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makeasnek

@makeasnek@lemmy.ml

github.com/makeasnek

on nostr here)

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makeasnek, (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Digital IDs are step one to a central bank digital currency which is probably the greatest threat to individual liberty, privacy, and financial autonomy we will face in our lifetimes. Imagine a currency supply the government can manipulate at will, where the government has 100% visibility into every transactions you make big or small, where the government can print and un-print money at will or dictate where and how you spend it. And imagine when the political party you don’t like is suddenly in control of this kind of power. Central banks already engage in enough shady behavior and market manipulation and if we give them this power, they will never give it back. This is a dangerous road imo. Plus, a CBDC provided a centralized database of all transactions can be hacked and leaked because that happens to all centralized databases, so now not only does the government know every transaction of yours, so does the world.

If we need the ability to do digital ID verification, there are decentralized opt-in ways to do this which don’t pose these same threats of centralized control and provide a safe opt-out/safety valve mechanism if the people administering that system are not trustworthy. CBDCs provide no such alternative.

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

There are ways to achieve significant privacy using Bitcoin, the protocol itself is pseudonymous, lightning in many ways enhances privacy. But you need to know what you are doing and there are many gotchas.

Spain orders Sam Altman's Worldcoin to shut down eyeball-scanning orbs due to privacy concerns (arstechnica.com)

Spain has moved to block Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency project Worldcoin, the latest blow to a venture that has raised controversy in multiple countries by collecting customers’ personal data using an eyeball-scanning “orb.”...

makeasnek, (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

It did. With Bitcoin, anybody with a cell phone and halfway reliable internet access can send money globally in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). They can be their own bank without trusting any single third party. It doesn’t matter if their country has secure banking infrastructure and it doesn’t matter what their credit score is. There are countries on this planet where women aren’t allowed to open bank accounts. Bitcoin doesn’t give AF.

It has promoted and maintained the exact same fiscal policy for 15 years without a single hour of downtime or hack: a limited supply and a guarantee of your ability to transfer your coin to somebody else. No bank holidays, nobody devaluing your currency by increasing the supply. No having your savings robbed by an unstable central bank. It gives anybody in the world access to a currency that is already as stable or more stable than most national currencies. And it gives any country in the world an option aside from using USD and, inherently, losing some degree of autonomy in the process. There’s a reason Ecuador and Argentina went in on it so hard.

People underestimate how big Bitcoin really is. It’s market cap is 850 billion USD, that’s the size of Sweden’s GDP and puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. On average, it has a trend of consistent growth year after year as adoption continues to increase. It is uncensorable, the US could decide to ban Bitcoin tomorrow, a gamma ray from space could blast half of the earth out of existence, and the next block would come regardless and the network would continue to function.

It does all this for around 1% of global electricity usage, mainly from renewables and is powering a new green revolution by being a “buyer of last resort” for power grids. This makes electricity cheaper for all other users of the grid as it’s able to buy power when nobody else wants it, enabling power generation facilities to not lose money during times of low demand. This also makes it easier for grids to add renewable capacity. Bitcoin is a form of energy storage in that sense. Miners don’t buy power during times of peak demand for price reasons, so it doesn’t take power that anybody else would be using.

Are there any Windows-exclusive programs you use?

I had to test/fix something at work and I set up a Windows VM because it was a bug specific to Windows users. Once I was done, I thought, “Maybe I should keep this VM for something.” but I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t a game (which probably wouldn’t work well in a VM anyway) or some super specific enterprise...

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

!boinc if I am donating GPU power to science research. There is a BOINC client for Linux but packaging is a hot mess (though getting better) and compatibility with graphics drivers is hit-or-miss. So any crunching rigs I have w/ GPUs all run Windows.

makeasnek, (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Do not use openshot. Really bad bugs that will make it impossible to export your project and make all your time working with it wasted. Use kdenlive instead

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

The fact that Linux lacks a decent system-level backup tool with a GUI is kind of a mind boggler for me. The best one I’ve found which gets close to this is timeshift. File-level backups can’t restore your whole system state and users shouldn’t be expected to remember or manually export their package lists and god knows what else. I have subsisted on file-only backups but it’s really not great as a solution. Disks fail, and when they do, you inevitably have to reinstall the entire OS. It’s a mess. RAID1 could theoretically prevent this, but no distro makes it easy to boot from a RAID1 setup.

Backing up the entire filesystem is not a technically complex thing, there are plenty of command-line tools to do this and some filesystems even support this concept via snapshots etc. But this has yet to be put into a useful practice for end users.

makeasnek, (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

I would be interested in this as a user and as a dev for OSS projects. I currently donate to a few projects via OpenCollective, Github sponsors, etc. A few options:

  • Users vote on how the money is spent, perhaps in proportion to how much they have donated over time. I think this is the simplest model that prevents self-dealing and accurately transmits user interest. You could use a quadratic funding model to better represent user interest instead of just giving the most vote weight to the users with the most money. On the other hand, assigning vote weight based on donations over time incentivizes users to donate more and keep donating (stopping a recurring donation could result in loss of vote weight and help redistribute vote weight as users become less active). You could also do a hybrid model: 50% is assigned according to vote weight based on total donations, 50% is assigned based on quadratic funding.
  • Developers vote on how the money is spent. I don’t know how to allocate vote weight here. Devs should also submit a list of downstream libraries which would receive donations. (or is it upstream?).
  • User and developers both vote on how it is spent. Vote weight could be distributed however, for example, 50% to users 50% to devs.

This kind of a system would be very possible to implement as a DAO, there are templates out there for making an organization like this. You could use BTC or ETH, both support DAOs. The benefit there is that since no single entity holds the money, no single entity has to file taxes and claim that money as income. It also automates the voting process and solves the issue of users having to trust a single person or organization to hold and distribute the funds. Making a DAO on Bitcoin lightning could reduce tx fees to less than a penny per donation.

You could also incorporate it as a non-profit depending on your jurisdiction. Many organizations like the Linux foundation have pursued this route, look at what things they have tried and what has worked. Also just a link to leave here for your research, I’m not suggesting you use this, I’m just saying it’s relevant interesting thinking in this area: blog.obyte.org/kivach-cascading-donations-for-git…

Other relevant links/research for you: github.com/Resolvr-io and nostrocket.org/About

Also research Gitcoin, they have used quadratic funding to fund a number of OSS web3 projects in a similar manner to what you’re proposing. I have participated in a few of their funding rounds as a donor and a recipient. Their interface is a mess but the concept is cool.

makeasnek, (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

The discussion portion wouldn’t happen over BTC, that’s just for funds management and voting. Discussion could happen on a forum, lemmy community, matrix chat, discord hangout, or other space. I suggest BTC because with smart contracts you can automate the voting process among stakeholders and make it so you don’t need to trust any single party to hold onto the money. It solves this exact problem of coordinating financial transactions with multiple people who can’t trust each other. It also solves the “how do we accept donations internationally easily” problem. Bitcoin has a market cap which places it in the top 25 countries by GDP, higher than Sweden. 850 billion dollars. On average, adoption and market cap grows year on on year. It may not be the USD, but it’s already more widely accepted than most national currencies.

Re: kivach, it’s not more widely used because many people don’t know about it, it’s using a lesser known cryptocurrency as a base, and people reflexively go “eew crypto” even though it’s perfect for solving these kinds of problems. Anytime you have a distributed decision-making process that needs to be international and you don’t want to trust a single party or parties to manage that system, crypto is good at solving that problem. Most people know it for solving that problem in the realm of currency production and decentralizing finance, but it has much broader implications in terms of anywhere you have distributed decision making. Note that kivach doesn’t have any kind of distributed decision making or voting, it’s basically just a smart contract bot that distributes coins based on github dependencies.

Bringing the state into this just brings us a bunch of problems and no solutions. For one, every state or block of states has different currency, and for every state whose population you want to participate, you have to some how bridge access to that state’s banking system and incorporate it into the system. And you can’t do it in a decentralized way, so you need some legal entity to be formed to handle all this and the staff to do all this. So that’s a nightmare. State-backed currencies can’t easily or cheaply be transmitted electronically across borders, and often, even within the same country. Or you have to use some third-party service like PayPal or Venmo to do this, which is its own set of complications. More nightmare. Plus, hello fees and making microtransactions prohibitively expensive. And that’s just moving funds from A to B, that’s not even getting into managing the voting system and navigating the laws every single country whose currency you use, each of which are going to have their own interpretation of whether or not your voting system is compliant with their legal system and whether or not they agree that funding a project like the Tor project is allowed. You may say you don’t care what Turkeys laws say, but if you want to maintain a bridge to their banking system, you have to. So that’s what incorporating the state and fiat system brings you. Or, you could write a smart contract once and have the administration of this system run automatically forever and be available to anyone in any country automatically. Running an international organization which receives funds, holds funds, votes on how to distribute those funds, distributes those funds is exactly the kind of thing blockchain excels at.

makeasnek, (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

I think you can still have users decide which projects get funding and have the system/organization/smart contract/etc automatically distribute funds to the libraries those projects depend on. 80% to the project, 20% to the libraries, etc.

If we let devs decide which projects get funding, they’re just going to always pick their own project. Since that doesn’t align with what users want, users won’t want to donate. If you want users to donate, you need to let them have some say in what their projects their donations go to.

makeasnek, (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

If you are going to “be your own bank” you need some very basic computer security skills like:

  • Research the reputation of the wallet you are going to use.
  • Don’t download wallets which aren’t open source
  • Download wallets from their official dev site, not some third party repo.
  • Don’t use Facebook search to find a wallet.
  • If you are storing significant funds, use a multi-sig wallet.
  • If you are not 100% confident in the security of a given wallet or system, send a smaller test transaction first before sending larger amounts

If you can’t be trusted to do that, you need to pick a trusted custodian to manage access to your funds (you know, like banks), preferably somebody who can get an insurance company to under-write your no-opsec-having-ass. Unfortunately, in the crypto world, these trusted custodians few and far between and have a terrible track record with exchange collapses etc. It’s getting better, but it’s still a mess. Hopefully as time goes on and the industry gets better regulated and more mature, this will be an easier thing to do.

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Hardware signing devices have lots of utility because they keep the key from ever being on the machine (which is more likely to be compomised). Think ledger or trezor for your Bitcoin. Hardware encryption devices are just really expensive and black-box ways to avoid Veracrypt.

If your encryption algorithm is secure, you have no use for automatic lock-out. If it’s not, automatic lockout won’t do much against an attacker with physical access to the device. Unless they are dumb enough to trigger the lockout AND the internal memory wipes itself sufficiently well AND/OR the attacker doesn’t have the resources to reverse engineer the device.

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

.onion

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Don’t try openshot next, it’s even worse.

I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why.

Mastodon is a great platform. I have an account there, and I have been using it as a twitter replacement for several months. I have been using nostr for around two months. I have also read fairly deeply into how Mastodon and Nostr work. I think nostr is better. Here’s why....

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

This is exactly why I won’t use Nostr. What you’re describing here isn’t ideal for many folk that are part of marginalised groups. When each individual has to individually block every bigot only after being exposed to their bigotry, then the vulnerable folk don’t hang around. This is doubly the case when there is nothing stopping the bigots from just creating another account after burning their first one.

In Nostr, each relay can set its own policies. Relays can and do establish policies for acceptable behaviours. If you want a strict content policy, connect to relays with strict policies. You won’t have to individually block any users or relays/instances. This is essentially the same as mastodon. The difference with nostr is that you normally connect to multiple relays, so a single relay, where your identity is tied to, cannot block you from following who you want and seeing whatever content you choose. Let’s say Relay A blocks a user you want to follow. No problem, you are connected to relay B and C that don’t. And, of course, if for some reason you only want to connect to a single relay, you can.

This is also something that activitypub communities do better, because they are communities not relays.

“Hope our commmunity of users donate” didn’t work out well for the previous iteration of P2P discussion spaces: forums. The fact is, hosting online discussion forums gets costly quickly, especially if you want them to be reliable. Hell, even IRC servers which serve only text can get expensive to host. I’m not saying there’s no way to convince users to donate to valuable instances, just saying that as a general strategy for FOSS it hasn’t worked particularly well.

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

On AP, because identities are tied to instances, the instance admin can kick the bigot and they’re gone for everyone, before many folk ever see it. And if there is an instance with admins that don’t deal with bigots, the admins can defederate from the entire instance.

Same with Nostr. Relay admins can ban users and relays who don’t have good moderation. The difference is, if you don’t agree with that ban, as a user you can: connect to other relays and route around it (so you can still follow/be followed by/DM your person/relay of choice) AND keep using that original relay because you like the content on it (if they banned another user, not if they banned you). And there’s no need to make a whole new account at another instance, login to it separately, etc.

In Nostr, your relay gets to make and enforce it’s own content policies just as easily as it does on AP. They are literally the same in this regard.

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

The default setup for snort (most popular nostr portal) blocks all crypto-related discussion by default. The crypto bro problem was apparently worse back in the early launch days, but it’s gotten much better.

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

But user have to be technically minded enough, and willing, to set up a crypto wallet to do this.

True. That would be true of any platform which allows tips, you’d have to connect to some source of money whether it be paypal or crypto. Paypal’s fees would be prohibitively expensive but it would be theoretically doable. Either way, it’s a <5 minute setup process if they care to do it.

Interesting I didn’t know AP supported E2E. I guess it’s Mastodon that doesn’t support that element of the AP protocol then?

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Nostr does all that too.

Has anyone here built a Beowulf Cluster? (spinoff.nasa.gov)

A university near me must be going through a hardware refresh, because they’ve recently been auctioning off a bunch of ~5 year old desktops at extremely low prices. The only problem is that you can’t buy just one or two. All the auction lots are batches of 10-30 units....

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Look into BOINC. It’s a free open source software for distributed computing (“map-reduce”-type problems). Runs on all platforms, handles computation at the petaflop scale. Large Hadron Collider (CERN) uses it to distribute computational work to volunteers. It’s also a way you can contribute your computer’s spare capacity to cancer research. !boinc

ajayiyer, to linux
@ajayiyer@mastodon.social avatar

I am thinking about hosting my own Mastodon server from home on a Raspberry Pi (Pi4 8GB)?

  1. Are there good tutorials out there?
  2. What's the annual cost just to host yourself?

@linux @nixCraft @raspberrypi

makeasnek, (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Have you looked into nostr? It offers most of the same features of Mastodon except that:

  • Your identity is not tied to your instance. If your instance closes up shop, you keep all your followers, followees, DMs, etc
  • You can send encrypted DMs, so your instance admin can’t read them
  • Cool tipping functionality so you can tip people if you like their posts. Or don’t use it. It’s optional.
  • Most nostr clients have some built-in filtering functionality to block out things that are NSFW, crypto-related, etc. Different relays have different moderation policies, much like mastodon instances.

You can run your own relay of course.

makeasnek, (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Your understanding is not correct. You do not need to use crypto at all to use the platform. There is an optional tipping mechanism where you can tip people via BTC lightning if you like their tweets. It’s pretty fun to use, it’s fun to receive tips from others when they like your post. But you don’t have to.

You can still post, like, re-tweet, reply, DM, etc with no crypto whatsoever. Crypto is not tied to upvotes/visibility unless you specifically set it to filter that way in your client.

One benefit of having crypto integration built-in is that it can provide a sustainable funding mechanisms for relays. You can use “pools” when you send tips. So when you send 10c in a tip for somebody’s post, you can elect to have 1% go to the relay maintainer, nostr development, or any other destination you choose. This problem of subsidizing hosting is a problem ActivityPub doesn’t has any real solution for.

On Activity Pub, instances may choose to run ads, issue badges, or otherwise pay for hosting, but if AP is going to scale to the level it needs to get to, we can’t rely on the altruism of instances to just host everything for free. If we do, we will end up in a centralized social media mess like we’re trying to get away from in the first place.

There are many ways to solve this problem of needing to pay for the network infrastructure, but nostr is the only one currently that has a workable solution.

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

No, but some functionality could be bolted onto it for that purpose. But it is a federated network, just within it’s own protocol. Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc) run on an underlying protocol: ActivityPub, so they can all federate with each other within ActivityPub. Nostr runs on an underlying protocol also confusingly called nostr. Nostr’s main “interface” is a twitter clone, but the underlying protocol supports things like video streaming sites etc and some interfaces have been built for that purpose.

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Nice to have a cordial discussion/disagreement on here. If you’re interested in reading some (IMO) good arguments for why it’s not a energy wasting pyramid scheme, check my comment history :).

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Still doesn’t beat nostr imo.

Bluesky:

  • Identity not tied to instance
  • You have to buy and administer a domain name, which is technically complex and costs $10.
  • DNS is also subject to censorship by firewalls

Nostr:

  • Identity is not tied to an instance
  • Your private keys (identity) are generated by your app. No purchase or administration required
  • Censorship is much more difficult
makeasnek, (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

The problem isn’t that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy. The problem is that people never consider that energy use in context. Yet any headline about Bitcoin and energy never provides that context, because they are essentially hit pieces designed to elicit anger and clicks. Instead, we have to ask: What does that energy get us? How does that energy use compare to the energy used by other systems which perform the same function? A car which gets 10 miles per gallon would have been a fantastic use of energy in 1953, but today it is seen as wasteful. It does the same underlying thing, but the context matters.

Historically, our currencies have been based on incredibly inequitably distributed resources: precious metals and stable governance. Bitcoin is based on energy, which is the most equitably distributed resource on the planet. It literally falls from the sky, it runs through every river and every gust of wind and is found in the earth’s crust as uranium. Sometimes we get energy from unsustainable places, it sucks that any industry (including Bitcoin) uses it. That is a policy and governance problem, not a problem of our monetary system. You should know that Bitcion miners flock to renewable energy sources and over-provisioned grids. Why? Because they need the cheapest energy possible, which tends to come from renewables. Bitcoin miners are “buyers of last resort”, if there was anybody else to buy that energy, they would have bought it, and miners would have been outbid, because miners can’t afford to pay high energy prices as they must compete with every other miner on the planet. This is why Bitcoin mines typically don’t operate during peak demand hours, which is where most fossil fuels are used. Bitcoin, as “buyers of last resort” can be a part of the green revolution, they make it easier for governments to invest in and over-provision renewable infrastructure, and they make that green energy cheaper for everybody else by ensuring that at least someone will buy it during times of low demand. The problem with renewables is that they produce all day whereas people only actually want energy a few times a day.

Energy use is critical for the security of the Bitcoin network. While schemes that don’t use energy have been proposed, they all suffer from some serious trade-offs that make them unsuitable if we are going to build a global reserve currency, including a tendency to cause centralization and to reward the system’s richest participants. If a way is found to avoid using energy while still providing the same level of security and decentralization, Bitcoin is absolutely capable of upgrading its own network to use that new way.

First, let’s look at what Bitcoin does in exchange for that energy: Bitcoin is an economic network that can be accessed by anybody with a cellphone and a halfway reliable internet connection including the billions of people, with a B, who are “unbanked” because they lack access to stable banking infrastructure. It enables anybody (with Bitcoin lightning) to send money internationally in under a second for pennies in fees. Having a settlement time for transactions of basically zero means that in an economy money can move faster. That means increased efficiency for any industry including the banking industry. It also offers us a way to opt out of an unsustainable inflationary currency environment, that is valuable to people as well. Constantly increasing the supply of money robs the money of value, it hurts the lower and middle classes the most. Bank runs happen, and banks are “too big to fail”, so we have to bail them out, which is how the 99% end up paying for the investment risks of the 1%, the system is deeply flawed. But there is no solution to the bailout problem, if our entire economy will collapse if we don’t do the bailout, we have to do the bailout, right?

Second, let’s look at how much energy that takes. Bitcoin currently does this with less than 1% of global electricity usage. Even if it doesn’t replace banking entirely, even if it only replaces remittance services (think PayPal, Western Union, etc). Think of every Western Union kiosk, branch, etc in the entire globe. Think of their lights, their servers, their call centers. How much energy is that? How much energy is used by SWIFT? PayPal? When you start adding these up, you find that we use well over this amount of electricity on remittance services. And we’re not just waiting electricity and earth’s resources, we’re wasting the most valuable assets of all: time and human capital. We don’t need people manually sending bank wires like it’s 1910. We can have those people doing more valuable jobs.

Bitcoin’s market cap is around 850 billion right now. That is bigger than the entire GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam, it’s in the top 25 countries by GDP. It transfers trillions of dollars of transactions every year. The average trend, year on year, is wider adoption and growth. It solves real problems and people recognize it and use it for that purpose. That’s why big banks, hedge funds, and others invest in it.

There is also the wider discussion to be had about predicating our economies on currencies which grow to infinity and how that may not be a sustainable strategy on a planet with non-infinite resources. A currency which is constantly losing value incentivizes people to spend even if they don’t actually need anything, because the currency is going to become worthless given enough time. This means more production is paid for than we actually need. More resources get used up. A deflationary currency, on the other hand, incentivizes the opposite. In a deflationary economic system, somebody producing a good or service must do more to make you want to buy it. In that environment, might products be more reliable? More repairable? Might they be built more sustainably? One can only speculate, but I personally feel positive about the knock-on effects of moving off an inflationary currency system.

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Engaging with your elected representatives matters. Voting matters. Keep it up (and your other political activity outside of voting/writing, too)!

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Love seeing content like this, just regular people talking about why Linux works for them. Kudos, enjoyed the post!

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

OBS is an absolute powerhouse, an amazing example of what OSS can do

makeasnek,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m working on !boinc and !gridcoin . BOINC is a tool used by scientists to distribute computational workloads to the computers of volunteers, Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency which issues rewards for people who use BOINC (like mining crypto but for science instead of hashes). I’m not a direct dev on either project, but I code tools which make those projects easier to use, write documentation, etc.

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