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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • The reality is that there is a difference now, and it needs to be clarified. How would you, talking to another regular human being communicate to install an app that isn’t in the official app store succinctly? If you just tell someone to ‘install the app’ then you are doing a bad job communicating. Economy of language means that new words are going to form to distill common concepts.

    Package managers have existed for a long time, so the concept of app stores isn’t new and is actually generally the accepted solution by the open source community. It’s typically regarded as the safest way to install software as it comes with auditing and active management.

    Side loading does a great job at communicating what is being done, and it helps consolidate the various ways you actually install applications into a nice generic term.

    A store being locked down doesn’t really have much to do with the concept of side loading anyway, since a locked down device doesn’t support it in the first place.




  • People generally don’t want to make games free because often 99% of what makes a game good is not the software aspect. People like games for interesting mechanics, story, art, and music. Those aren’t things that generally haven’t worked well being free and open

    FOSS generally works because people use foss to create end products, and have an incentive to contribute because it benefits them financially (and the side effects is that it benefits others too).

    Making a game FOSS rarely benefits the creators since it is the end product, even if it benefits the game or community.

    There are cases where it works though, such as rhythm games, where the end product requires immense collaboration, but those often exist on the borderline of acceptability (due to copyrighted music use) and they end up with a need to be foss since licensing 10,000 songs is basically impossible.

    (Shout out Quaver)





  • While trading in general is zero sum, if you believe the product you’re trading has intrinsic value, then no one needs to be holding a bag.

    If I sell you a car and you get to use the car, you wouldn’t be holding the bag, because you wanted the car. This applies to stocks, and stock derivatives, as well as commodities.

    The problem arises when there isn’t an intrinsic value (or the intrinsic value is very small), such as with NFTs or many cryptos in general.

    There are cryptos that have some intrinsic value like monero, since they have fungibility and a use case, but most do not.








  • Decentralization isn’t the reason, and conflating it with fediverse services is disingenuous.

    The reason many cryptos use a lot of power is because of proof of work.

    Proof of stake and proof of work have the same effective result for voting power. In order to effectively mine, you need a large capital investment and in order to stay competitive in mining you need to continue spending capital, the same is true for proof of stake as the larger overall stake the lower the payouts, so it requires more capital investment.






  • PGP can also do that, properly implemented, a PGP key with a large web of trust, can be just as effective at making immutable certified statements without having this weird cash based speech thing that crypto has going for it.

    The fact that every single action you do with crypto involves spending money is ridiculous. I don’t mean the scams and stuff, I mean, every single thing, every transaction, every smart contract, every interaction, who wants to play around with a system that just pilfers your cash from you just for the privilege of exploring it.

    At least with aws I can run code locally before they rob me.