Fair enough, thank you for your time.

Can you seriously not imagine how a corporation could benefit from generative AI, or are you just being obstinate and saying it’s useless because you think it’s unethical and you hope that by saying it’s useless that you can effectively manifest that?

Because there are plenty of use-cases for generative AI. None of them have to be good, or even products. Your phone machine example is a good one - it’s not a product, really, it’s taking the role of a human to fulfil some obligation, or to intentionally make it harder for people to add to the company’s support burden.

I think there are some useful applications for generative AI, but I do agree that the incarnations we have are unethical. And again, I really don’t think that simply telling people that they’re bad people for using it is going to win them over to your side.

Yeah, totally - I think it’s designed to be hard to understand, both tech stuff and financial stuff is often made intentionally confusing, in my opinion. It’s not dissimilar to the bitcoin mixers, but it’s still much stronger - the system is automated, you can’t mess it up as a user, you’re less reliant on a single-point-of-trust, and so on.

You might be on to something about quiet periods - I don’t really have the knowledge to say either way. There might be a bit of stuff that goes on in the background for wallets even if they’re not actively conducting “real” transactions. But, I don’t know, really.

From what I understand, which honestly, isn’t a lot - the method used to anonymize transactions and balances is more like obfuscation than anything else. The system uses various techniques to fuzz up the data in such a way that it becomes impossible to trace.

It’s a bit like if you wanted to send a bank transfer for £200 but anonymize it somewhat, you could transfer that money around between a bunch of other bank accounts, before sending it on to the final source. And if multiple people are doing the same thing, it becomes essentially impossible to determine where the money entered and left.

The problem is though that such systems aren’t true encryption in the same way that RSA is, for example - the data isn’t unreadable, and it’s not impossible to reverse, it’s just that there’s so much junk data and it’s such a mess that it makes the true transactions difficult to identify and the end user has extremely strong plausible deniability. However, it’s likely just a matter of time before some state actor finds a vulnerability in the technique that allows them to trace transactions - if they haven’t already done so.

I’m back to pirating all of my music. I will buy CDs or pay for downloads for artists that I really like or smaller artists, but I am fucking through with the streaming platforms. They just enshittify more and more.

I’m disabled - walking and standing are very difficult and painful for me - leaving the shopping cart as near as possible to the disabled bay without it being an obstruction is the right thing to do. You can immediately get the support of something to lean on as soon as possible after leaving the car.

Just something to consider. I now submit to your judgment for your death penalty :D

Cryptocurrency has basically many of the same problems as traditional banks, it’s just a matter of who is controlling it. Monero is slightly different from most, because it is much more anonymous, but it’s really only a matter of time before even that advantage is lost.

There is no substitute for physical currency if you want privacy and anonymity.

I think that you’re right, with the way that our society is structured, it is unethical. It’s essentially the world’s most advanced plagiarism tool.

However, being realistic, even if no private individual ever used it, it would still exist and would be used by corporations for profit maximising.

In my opinion, telling people that they’re bad people for using something which is made unethically isn’t really helpful. For example, smartphones aren’t made ethically, but the way to get that to change isn’t to change consumer habits - because we know that just doesn’t work - it’s to get organised, as a collective working class, and take action into our own hands.

Internet search, e.g. Google, is now functionally almost completely useless. I use ChatGPT basically as a Google replacement.

I will still search for stuff - I use Kagi - but give up after half a dozen results if none of them are relevant and go to ChatGPT instead. Often, ChatGPT is more helpful. But sometimes it just makes a bunch of nonsense up.

ChatGPT is great for when you need to find something where you kind of know at least the vague shape of what you’re expecting and you have enough expertise to filter out any of the lies it makes up.