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2765 sats \ 17 replies \ @SimpleStacker 22 Aug \ on: "Housing prices are not high by any historical standard" - evoskuil econ
I don't know who Voskuil is, but he's doing one of the things I hate most that the "everything-is-fine" people do, which is to use averages to make a point about the general experience of the population.
It's often used to dismiss the lived reality that other people are experiencing, and it's often wrong.
In this case, I think he is dead wrong. In the US (and probably most of the western world), it is harder to buy a house than any time in living memory.
Here are a few of the key things I think he's getting wrong:
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He says Americans of every age cohort are getting wealthier. Then he uses averages to back it up. It might be true on average, but averages are lifted up by an extremely fat right tail. I"m more concerned about the median, or even the 25th percentile.
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He talks about how people have access to more investment services and that people are much less dependent on home equity. Once agian, I'm not sure what point that's trying to make when we're talking about young people, who probably don't have equity in housing or any other asset in significant quantity.
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"The price for the same size and quality of housing is lower in real terms than it has ever been." Citation needed on this one. Even if it's true, these "quality adjustments" are pretty sketchy when it comes to debating whether things are getting better or worse.It's kinda like with cars: the entry level car is getting more expensive, but defenders of the price increases say it's because there's so much more technology in them now, i.e. their quality is higher.So take that logic to homes. If regulations are making it so that the minimum entry level house is now bigger and better than they used to be, but it's preventing young buyers from entering the market, can you really say that just because the price-per-quality-unit is stable, that young people should just gladly accept that?
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If you just look at the age distributions of when people are buying their first home, it's getting later and later in life. I'm not sure what else you could say to prove Voskuil wrong. It's not because people want to buy homes later (though part of it could be explained by delayed family formation and delayed career starts---but that's all wrapped up into the same set of problems!)
TLDR, i'm not on Voskuil's side on this.
what if you willingly choose to live a life thinking by default that nobody dislikes you nor likes you
I live naively by this because I really can't afford to think about it otherwise I would just isolate myself.
I just analyze my actions and how they can affect the other person. And I have to admit that, because of this, I get a whole bunch of anxiety by people that don't communicate much, but I just tell myself to keep going and that people are entitled to their own opinions.
If you’re using Google pay or Apple Pay, you are absolutely not anonymous and you might as well be fully KYC’d.
For that reason, I think services like these are actually a lot more dangerous because they give a false sense of security and privacy.
yes, it will come, in details and with a nice timelapse video.
- south wall - finished
- north wall, almost done
- 2nd roof - almost done
- west wall - hard to tell
A lot of advancing this year.
Sneak peak: the most harsh task - moving this fucking boulder
into the right position, with bare hands...
I agree that it could be nice for rapid development in an ecosystem around a central service - iirc that's what FB developed it for - but it's indeed overkill for something simple that doesn't change much (and if it does, you need versioning) and you just want to install and run; especially if it's distributed by nature.
It's also funny that the caching is killing my experience with this particular web-ui because I need to literally hit refresh when navigating (using in-app navigation) to see new state on an issue - so in this instance it's also kind of awfully implemented.
I was thinking that
git-bug could be nice for git-collab-over-decentralized-protocol (like the nostr thing) because it can ultimately reduce the code needed, and technically I shouldn't need to run it as a server other than for some management GUI. But to support github-like code collaboration, review and communication, issues need to evolve to pull requests, so I am looking to hack that in.Also, it may be nice to have everything in a single repo when running transient containers for LLM coding workloads. I figured a while back that if we're going to let an LLM code like a pro, we should treat it like a pro: not some prompt and a log and that's it, but really integrate a fully tooled agile workflow into the process. No need a gui with an annoying chatbox then, and doing it via text files doesn't scale with all the bloat LLMs generate - something structured would be nice. Anyway I was thinking that if this works well, I could in theory automate a whole dev team fr.
Sam talked about this in a tweet about GPT-5
if a user is in a mentally fragile state and prone to delusion, we do not want the AI to reinforce that. Most users can keep a clear line between reality and fiction or role-play, but a small percentage cannot. ... Encouraging delusion in a user that is having trouble telling the difference between reality and fiction is an extreme case and it’s pretty clear what to do, but the concerns that worry me most are more subtle. ... If, on the other hand, users have a relationship with ChatGPT where they think they feel better after talking but they’re unknowingly nudged away from their longer term well-being (however they define it), that’s bad. It’s also bad, for example, if a user wants to use ChatGPT less and feels like they cannot.
My girlfriend is bipolar type II with complex PTSD. She can either have a month full of delusions or a month with just 1 day of delusions but a lot of anxiety. Everything is linked to her past or traumatic events.
Now why I'm saying this, 3-4 months ago I gave her a GPT subscription to have a lifeline in case of crisis that I cannot manage as sometimes the toll is too big to bear and I really wasn't able to manage that with my work, even ended up writing my boss.
She was happy with it, successfully managed to have a source of reassurance about reality while also learning tricks to self-manage.
But a month ago she told me she stopped using it, she felt that GPT-4o was just running in circles, and when I read her prompt I got the same overwhelming feeling that I get when I try to manage her crisis. I think she gave anxiety to GPT.
GPT-5 on the other hand, in full thinking mode, was very helpful, albeit slow.
I actually don't care what people think about Sam Altman, but the guy is trying, considering he has a sister with the same problem as my gf's.
Progress is being made, and I'm just happy that it's making our lives a little bit easier.
fun real story:
I was like 25 years old and I visited for the 1st time my future father-in-law.
He put me at the table and he said: "You will have my daughter if tomorrow morning you are still at this table and me under it..."
So we drink all day and night and I was still sitting on the chair and he was under the table sleeping.
And that is how I get a wife :)
So sorry for your loss. I hope there was a life long learning from this incident.
I faced similar scam attempts when I contacted the LNBits telegram group for some technical issues. Someone pretended to be Ben Arc and called me directly on telegram. Within seconds he started to ask me questions about seed/mnemonic, certs. I immediately realized it was not Ben Arc as I had heard his voice on the youtube videos. - I got lucky, not everyone does. This was a very recent incident around two months ago.
After that incident - I've completely stopped using telegram. Since that day, I came to a realization that Telegram is the worst channel to run the support of any bitcoin related business or services.
We need to create an awareness campaign to inform the bitcoin community to stop using Telegram altogether for any support related issues. This movement must be initiated from the founders of Bitcoin business/apps/services. I'm not good at running such campaigns or movement. My social IQ is 40.
I'm hoping someone with enough charisma and grit comes along and start the awareness campaign to STOP USING TELEGRAM FOR SUPPORT
I also hope Jesse Shrader moves the support of Amboss/Magma to some other channel.
Nothing good ever happens at Telegram.
Thanks for posting this. I appreciate the clarity. I previously had not heard the argument that Taproot enabled spam in this context. I always thought people made such an argument because Taproot removed the script size limit, which meant that the ordinal people could include their ordinal data in the script.
Personally, I don't believe there is such as thing as a spam transaction that gets included in the Bitcoin blockchain.
The "special thing" about Runes is that they do exactly what BRC20 was doing (defining, minting, and transferring tokens), but it does so in OP_RETURN outputs, which do not get added to the UTXO set, in a blockspace efficient manner. So, it’s simply better in all dimensions than BRC20 tokens at what BRC20 tokens supposedly do, without resulting in an incentive to create minuscule abandoned outputs. And it was created by the inventor of Ordinals which probably makes it even more blessed in some circles. :shrug:
This morning I received a panicked message from a friend. He received an email that his non-profit was getting sued for copyright infringement and if I could put him in touch with a good lawyer on what to do. He noted that he hadn't clicked any links yet, so I said sure, but how about you grab the plain source of the email and send that to me, so that I can check if you're not being scammed into something.
- The
fromemail address was a dkim-enablededu.vnsub-sub-sub domain - Google let it through with a spam rating of -1.8 because dkim checked out
- Their private mailserver let it through because dkim checked out
- The mail was written in acceptable French (I could understand most of it and my French kinda sucks)
- The "evidence" wasn't attached but linked (normal for lawyers) but went to
rebrandly.com- not too normal for lawyers. - I tor-proxied curl and fetched it, after 5 redirects it came to some page that tries to script redirect to a zipfile
- I downloaded the zipfile (also tor-proxied) and read it with a throwaway user
- Turned out to be a rar file, so i did
rar -ton it. - Contents: an
.exe, a.dlland a script; i.e. this is a trojan.
Saved my friend 500k sats retainer money, in 5 minutes. Yay.
I’ve been pretty confident that this initial AI boom will be another tech bubble.
That doesn’t mean it won’t eventually meet and exceed the hype. It just won’t do it immediately.
At least at this stage of human development, hardship is not hard to come by.
I haven't had much hardship in my life, but the two or three serious hardships have usually resulted in growth and good things in my life.
I don't think that over-abundance is too much of an issue really. Most people will have challenges presented to them through the rough edges of life.
Perhaps the thing that our relative abundance can do for us is teach is to see to the challenges we do face as valuable events.
Consensus is determined by code, fees, blockspace, and economic demand.
If all the 'bitcoin is money' people used bitcoin as money, transactionally, at least semi-regularly, we would have way less spam and we wouldn't even be having these "debates."
People will tell you "we need to keep the chain clean" and "bitcoin is money..." while rarely using it as such. If only a small percentage of Earth's population were using Bitcoin on a regular basis the fees would be way higher, miner revenue more robust, miner centralization in better shape, and the 'censorship resistance' tested more thoroughly and more completely.
So where are these people???
This is a bit nonsensical really...
I mean, you could as well say that all Bitcoin transactions are text, if you consider each 7 bits of data as an ASCII character, or more if you use UTF-8 or other encoding... you would end up with random sequences of letters, forming a unique "text" per transaction.
The "art" that is being generated here in OP is simply interpreting the original data in a different way, as a color, which usually just give you random data. As an image, it's just randomly colored dots.
I thought they had found some interesting visual pattern or something, but there's no structure, it's just random noise, as expected.
Also, mentioning JPEGs when referring to an image in this context is just wrong as JPEG is a lossy image format, which means that the original information is lost when generating the JPEG file. At least mention a lossless format like PNG which preserves the original data.
Just to make sure I got this right, are they really gonna ban people in the US from having more than one Bitcoin address?
Notably, the mixer rule's suggestions on cryptocurrency swaps, transaction delays, "splitting," and the creation of single-use addresses, wallets, and accounts, would even put users under suspicion with the authorities, potentially ending in criminal liability – similar to how transaction structuring, sometimes also known as "smurfing," is deemed a federal crime in traditional finance, referring to the intentional breakup of transactions to fall below the $10,000 currency transaction reporting requirement. In traditional finance, smurfing carries a federal prison sentence of up to 5 years, even if the money transferred did not stem from illicit origins.
- What brought you to SN in the first place?
An ad on Fountain describing SN as Reddit, but with real money in place of cheap likes. I was in the process of finding alternatives to Big Tech platforms, particularly those that used real transferrable tokens (not a bitcoiner yet) to reward engagement.
- What brings you back to SN?
I was hooked almost immediately. Being new to bitcoin (and crypto), I mostly read and asked questions. On posts related to politics, economics, or science (which were less common before territories), I'd engage more in the discussions.
The quality of discussion is completely unrivalled and that's what I wanted from social media. I also love getting to talk to the devs about the structure of the site.
Now, of course, I also check in regularly to keep tabs on my territories.
- What causes you to make posts on SN?
Usually, I just want to share stuff with the other stackers and see what they think about it.
I also make some posts that I think of more as territory maintenance.
One might also argue that mining is being subsidized by governments or investors
My nephew works for the cities utility company. They have recently gotten interested in mining to act as demand sinks....particularly for wind.
If you ever drive by the large wind farms, at any given time you may notice that only 50% of the turbines are spinning. This is because there is only enough demand at that time for X amount of electricity, so they put the brakes on the unneeded ones.
If they have mining equipment, it makes more sense to just always run the turbines and power up/down the miners to sink excess electricity. Its literally free money if the wind is blowing and demand isn't taking the full amount....
I think there is some amount of that happening. To that user, they don't care really about economics of mining since the question is: Do you want $0 or >$0?
1529 sats \ 20 replies \ @Scoresby 12 Sep \ parent \ on: Peter Wuille post about dropping OP_RETURN limit bitcoin
yeah, bitcoin can be abused, so we legalize the abuse
policy is poorly compared to legality. If you want to make "the trade" illegal, you need to make such transactions invalid. Changing policy is akin to saying "we don't want people to do this, but we will still accept it when it's in a block"
This is what I don't get about what I believe is your argument: Bitcoin is a permissionless network. Run any code you like. Why do you care so much what Core changes when it comes to policy? Just run Knots. Problem solved as far as you are concerned.
Now show the price of storage in BTC terms! Running a node gets exponentially cheaper if you invested your BTC into your node instead of saving in fiat for node upgrades.
Lightning nodes, especially, can benefit from more expensive hardware like ECC RAM, RAID volumes, UPS, dual uplinks, etc.
The marginal new node is a net burden to the network. Unless it is actively listening for inbound connections and "seeding" blocks to peers, most nodes are just "leeching". To seed blocks, you need public IP and lots of bandwidth. Arguably, bandwidth is the "scarce commodity" which sets the floor price for a node. Many ISPs will throttle you after 1TB of usage in a single billing period.
1475 sats \ 10 replies \ @optimism 12 Sep \ parent \ on: Peter Wuille post about dropping OP_RETURN limit bitcoin
If you disagree with every single point of someone that has literally written more than half of the critical code that you use also when you run Knots, does that make it nonsense?