I've always been intrigued by the whole "decentralized and fixed supply" argument around Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies.
But the more I look into it, the more I wonder: if one Bitcoin can be split into 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 or even smaller fractions for transactions, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole “fixed total supply” idea?
Also, sure, cryptocurrencies are decentralized in theory and the transactions are hard to trace. But at the end of the day, anyone holding crypt is still very much under the control of governments. You can't magically escape regulations or enforcement just because the currency is "decentralized." It's an interesting tension between theory and reality that I don't think enough people talk about.
Lightning Network already uses millisatoshis. Of course they can't be settled in sub-satoshi amounts on the main chain, until there's enough interest in a fork to do so.
The fixed supply describes the total sum of units that have been issued, and that are intended to be issued in the future - it doesn't relate to the divisibility of those units.
Maybe we could try asking Claude to generate code using <table>, <tr>, <td> for layout instead of relying on div + CSS. Feels like it could simplify things a lot.
Would this actually work, or am I missing something?
I think it probably gets you 80% but the last 20% of pixel perfection seems to evade Claude. But I'm pretty new to writing prompts so if you can nail it let me know and I'll link you in the post.
If the goal is to fix the behavior instead of just documenting it, the penalties need to escalate with repeat violations. The first mismatch can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth inspection still shows the same pattern, the fine shouldn't be the same $5k: it should jump sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the profit from letting it continue.
Right now the incentive structure is backwards. As long as the downside is fixed and small, large retailers will keep treating it as business-as-usual. A tiered system tied to repeated violations would at least push them toward actually fixing the issue, instead of just shrugging it off every time they get caught.
If the goal is to fix student grades instead of just documenting it, the points counted off need to escalate with repeated incorrect answers. The first incorrect answer can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth quiz still shows the same incorrect answers, the grade shouldn't be the same C; it should decline sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the points from letting it continue.
Same, but I only watch Youtube through MPV (which also has Sponsorblock plugins). When I need to actually browse Youtube I use an Invidious instance. I don't even remember the last time I intentionally watched a video on the Youtube website proper.
I use this combination on my personal laptop, but on my work machine I need to use Edge browser. For some reason, Edge still supports the uBlock Origin extension, so I get to avoid ads on my work laptop too.
Both are superfluous if you have ublock, and pihole doesn't do anything for "native" ads like on twitch or youtube. The only benefit is that it blocks ads in apps that use third party ad SDKs.
This doesn't change the UI as such, but it auto-mutes ads, and auto-skips once the skip option is available. It's a bit of a funny thing to setup, but it works great once setup.
https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV should get you started. In HA, it will available in the Settings > Add-ons / Add-on store. If you don't have home assistant, you can always run it on an rpi or in docker on a system on your network.
You probably should use AdNausem instead. It uses same uBlock under the hood, but it clicks all the ads.
Site owners make money and advertisers loose them. Additionally, if enough of us switch from uBlock to AdNausem (which are nearly identical), it would be the end of surveillances capitalism. It just wouldn't be profitable anymore.
>AdNauseam 'clicks' Ads by issuing an HTTP request to the URL to which they lead. In current versions this is done via an XMLHttpRequest (or AJAX request) issued in a background process. This lightweight request signals a 'click' on the server responsible for the Ad, but does so without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. Further it allows AdNauseam to safely receive and discard the resulting response data, rather than executing it in the browser, thus preventing a range of potential security problems (ransomware, rogue Javascript or Flash code, XSS-attacks, etc.) caused by malfunctioning or malicious Ads. Although it is completely safe, AdNauseam's clicking behaviour can be de-activated in the settings panel.
and also "dearrow" for good measure. it replaces the titles and thumbnails with something less sensational. not having to look at those stupid faces that youtubers make is a big plus as well
the freetube app has both of those extensions built in. you just have to enable them in the settings
Good question. When I think about how people actually discover features, it's usually:
1) clicking through menus
2) reading docs/watching tutorials
3) getting hands-on help from a coworker or support person
Some apps try to do progressive disclosure as you get better at using them, but that's really hard to scale. Works okay for simpler apps but breaks down as complexity grows.
With generative UI, I think you're basically building option 3 directly into the app.
Users learn to just ask the app how to do something or describe their problem, and it surfaces the right tools or configures things for them.
Still early days though. I think users will also have to adopt new behaviors to get the most out of generative apps.
What this incident really shows is the growing gap between how easy it is to create a convincing warning and how costly it is to verify what's actually happening. Hoaxes aren't new, but generative tools make fabrication almost free and massively increase the volume.
The rail operator didn't do anything wrong. After an earthquake and a realistic-looking image, the only responsible action is to treat it as potentially real and inspect the track.
This wasn't catastrophic, but it's a preview of a world where a single person can cheaply trigger high-cost responses. The systems we build will have to adapt, not by ignoring social media reports, but by developing faster, more resilient ways to distinguish signal from noise.
Would calling and saying, "Hey, the bridge is destroyed!" without an image not have also triggered a delay? I question the safety standards of the railway if they would just ignore such a call after an earthquake. Generative AI doesn't change the situation at all. An image shouldn't be treated as carrying more weight than a statement, but the statement without the image would be the same in this situation. This has really been an issue since the popularization of the telephone, which made it sufficiently easy to communicate a lie from far away that someone might choose to do so for fun.
Calling identifies one person by name/number, and makes that person liable for any damages from the hoax, similar to how calling in a fake bomb threat is a crime. Publicly posting a fake comment and waiting for the rail operator to react of their own volition removes liability from that individual. That's where the AI footage comes in: it makes it more likely for the hoax to be taken serious.
This in itself is not a big deal... but there very much scenarios that could mean life or death.
Take a fast moving wildfire with one of the paths of escape blocked. There may be other lines of escape but fake images of one of those open roads showing its blocked by fire could lead to traffic jams and eventual danger on the remaining routes of escape.
Given the number of cctv cameras that operate in the UK, and their continued growth, I am surprised that the rail operator did not have access to a direct view of the bridge. I am also a bit surprised that there isn't technology to detect rail damage, especially the power lines that runs over the track.
Where I live it is not uncommon for rail to have detection for people walking on the rail, and bridges to have extra protection against jumpers. I wouldn't be that surprised if the same system can be used to verify damage.
> Given the number of cctv cameras that operate in the UK, and their continued growth,
CCTV cameras are mostly in private ownership, those in public ownership are owned by a mass of radically different bodies who will not share access without a minimum of police involvement. Oh and of course - we rarely point the cameras at the bridges (we have so many bridges).
> Where I live it is not uncommon for rail to have detection for people walking on the rail, and bridges to have extra protection against jumpers. I wouldn't be that surprised if the same system can be used to verify damage.
This bridge just carries trains. There is no path for walking on it. Additionally jumping would be very unusual on this kind of bridge; the big suspension bridges attract that behaviour.
You mentioned twice that you are surprised by things which are quite common in the UK. I don't know where you're from, but it's worth noting that the UK has long been used as a bogeyman by American media, and this has intensified recently. You should come and visit, the pound is not so strong at the moment so you'll get a great deal to see our country.
The saying/claims in the last 20 years or so is that London has the highest ratio of cameras to people in the world, through looking at what seems more correct statistics it is only the 12th most dense camera city in the world. how well that translate to the rest of the country is much less talked about.
Here in Sweden, people walking on the rails without permission is a fairly common problem, which cause almost 4k hours of accumulated delays per year. For people who often travel by train, the announcement of reduced speed because of the system has detected people on the tracks are one of the more common ones, only second to the catch-all announcement of "signal error", which simply mean the computer says stop for a reason that the driver don't know or don't want to say.
When it comes to suicide prevention on bridges, it is not just the big bridges. Suicide by train is a fairly talked methods in the news as a work hazard for train drivers, and the protection here is for small bridges that goes above the track. Similar issues exist with bridges over roads and highways. Those methods are to my read of the statistics more common than the movie version of a person jumping from a suspension bridge.
People on tracks and suicide by train are, I suspect, way more common in London for us than elsewhere. I can't get solid figures though. But it seems to sit around 15k hrs of delays nationwide for people on tracks.
We had a big government inquest into suicide in 2018 which included asking national rail to justify it position and actions. Of the 30k rail bridges in the UK only the hotspots have any modern measures of suicide prevention; and the hotspots are mostly but not exclusively suspension bridges.
However, from your comment, I see that you might be meaning pedestrian bridges across tracks, which almost always have metal rails higher than an adult man here. Our older stone road bridges (which are very common) have thick and tall walls on the edge which serve a similar function if not as effectively.
However, I think to hark back to the original image and post - the bridge depicted is a train bridge going over a road. More like a viaduct tbh. Its highly unlikely that there is any normalised pedestrian access so it won't tank highly for assigning prevention and detection measures for either suicid, and its easily assessed from the busy public road so I doubt it makes the priority list for automated collapse detection.
There is technology that could detect rail breaks, in the form of track circuits: feed a current into a rail, detect whether it gets to the other end (or bridge the two rails at the other end of the circuit and see if it gets back to the start of the other rail). A variation of this is commonly used in signalling systems to verify that the track is clear: if a pair of wheels is in the track section then the signal will short across the rails and make the circuit show 'occupied'.
Ultimately, though, this kind of stuff is expensive (semi-bespoke safety-critical equipment every few miles across an enormous network) and doesn't reduce all risks. Landslides don't necessarily break rails (but can cause derailments), embankments and bridges can get washed out but the track remains hanging, and lots of other failure modes.
There are definitely also systems to confirm that the power lines aren't down, but unfortunately the wires can stay up and the track be damaged or vice versa, so proving one doesn't prove the other. CCTV is probably a better bet, but that's still a truly enormous number of cameras, plus running power supplies all along the railway and ensuring a data link, plus monitoring.
I mean, you're supposed to call the police or Network Rail: there are placards on the (remains of the) bridge with the telephone number. But yes, it's not uncommon to have to send a train to examine the line (at slow speed, able to stop within line-of-sight) after extreme weather.
One of the more interesting ways of detecting rail damage, and subsidence in general, is optically detecting noise / distortion in fiber optic cables. An applied case of observables which are the basis for an evaluative (the "signal") being utilized originally to diagnose possible maintenance issues and then going "hey there, wait a sec, there's a different evaluative we can produce from this exhaust and sell".
Most economic value arises from distinguishing signal from noise. All of science is distinguishing signal from noise.
Its valuable, because it is hard. It is also slow - the only way to verify something is often to have reports from someone who IS there.
The conflict arises not from verifying the easy things - searching under the illumination of street lights. Its verifying if you have a weird disease, or if people are alive in a disaster, or what is actually going on in a distant zone.
Verification is laborious. In essence, the universe is not going to open up its secrets to us, unless the effort is put in.
Content generation on the other hand, is story telling. It serves other utility functions to consumers - fulfilling emotional needs for example.
As the ratio of content to information keeps growing, or the ratio of content to verification capacity grows - we will grow increasingly overwhelmed by the situation.
I also think not a hope, check Brandolini's law[1]: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
There should be a countervailing law that the more bullshit is produced the more skeptical the populace becomes. The amount of conspiracy theorists has remained constant even with the advent of the Internet this hasn't changed.
Great comment and very true in this AI world. In 2030 it will be even easier to make even more realistic images much quicker...
Reminds me of the attacker vs defender dilemma in cybersecurity - attackers just need one attack to succeed while a defender must spend resources considering and defending against all the different possibilities.
It is cheap to have live monitoring of key infrastructure these days, and in the case of rail infrastructure it would also save time and money in general. Perhaps this hoax will push this higher up the todo list.
There is a balance like always. It seems odd that they have zero cameras on bridges and other main infrastructure, although I believe that level crossings tend to have them (perhaps more to avoid liability in case of accidents, though...)
Main point is that there aren't technical difficulties in verifying the state of main infrastructure in real time (contrary to the claim of the commenter I was initially replying to), and it's more a question of priority and will than doability or cost.
It will happen but the usual way is that "it's not possible", "it's too expensive", etc until something bad enough happens and then suddenly it is doable and done.
You don't need AI for this kind of disruption. People have been making fake bomb threats for years. You just have to say it, either directly to the railway/etc. or publicly enough that somebody else will believe it and forward it to them. The difference might be of intent - if you say you planted a bomb on the bridge, you're probably committing a crime, but if you just post a piece of art without context, it's more plausibly deniable.
It's also pretty common in the UK for trains to be delayed just because some passenger accidentally left their bag on the platform. Not even any malicious intent. I was on a train that stopped in a tunnel for that reason once. They're just very vulnerable to any hint of danger.
AI image generation is already freely available to everyone. Why is it not already happening very often? This is the first case I've even heard of. Seems like you're already proven wrong, unless you're counting on some future change that isn't here yet?
Thanks for the heads-up! I actually wrote this based on my own thoughts about the incident, but I understand the concern. I'll make sure to keep my posts in line with the community guidelines.
Your approach looks promising. One question: how do you handle conflict resolution at scale? ProseMirror's steps model helps, but once you mix in multiple cursors, mobile clients, and permission controls, things get complicated fast. If you've built extra abstractions or a custom syncing layer on top of ProseMirror, I'd be very interested in how you approached it.
Overall, impressive work - it’s refreshing to see an editor that aims for minimalism without sacrificing collaboration features. Bookmarking this to test on a few writing workflows.
Technically having your own domains is superior, but it can be difficult to get past spam filters if you have your own domain. Not least because Google and Microsoft often automatically trash anything from custom domains. If you're ok with the delivery issues that can come with this setup, it's better. But personally I get really pissed off when my mail does not get delivered for any recipient.
You're absolutely right, ending up in spam is a real pain. I've run into the same issue myself with custom domains; even when everything is set up correctly, delivery can still be unreliable.
This is more about reputation than “custom domains”. I’ve had <realname>.com registered since 1996. Hosted at free Google Workspace account for 15+ years. They added SPF and then DKIM/DMARC as those thigs evolved. Never had spam reports in all that time; delivery is better than $dayjob’s 30-year-old domain.
I set all that stuff up for mine, and used a reputable mail server (FastMail), and even went through steps particular to Microsoft and Google. Google started accepting my emails, but my employer's Microsoft Exchange system kept sending my stuff to spam. How many other people would just not receive my stuff? It's impossible for me to know. If you want to reach out to strangers, any false positives will hurt you.
That might be from a Microsoft feature to prevent phishing that blocks display name spoofing. I get hit with that when I email from my personal to work email… the display name portion of the FROM address matches my work so it trips this filter.
Obviously they can only do this for unique-enough names and so this filtering could never work for “Joe Miller” but it does stop the dozens of phishes we see per day that are FROM our CEO’s first and last name but with a Gmail email address.
I don't think it's anti-phishing. If it is, then it's a broken rule. I have registered FastMail as my mail server properly with my DNS (MX record, I think) and also done the other authentication stuff. This is not a case of merely setting the FROM field, as many people do. You can set the FROM field of a message to anything if your mail server allows this. The receiver might reject this, but it is/was a common way to configure your mail client in the past because of stuff like email forwarding. Lots of people use 3rd party mail providers whose servers are not under the same domain as the mail being served. I think most people with custom domains do not run their own mail servers, and thus point their MX entries at a 3rd party mail provider just like I do.
I don't know why this stuff would be rejected. I went through several debugging steps online and didn't get anywhere with it. Every tool said I had set it up correctly.
as someone who did that a long time ago - I largely regret it
granted, it gives me an out if my provider revokes my access (in this case, google) but the custom domain requires some headache to manage well - I wish I had just used a google account...
If I'm remembering correctly, there was another outage around 10 days ago.
It still surprises me that there are basically no free alternatives comparable to Cloudflare. Putting everything on CF creates a pretty serious single point of failure.
It's strange that in most industries you have at least two major players, like Coke vs. Pepsi or Nike vs. Adidas. But in the CDN/edge space, there doesn't seem to be a real free competitor that matches Cloudflare's feature set.
It feels very unhealthy for the ecosystem. Does anyone know why this is the case?
But the more I look into it, the more I wonder: if one Bitcoin can be split into 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 or even smaller fractions for transactions, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole “fixed total supply” idea?
Also, sure, cryptocurrencies are decentralized in theory and the transactions are hard to trace. But at the end of the day, anyone holding crypt is still very much under the control of governments. You can't magically escape regulations or enforcement just because the currency is "decentralized." It's an interesting tension between theory and reality that I don't think enough people talk about.
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