Zaskoda

This sounds like a reflexive "I hate blockchain and cryptocurrency" reaction but I'll give a reply regardless.

You can't do transactions with just a database. You'd have to add a payment processor. Now things are getting wildly complex.

x402 is designed with agentic AIs in mind. AIs make mistakes. Having an immutable record that can't be tampered with is a nice layer of security.

And while I haven't worked with it personally, I understand x402 to be extremely straight forward for devs to implement.

I found that feeling again while building a game on the EVM. All of the constraints were new and different. Solidity feels somewhere between and high and low level language, not as abstracted as most popular languages today but a solid step above writing assembly.

A lot of people started building projects like mine when the EVM was newer. Some managed to get a little bit of popularity, like Dark Forest. But most were never noticed. The crypto scene has distracted everyone from the work of tinkerers and artists who just wanted to play with a new paradigm. The whole thing became increasingly toxic.

It was like one last breath of fresh cool air before the pollution of AI tools arrived on the scene. It's a bitter sweet feeling.

Every once in a while, at random times in life, I hear "I am not an atomic playboy" in my head.

I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it. One could argue that I loved it all along given that I watched it so many times... but there was a distinct moment where I let go and that's when I was able to see just how wonderful this movie really is.

So many PHP libraries are just wrappers for some other library. I think that's mostly a strength, but in this case it was clearly a weakness.

> My current mindset for this is that social media should only work augmenting my real world social life, not take what's left of it away from me.

110%

People are seeking multiple things on social media. One common one is connection. I am in Mexico dealing with family business. I am in a rural area. My Spanish skills are developing but are still weak. I can have light conversation here, but I can't deeply connect. My desire to use social media has drastically increased.

But I only want to engage with my friends. Every platform feeds me various flavors of rage bait mixed in with my friends' content. Some of my friends groups have moved to chats on other less public platforms like Discord, Signal, or Whatsapp. But that's not the same experience. And a lot of the people I like to engage with aren't moving over to those platforms.

We all thought maybe social media would evolve into something good... but it was enshitified. So maybe part of the solution here is to develop a tool that offers that connection without the whole being exploited aspect?

I once interviewed for a tech job at the Seattle times. I didn't land the job, but the interview was enlightening. I was told that the investigative reporters at the newspaper did all of the "work" of uncovering news. Subsequently, the TV broadcast station would just report on what the newspaper found. Meanwhile, the broadcast news was raking in tons more ad revenue than the newspaper.

Ever since then, I've often brainstormed of ways to remove all of the layers between the actual investigative reporter and the general public looking for a way to get as much of the revenue directly from the public into the hands of those doing to investigations and reports.

I've had ideas though nothing revolutionary enough to share here. Still, I think the overall goal would be good for literally everyone.

Oh I've been a decentralist long before anyone coined the term "Bitcoin Maximalist". I've been watching haters whine and complain the whole time. Speaking of google searches, you could have easily looked up the use of hyrdro power yourself and found that it's a common practice.

Speaking of, I just did a Google search asking if we know how much power AI is using and this was the AI response: "It is difficult to determine the exact amount of power AI is using because most leading AI companies do not disclose specific data"

It doesn't matter how much you hate Bitcoin, it's here and it's not going away. You should probably get over it.

We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:

- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information

- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups

- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings

- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged

Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.

What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.

Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible. Because that's what everyone else is doing. With Bitcoin, you now exactly what your costs are and what your yields are. There's a clear threshold, when power in an area becomes too expensive there's no reason left to mine.

AI, on the other hand, is a bet on the future - infinite gains. No matter how much power costs, it's worth it to keep using as much as possible. We can't know how much power AI uses. Unlike Bitcoin, there aren't any metrics from which to extrapolate. But we do know that AI uses more power than Bitcoin already. We just have no idea how much more.

What is the next best alternative to throw support behind? I did a very shallow search and the forks of Firefox I found don't appear to be actively maintained.