In my day, the whole world was an "analog bag".

Mainly because my parents were too cheap to buy me the TRS-80 I kept harping about.

... when the AI bubble bursts and 90% of the AI data centers go dark. The AI that remains will be the AI that is doing something useful enough to be worth the electricity it sucks down.

What the world would really like is something that performs like nuclear fission (lots of 24/7 reliable baseload power, deployable anywhere) but without the big upfront expense or the catastrophic risks (pollution, storage, proliferation) to manage.

Is there such a thing? Could there be? Nuclear fusion might be one answer, and they've made good progress, but it's still a bit iffy and even in the best-case scenario it won't be applied at scale for some years yet. Geothermal is seeing some interesting developments that might allow it to be deployed more broadly, so that's what I'm currently geeked over. Short of that, there's always good old-fashioned renewables+lots of storage, which can be made to work, but requires a lot of infrastructure.

100 Big corporation publishes paper claiming to finally achieve quantum supremacy
200 Wait a few days
300 Some random math guy demonstrates how to calculate the same thing faster on a conventional consumer laptop
400 GOTO 100

The more decentralized mining is, the harder the 51% attack

Therefore, you want mining that is about as efficient on a current CPU as it is on a high end GPU or even ASIC. That way big server farm investments scale up with a low integer factor -- compared to a Bitcoin ASIC farm which can be (IIRC) dozens of millions of times more efficient per dollar than your PC CPU.

Various strategies were considered and tested. The end result was really clever: create a simple virtual machine with specific characteristics (such as non-halting totality, and a syntaxless bytecode). The one-way function is simply to run the random input program to completion, and provide the output. In other words, be a CPU.

The algo was specifically released as a separate standalone so others could pick it up. But there is only one crypto that uses it. It's the one that actually encrypts the data on the blockchain, has hundreds of .onion nodes run to this day independently by true believers (and yes I am one), so that actually it would be really hard for even a major government to shut down its untraceable transactions.

I just checked, for the first time in probably 2 years. Huh. It's not even in the top 25 market cap anymore. But it's the only coin that IMO for better or worse matches the original Tim May style cryptoanarchist vision that Satoshi was gesturing towards. And I don't need to say its name because you know which one it is.

Actually people like that are why Slashdot is still kicking in the age of Reddit and Fedi. I am here for my fellow nerds and await the day my particular hyperspecialization becomes newsworthy

meh missed making link about prisoner exchange

Hackernews Aug 12 2025 on the Salesforce hack: Cybercrime Groups ShinyHunters, Scattered Spider Join Forces in Extortion Attacks on Businesses

I bet anything China, Russia, and Iran are those so-called cybercrime groups. Check this BlackHat talk about catching the (at the time) biggest ever card fraud guy. Russian oligarch son. Guess what, he was one of those returned to Russia in an exchange with the Trump admin as part of "peace negotiations".

Cyberattacks are part of the low level war they are also waging via dragging anchors to cut Internet cables, throwing drones and jets into NATO airspace, and ofc disinformation campaigns.

So yeah they are leveraging the cybercrime aspect to further weaken USA / NATO / The West / Tolerant Inclusive Democracy.

I wonder, are there any computers that both have a PS/2 port and also can run Windows 11?

On the flip side, one reason I'm sticking with my old cars and not considering buying a new one any time soon is because I really like the fact that they lack connectivity of any kind. They also have real control knobs and no touch screens.

Probably a free stater. They do love their pedos

Folger's Crystals already did this experiment this back in the 1980s. Then they publicized the results ad nauseam.

No.

This room-temperature ice is simply a plot device that demonstrates the sheer stupidity of human behavior.

Au contraire -- quite a few police have a well-known back door that you can exploit with nothing more than an envelope full of $100 bills.

If you set up a market, and multiple people who actually had $1e100 put in a bid of that amount for your stupid crypto, then at least for that instant it was worth that much. It may not be worth that much later, but it would be NOW.

FFS, how can you have such a hard time understanding such a basic concept?