> the BTC network uses a staggering amount of power
Actually, bitcoin uses a ridiculously small amount of power for what it provides. See for example here https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ for an introduction to clear up this misconception.
If you really believe that something that is 1 million times less efficient than Visa/MasterCard for a fraction of the service, and that miners really use residential energy when they are active 24/7 and thus by definition a continuous strain on the grid, I have so many scams^W interesting products to sell you
Comparing Bitcoin network to Visa/MasterCard is as pointless as comparing Gold mining to those cc networks. Fair comparison would be Bitcoin network vs Gold mining/storage/securing/transfer activities.
If your country's money and banking works for you I don't think I can explain to you why bitcoin is useful, you simply have no use for it. That your peers primarily use it for speculation says more about them than about bitcoin.
Because I cannot fathom a system where either currency or banking does not work, and the preferable alternative is to rely on a highly volatile asset that requires vast amounts of energy and time to work.
> That your peers primarily use it for speculation says more about them than about bitcoin.
We are not in 2011 anymore. Bitcoin did not become a widespread vehicle for commercial transactions. Countries with defenestrated economies did not find an alternative in Bitcoin. Instead, we have whales, among them large banks and corporations, controlling over a third of the market, and most transactions are made in exchanges with arbitrage or speculation purposes.
Suffice to say, I don't consider JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs my "peers".
> Because I cannot fathom a system where either currency or banking does not work, and the preferable alternative is to rely on a highly volatile asset that requires vast amounts of energy and time to work.
May I ask you where you were born and raised? A lot of people do actually have to face shitty systems where Bitcoin is a godsend.
Isn't it a bit disingenuous to think that common people have moved $50bn in Bitcoin out of China? Or have moved ~$2.4bn worth of Bitcoin in Nigeria in a single month?
> A lot of people do actually have to face shitty systems where Bitcoin is a godsend.
I would say that a handful of examples, of which some are highly questionable, constitute anecdotal evidence, at best. Some of these scenarios are indistinguishable from using any other stable foreign currency, or even commodities, with the added difficulty of requiring certain technology literacy most people don't have.
> May I ask you where you were born and raised?
I could ask the same, because I haven't found many ardent defenders of cryptocurrency outside the tech circles of the so called developed world.
Well, Bitcoin price is still 30K USD and the market cap is almost 600B USD. That is a very good macro proof that people value Bitcoin.
> I could ask the same
I was born in a third world country where the leader decided to demonetize 87% of currency in circulation on a whim. And the society doesn't trust government at all - people buy gold or land as soon as they can. Where are you from?
> I haven't found many ardent defenders of cryptocurrency outside the tech circles of the so called developed world.
Have you actually bothered to talk to anyone? I have had in-person conversations with people from multiple despotic or shitty regimes (Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Iran) to understand how and why they use Bitcoin. You talk to them, understand how it is used and you will also realize that Bitcoin is here to stay and grow.
> Well, Bitcoin price is still 30K USD and the market cap is almost 600B USD. That is a very good macro proof that people value Bitcoin.
Let’s not forget that Bitcoin price averages a volatility of ~4% daily. With Bitcoin, any given individual could have sold goods or services and make a profit one day, and lose pretty much everything in a week.
If that is not a sign of Bitcoin being used as a vehicle for speculative markets, I don’t know what it is.
> Have you actually bothered to talk to anyone? I have had in-person conversations with people from multiple despotic or shitty regimes (Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Iran) to understand how and why they use Bitcoin.
Using Bitcoin properly requires a certain level of tech and financial literacy most people just don’t have. It also relies on expensive infrastructure that is highly dependent on mining being profitable. Again, this is not 2011 anymore, nowadays only the very wealthy can expect to profit from Bitcoin mining.
I guess the question is, what is so different between a crappy hyper inflated currency, controlled by an authoritarian government, and a crappy volatile cryptocurrency, controlled by a few wealthy individuals?
On that regard, If I were to call any friend from Venezuela and ask them about starting to use Bitcoin right now, they would surely get some 2014 vibes.
> Using Bitcoin properly requires a certain level of tech and financial literacy most people just don’t have. It also relies on expensive infrastructure that is highly dependent on mining being profitable. Again, this is not 2011 anymore, nowadays only the very wealthy can expect to profit from Bitcoin mining.
But most of the users don't mine - they just buy and hold. It is pretty simple and is as complicated (or simple) as buying and holding gold.
> a crappy volatile cryptocurrency, controlled by a few wealthy individuals
No idea how that is relevant since we are discussing Bitcoin :-p. In seriousness, that is where the social belief comes from. If people believe Bitcoin to be controlled by a few wealthy individuals, then either they will stay away. If they believe Bitcoin to be a truly decentralized store of value not controlled by any single government or entity, they will flock to it. If they are right, they will be rewarded with an asset which will appreciate in the long run. If they are wrong, they will get burned.
> If I were to call any friend from Venezuela and ask them about starting to use Bitcoin right now, they would surely get some 2014 vibes.
I met a Venezuelan last week and he regularly sends Bitcoin back home to help his family. Fiat exchange rate is artificially suppressed so his family would receive less if he sends USD. Gold is hard to send from the US to Venezuela. No one can stop Bitcoin transfers though and it is more trusted than the local currency.
No, the price is 30K USDT, which has very dubious backing, part of which is BTC. They've never been audited and thus nothing points to them being solvent. It's believed that a lot of the backing is in Chinese real estate papers which took quite a big fall with Evergrandes' troubles.
This article is basically like arguing: “Sure, using the Infant-Chipper 9000 results in the deaths of infants. But it’s a rounding error if you consider how many infants die in the world every year!”
Bitcoin purposefully wastes lots of energy to provide something of extremely dubious value.
The people finding it useful are overwhelmingly moving money illegally, such as how you can peg BTC shifts to Xi's anti-corruption crackdowns in China, or MBS in Saudi. Or moving drugs. Or hyping something to sell more made up money to rubes.
When how people live their lives depends on them shoveling millions of joules s of externalities onto my environment and that of my kids, in addition to propping up a rube goldberg Ponzi scheme that has a non-zero chance of ensnaring people I care about either directly or indirectly through financial mismanagement, you better believe I'm going to tell you how to live your life.
I'll tell lots of other people how you live your life is hypocritically contributing to a massive increase of financial leverage on the part of "rationally self interested" sociopaths and criminals at everyone else's expense( in direct opposition to its putative purpose of undermining predatory central bankers, yet is simply shifting the power to predatory anon-ish ransomware purveyors and sex traffickers and bullshit gambling token insta-twit "influencers" seeking to exploit the naivety of children for their own financial gain), and generally promoting the enshittification of everything that touches the internet, and should be mocked and discouraged at every opportunity.
You don't like the free market of ideas when it turns against you? tough.
"When how people live their lives depends on them shoveling millions of joules s of externalities onto my environment and that of my kids, in addition to propping up a rube goldberg Ponzi scheme that has a non-zero chance of ensnaring people I care about either directly or indirectly through financial mismanagement, you better believe I'm going to tell you how to live your life."
This is no defense of Bitcoin/crypto, but the above paragraph relatively concisely describes how I feel as part of the underclasses in the traditional world. Except that all the fears it encapsulates have already occurred for my family, generations back.
There are people in this thread who get a yearly payrise (which translates to increased selfish expenditure on plastic toys and air flights and fancy petrol burning machines) that's greater than my entire household's income, and I'm just an ordinary person in a western country. How many household bitcoin miners does that equal, environmentally speaking? For that one person?
The hypocrisy embedded in fervent hatred of crypto, as though extravagant & hugely unbalanced wastage of resources wasn't practiced by us all daily, implies a moral distance that, imo, barely exists. Bitcoin and crypto are mere reflections of the wastage that we as a species have normalised, and still do, via our lifestyles.
It's "industry" and "business" that have fucked this world.
I'm not advocating for the "industry" side as if it's a dichotomic industry against crypto, or banking against bitcoin. I'm specifically criticizing crypto and especially Bitcoin because the entire ideological mission of the project is to disrupt and disintermediate all of these well-known predatory Industries, when it has done none of this whatsoever. In fact has actually contributed both to incumbent disproportionate inequality of wealth, as well as creating new classes of disproportionate and malignant, aggressively unaccontable wealth. It has backfired in the worst possible way and all the fallout is on the people that was supposed to benefit.
And the and the relative handful of people at the center of the so-called decentralized crypto world are well aware of this and don't give a flying f**.
The tcp/ip protocol didn't have a white paper and accompanying ideological promotion and narrative expressly stating the purpose was to wrest power to create money from sovereign central governmental authorities that had ostensibly abused it, back to regular people in a decentralized manner. And instead resulted in a cartelified cabal of people who go out of their way to be unaccountable by obscuring their identities, which is actually a step down from people who you can at least in theory remove from power or hold accountable through democratic means.
It sure doesn't help that the earliest adopters went on the social media of the time crowing about how they were the new wealthy elite.
> So most of the people using it are either bad actors or speculators
"bad actors" according to their government, which could mean people who simply want the right to vote, or to live free from oppression, secret police, etc.
Even if we take this at face value and assume these are all dissidents seeking freedom, cryptocurrencies would be a bad idea because they force you to leave a paper trail for prosecutors and deal with intermediaries who could be suborned. If Iranian dissidents buy something with cash, they might find that the person they thought was trustworthy is secretly working for the police and they’re going to have a bad time but they would at least only have proof of that single transaction. If they use cryptocurrency, the police get likely years worth of transaction history and a list of everyone you’ve worked with.
> Apple marketed the iPad Pro as a replacement for a computer
Nah, they were using an extremely narrow definition of computer, one where you can buy and consume stuff and do "cool" social media with the device. If that's not your use case you want a different kind of computer.
The current marketing copy for the 10th gen iPad on Apple's website says
"Get things done — all on one device. Take notes, collaborate, and work seamlessly between apps. From pie charts to pie recipes, iPad is designed for all kinds of productivity."
and from the iPad Pro site:
"Enhanced ways to work. iPadOS 16 gives you powerful new ways to do more than ever. New desktop-class apps make your workday more productive. Resize and overlap apps to multitask like a pro with Stage Manager. And hook up an external display, with resolutions up to 6K, for even more room for all your apps"
They are clearly marketing these things as do everything productivity devices even though in practice it's pretty bogus especially if you need any sort of programming functionality. Heck they even show an image of Swift Playgrounds being used!
The only effect of a Code of Conduct I have ever personally witnessed was that people were being bullied for greeting others. The greeting they used was "hey guys", and instead of recognizing that language is fluid and different to different people they tried to impose their linguistic views on others. The people who encouraged this behavior were people on the Code of Conduct committee and at the top of the project's hierarchy, and to this day nobody has apologized for this behavior, but the behavior was silently dropped.
I'm from a part of the US where "guys" is used as a gender neutral collective noun. My mom and grandma would call out "guys, dinner is ready!" to the whole family to call us to the table for example.
So it's definitely whiplash inducing for the same group of people preaching inclusion and tolerance, and how we need to accept regional and racial dialects in the workplace, to then turn around and implement slackbots that nag and shame me for my regional speech patterns.
I work in Japan - naturally I've Japanese colleagues, and a significant number from other Asian countries too. The "you guys"/"hey guys"/"that guy" thing is practically universal.
The idea of a native (probably white) English speaker lecturing them on it being sexist or non-inclusive is repugnant to the extreme. At that point they've lost the argument, and can frankly get fucked.
> The idea of a native (probably white) English speaker lecturing them on it being sexist or non-inclusive is repugnant to the extreme
It really is amazing how those people don't see it that way and instead think they are really helping anyone. English was forced on a lot of the world. Now it's sort of happening again, in a different way and with infinitely less violence, but the justification remains the same: to civilize the savages.
To what Japanese phrases are you referring? Most of the various phrases I'd expect to use to refer to a group (minasan, [name]-san-tachi) are gendered at all in typical use, and the ones I can think of that are gender only one member of the group (e.g. kanojo-tachi to refer to a group including one known female).
And it's not like Japanese doesn't have similar sexist norms baked into its own vocabulary either (if anything, to a rather greater extent than English). No, an everyday modern speaker probably doesn't mean anything by the fact that it's danna-sama but oyome-san, or the fact that formal speech (as one would use with a superior) is read as feminine-coded in casual contexts. But that doesn't mean there's not something behind those norms, either.
Whether the lecture is counterproductive is an entirely different question to whether the usage is sexist.
When non-native English speakers are taught English, they are taught that "Hey guys" is gender neutral. So you'll meet lots of non-native English speakers who will be completely shocked at that it's not.
I have so much fun joking with some of my women friends that they're sexist because they're using "guys" instead of "folks".
To me, it's one of those things where someone is always going to be awkward and say "that doesn't include me". They may jokingly say something but some take it as a personal insult and just assume the other person is being sexist. While I always use "folks" just to avoid the hassle, personally I wouldn't be too bothered if the people who take "Hey guys" as a sexist insult don't talk to me.
I've noticed that white people as a group regularly get abuse in anti-woke HN threads. Seems bizarre to me.
I guess it is some kind of "gotcha", intended to undermine "woke" people but it seems a bit self-defeating.
"White people are so racist they're even racist when they're trying to be non-racist" seems more woke than anti-woke to me, but that doesn't seem to be the intention.
It's specifically the phenomenon of rich 1-percenters trying to cancel each other that's grating.
Is there injustice in the world? Clearly. Are these people insufferable? Also very much yes.
In the tech context specifically, we are very international in a way that doesn't map to US culture wars, which makes the white woke people look even more out of touch with reality.
My pet theory is that most 'woke' people are people that feel ashamed at not being at the bottom of the hierarchy, and so try to compensate their 'privileges' by being overly sensitive to any kind of injustice, to the point of seeing moral or symbolic violence where there is none.
And since the negative discourse (e.g. saying "Women face so many issue in the workplace" as a man) is way more socially palatable than a positive one (saying "Women have it OK now in the workplace" as a man), people who try to be sensible about thing not directly concerning them tend to overdo it by amplifying the "everything is bad" angle.
Which is why at the height of the BLM movements, lots of well-meaning (but IMO severely misguided) people felt that 'master' or 'blacklist' were carriers of oppression, while not thinking twice about words such as 'white noise' or 'white-label' (Implying that a lack of creativity or panache is associated with whiteness, the horror!), The former was among white 'wokes' sensibility-by-proxy, while for the latter the same crowd had the experience and tool to know this argument is bonker, and that anyone having issue with the expression 'white noise' has mental issue.
I came to this conclusion after a gay/muslim friend of mine, who likes to do humoristic quizzes on Instagram did one for the Ramadan.
He asked "Apart from Ramadan, what are the other 4 pillars of Islam", and accepted the Ru Paul reference "Creativity, Uniqueness, Nerves and Talent" as the answer.
The only people taking issue with that were non-muslim white french dudes who felt it was islamophobic, which greatly annoyed my friend, who felt it feed into the stereotypes of "angry muslim".
And of course, complaints about white people are one of the things that wouldn't be punished under these code of conducts despite the "no racism" clause, because they're usually not evenly enforced.
Another data point: I’m from Ireland and grew up in the 80s. For as long as I remember, the plural form “guys” always referred to groups of any gender. I’d be just as likely to use it to greet a female-only group of colleagues as a mixed or male-only group of colleagues.
There are lots of languages where the gender-neutral term and one of the gendered terms are the same. Consider the Spanish "ellos", meaning either "the masculine group" or "the masculine and feminine group". The word "ellas" denotes a feminine-only group.
It seems very reasonable that "guys" could function similarly in English. Moreover, I might not say "the guys I've dated" as a straight man, but if all the women I've ever dated were talking together in a room, I wouldn't bat an eye asking "what are you guys all doing?".
Similarly, I wouldn't say "all the folks I've dated", but I might say "good evening, folks" -- the word is a misfit solely because of the idioms and context, not because the word is inherently communicating something else.
"Guys" tends to be neuter in the second person and masculine in the third person.
In any case, I think your example works better with a bisexual speaker. A straight guy would probably use more specific gendered language rather than a neuter construction. A bisexual person using "guys" to refer to the men and women (s)he has dated would be an example of a third person neuter usage—which I also think would be quite rare.
A nuance of that usage of "guys" to refer to a group consisting of both men and women is that the group of people being referred to is typically immediately present in some way.
Like in those earlier examples, the people are probably all within the same house/yard at the same time when they're called to dinner, or they're all using the same online discussion forum at about the same time.
When discussing multiple individuals with significant time and/or distance separating them (like the people somebody has dated over the span of years), a more specific term like "men", "women", "men and women", or "people" would likely be used instead.
The person he's responding to is choosing to be obtuse in order to police other peoples' language based on rules derived by their political ideology, and does not care about context
Glad it's not up to you to "buy" the words I choose!
My region uses "you guys" for the you plural in English, too, and you petty speech totalitarians didn't show up until I was grown so even though I now live in a region that says y'all and even prefer it, when speaking I form sentences in my native language too quickly to catch myself every time I use my native term for you plural
But you and your language policing petty authoritarians would have me sent to the gulag for your ridiculous overly academic context ignoring willful and politically motivated misinterpretation of my diction
Oh my god you are being so dramatic. Someone says something you disagree with about whether a term is gender-neutral and you're suddenly talking about "speech totalitarians" and authoritarians and gulags. Get a grip.
If everyone I dated were in a room, then I, a heterosexual male, very much might address that room as guys. As in, "hey guys, what are you doing here?"
It's an interesting bit of context. I also grew up with guys as a generic plural, but it's not really generic, rather it's a mixed group plural. It would feel just as natural to say "the people I date", as "the women I date", but never "the guys I date.
Even that's a weak rule though. For example if a girls soccer team performed really well you might hear someone say "those guys really gave it their all today" (though I'd say this usage is mostly dead, I don't think I've heard it this way in a long time), but never "THE guys really gave it their all today".
I'm sure some linguists have studied this and have a term for this kind of thing.
Why would they use it to refer to a group of exclusively women? 'guys' refers to a group of men or a group of men and women, not to a group of women. Is that so hard to understand?
I’ve been working on open source projects for about a decade now, including years of professional work, and I have never seen or heard someone chastised for using “guys” informally. This includes in communities with established, formal codes of conduct. It strikes me as something that most people wouldn’t even notice, unless the speaker was intentionally using it in a way that implies gender.
A CoC might be just fine. GCC's looks nice -- basically "act professionally".
But, there are people out there who jump at the opportunity to take offense on someone else's behalf.
The female analog to "guys" seems to be "gals", but nobody uses that anymore, preferring "girls". The word "girls" is a word of automatic offense taking to some, even if everyone involved in the conversation is cool with it.
I've seen the "girls" one play out with someone stating that the women get a pass self-referencing and the guy who actually goes to lunch with them can't say it.
These same people who want to take offense are sometimes drawn to these CoC's -- either to implement or enforce them.
Then add in the desire to drop life changing punishments to such mild things. Say the wrong thing and get fired. See Python and the stupid dongle joke. That didn't need a video, that needed a brief reprimand of, "grow up" and it could have been done. Instead it got an interrogation and people fired -- and more CoC's for everything.
Holy crap, if some of these people had seen the 70's.
Again: details would be nice. People do indeed take offense on others' behalves (and probably should do so less often), but that's more of a human nature thing; it's not evidence that CoCs actually make that phenomenon worse.
> Then add in the desire to drop life changing punishments to such mild things. Say the wrong thing and get fired. See Python and the stupid dongle joke. That didn't need a video, that needed a brief reprimand of, "grow up" and it could have been done. Instead it got an interrogation and people fired -- and more CoC's for everything.
To be clear: this had nothing to do with a CoC; I don't think PyCon even had one at the time. Given that both people ended up being fired it's unclear that a CoC could have even possibly produced worse individual outcomes for either, given that the power implied by one is normally limited to an online community or physical conference center.
> Hi! Reminder: “guys” is an inherently gendered term. Great alternatives include “everyone”, “folks”, “team”, "friends" or “y’all”. Thank you for helping us build a more inclusive community!
The only thing that really bothers me personally about this is the mistaken idea that language can be "inherently" anything. The meaning of a term varies based on usage, it is not inherent.
You're entitled to an opinion about it, but a Slack bot that pings you when you say "guys" is not remotely comparable to bullying (which is the top-level claim in this thread).
I would consider it a form of harassment and such petty language policies would certainly impact my desire to participate in a community. I would feel unwelcome.
You said you personally witnessed something; I'd like to understand more about it.
In particular: did you witness the instigating incident, the bullying, or both? Did the bullying actually weaponize a CoC, or is it your impression that the presence of a CoC empowered the bully? Is "bullying" your characterization or someone else's? And so on.
I witnessed everything, the bullies used the CoC to justify their behavior and told me their committee encouraged their enforcement of the CoC in this way. People on the committee have published articles on the matter calling for such enforcement. Bullying is well defined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying, I specifically mean it in the sense of repeated abusive behavior by people with more power.
Having a CoC is what gives moderators of a community the ability to drop the ban hammer and give a decent reason (in other words, establish some rules and keep out people who routinely break them). Enforcement is rarely public, for the same reason you don't fire someone in front of the entire office.
I mean CoC violations can also result in people losing their jobs; it's better to handle things in private. That also removes any cool factor from someone who's blatantly being a troll, the "us vs them" mentality that's easy to pick up.
I personally never contribute to an OSS that has a CoC, and if I find my organization is using OSS that has a CoC I actively work to remove it and ban my employees from contributing to it.
CoC's are poison, and if your project has a "Code of Conduct committee" it is dead to me.
I fully admit this hasn't been possible for everything, but I'm making great progress
Mine does not, but then around here we have anti-bullying, anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws so these things are penal matters, not merely contract breaches.
Right, but the legal system gets involved in cases of wrongful termination of contract or if the code enforcement itself leads to discrimination, harassment, or other issues.
I wait for the day soon to come when AIs will "actively" participate in. And we have to find a term that encompasses both humans and AIs. And anyone not using the currently correct one will have their lives destroyed. Or if someone finds recording from using previously correct one and does the same.
Fair enough. Was trying to make a constructive point, but clearly my bias leaked through.
Point is that it seems any discussion here is fruitless, just both sides digging in. I usually appreciate the discussions here. These are just frustrating.
> A big problem is that you don't actually see content on other instances
What do you mean? On lemmy you simply click "all" and see a feed from all federated sources, on kbin that seems to be the default. When you open threads/posts you see comments from all sources. The other stuff doesn't exist yet as the platform is very new. You can help.
this isn't strictly true and the weird edge cases add more mental energy than conforming to the expectation of "all of the content I was expecting".
For example, clicking on one of the profiles I follow, and then their followers. This will only show the profiles I also follow on that remote server. Do that again, and it gets even worse.
Where instead, the "thing you expect to happen" is to list, 1:1, their follow list as it exists on the remote server.
Other things, for example, not fetching someone's post history earlier than before you followed them, when you're browsing their profile. e.g., a user with 100 posts that you just followed.
I'm aware of the technical reasons (you weren't subscribed), and the open source reasons (not enough volunteers to fix the bug); but both are inadequate to a new user, frustrated and lonely, struggling with a lack of network effects, where having a delightful app might save that experience.
That sounds like toxic work, any sane person would rather move somewhere else and do something productive, like building a new community, or find an entirely new hobby.
If you want to change the license for FOSS software like the Linux kernel, you need to get approval from _every_ contributor. To me, this means for a sub to shutdown as they have they would need permission from _every_ subscriber.
I can take your GPL code and never show it to anyone any more, that doesn't violate the license. I also don't have to publish GPL code indefinitely simply because I showed it to you once. Terrible analogy.
Actually, bitcoin uses a ridiculously small amount of power for what it provides. See for example here https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ for an introduction to clear up this misconception.