Wait… We don’t have trains and boats already?

Whilst I cannot argue against the environmental damage done by PoW, it is simultaneously (when done right) a far more fair and inclusive way of reaching consensus than PoS.

I don’t really think so. PoW is actually a PoS in disguise: it just shows how much GPU/ASIC money and electricity you are ready to invest. PoS just skips the electricity consumption by asking the just show the money directly. Richer participant using their money to get a bigger share will actually get a similar one under both systems. And unless we have a reliable way to uniquely identify people (a holy grail against sybil attacks) I think they are going to remain similar.

we should instead ask ourselves if that would be quite as much of a concern if people felt like they were truly getting value for their tax money 🤔

I know some of these people. They don’t see it as a fair exchange, they see it as “if I can get away with it, then it is your fault for not preventing me”. Offer them more service without forcing them to pay, they think they are winning more and you are a loser. They are not in a cooperative mode.

About DAO, the thing is that it is promising in theory, but I feel that in practice it breaks down at many simple obstacles and technicalities. It works when you have managed to fully dematerialize your cashflow from final clients to individual contributors. But you still need some interface with a regular banking system at one point, you need points of trust and you need the majority of people along your chain to not be malicious. Under these conditions, usually a DAO is not even needed.

Though one day once a threshold in usability and effectiveness is crossed, I can imagine a DAO behemoth taking almost overnight over the world.

“Model alignment seems like an easier problem than corporate alignment” :-)

I have been dreaming about the AI era for 20+ years and I must say that we are currently in one of the most positive timeline I could hope for. Yes, we talk a lot about the companies because clueless journalism has a hard time measuring innovation but prefers to look at market cap, but for once the open source community in the field is incredibly active and reactive and we have reached a point where several big companies have understood that they can’t keep the pace up if they don’t play the openness game.

Yes and cryptocurrencies are here to stay too (though we should move away from proof-of-work because of the environmental impact) but I am not sure if utopians should support them because of the use they have in the third world or fight them because of the mostly negative aspect they have in the rich countries. Unless you go full-anarchist with no state whatsoever, you want taxes to be paid and tax evasion becomes really easy with crypto.

To be honest, I am kind of hopeful of DAOs because I feel there is no good tool for small international businesses, and staying non-profit is too often very limiting. The ability to have a working coop where no one can rip each other and without having to rely on a court is really enticing. I think it is very limited in its potential applications though but I’d like that model to grow. Unfortunately, if it grows it will go through the whole ICO-scam bubble again…

I am biased as I work in AI but the reason I do so is because I think a lot of its applications are hugely beneficial, the last part talks about AI as enablers of democracy but the other paragraphs are essential to see how we keep it in control.

I usually don’t engage in discussions about the blockchain because 99% of the time it is about the promotion of a scam. I used to like these tech that enable some new kind of decentralization but I totally moved away from them when I realized that bitcoin’s main usage now is to dodge taxes and international sanctions.

In general I am interested in cryptoanarchism (from which blockchains and DAO come from) without really being a proponent of it: I feel like it is a solution looking for a problem. But then, I live in a relatively free country where I can open easily a bank account, make a non profit, associate with who I want. The whole cryptoanarchism thing shines more in cases where you consider governments to be an enemy but this is a double edged sword: going this way means you don’t mind enabling criminal groups in the process.

When I talk about it to people from more authoritarian countries or from countries where inflation is very high, their perspective in a parallel system is different.

I don’t see a place for them in a functional, cooperative society. They can be useful but to me, their existence is the indication of a problem. In an utopia, they can be useful as a backup system: “we can always revert to a cryptocurrency if you fuck up your currency policy” but ideally we should do better than them.

Good to know, thanks!

Ah that must be it sorry. I thought they had decorelated phone numbers and IDs

Groups have an encryption key that I guess you receive from other members upon joining.

Spaces is an underused feature that I hope see gain more traction! It makes Matrix a credible competitor to Slack and Discord

Not really, have used it for years like that. But you need to set it up initially on your phone. The newish feature (less than a year) is that I think they do not require a phone number to set up a new account.

Show me the calculation then. To me it is clear that we are heading towards 100% renewables now that batteries have reached prices that makes intermittence a solvable problem.

To me the switch to renewable, on the contrary, will remove many scarcity constraints from energy production. We will have peak production times where energy will have a negative cost. This will radically change the way we think about energy consumption.

There’s no way you can use the same amount of energy with solar and wind as you can with fossil fuels and nuclear.

Renewables keep reaching “impossible” milestones. Recently in many places, including places in the US, renewables surpass coal so to create an “impossible” milestone you need to separate wind and solar from other renewables and lump together fossils and nuclear (which is not a problematic source for the climate)

I mean, can you imagine telling people 15 years ago that even Texas, despite its toxic mentality of coupling fossil fuels and masculinity would produce more wind energy than coal energy by 2024? The trend is clear, the impossible thresholds are met one after the other and without electricity production dropping.

In the context of meeting the targets, I see little way to invest time in a more efficient way than switching to renewables. Changing mentality takes a magnitude more time and effort. I still think it is a worthwhile endeavor, but if we wait for that transition we will have destroyed most of the earth by then.

Space may not be completely renewable, some is lost

??? Square meters are square meters.

or the energy to remediate the space for use could be higher than the energy/utility we could gain from it.

In what scenario do you see the energy to recover a solar power plant’s space being higher than the energy gained from it?

I guess by “time” you mean “labor”. This is the first time I see this mentioned as a non-renewable resource.

How is “space” not renewable/reusable? You can destroy solar panels and put something else on its place.

All the materials used are abundant and in enough availability to multiply several times our current capacities, and as you point out, may even become reusable/recyclable at one point if it ever become economically profitable to do so. Or even before if we so desire.

Not when solar is generated. Creating and maintaining infrastructure, and using space for infrastructure.

So, what do you think gets exhausted when we are doing this?

What do you think gets exhausted when we generate solar energy?

The very point of renewables is to not consume resources to generate energy, but merely when installing capacities.

And our current problem is not of unmet needs, it is of climate damage done by fossil fuels. Climate-wise, the planet would be better off if humans used 10x more energy in a sustainable way rather than using half as much without changing their energy mix.

Renewable and abundant is what we are going full speed towards. No need to mention infinity but we will clearly end up with more renewable energy production than fossil energy we are using now. Renewables are going to actually end scarcity of energy.

There’s a difference between “renewable and abundant” and “infinite”.

The amount of energy required to heat bath water is not infinite.

More solar panels aren’t going to change that.

Well yes it will. That’s the whole point. To get out of fossil fuels. You get out of it by replacing things that require fossil fuels by renewable ones. You don’t get out of it by merely using less of it.

That’s the mentality I dont get.

Solarpunk is not about switching to a scrappy medieval lifestyle, it is about building a sustainable comfortable future.

Why do so many people always assume that energy uses are necessarily unsustainable or scarce? It is the first part of “SOLARpunk”. You can have renewable and abundant energy.

That’s really interesting! It shows which communities share users. I am part of jlai.lu, a french-speaking community that is relatively isolated by also slrpnk.net that seems very spread out!

Would it make sense to compute the standard deviation of each instance’s communities? It would give an idea of which are islands and which are more extended. Not sure if it makes sense to compute it more on 2 dimensions or on the original 21934 though.

It was a Mexican who taught me to be careful with the word “American”

Most Europeans will accept that label, most Asians too. Countries like Russia or Turkey who are in-between are exceptions.