The only thing I’ve missed, like truly missed about old Reddit was Secret Santa. There was something so fun about it, and the system was so good. I know it’s logistically challenging, even more so for a federated platform, but it was one of the things that made the site feel unique.

What’s up with the þ symbol in your comment? Odd thing to go out of your way to use?

I think you’re the one who misunderstood. The guy I replied to was talking about backing up digital games to disc. I mentioned optical discs have poor longevity, then you took it personally.

I am biased, I admit, but that stems from lived experience. I was, for a time, pretty invested in the concept of cryptocurrencies, blockchain cryptography and NFTs. I don’t like traditional payment processors or banks, but I don’t think NFTs themselves are the solution. In general, I think applying physical restrictions to digital content is a bad idea, and ultimately that’s what NFTs and smart contracts aim to do. It sounds nice to be able to validate ownership, but all it does is prop up existing licensing schemes by building a framework to enforce them.

And if you don’t see a problem with that, then we’ve got different perspectives on the world and that’s fine, but don’t assume I’m not willing to listen.

The first question is kinda encompassed by the rest of the structure, so I’ll work through the others and come back to it.

Legitimate currency, is admittedly a nebulous term, so I’ll revise this to match something closer to what I meant: minted, regulated currency held to an economic demand. I believe there’s merit to this system, though its benefits have been substantially eroded by modern aristocrats.

By my statement, I meant to say that the most popular use-cases are frequently that of investment, rather than good-faith application of cryptocurrency as currency. I recognize this isn’t true of all currencies, but as long as it remains the case, crypto will continue to be utilized as an investment vehicle for national currencies rather than as something I could go buy my groceries or pay my bills with. One of the biggest fundamental problems that have been a challenge to solve for cryptocurrencies is the overall stability of its value. For some currencies, the idea was that a limited supply would lead to a fixed value, or that proof of work systems would mitigate speculation. This hasn’t proven true. It cannot be tied to someone’s needs, and instead floats based on wants or hype. This is remedied by stable-coins, but at this point you’ve only recreated a national currency with extra hoops to jump through to use it. That said, I do recognize its value as a means to ensure some personal liquidity in nations where the currency at home is more volatile than not, but I think the flaw in this is that no matter what you end up pinning your personal wealth to someone else’s economy.

And believe me, I agree people should be able to spend their money how they please. No few should have complete power of the many, especially not in how the many may accumulate or redistribute their wealth. Robinhood, stock exchanges and their third party brokers should not have power to affect this. In a well-regulated context, they would not.

Now let’s talk about money laundering and fraud. I wasn’t referring to an old mafia outfit. Organized crime has evolved well past that, though I’m sure a shell company with some shady accou ti g is part of the process. Cryptocurrencies are weak for the same reason they are strong. Wallet addresses are at worst, pseudnonymous. It is possible to track them through transactions to exchanges or services with KYC requirements, but not all blockchain services expose transactions transparently. This makes currencies like Monero a popular option for anyone looking to hide the sources and destinations of their payments without needing to worry about how to balance their books for a nail salon. Add in tumbling services for popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and stablecoins and now you’ve got yourself a very convenient pipeline for shady dealings.

As a privacy advocate, I believe in the ability to make a cash deal with someone without the scrutiny of the bank, payment processor or other entities, but many of those guiding principles have led to the design of systems that directly facilitate scams, fraud, human trafficking and espionage. The fact that there is no oversight means there are no repercussions until that money re-enters a national currency. It’s an immensely popular way to hide wealth for those who are already rich beyond their means as well. Everything about it requires trusting the individual, and that’s rarely the correct choice.

As for decentralization. I agree here, that’s a better approach. The web should be a collection of nodes, with each reaching to the other to properly describe its namesake. Instead, we have the problem of consolidation among services, where large entities with the means to do so have become immovable conglomerates of critical infrastructure, developing a hub and spoke design instead of the web it was first called. However, blockchains by nature risk the same eventuality. A blockchain relies on redundancy. It needs to be able to point to its own history, and then it needs to have copies of that history redistributed among the entire network of users. The problem is that this requirement becomes exponentially more difficult to fulfill as its use and history extends further. Mining needs to be performed to validate transactions, but mining becomes more time consuming the longer the chain. As a result, the ability to perform these tasks is directly tied to the person able to afford the hardware required. There’s an initial or ongoing investment required no matter what. Not to mention that the validation of these transaction requires energy. It needs to be done computationally, and the cost of that computation also increases as the chain does. The environmental impact may be overshadowed by present AI training datacenters, but it’s still a present and largely unsolved issue.

I hadn’t heard of arweave mind you, but nothing in their documentation about hosting a node or being part of the chain itself leads me to believe they have found a solution to this, which is a must, if you are to rely on it as a stable, distributed storage medium. That said, its permanent storage design is intriguing, since it has the potential to address common problems with the bittorrent protocol.

As for complexity, it’s as described above. The infrastructure is the complexity. You’re right, it’s easy to deploy an NFT, but there is no move to standardize on a platform for them. No self-serving enterprise is going to set themselves up on a chain of custody they do not have control over. I admit this is a political complexity, not a technical one, but I think it’s a truth to contend with for the same reason centralized services exist to begin with.

As for your last point: I don’t believe in NFTs because I fundamentally do not believe in DRM. Smart contracts, NFTs and blockchains on the whole are designed to track, verify, and validate the transfer of ownership in a way that describes and acts as an extension of existing DRM schemes. It goes beyond a certificate of trust, and introduces the limitations of physical property into a digital space. In fact, it doesn’t even solve the resale problem because there would be nothing to prevent a vendor from reintroducing some kind of SecuROM nightmare via a Smart Contract.

I think the base technology is important. At the end of the day blockchains are actually a useful technology, with wide application. But the need to have visibility of the whole transaction is the flaw. You can mitigate it somewhat by chunking the chain and holding data in different places, but the data must remain intact.

Fair enough. I didn’t assume you were doing that for data generally. My original comment was unnecessarily condescending in tone, sorry about that.

I’m not sure I understand. Whether it’s DRM free or not has no bearing on the reliability of optical media as a backup format. Discs you write to are not generally as reliable as factory pressings, with some archival exceptions, so it’s not the ideal choice. I wasn’t making any argument about whether it works or not.

Optical media really isn’t your friend. I love it, I have loads of old games on optical discs and I bought a PS5 with its disc drive specifically because that’s how I wanted to buy the media. But I also back up what I can to spinning rust or solid state drives that can sit cold stored until I want them. Optical media will degrade. There are exceptions, like M-Disc, but the medium is slow and space consuming.

Imo they weren’t ruined by grifters. NFTs are built on a flawed system that caters to exactly the kind of libertarian, free enterprise assholes who ate it up. If they weren’t running the grift, they were getting scammed themselves. Crypto is a mirage of wealth, and everything built on top of it is either only a vehicle for legitimate currency or laundering ill gotten gains. It’s just an unregulated stock.

Signed chains of custody already exist, they could be inplemented and nothing is stopping any of these marketplaces from doing so. They don’t need NFTs, which have a needlessly complex set of requirements, to validate a game’s license. Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else, but that doesn’t give them the same benefits as someone buying a new copy.

Nah, I was never that dedicated. If anything, I treated speedrunning that game more like it was an extension of the existing game mechanics so it was more about finding a new way to enjoy the game rather than just playing for the sake of speedrunning. Unconventional, but fun.

Bought Mirror’s Edge because I liked it, but yeah most of the hours are speedrun related lol

Best is either Minecraft, Counter-Strike or Mirror’s Edge. I’ve got 3k+ hours in the first two, but also something like 600 hours in Mirror’s Edge which is nonsense for a game that’s 4 hours long on the first playthrough.

Worst is almost certainly PUBG. Bought it to play with friends, realized I hated the entire concept.

They’re actively producing DDR4 and 5, with Corsair notably having purchased supply from CXMT for use in their Vengance line, just not for North American distribution

It’s still not bad if you’re buying old SAS drives. At this point, anything 4TB or less is fine, and for most people that’s plenty to start with.

If you’re ripping DVD and BluRay content, you probably will gobble up space quickly without re-encoding it, but otherwise you can store content from streaming services with ease.

I can’t recall, was this the issue specifically related to RX 6000 series cards? I was halfway through the game when I happened to upgrade my GPU by chance, only later learning it was a problem for fhat gen

About halfway through the lifecycle for Windows 10, HDD performance became pure garbage and I genuinely do not know how/why they did that. Something about how they were handling indexing or read operations at idle meant pinning the disk at 100% usage almost all the time and the only solve was an SSD. I hate that shit so much.

I’ve used Windows 10 with 4GB. It’s not a comfortable experience. Neither is Windows 11 with 8GB.

Have I gone my whole life doing cover letters “wrong”? I use them as an opportunity to talk about things I’ve worked on as it relates to the responsibilities of the job that a resume wouldn’t necessarily explain in depth. I’ve never treated it like I’m meant to ingratiate myself to anpotential employer for the chance. Usually the resume is “Here’s where I’ve worked and my roles there” and the cover letter is “Here’s what I’ve worked on and how that experience is relevant”

I’ve had a great experience with Heroic for this purpose. Generally just as easy to configure as Steam, compared to Bottles or some strange Lutris script

I’d be trading one smart mess for another, and paying more money to do it. My TV is from 2018, and when it’s hit 10 years old maybe I’ll think about it. But right now, there’s no reason for me to rush out and find something else when I know the Roku can’t phone home and Jellyfin works like I want it to. Besides, whether an account is required or not, I wouldn’t trust Google any more than Roku/Fox. I don’t know what I’ll buy next, but I’m not prepared to think about it right now.