Holy loaded question batman! Yeah I’m not gonna take this seriously with you just making these sweeping assertions with no evidence.
The assertion that lemmy users call Blockchain and AI a grift is not without evidence(just browse around on any thread related to the topic) people calling QC a grift is more nuanced and something I have picked up on, you could make the case when ‘it happens’ lemmites would call QC a grift.
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Let’s not perpetuate the idea that industry develops most technology. It’s all built off academia, which is funded by taxes. At best industry swoops in the last few steps and scales it up. That’s necessary and even good, but it’s not worth destroying the rest of the world over – particularly when that includes academic research.
capitalism
The problem is not that this technologies are or aren’t a grift, the problem is that they are used to grift (and that the 4th power that is supposed to protect us against this isn’t doing its job).
In that sense : every next technology will be a grift. Look at spaces, he sold refueling booster as the next step in human
space explorationevolution and finally its just another company used to mine our data. GriftGene therapy and stem cells.
There is one from Japan about regrowing teeth, and then the one (forget where) about a 4 hour gene therapy treatment that basically cures issues some people have around cholesterol.
Although maybe the first one might turn into a grift. Like honestly, if I could GMO in/ Stem cell in like, just one alligator tooth into my grill, I might just.
Would you like to have a big dick that put a horse to shame? Sign up for our premium gene argumentation stem treatment for monthly subscription of $67. Fine print: if you canceled, dick felt off.
dick felt off
Vibe.
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The technologies were/are not grifts. They were used as buzzwords to enable the grift of spending investor money.
Fire.
A great time to be on the Internet. Felt like anything was possible.
Blockchain had potential in use cases beyond currency replacement and speculative assets. AI has actual use cases as a high quality chatbot. Instead these things were hyped and marketed as things beyond their actual capabilities.
Quantum as it is currently doesn’t seem like a grift, but is just a susceptible to being manipulated and marketed as one as soon as there’s a remotely market viable version of it.
The problem isn’t lemmings or luddites, the problem is lying capitalists hoping to sell something that doesn’t exist or isn’t stable.
What exactly are some of the use cases for an infinitely growing, append-only database built primarily so its largest users can rewrite history at will?
Why does a blockchain have to be one big omni ledger? Why do users need more than one token in it? Blockchain could be used for login tokens for a website or for proof of ownership of software licenses.
Yeah it’s currently flawed and used beyond the scale it’s capable of for things it’s not really good for, that was my entire point. Now the tech is tainted and reviled because of the grift and no one wants to touch it and explore what it could be useful for.
If login tokens are stored on a public ledger replay attacks write themselves. Public or private, keeping every login token ever is a horrible audit mechanism and doesn’t scale well. At scale, speed to generate becomes a concern. Not at scale, something lighter is faster.
A normal database scales better than a license blockchain and doesn’t require extra computation to write. Audit logs and hashes prevent extra edits. License files signed by a central authority don’t require a database and the central authority is functionally equivalent albeit less expensive than a blockchain.
I am still interested in a good use for the tech. I have yet to see one that is genuine.
Is it rewritable, or is it append only? You only wrote one sentence yet still managed to contradict yourself so I suspect you have a very meager comprehension of the technology.
Go ahead and prove me wrong. Show me blockchain implementations that are immutable post append. On my end, we can talk about Bitcoin forks. We can also talk about the current state of consensus mechanisms, each of which has the explicit ability for large actors to rewrite history in their favor. Even Monero is susceptible because this is fundamental to the blockchain in any form. It’s been a huge reason why I make sure I get paid up front for any consulting I do in this space.
Only the last few blocks are “rewritable,” which is why a certain number of confirmations are a necessity. Going any further back than that, would be a completely different chain - a fork. The last of of those occurring on Bitcoin was thirteen years ago when it was still encountering growing pains due to an uptake in usage. Forks of more than a couple transactions are not a frequent, regular occurrence by any exaggeration, so for all intents and purposes of modern crypto usage, it is immutable, not rewritable.
If any of it is rewritable, none of it is immutable. You can’t have it both ways.
Notice I put quotes around rewritable. That’s because it’s not the correct term, and I was being charitable in engaging in your straw man argument. It’s actually a collision of timing, where two solutions are presented for the same block in a short amount of time, and until the consensus is reached by the majority, both are temporarily valid. Once consensus is reached, it’s final. There’s no going back. In that sense it is not rewritable, it is immutable. It’s just fuzzy for the first fifteen minutes which branch will resolve as the actual Blockchain in the event of near ties.
I don’t think you’re using straw man correctly.
You’re naively referring to how consensus should work while completely ignoring both the well-defined attacks I referenced and the reality of large actors in a consensus network. You don’t know what you’re talking about or you don’t understand how the theory works or you’re possibly just being obtuse. No matter what, this is pointless. Good luck.
As I understand, it’s normally append-only. But, with some implementations, if a malicious entity controls most of the block production, they can undo recent transactions at will.
Some resort to majority vote, in the case of disagreements. Theoretically, if someone owned/controlled over 50% of the database, they could rewrite it, and have their version seen as true.
For the few valid uses of it, that shouldn’t be a problem. It will also be reasonably detectable beforehand.
It’s not as simple as that. Each block solves the problem of the former block, so to change something five blocks back, you now need to solve six blocks prior to writing the next block, otherwise it’s not cryptographically valid. The resources required to accomplish that are not trivial, and it’s never been done. Very theoretical indeed, in the same sense you could theoretically run through a wall if all of your atoms missed all of the atoms in the wall when you should have collided.
Anything where a trustless system is important. The “largest users can rewrite history at will” is a critique to specific implementations, not Blockchain.
I don’t know that it is, though. Can you show me form of blockchain in the real world where this doesn’t apply? Saying large actors can’t affect a specific piece of internet technology, so far, is rather like teaching physics without friction. It’s nice and fun and easy to understand but completely ignores the reality of any implementation.
Well, you just don’t know. In the real world there are private blockchains between equipotent participants that don’t rely on burning the planet to function. Helpful reading: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ethical-hacking/private-blockchain/
Blockchain is a concept, can’t be owned or affected.
Yup they have their uses, but what happened here is like in a world where hammer is not invented yet, but the invention of the hammer causes every single industry to start using hammer for all their existing process without considering whether they are appropriate or not.
All technologies are grifts when controlled by the capitalist class and marketed under the logic of capitalism. Simple as that. Even the simple hammers you find at a hardware store are a side effect of some rich asshole’s money hoarding operation.
For this reason, I do not reject the listed technologies outright. (Although I do not personally know of a non-capitalist use for Blockchain, I’m open to suggestions.) I reject the capitalists who control these technologies.
Let me see if I got this right. By that logic if I can see that people need spoons to eat their soup and I provide said spoons at a price that covers my costs and earn me a profit for my hard work to produce them, I’m an asshole that hoards money?
Depends. Are you one of the workers in the spoon production process? Then no, you’re not an asshole that hoards money, at least not on that basis.
Do you privately own the factory? Do you privately own all the spoons that the workers produce under a series of “”“voluntary”“” employment contracts? Then yes, you’re hoarding money (more precisely, hoarding the means of production and products).
Profits are just wealth stolen from workers.
I’m a bit surprised that you’re reacting to that particular clause in my comment because it’s bog standard socialist analysis. Like I’m not saying anything controversial there unless you’re just not a socialist.
We’re very stuck with LLMs etc but the current shit is very much a bubble. It mostly reminds me of the dot com era but the money was far less frantic.
Arch Linux
btw
+1 for stating that the technologies themselves are not the grifts.
LLMs are fantastic tools. Quantum Computing will have meaningful uses.
The grift is the marketing and the dumb C-Suites that fall for it.
To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes. That shit will be revolutionary.
To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes.
I mean we have two machines that together convert a basket of dirty laundry into clean clothes. And then by appeal to authority (“There’s no law that says I have to fold my clean clothes.”), voila! It’s done.
Unacceptable. Pathetic. Is that the best humanity has to offer? Some brutish, crude machine that just agitates my clothes in soapy water? And a second machine that just blows hot air on it as it spins it?
No.
I should be able to put my dirty clothes in a receptacle, and say “Hey,
Robot OverlordGoogle. Start clothes cleaning cycle” and when I return the clothes are separated, cleaned, and neatly folded. At a minimum. Really the clothes should also be put away in my dresser by the AI.What if a robot came and gathered all your dirty clothes, made listings for them on craigslist (or whatever people use now), marked up above MSRP or whatever you paid (people will still buy them, even used, even at a higher price than new, if you include a note saying they were owned by a woman, whether they were or not), shipped them to the interested buyers, used the proceeds from those sales to purchase new, identical clothing to what you previously owned?
I’m sure at first I would love it because instead of having to purchase this robot it would be “free” to me.
But after everyone gets used to the clothes robots there would eventually be paid subscription tiers and the next time you open your drawers all your pants have DraftKings ads on the butt.
I think it is only partly dependant on the technology. Each of the listed technologies CAN have useful applications, but the current capitalist system is expecting unattainable growth so ot creates bubbles and in the bubbles there are grifters.
Blockchain was an incredibly transparent grift. AI is a fascinating technology that’s being used and abused by the worst people on the planet and will probably cause society as we know it to collapse. Quantum computers are a very niche, very specific tool that are super cool but get talked about weirdly by the media.
Virtual reality is neat and I think it hasn’t really been used as a grift yet. I don’t think we’ve really solved its UX nor explored all its possibilities. It seems like as a consumer device it will be a niche product, but the applications for companies and organizations are very untapped.
didn’t meta and apple try turning VR into the ‘Next big thing’ very recently, i mean they got distracted with LLMs but they could always try again.
I still dont think blockchain; the tech itself is a grift, it does what it promised to do(not BTC, other coins that improved on it, BTC itself has turned into a big game of chicken), has uses beyond its initial purpose. Its just that the tech attracted grifters like flies, and their actions were transparent(yet people still fell for it)
The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widly accessible.
Sure, they can lobby state legislatures to legalize balcony solar. Yet if I try to go around and convince those legislatures to legalize balcony fission, they look at me like I’m crazy! 😀
This to me is the most exciting thing. And not just solar, but also modular nuclear power, fusion power, battery tech. The PRC is at the forefront of this green revolution.
Capitalism makes every innovation into a grift
So what innovation would socialism turn into a grift?
Vanguardism, as seen in Russia and China.
We’ve seen this movie already
I agree. No matter how much a technology will eventually be useful, it’s always turned into a gift beforehand, then there’s the collapse and only after that it settles into a reasonable thing.
See: the dot-com bubble
