A computer is much like a car or a gun, their ownership blurs the line of public, private, and personal property. I think we can all agree there is something fundamentally wrong with an individual buying a whole bunch of GPUs to mine crypto. How much computing power is too much for an individual person to be allowed to possess?
just make bitcoin ownership punishable under the old witchcraft laws
Anyone should be able to own any amount of computing equipment, but the only operating system you can run without government approval is NetBSD
A computer is much like a car or a gun, their ownership blurs the line of public, private, and personal property.
:marx-joker:
Banning would be a bad approach - but nationalizing computer companies and centrally planning tech would allow us to fix all of the problems plaguing the industry and ensure equitable distribution of machines across the population. The big things to fix are planned obsolescence and competing standards for every little thing - imagine if everything could be put on USB-C and lasted a decade or two, and if 90% of software was open source and built on a database of libraries maintained by a state-sponsored computer software org tasked with keeping everything compatible and up to date.
We need to do literally whatever gets boomer-types in my life to stop asking me how to transfer all their photos to a new phone or how to respond to someone on Whatsapp every time they see me.
Social tech help. There needs to be public tech educators and help through the library to save us from this bullshit.
nah just put software developers in the gulag if they don't do good UI/UX.
there's this one weird trick i've been using for 15-20 years now. i tell them i have no idea how any of that works.
this is plausible because i really dont, since i havent used windows seriously since win98SE and have literally never seen a whatsapp.
After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two.But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community – the internet.
Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers.
Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book.
And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.
What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.
Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument.
None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connections, try again later.”
Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.
Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah.
These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love video games–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.
What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee.
No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing?
While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
He's wrong on a lot of specifics, but in the broad strokes he's absolutely correct. Everyone online is shouting, therefore nobody is bothering to listen.
I think we can all agree there is something fundamentally wrong with an individual buying a whole bunch of GPUs to mine crypto.
Modern crypto mining is pretty thoroughly industrialized. The need for a cheap energy source and lots of high-end hardware filters out one-off miners. That's why you see businesses setting up around abandoned hydroelectric dams and out in West Texas near natural gas mines.
I don't think a regulation on private ownership of GPUs would do anything substantive, in the same way that a ban on owning large numbers of cars or guns would meaningfully impact the prime offenders - rental companies or police agencies.
