Andrew Sayman @gnu_lorien@ourislandgeorgia.net
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Joined May 2020
Apparently for Windows 11 Microsoft wants to me actively turn on TPM on my processor. I'm not sure what has to happen in this life for me to intentionally turn on that particular DRM engine, but it hasn't happened yet.
I just heard the Senate described as structurally "affirmative action for rural white people." Need to remember that totally apt description.
Is this really it? Is this really the last episode of The Expanse ever? I almost don't want to watch it so it never has to end.
Good summary of McCarthy's receding into lies to cover a twice-impeached former President.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/12/new-york-high-schools-walkout-cororonavirus/
"New York City high school students stage walkout, citing inadequate covid measures"
Remember as they try to convince you to vote for them because of how badly the pandemic is going: The Republican party has not spent one single day taking this pandemic seriously. Even as they did fast track vaccines they were so egregiously lying and diverting from the right path that they set up their own vaccine rollout to fail.
"You keep coming back to personal attacks on me that have no relevance to reality." Dr. Fauci when responding to Rand Paul.
Deflect deflect deflect! If I can make every person trying to help look like an idiot we can end the world soon!
These people obsessed with helping a virus to wipe out large swaths of the population deserve nothing but your enmity.
I have now paid off my student loans!
Wordle 204 3/6
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As an aside on all of this, I don't find the concept of NFTs to be ridiculous or anything like that. I think the hype is currently a little silly, but that's as far as any disdain goes.
The earliest form of this that I liked, but hasn't gained much traction, was LBRY.
Essentially a shared digital marketplace is the only way to solve the real problem of digital piracy: Rather than controlling access to data, which is nearly impossible, we reach consensus on permission for data. Said a different way: Currently, when I've finished pirating a show so I can watch it however the fuck I want, there's no way for me to remunerate anybody involved. Because we treat the act of hosting material for these business as a crime rather than a service I usually can't even admit that I did it.
This is one of the things that smart contract systems can help to fix. We already went ahead with paying the hosting fees, bandwidth fees, and power consumption ourselves for the data. Might as well toss some gas money to the creators so we can get more.
I decided to look more into the Polygon bridge itself. This part, by itself, doesn't feel like a scam. They've essentially created a new token type (MATIC) which is used to represent each bridged currency, so it is bidirectional in a way.
What actually seems to happen is something more like this:
On the main chain, you create a MATIC token which encodes some amount of ETH and costs gas. When you want your money back, this MATIC token is cashed in for ETH and some gas is paid.
I'm looking more into how these tokens are organized to make cash-out part work on the main chain. As I'm conceptualizing it now there must be a locked in value for the amount of ETH that MATIC can represent.
I read an article that mentioned OpenSea as the largest and most successful NFT marketplace. It's my habit when I see something like this to go search for the hallmarks of a product throwing around the word "blockchain" hoping you'll find the word synonymous with "distributed." OpenSea is luckily open about the way it's built.
On the front-page you can find a Resources tab that says something about a "Gas-free marketplace." This makes me immediately suspicious. In Ethereum gas is what you "pay" nodes to do work for you in the network. If nobody's getting paid then how is the network maintained?
The thing underlying it is something called Polygon. I'd never heard of this one. It appears to be another fork of Ethereum, but this time with the goal of bridging different blockchains together.
Reading a little into it I'm a bit suspicious of the word "bridge" here, because it appears to be uni-directional. They've set up an easy system for you to convert Ethereum into Polygon.
One of the major features listed for Polygon, however, is "sovereignty." This is explicitly meant for running private blockchains. Which means anything you do on this isn't verified by "the blockchain," just some single company's blessed nodes.
In this use-case using a cryptocurrency at all is just marketing fluff. The concept of publicly exposing a verified ledger isn't interesting or novel. It was the act of distributing the verification of this chain that's novel to cryptocurrencies.
Because of this polygon, as it's advertised by OpenSea, seems like a scam. It's a centralized system masquerading as a decentralized one. None of the documents about being "gas-free" say anything about what you're giving up. There's an adage about this: If you're not paying, then you aren't the customer.
If you see the influence of George Soros everywhere, maybe you should take a look at the Koch Brothers who have as much money and fingers out there along with the explicit goal to influence policy.
I wonder how much Spider Man No Way Home being in theaters specifically contributed to the rise of omicron.
Doug Collins spent a huge swath of his time during the Drumpf's first impeachment hearings in the House making a variety of claims about the "clock and the calendar." His disingenuous assertion was that the Democrats were rushing things. That there needed to be more hearings, more witnesses, and more information on the record.
Doug Collins knew he was lying at the time. Every member of the House and Senate across both parties knew that he was lying at the time.
While he was making these arguments Mitch McConnell made it clear that he'd heard enough of the information and the planned defense of Drumpf was simply to ignore any indicting information and vote to acquit.
Republicans like to retell stories about themselves to try to paper over their overt lies and general disdain for electoral freedom. Don't give the 9th back to them. It was our fault that such a corrupt, perfidious, anti-democratic loyalist was there in the first place. Don't give them another shot at it.
One of my favorite parts of Blade Runner 2049 is how they wove wild weather changes into the background of the world. One scene it was hot and rainy. The next scene it was snowing. All to be a visual sign of how climate change devastated their world.
Not sure why that's on my mind today...
I have been boosted! Yesterday my arm was a little sore. Overall though no big sickness.
I have been enhanced. Begone omicron.
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Joined May 2020
