Politics_And_Law

“People deal with politics; politicians deal with business,” a friend told me yesterday as we were having coffee and talking about various issues.

This phrase set me thinking. Most likely, in countries with autocracy, stabilocracy, or fragile democracy, it is true. In such countries, politicians hold all the power. As a result, they use citizens’ taxes and the state budget according to their own interests.

I can understand this. What I cannot understand, however, is why people in these countries talk so much about politics but do not take political actions? Why they do not vote responsibly, protest, go on strike, defend their taxes, and so on?

Why do people ruled by autocrats or stabilocrats seem asleep, numb, and inactive?

This puzzles me greatly, and I cannot think of a convincing answer.

What do you think?

People deal with politics, politicians deal with business!

lightning

Introducing Satdoku: Sudoku with lightning payments and AI mentor

02a0613802

I have a very practical question: why buy 1,000 sats for an extra life when there are so many free Sudoku apps out there?

I’m asking for a friend. 

bitcoin

Christmas greeting card v3 [100x gift inside]

030e0dca83

Merry Christmas! 

May your home be filled with the kind of joy that lasts long after the decorations come down.

AskSN

English translation:

The greatest threat to human dignity begins when we live to meet other people’s expectations.

Society always has a ready-made list for us: how we should behave, what we should achieve, whom we should follow, and so on. But the more we try to fit into frameworks that aren’t ours, the more we lose ourselves; and the more we resist, the greater the external pressure becomes.

Thales used to say that “the hardest thing is to know yourself,” especially when the noise of the world imposes foreign roles on you. Aristotle called freedom “being master of oneself,” while Epictetus warned that “if you want to improve, accept being called a fool.”

But we don’t like being called fools, or “outcasts.” We want to be like everyone else, because we lack the courage to be the “black sheep.” Personally, if you want to irritate me, just use as an argument expressions like “that’s how everyone does it” or “that’s just how life is,” and I immediately lose interest in the conversation.

For me, dignity begins where the fear of judgment ends and the courage to be oneself begins. I am sure life would be easier for everyone, especially when each person minds their own life and doesn’t bother others.

I say this because I want people to be happy with their lives. Because happy people don’t bother you…

Why are people afraid to be themselves?

> Publicly traded Bitcoin services firm Fold is teaming up with restaurant chain Steak ‘n Shake, offering a new promotion that allows buyers of the new Bitcoin Burger to claim real Bitcoin rewards. And the restaurant brand is also launching its own "strategic Bitcoin reserve," holding all payments received in BTC.

> This is the first in a series of mainstream partnerships we plan to roll out, all focused on showing how Bitcoin can fit naturally into everyday spending," Fold fonder and CEO Will Reeves told Decrypt. "Fold is already integrated across retail, dining, and lifestyle brands through our gift card marketplace, and we’ll keep expanding into categories that help people earn Bitcoin in ways that are simple, safe, and rewarding."


Is this good news for Bitcoin adoption, or just a marketing trick?

Receive up to $5 in Bitcoin as a reward when you buy a burger at Steak ’n Shake

Do you believe in any form of life after death?

Is death the end of everything?

Animal_World

One of the things I love about my Dodo is his animal honesty. 

![](https://m.stacker.news/121977)

In every situation he reveals himself as he is: when he asks for food and rubs against my legs; when he gets irritated, thinks I’m getting on his nerves, and doesn’t spare me the occasional scratch; and when I pet him and he rolls onto his back, exposing his belly like a peace treaty.

None of the people I have known, myself included, possess the authenticity and perhaps even the sincerity of Dodo and of pets in general.

As I was thinking about this, I was reminded of Albert Camus, who said that man is the only animal that refuses to be what it is.

That strikes me as entirely true, yet I can’t quite say why human beings refuse to accept themselves as they are: is it because they strive to be better, more fulfilled? Because they seek the approval of others and hide themselves in order to present a more pleasing version? Because they are led astray by famous models that bombard them at every step today, making their own selves seem worthless? Or…

Whatever the case, I envy the way you accept yourself, dear Dodo.

Why human beings refuse to accept themselves as they are?

Two lonely kittens holding paws through the bars

Stacker Saloon

saloon

Oh, thanks. Good to know. And you are what? 

Those were my first days on Stacker News, and I misunderstood that post—nothing more. But that doesn’t change the fact that you’re just an arrogant, worthless person who’s learned a few things about Bitcoin and then insults and criticizes everyone else… 

What are you thankful for?

k00b

Oh, there are many things I'm thankful for. I will mention a few: 

Thankful for being alive, for having a functioning body, mental clarity, emotional resilience, feeling peace and joy in small moments...

Bro, I don’t understand why you try to respond to Darth. He doesn’t read what you write as it is; he reads it the way he *wants* to interpret it. He keeps trying to impose his thoughts and beliefs all the time, but without making any effort to listen to you or understand you. The most arrogant person I’ve ever seen here on Stacker News. There are others too, but he’s the most arrogant one.


Photography

![](https://m.stacker.news/119502)

This morning view beyond the window makes me somewhat nostalgic. I can’t quite say why. There’s something inherently beautiful in it, or perhaps the poignancy comes from the way it awakens within me the sensations of rain, the autumn forest, the edge of winters, departures, losses. Feelings that I have either lived myself, in real life, or that poetry, songs, paintings, and films have instilled in me.

A hint of nostalgia

ideasfromtheedge

I came across a quote recently that really made me think:

>People are less sincere in love, and more sincere in hate.

Do you think this is true — that people are less sincere when they love but more honest when they hate?


People are less sincere in love, and more sincere in hate

The University of Oxford is teaching its students how to use ChatGPT.
And this Oxford study says that 92% of people are using it incorrectly.
Most people ask GPT to do things for them:
     to write an essay or an email,
     to summarize an article,
     to explain something.

And that seems useful, doesn’t it?

But the more one asks Artificial Intelligence to do things for them, the less them engage ourselves. It’s like pretending to learn how to drive just by watching someone else drive. Or like having a personal trainer who runs laps for you on the track and expecting that you’ll lose weight.

Oxford says, therefore, we should do exactly the opposite.

Artificial Intelligence should ask you questions, test you, challenge whether you have really learned something.

For example, you could say:

Today I learned about the law of supply and demand in economics. Can you ask me 10 questions to see if I’ve grasped the concept?

And it might ask:

“What happens to the demand for a product when its price rises?”

You write your answer, and it evaluates how well you’ve understood.

So it’s like having a private tutor, but without the awkwardness of worrying that you might give the wrong answer.

The next step is to ask ChatGPT to create a real-life scenario and for you to step in and apply your knowledge. For example, ChatGPT might say:

Let’s suppose there are only two bottles of milk left on the market. You go to buy them for your children, but the seller tells you the milk is sold out. At that moment, you see the person in front of you in line, smiling as they pay 600 dollars and take the last two bottles of milk to give to their dog…

So, ChatGPT asks: Is the law of supply and demand just a trick to fool the poor?

And you can give your own answer. That’s how the dialogue continues.

What do you think about this way of using ChatGPT?

Could chatgpt be a great private tutor?

I was watching a documentary about animals on television and I don’t believe there is anyone who isn’t amazed by the way everything in their world has so much order.

You are amazed at how they preserve the balances that nature has set for them. There is no need there for laws, strategies, or conferences and summits. There everything exists simply by maintaining its delicate balance.

Animals live within this balance without planning, without philosophies, and yet every action of theirs contributes to the common harmony. Their instinct is simple, but wiser than any kind of knowledge we humans claim to have.

We humans, with all our achievements and our “brilliant” mind, have forgotten this simple wisdom. We build cities, create cutting-edge technology to control the world, but every step of ours often destroys that balance that existed without us. Forests are extinguished, rivers and the air are poisoned, and the creatures that lived in harmony with nature are disappearing under the weight of our “wisdom.”

It is tragic and ironic how man, the most intelligent being on the planet, has lost the most fundamental connection with the life that surrounds him. When we look at an animal that moves according to instinct, we understand a simple truth: wisdom does not come from words, diplomacy, or planning, but from harmony with the world that gave us birth.

God gave man dominion over the earth and everything in it, but we did not take care of it at all. I am certain that even for this we will be asked to give account for why we did not preserve this priceless gift of life.

Have we failed the gift God entrusted to us?

Philosophy is the inevitable future of humanity. The present is _ techne_, in other words the totality of activities through which man removes more and more pain and limitation. “Science” (which is the most powerful instrument that _techne_ possesses today) has achieved results because of the abandonment of the ancient category of _episteme_, in a word, the renunciation of the position of being absolute and irreversible truth. Today, “science” may have not only the aim of constructing—I emphasize, constructing—man, but it may also have the aim of removing from man any kind of limitation, and even of constructing God, which in other times was taken as something to be contemplated with worship.

But precisely because “science” has renounced being truth, any degree of perfection and happiness toward which it claims to lead man cannot be lived except as something unstable, which can be lost at any moment. The more desirable that life which _techne_ can build, the more unsatisfying is every logic, possessed by _techne_, that is put to work with the aim of achieving perfection or at least stability of what has been built. _Techne_ may remove from you any kind of limitation, but not that which consists in the doubt that everything you are or have can also be swallowed up by a nearby catastrophe. Only the logic of truth—I mean, only an absolute and irreversible answer—can remove the doubt. Precisely for this reason, philosophy is the future of man; who, when he arrives at the point of believing himself to be lord of being, will feel, through an impulse that has never before crossed him, the need to know the truth of this belief on his part, and consequently, what is most important, the need to know what truth is. 

Could Philosophy be the future of humanity?

Write a title for this : OpenAI just exposed thousands of private ChatGPT conversations to Google Search. And most users had no idea it was happening.

Your private chats were literally one toggle away from going public and showing up in Google results.

Here's what actually happened - and it's worse than you think.

OpenAI quietly introduced a "Make link discoverable" option within their new Shared Chats feature. Sounds innocent, right?

Wrong.

If you clicked that option, your chat became a public webpage that search engines could immediately index.￼

Google started crawling these conversations, and thousands of ChatGPT chats - many containing personal, professional, or sensitive content - began surfacing in Google Search results.

Why this was so dangerous:

- No clear warning: There was zero indication that enabling this option would make your content publicly searchable on Google.

- Basic web dev failure: OpenAI didn't add a "noindex" directive - web development 101 for keeping content off search engines.

- High-risk data exposed: The indexed chats included job applications, personal identifiers, business plans, technical code, and internal documents.

For a company pushing AI for enterprise use, this was a massive data governance failure.

Once this story started spreading, OpenAI pulled the plug within 24 hours.

They removed the "discoverable" option, started coordinating with Google to remove indexed links, and urged users to review their shared chats.

But the damage was already done. Cached versions of these conversations may still appear in search results.

Sam Altman previously warned about this - "There's no legal privacy shield around your AI chats yet - it's screwed up, and it needs fixing."

This wasn't some sophisticated hack. This was a feature working exactly as designed - with very poor execution lol.

Thousands of users accidentally made their private conversations public because of one unclear toggle.

And this won't be the last AI privacy incident. It's just the first one that got caught.

Thousands of ChatGPT Chats Accidentally Indexed by Google

Can you spin the threads?

Coinsreporter

BooksAndArticles

Diana was a very respected lady in the apartment building where I’ve lived for years. We had a family acquaintance and would often visit each other’s homes.

Diana left this life quite suddenly and at a very young age. She was only 57 years old. Three weeks ago, on a Sunday afternoon, she left her house to take a walk in one of the parks in our city, which lies around a lake. Poor Diana left on her own two feet and returned on the stretcher of an ambulance. 

While walking through the park, she suffered a sudden heart attack and died on one of the park’s pathways, near a plum tree.

I wasn’t in the city when it happened, so I couldn’t attend her funeral. Instead, I went to her house afterward. I found only her husband, Spiro. Their children, a son and a daughter, had already performed all the funeral rites and returned to their homes—her son in the Netherlands and her daughter in Canada.

As I was speaking with Spiro, the house cat, Pisua, came near and rubbed against my legs. “Poor cat,” said Spiro, “he’s sad. For the first three or four days, he hid in the wardrobe, among Diana’s clothes, and wouldn’t come out—not even to drink water or eat food.” Apparently, Spiro told me, the cat had seen the entire scene when they brought the lifeless body home in the ambulance, when they placed her in the coffin, and so on. It seemed as if the cat, too, was mourning the loss of the lady of the house.

In the days that followed, the image of the grieving cat stayed with me—the way he hid in the wardrobe, among Diana’s clothes.

But perhaps it wasn’t exactly grief, I thought to myself. The poor cat, frightened when he saw his owner lying in a coffin, must have felt uncertain and scared, and in search of safety, he chose a closed, enclosed space.

There is said that cats are deeply connected to their territory, often perceiving it as essential for their sense of safety and existence. Maybe Diana’s scent among the clothes, in one way or another, created in the cat’s brain the feeling that she hadn’t left, but was still present there, in the wardrobe.

But perhaps it goes deeper, I thought, and I recalled the belief that cats are among the animals that understand humans best—they feel the emotions and sentiments of those they are close to and with whom they have a special bond.

That last thought seemed a bit exaggerated to me, and I remembered Hachiko, the famous dog from the movie of the same name, who kept waiting for his owner even years after he had died. People say, not without reason, that the dog is the most loyal animal and the most inclined to serve humans. Still, I reasoned, Hachiko is a fictional character, even though at the beginning of the film it says it’s based on a true story. To make the film more compelling and emotional, it’s possible the creators exaggerated the dog’s loyalty after his master’s death.

But maybe the exaggeration isn’t that great, I reconsidered, as I recalled another dog—Argos, Odysseus’ dog—who is the only one to recognize his master when he returns after twenty years of war and wandering. Worn out from neglect, the dog died just moments after confirming that his master was alive and had come back.

Argos’s loyalty to his master contrasts sharply with the other characters, especially the many suitors who aimed to usurp the throne, steal Penelope, and kill his son, Telemachus. It’s no coincidence that scholars note the language used in the poem to describe Argos’s death resembles the language used for the death of noble warriors.

It’s hard to say whether animals, including Diana’s cat, actually mourn. Skeptics might be right in saying that such beliefs are rooted in humans’ anthropomorphic tendencies—in other words, the tendency to interpret every noble trait in animals as something borrowed from humans. But perhaps we can say with some certainty that some animals, even without knowing what mourning is, feel the absence of their four-legged companions—and even of their two-legged masters—with sadness.

Surely, they don’t know the word “mourning,” and they don’t understand human customs and conventions, but they seem to experience the void left by death. And if that’s true, then the phrase “In the beginning was the Word” should be replaced with “In the beginning was the feeling.”

In the beginning was the feeling...

I'm curious about what such an album would sound like for you. Would it be techno, metal, folk... 

Which music genre would best suit this album? What kind of titles, lyrics, and moods would capture the spirit of decentralization, cryptography, and financial revolution? 

I would like to see a **hip-hop** album inspired by Bitcoin because of its revolutionary, subversive tone. I mean a serious project.  

I'd love to hear your imaginative takes.