Noone is expecting you to understand crypto, but I hear this about modern technology in general all the time and I just don’t buy it. It’s only brain-melting if you’ve spent your entire life being deeply incurious. There are 80-90 year olds who understand this shit just fine because they bothered to keep up.
Apparently I’m an elder.
The shifts in tech were easy.
It’s the repeated economic punishment, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and political dive bomb this country has put us through that’s been tough.
I thought this was a Canadian site? You must be usaian
elders
1990
I remember being happy to watch whatever came on one of the four channels that your TV could pick up with a rabbit ear antenna.
I don’t expect them to understand crypto. No one expects them to understand crypto.
I expect them to understand FUCKING FASCISM.
Yeah.
We can move on to “complicated” things like crypto after we’ve made sure people understand basic things like FUCKING FASCISM.
Priorities.
It’s not “brain melting”. Even watching the internet go from “this is super neat, and way cool” (For nerds) to “Well, it’s ALL going through enshittification now” wasn’t “brain melting”, it’s just what happens under capitalism.
Going from seeing nothing but possibilities when I heard about some new device or software coming out to dreading what they are going to remove or break has been one of the most depressing parts about my life.
He’ll, I was looking to replace my 10 year old mouse last weekend and couldn’t find one that was equivalent or better. I even asked people who were more into computer shit than me and I felt like I was taking crazy pills reading their responses. I ended up just fixing the problem myself rather than replacing it.
I have been looking for just the right mouse for ages and the market for mouses (mice?) is terrible. I’ve been looking for a 5 button mouse that supports bluetooth (reliability) and I am actually so frustrated with what the options are. They are either massively over engineered, huge, expensive paper weights or cheap, super light, cheap junk I can crush with my weak feminine hands. I have ranged from top of the line hundred dollar gaming one to junky light weight 10 dollar ones and I am still looking. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Mine is a Logitech G602. To replace it I need something with at least 6 extra buttons (I actually use 2 more but I can compromise on those functions), it needed to be wireless, and take regular batteries (I don’t want to be stuck replacing it or having to use it wired when the built in one wears out). I wouldn’t have thought that would be asking for much but nothing lined up at all. And the shit people were recommending weren’t even close. Like, the point is I still want to be able to do what I’m doing now. Not just buy an expensive mouse you swallowed the marketing for…
G602
AH I have that one too, loved it for years but then the click went out and it started double clicking randomly. I took it apart to try and fix it and no luck, its in my dead mouse drawer along with 2 G302s, the MK mouse, a M240, several Microsoft mice, a Naga, Death Adder and 5 cheap no name mice. They aren’t all actually dead, just dead to me.
I ended up replacing it with the G502, which is not an upgrade or even a side grade but it works for what I need it to do for now. For my laptop I am using a cheap no name bluetooth mouse for now. It’s way too light and disconnects randomly, but it has bluetooth and 5 buttons with is the minimum count I need.
I really like my Logitech mx master but I like heavy beefy mice
Hmm, I might try the MX Anywhere. I have a M240, I like the size and weight and the Bluetooth connectivity, but it only has 3 buttons, that got old real quick. Look like they don’t even sell that one anymore.
Us millennials basically had the internet to ourselves for like 15 years.
The only reason we’re still on it is chasing that high even though it’s gone
What? I’ve been on it since the early 1990s ….
Nobody is expected to understand crypto. Same with the stock market and generally the economy. If it was simple and see thru you couldn’t run this many scams.
Same with the stock market and generally the economy.
Okay, you can tap the breaks on that one. There’s a book from 1949 called “The Intelligent Investor” that’s been the benchmark for savvy stock market analysis for generations. Hardly the only one (although a lot of the newer stuff is just variations on the core themes). Understanding price-to-earnings, market share, debt-to-asset ratios, and marginal return gets you a long way towards consistent middle-of-the-road long term safe returns.
Same with The Economy. Get a copy of Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century and you will have a firm grasp of macro-economic models and trends by the end of it. You’ll get a core understanding of the difference between short-term investment returns and long term value creation. You’ll get an idea for the broad reasoning behind different public policies and their impact on the broad growth and development trends seen over the last 500 years.
There’s no need to mystify markets or economic systems. In the same way that a modern physician has a generally firm grasp of the human body (without knowing how every single cell is going to behave or every single genetic variant of human is going to respond to a given treatment), a modern business analyst has a generally firm grasp of their industrial or market focus.
Even crypto is something people can broadly understand as a modern iteration of a privatized experiment in currency manipulation. The thing about crypto is akin to understanding how a casino works. Analyzing the system doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to profit from it. Its like analyzing a grizzly bear with a plan to engage it in a boxing match. The best analysts will tell you “You’re going to get horrible mauled if you interact with this thing, stay away.”
If it was simple and see thru you couldn’t run this many scams.
The scams aren’t a product of (lack of) transparency so much as they are the result of misinformation and market manipulation.
You’ve got a guy in a big wagon with a bullhorn selling “Better Than Aspirin!” for $10/pill right outside a pharmacy selling aspirin for $3/bottle in a bottom shelf at the back of the store. The moral of this isn’t “Nobody will ever understand pharmaceuticals”. It is that there’s is a great deal of money in capturing people’s attention and then lying to them.
In the same way that a modern physician has a generally firm grasp of the human body (without knowing how every single cell is going to behave or every single genetic variant of human is going to respond to a given treatment)
But the cells existed before us and we are simply trying to understand them.
We created the economic system and now we make conflicting theories about how it behaves.
Now people wait in line for Pokemon cards. 🤔
I understand crypto… and it is utter shit.
People used to enjoy anime and MST3k episodes on fifth generation VHS copies. Crypto is worse than that.
People used to enjoy anime and MST3k episodes on fifth generation VHS copies.
As a general rule, I prefer getting torrent links from friends in a Discord stream over huffing it over to a Blockbuster and hoping their single copy of “My Neighbor Totoro” isn’t checked out. You can make the case for a better brighter tech future.
Just don’t put half your paycheck into “TotoroCoin” because its trending on pump.fun
MST3K was great, and anime is good.
You know why vhs quality degraded with every generation of copy? It wasn’t an accident or a technical problem, it was deliberate.
They want to discourge people from copying their tapes, so there was a mechanism in the VCR to actually cause some drop in quality when you taped something.
This is why TV tapings of a movie would never be as good as buying/renting the same movie from a store. Even if you used a virgin tape.
No, it was really a technical issue. Analog signals are very prone to noise, and noise is cumulative. Even the best recording heads are going to pick up stray magnetic fields, and of course you get the typical cosmic ray noise hitting the recording tape and head, and then there’s noise in power lines that also contribute to the noise.
Basically, what you don’t get to hear anymore causes it: Tune an older radio to somewhere between stations. The static exists all the time. If it didn’t, it would just be no noise at all, rather than static. Same with older, analog TVs: You see snow and hear static. That’s all environmental noise, which will impact analog recording medium. Even the source side of the house gets that noise introduced. That’s what Signal-to-noise ratio means: How much signal, vs how much noise exists.
So, dupe of a dupe of a dupe… All recording noise.
It’s also quality of the tape and how we used it. You could buy a tape and use it for 2, 4, or 6 hours with a tradeoff in quality. Blank tapes were rather expensive, so we all used 6 hours and then copied from there.
Commercially produced VHS tapes also tended to be higher quality than blank tapes, unless you went out of your way to buy the quality ones.
And it still happens even with digital technology. If you, say, rotate a .jpg file a few thousand times, the image will start to degrade as it doesn’t perfectly copy over everything and the very slight losses start to add up.
Somewhat different issue there. JPEG compression is lossy. It doesn’t happen on a BMP. Though you can probably link the two up with underlying information theory.
However the original quality was so shit you don’t really notice.
Prior to true HD home media we really didn’t know any better. I grew up in Dubai and the Disney Aladdin film was actually banned there, but not before some pirated copies came out. That pirated tape was really poor quality but I didn’t notice or care. Seeing the 1080p, however, totally blew my mind.
Goddamn I’m not that elder! But also true
1990 time for Guru
i remember standing in line for dvds. we were hacking regionlocked discs before nft was just a scammer’s wet dream. we were moulded by early modern technology.
Crypto? Yes, I know what a pyrimid scheme is.
Who is expecting them to understand cryptography?
A yes the RS encryption, public key, private key …
I vaguely remember
- Fuck you
- Who the fuck do you think you are?
- crypto is a fucking scam
Crypto isn’t a scam. It’s a fantastic way to protect yourself online and HTTPS has been a game changer. Crypto currency is a scam though.
