- 5 days
There’s quite a lot happening in 3d printing that is kind of life changing, and not getting any press coverage because no single obscenely wealthy person can use it to hype a pump and dump.
Weird specific stuff exists now, that never did before - like custom cases for weird sizes of batteries, and a pen-holder that looks exactly like the latest manga character to make a splash.
- 5 days
Do elaborate more on the 3D printing stuff
There’s all kinds of mechanical things that can be directly 3d printed, now - screws, and hinges and springs!
Someone invented a 3-way zipper that allows a structure to be rigid when zipped or flexible when unzipped. Supposedly we’re going to get a bunch of cool new more convenient tents and field furniture with it, soon.
Yeah 3D printing has either allowed me to print out stuff that helps around the house that I don’t necessarily want to spend money on (a basic flowerpot for example), or things that are obscenely overpriced that I can print at the fraction of the cost (a case for clarinet reeds, with some cases going for nearly 100$ for a basic plastic case with a space for a silica gel packet).
At first I picked up my printer thinking it would be useful for robotics and prototyping some cases for electronics projects. Turns out its playing a big role in me just not going out to buy stuff anymore.
I wouldn’t say all “AI” was a grift. Machine learning is a useful tool, like a hammer, it’s just not a magic genie for everything. Always has been, always will be.
Same with blockchain, albeit in a much narrower niche. I do think it’s a terrible system for a widely-used currency, though.
Same with quantum computing. It’s a niche.
The pattern is that Tech Bros inflate something narrowly interesting into a “it’s going to ascend the human race if you give us enough money” FOMO thing.
…And, currently, the next target seems to be space travel.
Again, I emphasize. Very useful in certain niches, like science. Stupendously impractical outside of them.
- 2 days
I hate how “AI” is abused in many ways. But it is a huge help for me transitioning to Linux. It’s such a time saver, plus I actually learn from it as I always ask what the commands are for and to explain them to me. Often I can then detect if it’s right or wrong and then come up with better alternatives. I’m a bit ashamed to admit this honestly.
Yeah, the shame is weird.
I’ve been playing with LLMS since 2022 or so, and the transition from being able to talk about them as something neat to the (well deserved) hate was… surreal.
I’d point to trying to use local or open weights models first, but other than that you shouldn’t be ashamed of reasonable use.
- 4 days
Most of Lemmy are idiots and poor people that hate everything. Don’t listen to most the idiots here.
- 6 days
Calling blockchain a pure grift ignores the serious enterprise-level work being done to solve real logistical problems. The technology behind NFTs isn’t just for JPEGs it’s used to create a unique and immutable digital identity for stuff like physical shipping containers and pallets as digital twins. In a global supply chain where a single shipment passes through dozens of untrusted parties like factories, freight forwarders, ports, customs, and warehouses a distributed blockchain ledger provides a single source of truth that replaces manual emails, scanned paper documents, and spreadsheets. Smart contracts can automate releases upon verified scans, directly reducing the demurrage and detention fees that cost millions of dollars. The big hurdle isn’t that the tech doesn’t work or is a grift, it’s getting competing companies to agree on common standards and invest in the infrastructure. The speculation was a sideshow, but the underlying utility for tracking physical assets across trust boundaries is a real thing
5 daysWhy do folks think quantum computing is a grift? I haven’t heard that yet.
- 5 days
The technology itself isn’t, but companies will probably abuse the word ‘quantum’ until it loses all meaning, like they have with AI.
…which is something I actually consider. It does indeed actually bother me that very few companies have actually adopted post-quantum cryptography yet. What is even the point of my VPN, for example, if there is a potential that everything is cracked 40 years down the line? NIST has already basically approved the standards. It should be an option for sensitive things, like anything to do with banking, data storage, and VPN.
Oh, I agree, it’s definitely important. But that’s sort of where the grift comes in. You mix the valid concerns with fear mongering and upcharges. I use ecc (or whatever it’s called) for my ssh keys, not RSA.
I believe ECC is also targetable by quantum computers in theory. Post-quantum cryptography is lattice-based ciphers like Kyber.
I think Fire and Stick have a long future ahead of them still. Also a big fan of Wheel and Stardew Valley.
- 4 days
I think Fire and Stick have a long future ahead of them still. Also a big fan of Wheel and Stardew Valley.
Uh…one of these is not like the others.
Are we sure
Wheelhas the long term practical staying power of the others in this list?
The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widely accessible.
- 7 days
This to me is the most exciting thing. And not just solar, but also modular nuclear power, fusion power, battery tech. The PRC is at the forefront of this green revolution.
- 6 days
AI is not a grift but it is very much a dangerous rudderless ship right now.
Quantum computing is also not a grift.
Hell I feel dirty saying this but you could argue blockchain is not a grift either.
The problem in all these things is the people not the technology.
I’d disagree about the blockchain. It doesn’t actually provide anything useful and massively wastes resources, because it requires a ton of energy doing useless calculations for a fake token that you just gamble with on the internet. Countries that ban it are immediately placed in an economic advantage because they free up tons of resources to actually go into producing real physical things and not meme coins, which is a big reason why China has largely banned Bitcoin, viewing it as a major burden on their energy infrastructure while contributing nothing real to the economy.
There are a lot of libertarian weirdos in tech who try to push certain technologies solely for ideological reasons. They will tell you how ideological superior the blockchain is for decentralizing things and thus not making you dependent on Uncle Sam. But they don’t actually provide any utility to that other than ideology.
The only non-ideological explanation I have ever received is that the blockchain is good because it makes it easier to break the law if the law is unjust. If for example you want to pay someone for something that is wrongfully made illegal to begin with, you can pay them in Bitcoin and get away with it easier.
That to me, however, is a bit of a bizarre argument. Saying that X should be legal because X can be used to break the law makes little coherent sense. Obviously, the law at that point is the problem and is what should be changed. If you have the power to influence what is legal (and thus to actually act upon the question of whether or not something should be legal), then obviously we should choose to get rid of the unjust law, not to legalize Bitcoin. If we do not have the power to influence what is legal, then the conversation is moot anyways.
NFTs were even worse, because nobody has ever made a non-ideological argument for NFTs. They are always justified based on some weird ideological belief about the sanctity of some nebulous “private property” registered on the blockchain. Laughably, blockchain technologies do not have the storage capacity to practically hold entire images, so they just held links to the images, and so many now lead to nowhere because the original servers they were registered with are down.
People often hate me for the fact that I often defend the utility and potential utility of AI and quantum technologies (even if I do agree that companies hype it and push out slop, that does not prove the technologies themselves are entirely a scam). But I have always been a critic of blockchain and the “metaverse,” because those were hypecycles which nobody could actually give me a single coherent explanation of how these things might improve human society at all in any material way.
- AnimalsDream@slrpnk.netEnglish6 days
If you agree with the basic view that any software that does not respect your rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute it, is a form of unjust power over you - then that principle becomes a convenient acid test for virtually all computer technology. Any tech that enables and enhances those rights is not a grift. Any tech that restricts those rights is a grift.
Of course there are edge-cases. Blockchain stuff is usually open-source, and yet it’s a tool that has been designed by and for the most extreme right-wing libertarian types, so while the underlying technologies could hypothetically be used for good, the forms that they’re implemented in are pretty clearly a grift. So intention and design matter too.
I’d also like to see how the Hyppocratic License shapes software over time.
Would also love to see more developments in Farm Hack, Appropriate Technology, and Open Source Ecology.
thats why I think there should be a fsf led effort to make some version of FOSS agentic AI(i know its just a marketing term).
I hate that the ability to just sit at the computer and go
Hey, can you go through the hundreds of images i have in my Downloads folder, and transfer the images in which i appear in the center to this directory, also make it so in the future any pdf with a specific header goes into this directorywill M$ exclusive feature.- AnimalsDream@slrpnk.netEnglish2 days
Yeah, if you can get over a knee-jerk hate of “ai” systems, it’s pretty evident at least some of them are here to stay. So it is necessary for there to be fully free alternatives for those.
Blockchain had potential in use cases beyond currency replacement and speculative assets. AI has actual use cases as a high quality chatbot. Instead these things were hyped and marketed as things beyond their actual capabilities.
Quantum as it is currently doesn’t seem like a grift, but is just a susceptible to being manipulated and marketed as one as soon as there’s a remotely market viable version of it.
The problem isn’t lemmings or luddites, the problem is lying capitalists hoping to sell something that doesn’t exist or isn’t stable.
What exactly are some of the use cases for an infinitely growing, append-only database built primarily so its largest users can rewrite history at will?
Is it rewritable, or is it append only? You only wrote one sentence yet still managed to contradict yourself so I suspect you have a very meager comprehension of the technology.
Go ahead and prove me wrong. Show me blockchain implementations that are immutable post append. On my end, we can talk about Bitcoin forks. We can also talk about the current state of consensus mechanisms, each of which has the explicit ability for large actors to rewrite history in their favor. Even Monero is susceptible because this is fundamental to the blockchain in any form. It’s been a huge reason why I make sure I get paid up front for any consulting I do in this space.
Only the last few blocks are “rewritable,” which is why a certain number of confirmations are a necessity. Going any further back than that, would be a completely different chain - a fork. The last of of those occurring on Bitcoin was thirteen years ago when it was still encountering growing pains due to an uptake in usage. Forks of more than a couple transactions are not a frequent, regular occurrence by any exaggeration, so for all intents and purposes of modern crypto usage, it is immutable, not "rewritable.’
If any of it is rewritable, none of it is immutable. You can’t have it both ways.
Notice I put quotes around rewritable. That’s because it’s not the correct term, and I was being charitable in engaging in your straw man argument. It’s actually a collision of timing, where two solutions are presented for the same block in a short amount of time, and until the consensus is reached by the majority, both are temporarily valid. Once consensus is reached, it’s final. There’s no going back. In that sense it is not rewritable, it is immutable. It’s just fuzzy for the first fifteen minutes which branch will resolve as the actual Blockchain in the event of near ties.
I don’t think you’re using straw man correctly.
You’re naively referring to how consensus should work while completely ignoring both the well-defined attacks I referenced and the reality of large actors in a consensus network. You don’t know what you’re talking about or you don’t understand how the theory works or you’re possibly just being obtuse. No matter what, this is pointless. Good luck.
- 7 days
As I understand, it’s normally append-only. But, with some implementations, if a malicious entity controls most of the block production, they can undo recent transactions at will.
- cynar@lemmy.worldEnglish7 days
Some resort to majority vote, in the case of disagreements. Theoretically, if someone owned/controlled over 50% of the database, they could rewrite it, and have their version seen as true.
For the few valid uses of it, that shouldn’t be a problem. It will also be reasonably detectable beforehand.
It’s not as simple as that. Each block solves the problem of the former block, so to change something five blocks back, you now need to solve six blocks prior to writing the next block, otherwise it’s not cryptographically valid. The resources required to accomplish that are not trivial, and it’s never been done. Very theoretical indeed, in the same sense you could theoretically run through a wall if all of your atoms missed all of the atoms in the wall when you should have collided.
- 7 days
Anything where a trustless system is important. The “largest users can rewrite history at will” is a critique to specific implementations, not Blockchain.
I don’t know that it is, though. Can you show me form of blockchain in the real world where this doesn’t apply? Saying large actors can’t affect a specific piece of internet technology, so far, is rather like teaching physics without friction. It’s nice and fun and easy to understand but completely ignores the reality of any implementation.
- 6 days
Well, you just don’t know. In the real world there are private blockchains between equipotent participants that don’t rely on burning the planet to function. Helpful reading: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ethical-hacking/private-blockchain/
Blockchain is a concept, can’t be owned or affected.
