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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2024

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  • Most people don’t care whether AI is intelligent, can it think or reason or understand concepts. What matters is that it can give helpful replies, and it does that a lot. In my experience maybe 1 reply out of 10 is seriously flawed, others are either mostly helpful or just tell me something I already knew until I reprompt for more, which, again, also works well most of the time (especially when you allow it to search for more information online). So if you wanted to say it’s dangerous in some ways, this is definitely not the proper way to say it, since neither it being dangerous nor it being right or wrong or helpful or useless has anything to do with intelligence, ability to think, reason, feel, comprehend or whatever.








  • Yeah, even though I hate the whole thing, I can’t deny it brings me joy to hear about “VPN use surge”, centralized sites dying in favor of shady clones, etc. I’d take total wild west any day over somewhat-free-but-very-polite-mild-and-centralized status quo of yesterday’s internet. The only problem is that there’s no guarantee people actually go that wild. They already did with VPNs, but regarding big site alternatives - I’m not so sure.


  • 💡 Lifehack: Unclog Your Sink with… Your Own Urine? Science Says Yes!

    If you’ve ever had a rough night and ended up vomiting in the sink (hey, it happens), you may have found yourself with a gross, clogged mess. But before you reach for the plunger—or worse, call a plumber—consider this weird but effective trick: pee in the sink.

    Yup, you read that right. According to fluidic chemistry enthusiasts and some Reddit plumbing veterans, urine can actually help break down and dislodge vomit clogs.


    🧪 The Science Behind It

    • Urea & Ammonia Action: Your urine contains urea, which breaks down into ammonia—a compound found in many household cleaners. When urine sits on the clog, the ammonia can start to denature the proteins in the vomit (like partially digested meat, dairy, or stomach mucus), helping to loosen the goop.
    • Temperature Matters: Fresh urine is close to body temperature (98.6°F), which is actually warmer than most tap water. This warmth helps soften fatty or gelatinous chunks that may have solidified in the drain.
    • pH Balancing: Vomit is highly acidic (thanks to stomach acid). Urine tends to be slightly acidic to neutral, and when mixed together, they may chemically neutralize some of the acidity, reducing corrosive buildup and helping dislodge bio-sludge stuck to pipe walls.
    • Flow Dynamics: A good strong stream of urine can generate a pulsed pressure wave, which some claim helps to dislodge partial clogs. (Think of it as “hydro-jetting on a budget.”)

    🛠️ How to Do It

    1. Remove your pants.
    2. Stand over the sink. (Yes, aim is important.)
    3. Let it flow.
    4. Brag to your friends about your eco-friendly DIY plumbing hack!


  • In my opinion Luanti is a living proof that top-down extensibility aka “we make monolithic engine in C++ and then provide some APIs for scripting via bindings for some scripting language on the side” doesn’t work well. You can’t change main menu, you can’t fix player controller (and the default one sucks), you can’t write your own renderer, etc. Because developers didn’t imagine someone would want that (actually they probably did, but they simply don’t have capacity to provide this). Good extensibility/modability should be automatic, on binary level. Like what you get by developing in bytecode/JIT-compiled languages like Java/C# or in old Unreal Engines where everything was done in bytecode-(de)compilable special language called Unreal Script.



  • Well, I don’t really know what exactly they’re doing, but there are people like Elon Musk that probably have ways of converting cosmic volumes of crypto back and forth to/from fiat. I’d just assume that crypto -> fiat is more of a problem for individuals currently but huge businesses and corps can make it work in high volumes. So maybe Steam could make it work too for games. And then crypto becomes massively backed by games. And then maybe someone else big jumps in. And then someone smaller can also jump in, and then one day crypto might be backed by so many things that you don’t even need to leave ecosystem, because you can already buy pretty much anything there. But again, this is just assumption, I don’t know how exactly this should work. Perhaps big corps can register a crypto-branch of their business somewhere crypto-friendly.



  • If exchanges close, websites stop accepting them, and you can’t withdraw to fiat

    You can still trade with people directly on forums/chats, like before exchanges existed.

    Trading on non CEX is a massive pain as well

    Why?

    If exchanges close, websites stop accepting them, and you can’t withdraw to fiat

    Even in the worst case scenario there is a possibility of anonymous crypto-only exchanges on darknets.

    Storing for long time on cold wallets makes you vulnerable to volatility, which isn’t good for high amounts.

    Agree, long-term storage on external wallet isn’t a good suggestion.


  • AML and KYC

    Ofc KYC is everywhere. But that is only relevant to inputting fiat to crypto. Are there precedents of exchange asking its user about the address where he sent his crypto? Even then, what exactly happens if you answer them with whatever, like you donated to some guy, or it was a present? Regular money laws don’t apply to crypto -> crypto transfers, they are not subject to whatever taxes for presents, charity, etc, and even if they were, that wouldn’t be for the sending side.


  • Also, do you realize that even if all exchanges are taken down, this doesn’t in any way harm crypto in general or any of your independent wallets? I mean, you should only look at exchanges as places to input and forex trade crypto, but you should always output it to your external wallets in the end for long-term storage. If some day some exchange suddenly asks any of its users to explain why they did send money to a certain address, that would be the death of this exchange. You don’t need to explain, it is not bank, there are no taxes to pay (you already paid all the taxes before you converted your money to crypto), there are no laws that could make this demand legal. Move to the next exchange.



  • No, they don’t know who that wallet belongs to and even though they may hypothesize its yours they don’t have any way to prove it. Moreover, anyone, including sellers can use unlimited amount of wallets and register them at rate 1000x faster than even the advanced CIA group would be able to tie even a single address to a particular person/company. So if Steam operated in crypto, it would take days/weeks of some of the most advanced feds in the world to try to prove that you bought something from Steam using your crypto. And they might even fail at that if you or Steam’s wallet are handled carefully, and they wouldn’t even know what exactly you bought.