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We have reached the “severed fingers and abductions” stage of the crypto revolution - Ars Technica

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  • What knowing someone rich in an untraceable currency does to a greedy ass criminal .

    If you are rich, or at least well-off, SHUT UP. Conventional currencies already cause this, imagine untraceable currencies like crypto is.

  • As much as I dislike crypto, this is not a crypto fail story, even though the article paints it like that a few times (or at least the tone implies).

    No one should have their finger servered because of other people's greediness.

    These are the occasions I wish death penalty was a thing, especially for those cases where the idiots have been caught in the act - there are better things to do with my tax money than making sure they have a place to live in and some nice good meals to go with it.

    The death penalty doesn't work at all because the state serves capital (among other reasons). The worst offenders are never punished.

    If you want the death penalty, there are far worse crimes than this. Just look at the genocide of Palestinians. Those murderers are invited to dinner with presidents.

  • Sure, you can call it that and yeah, it might make some people think more before being in favour of it just because it doesn't sound as bad.

    But I disagree with the first part, plenty deserve to be killed, always had and always will.

    In theory death penalty is exactly that - people justly decide that someone harms society too much and they don't want that person in society.

    (again, note that I don't think it should be implemented in real world because of how easily corruptible people are)

    No. Murder is murder. There is no rationalising one's way around it. There is no acceptable context for killing someone other than immediate self-defence, which is not the case when discussing things in terms of justice systems.

    Killing is never justice.

  • No. Murder is murder. There is no rationalising one's way around it. There is no acceptable context for killing someone other than immediate self-defence, which is not the case when discussing things in terms of justice systems.

    Killing is never justice.

    There is no acceptable context for killing someone other than immediate self-defence

    But you know he's gonna kill a hundred people next week. Starve ten thousands people to death over the next six months. Start world war 3, and cause the death of millions of people. Those people people have no recourse to self defence, but you could defend them, right now.

  • There is no acceptable context for killing someone other than immediate self-defence

    But you know he's gonna kill a hundred people next week. Starve ten thousands people to death over the next six months. Start world war 3, and cause the death of millions of people. Those people people have no recourse to self defence, but you could defend them, right now.

    Again, this is not immediate self-defence, this is something else entirely: this type of situation demands systemic change.

    As a Romanian, our Revolution ended the instant the people took back control of this nation and Ceaușescu had no more power (it was obvious, because literally nobody was taking orders from him at that point). Then they shot him. Then they shot his wife. That's the point when the Revolution just turned into mob murder.

    In this case, it is the people's duty to protect their collective interests, yes, but killing still isn't justified. You remove them from authority then send them on their merry way to live out their standards alone, far from the rest of us.

    Friggin' children know this already, if someone doesn't play nice, you stop playing with them. Why the hell are we still debating the ""virtues"" of murder?!

  • Isn't being jailed forever also an "easy way out"? I'm sure there are people on this planet who are not in jail, but, because of too little money or other circumstances, have less and get treated worse than people in jail.

    Also, if being alive really is hell to you, you might want to do something about this.

    [edit]

    It seems this has been unclear. By "do something about this" I meant speaking about the problem or therapy or the like. Yes, life sucks some times, but if being alive is hell for you, you got a problem to fix.

    I can't think of anything humane that is worse than being imprisoned, even if you are treated well. Though I guess if you don't know of anything better anyway then maybe its different.

    At least writing this made me feel better, no need to read or reply if you dont want to. I don't mean to dump all this on you, but I cant think of sensible place for it elsewhere. I'm not sure if its even good idea to post this but I want to hear someone else's thoughts about it for chance, be it you or someone else who happens to see this crazy wall of text.

    If i could at least do something about things, it would be so bad but there is nothing I can do, only endure. Talking about it helps a bit, but it doesnt fix the problem. And by hell i mean slow erosion of everything until I have nothing left, not horrible suffering constantly. Its also not few big things but tons of smaller things that together make a mountain. Even if you fix one thing it doesnt remove the mountain and many things on it are things that can't even be fixed by yourself. If i could at least work towards those things they wouldnt feel bad.

    I have also tried looking for help, but healthcare and especially mental healthcare is badly neglected in finland. If you can get treatment then its ok quality, but the thing is you can't because there is queue that is probably years long. It didnt even used to be like this, but our current government sees anyone who isnt rich as scum and so they cut funding to basic things while giving tax cuts to the rich. They even cut funding from programs and institutions that help people find work, so unemployement has skyrocketed too.

    I guess this world feels like hell because so many things just fit into the concept for me. It doesnt feel like that all the time, if it did i would likely just kill myself or go insane and thus escape the suffering. Even if i want to kill myself I know I cant and shouldnt due to many reasons.

    I can't stop caring about important things and i feel like if I seriously try its like mutilating my soul or making myself into something I hate so I cant escape that way either. Also the way I am is also making me suffer, i think. Intelligent enough to see the problems but just stupid enough to not being able to do anything about them but not enough to try anyway.

    I can't do anything about those things because its like society itself has been structured in such way you can't affect anything by following the rules and if you try it by not following the rules it doesn't work either and just makes things worse. Best I could do is find someone else trying to do something and try support them, but I can't find anyone and dont know where to look.
    I can't even tell if its me who is crazy for caring or everyone else for not wanting to care about anything. I know I can't fix world's problems but doing at least something towards fixing them would be enough for me but I cant do anything alone that feels meaningful enough.

    I know my problems aren't even that bad especially compared to many other people. I also know some are my own fault, be it either mistakes or just not putting in enough effort. I dont really even know why i cant find the energy and motivation for many things or how to improve that.

    I didnt want to go into specifics so there are a lot of other things not mentioned

    I have tried to improve things like starting to go to gym, sitting less on computer and going to different groups to be more social, so maybe that will start helping. I also really should try to look for ways how to help other people since good way to help yourself is to help someone else.

    But ultimately even all that feels like just enduring by making oneself feel better about things.

    I have written similar things before and just deleted the whole thing. I guess I can just delete it later if it turns out to be bad idea. I just dont want to be silent about it all again.
    Its also going way off topic from the main thread, but at least I enjoy reading other's off topic conversations here so hopefully its not that bad thing.

  • Why only the crypto rich? Any rich person can just buy crypto at an exchange at this point.

  • Why only the crypto rich? Any rich person can just buy crypto at an exchange at this point.

    Those people don’t want crypto or they would do just that

  • Those people don’t want crypto or they would do just that

    Kidnappers don't want crypto? I thought the hard part about kidnapping was getting the money without getting caught.

  • Kidnappers don't want crypto? I thought the hard part about kidnapping was getting the money without getting caught.

    Yeah, crypto is the farthest thing from a solution to that problem.

  • Yeah, crypto is the farthest thing from a solution to that problem.

    Why do you think that?

  • Why do you think that?

    It's extremely traceable. There is a literal public ledger if every single transaction.

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    The topic is more nuanced, all the logs indicate email/password combos that were compromised. While it is possible this is due to a malware infection, it could be something as simple as a phishing website. In this case, credentials are entered but no "malware" was installed. The point being it doesn't look great that someone has ANY compromises... But again, anyone who's used the Internet a bit has some compromised. For example, in a password manager (especially the one on iPhone), you'll often be notified of all your potentially compromised accounts. [image: 7a5e8350-e47e-4d67-b096-e6e470ec7050.jpeg]
  • Things at Tesla are worse than they appear

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    halcyon@discuss.tchncs.deH
    [image: a4f3b70f-db20-4c1d-b737-611548cf3104.jpeg]
  • CrowdStrike Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

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    This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/
  • Instacart CEO Fidji Simo is joining OpenAI as CEO of Applications

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    paraphrand@lemmy.worldP
    overseeing product development for Facebook Video So she’s the one who oversaw the misleading Facebook Video numbers that destroyed a whole swath of websites?
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    100% agreed. Here's a relevant Louis Rossmann video where a US Senator (Ron Wyden) officially asked the FTC to look into issues like this. I sincerely hope something comes out of this.
  • Are We All Becoming More Hostile Online?

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    Back in the day I just assumed everyone was lying. Or trying to get people worked up, and we called them trolls. Learning how to ignore the trolls, and not having trust for strangers on the internet, coupled with the ability to basically not care what random people said is a lost art. Somehow people forgot to give other the people this memo, including the "you don't fucking join social networks as your self". Anonymity makes this all work. Eternal September newbies just didn't get it.
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    "Extra Verification steps" I know how large social media companies operate. This is all about increasing the value of Reddit users to advertisers. The goal is to have a more accurate user database to sell them. Zuckerberg literally brags to corporations about how good their data is on users: https://www.facebook.com/business/ads/performance-marketing Here, Zuckerberg tells corporations that Instagram can easily manipulate users into purchasing shit: https://www.facebook.com/business/instagram/instagram-reels Always be wary of anything available for free. There are some quality exceptions (CBC, VLC, The Guardian, Linux, PBS, Wikipedia, Lemmy, ProPublica) but, by and large, "free" means they don't care about you. You are just a commodity that they sell. Facebook, Google, X, Reddit, Instagram... Their goal is keep people hooked to their smartphone by giving them regular small dopamine hits (likes, upvotes) followed by a small breaks with outrageous content/emotional content. Keep them hooked, gather their data, and sell them ads. The people who know that best are former top executives : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/business/addictive-technology.html https://www.today.com/parents/teens/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-rcna15256
  • Microsoft's AI Secretly Copying All Your Private Messages

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    Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation. Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process. Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition. Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot. Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine. Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image. Telemetry refers to data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution. MS = Microsoft OSS = Open Source Software Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control. Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows. Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.) Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry