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A few years ago I read Rene Guenon - Crisis of the Modern World (which was interestingly written in 1920s).
Its one of those books that you may not agree 100% with every assertion he makes, but in the end the viewpoint he illustrates becomes "impossible to not see"....and it winds up reshaping how you see the world.
A very very summed up version is that: Modern world is a void of meaning. During the "enlightenment", man traded meaning for empty motion....individualism reframed the world and internalized everything to become subjective.
We were able to coast for a few decades because of the incredible inertia of meaning that pre-enlightenment society passed to us....but the meaning keeps collapsing in on itself and we've now reached a sort of black-hole moment where there is no meaning left whatsoever.
Its not simply "God is dead", but "words themselves are dead" (eg. what is a woman?).
After you start to see the world in that lens it reshapes how you see things like the great enlightenment thinkers, for example Descartes "I think therefore I am" - at an initial level that comes across as a completely sensible concept. But the more you ponder it, the crazier it starts to sound...because it reframes your very existence to become an internalized / subjective function.
It becomes easy to see how you get from that, to "every person is allowed to create their own atomized personal reality that need not connect to anything external".
There are lots of interesting parallels to the modern world, not least of which is that the US system was explicitly modeled on roman republic.
Much has been written on the political / military parallels, but at a deeper cultural level there are interesting parallels between Rome <-> Greece and US <-> UK/Europe
Rome ultimately saw itself as a very practical regime. No need to re-invent philosophy, sciences, religion, etc....simply borrow and adapt everything from Greece.
They viewed Greece with an interesting mixture of both respect and simultaneously as a 'weak' vassal state. So Rome's elite sent their sons to Athens to study, while simultaneously viewing contemporary Greeks as effete, politically enfeebled, and culturally spent. Not very different how modern US sees UK/Europe in general.
Being a cultured roman meant that you would write to each other in Greek - there was an intentional cultural dependency that Romans felt towards Greece, while simultaneously holding a view that Greece didn't really matter and "all roads lead to Rome".
Even in things like food: I read an essay once that was exploring the idea of "did Rome see itself as a 'melting-pot'?" and the general takeaway was no, because it would just wholesale borrow every culture in came into contact with and then claim it was 'roman'.
So in Rome you didn't go out to eat "Greek food" or dine on "Egyptian food"...they simply just took all those ingredients and cooking styles and sort of blessed them as 'Roman'.
Lots of interesting parallels to US with things like Pizza. Modern day "Papa Johns" pizza is simultaneously linked / not-linked to it Neapolitan origins. At a certain level, the US sort of "invented Pizza" (not really of course, but get the drift). It took a provincial food from a far-off corner of the world and then re-exported it as a more explicitly "american" product.
All the building blocks are in place.
Next step is same doctor to declare him clinically depressed and prescribe MAID.
Exactly there is no "burn address" built into bitcoin code, but there are addresses that are so improbable that there is no real way someone holds the private key.
There are tools that generate "vanity addresses" (along with private key) but typically it becomes impossible after the first few chars. So you can probably easily generate private key for bc111XXXXX address but generating bc111111111111111... is impossible.
Yes, our entire concept of what we think of as the "music industry" is actually just a temporary happenstance of various market forces combining into a specific supply/demand curve around 1960's
Probably is the same for other "media industries" as well....
I don't claim to have any novel or particularly profound thoughts about this, but I have thought about it before.
If you go far enough back to before recorded media (say late 1800s) good music was pretty rare because it required lots of dedication and the high expense of buying instrument, BUT it wasn't very reproducible (ie a musician could only play in front of X number of people on a given day).
Fast forward to mid 1900s and the rise of cheap vinyl media and radio solved the distribution problem. This probably represented the peak of the music industry because it was still a rare skill AND supply was still constrained....so demand clustered around the few content producers available (Elvis, The Beatles, etc).
Now supply has become essentially infinite the skill to produce music is very very low and distribution is even cheaper than vinyl / radio, so market is destroyed....in a sense we have returned to 1800s for actual musicians, that is they can only really earn money now by playing for live audiences.
(EDIT) tldr - there will never be another Beatles again
They are not immune to QC attacks.
The easiest way for you to understand it is to play around with the concept. For example, go to https://www.md5hashgenerator.com/ and enter "hello" and hit "Generate" button. That should produce the hash 5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592.
Try enter a few hundred or thousand different strings. See if you can get a meaningful repeating pattern in your output hash.
The odds of any hash producing some sort of repeating pattern like 111111111111111.... is so low that you can assume that the you are being given a hash that the person doesn't know the source data to. Therefore its a burn address.
I haven't fully read all of it, but maybe 30% complete
All in all very balanced take. The things I do really like is he resisted the knee-jerk reaction to "call for govt regulation" and instead sort of admits that governments are pretty much powerless to stop any of this as the companies producing this AI are probably more powerful than most governments.
Instead, he focuses on individual accountability and an exhortation to a shared goal of keeping humanity front and center and not reduced to an assistant to the machine.
This individual accountability extends to creators of AI in the moral sense....if the things you create (and you created without the proper safeguards) are then used for war, murder, etc....then you become morally culpable.
Lastly, which I think is very much needed, is a warning against transhumanist endeavors. That human frailties and limitations are not "problems to be fixed", and humans should not become hybrid constructs with the goal of obsessively trying to remove all possible forms of suffering.
Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them. The light of faith offers a perspective on reality that helps us recognize what we call the “contingency” of the things of this world. While it is right to strive to alleviate the suffering that marks human life, it is also wise to acknowledge our fundamental finitude, knowing that “religious experience, and in particular Christian faith, propose that we live, without oversimplification, this ambivalence between human greatness and limitation, interpreting it in the light of our original and fundamental relationship with God.”
AI Summary (yes I recognize the sardonic humor of that)
The Challenge to Human DignityThe Challenge to Human Dignity
- Transhumanism & Posthumanism: The text warns against ideologies that seek to "upgrade" or "hybridize" humans with machines. It argues that true transcendence is found through divine grace, not biological or technological optimization.
- Ontological Dignity: It emphasizes that human worth is not based on productivity, data, or "efficiency," but is an inherent gift from God that cannot be lost or earned.
2. The Governance of AI2. The Governance of AI
- The Need to "Disarm" AI: The author calls for "disarming" AI—not by destroying it, but by stripping it of its monopolistic, opaque, and "armed" competitive nature. AI must be transparent, accountable, and subject to human oversight.
- Data as a Common Good: The text argues that data and algorithms should not be the private property of a few transnational entities but should be treated as "common goods" to prevent new forms of digital colonialism and inequality.
3. Socio-Economic Impacts3. Socio-Economic Impacts
- The Dignity of Work: The document expresses concern that AI might "de-skill" workers or turn them into mere appendages of machines. It calls for an economy that values the person rather than just the output.
- New Forms of Slavery: It highlights the "invisible" labor behind AI (data labeling, content moderation in poor regions) and the exploitation of mineral resources, warning that the digital age is creating new, high-tech chains of servitude.
4. Truth and Democracy4. Truth and Democracy
- Ecology of Communication: The text warns against the erosion of truth through deepfakes, disinformation, and algorithmic bubbles. It calls for an "educational alliance" to teach critical thinking and digital sobriety.
5. The Ethics of Warfare5. The Ethics of Warfare
- Autonomous Weapons: The document strongly opposes the delegation of lethal decisions to algorithms. It argues that killing must always remain a human decision, subject to conscience, mercy, and accountability—qualities an AI cannot possess.
The Proposed Path: "The Civilization of Love"The Proposed Path: "The Civilization of Love"
The document concludes by advocating for a transition from a "Culture of Power" to a "Civilization of Love." This involves:
- Subsidiarity & Solidarity: Ensuring decisions are made at the most local level possible while maintaining a global responsibility for the vulnerable.
- Integral Human Development: Measuring progress not by GDP or technological speed, but by how well society supports the "whole person"—spiritually, socially, and physically.
- A Eucharistic Spirituality: Grounding all social action in the reality of communion and the recognition that we are all interconnected.
I think one of the biggest gaps in current grocery store is the lack of a "over 30 items line". I mean there are express lines for people with 5 items, but why not the reverse?
Like it should be a double-staffed / double-conveyor belt line to process those that have lots of items....I mean on the surface its kinda crazy this hasn't developed.
The guy with a six pack of beer and sandwhich bread gets to zoom thru the line, but the mom with a $350 basket of goods waits the most.....
Any >50 users probably remembers the "Clipper Chip" fiasco in the mid-90s. Right when internet was gaining in popularity there was this US Gov sponsored idea that "security chips should be installed in all phones and internet devices".
There was lots of push back on the subject and it was defeated. But the push to de-anonymize users never really went away and is now just bundled up in these age-protection laws....which it appears that they are successful.
The problem I see is the security issue.
Yeah, like all engineering challenges its just a series of tradeoffs. They would need more security staff to watch cameras of what was placed into carts vs what was scanned in app....so its just reshuffling staff around.
Another huge issue is: You have just placed your entire checkout process into the hands of Apple / Google for no apparent gain to your organization. Your entire business is now intimately bound up with them "approving each app version" and dealing with new iOS/Android versions, etc....
Its one of those ideas which sounds clever on the surface but the more you dig into it you realize why the world came up with the current solution.
Thanks for the clarification. I think they added the "encrypt backup feature" after the first version was unencrypted. There was a dust-up about it on HN at the time, so likely they were pressured.
But as you said, I don't really trust the E2E encryption anyways....
One thing I know is true about WhatsApp is that they constantly nag you to "backup your chats" as if its some wonderful security feature they are offering you.
In reality when you "backup your chats" you are saving them encryption free on their servers. So meta gets to advertise "end-to-end encrypted chats" and then separately disclose "backups are not encrypted". So they can still data-mine you under the theater that your chats are secure.
All these things need to be solved:
- Not everyone has a phone (ok boomer)
- Some people will refuse to install / use app
- Weighing things
- Receiving / Dispensing Cash
- Activating Gift Cards
- Receipt and Voucher printing
- Loss prevention (monitoring how many things are bagged vs scanned)
You may not live in an area that tried exactly what you describe, but its never worked. I think the Walmart app actually allows you to scan-as-you-go like you describe but like 0.1% of users do that. The biggest hassle is separately having to weigh things at approved weigh stations, and print a ticket for those and then scan that ticket..etc and probably most importantly lack of cash processing.
The biggest issue you are going to have is once the CP and snuff film people find it. The simple truth is, there isn't much reason for "normal / non-illegal" people to use it, thus its going to solely become a tool for the most evil aspects of humanity.
You need to decide if you want to deal with that.
Net worth Scale:
$100M - $999M = Fuck this place, I'm going to buy these politicians to do what I want
$1B - $99B = Fuck this place, I building an underground city in new zealand and 400ft solar/wind powered yahct
$100B - $1T = Fuck this place, I'm going to mars....
There was also the case of Brian Armstrong's Earning Call (https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/01/coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-trolls-the-prediction-markets/)
They had bet what words would he mention during his call. At the end of the otherwise normal earnings call, Brian said:
And I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call
These just happened to be the exact words that polymarket betters were betting on.
From a larger view lots of this unironically points back to George Soros "reflexivity thesis" of markets. Which is that market bets influence real world behavior, which influences market bets....etc.
Rerum Novarum
Very interesting that you post this....Rerum Novarum was primarily a response to Industrialization. That is the church was trying to navigate humanity moving from primarily agrarian society towards a more top-down capital controlled society.
Just like today, there was widespread fear that the coming Industrialization was going to unleash huge unemployment and uncertainty....so the Church was trying to strike a balance between reminding everyone that we have a need to be charitable and that humans aren't "units of production" while simultaneously quell the nascent socialist calls coming from people like Marx.
I mention all this because our latest Pope Leo is set to release his encyclical next week named Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) which will be his response to the coming AI wave. It is thought he is trying to strike a balance as well....in fact people online have mentioned that they expect this to be his own Rerum Novarum moment....
So the leader of the "2nd Wave Feminist" movement, which was primarily advocating that women join the work force, worked for the CIA...
Very convenient timing that right when the US was moving off the gold standard, and 1970s inflation was about to kick in, that a CIA agent was telling women it was a good to have a 2-person working household.