in a very short period of time, to that extent where no one else can afford them.
When I posed this issue to them directly, the general attitude was 'well, Walmart and Nike can afford us, so...', but zero acknowledgement that their entire value to those corporations is based on the number of product consuming users they can bring to the table.
Their self-governance machine, the DAO, is a thing of beauty, in that it could be employed to actually produce an autonomous, self governing organization that embraced everyone on equal terms and let everyone involved behave as the peers they should be in an ideal community; instead, they have pretty well implemented everything bad about today's governments, arriving at a functional oligarchy made up of those with the most land and currency, which they call 'voting power' - and the so called officers of the various supporting and ideally moderating concerns (their foundation, their DAO, and, due to the concept of voting power, their property holders), are all the same people.
They do a steady job right now in their discord channel of gaslighting these concerns where ever they are indicated, to the extent that they tossed me out this morning for calling them out on it; I haven't troubled myself to see if they just tossed me out or banned me, because I really don't much care.
I do know that their behavior in every respect will alienate users not just to virtual worlds and cryptocurrency, but to the whole endeavor they are labeling 'web3'.
Cool, but this is one data point. Would be good research how autocratic type of coordination convergence (e.g. functional oligarchy in this case) is the case compared to open source? If more then that means DAOs are failing to be a better coordination technology.
My biggest problem with copilot is not how it's trained, but with it's targeting of microsoft coding tools.
I don't use visual anything, and I don't know anyone who does. I code a lot of python, html and JS, and I use neovim. If I need a smart 'crutch' I'll whip out pycharm.
Mostly I don't feel the need for such things, but it would be fun and interesting to see just how good copilot is.
Just asking for a friend: what makes this such a great scientific achievement? of what practical use is it? Can it be used as a means to solve other 'hard' math problems? can it power a hyperdrive? a time machine? practically infinite energy without carbon entanglement?
