twovests

twovests wrote

Reply to comment by Seirdy in cohost! is a place to post by devtesla

It kinda brings me back to the time of phpBB and proboards and whatnot. I loved having all these tiny forums, sometimes run by some narcissistic teenager, etc.

Now people are building their social media from scratch which is kinda rad. Jstpst has been my favorite place to post

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twovests wrote (edited )

The privacy policy is good! I read it: https://cohost.org/rc/content/privacy

It lists types of personal information, including ones it does not even collect. Notably, they include keystrokes under biometric information. This is a rare and non-obvious insight!

A quick look at their posts also tell me they're cool and good. Thank u for sharing this new site to post on

EDIT: Yeah I skimmed out the admins and their manifesto and stuff. Very good, very in line with the community we have here

EDIT: One thing is they have a binding arbitration and class action waiver, and you can't opt out of. This is shitty, and they're implicitly banking on the far-right US Supreme Court here. (Not that Dems are much more consumer friendly.) Kind of surprised to see this

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twovests wrote

Just smuggled in human intelligence in figuring out which prompts produce cool results.

People in ML have been (somewhat derisively) calling this "prompt engineering."

Very tangential, but I imagine this has implications for how people view "curation" as art. I wonder what people in Art have to say about that.

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twovests wrote

This is horrible, but I also hope these discussions gets us talking about all the other surveillance people perpetuate. Like, downloading apps which wardrive on your phone for wifi networks, giving apps ALL the data of your contacts, cameras on ordering kiosks (???), etc being pretty horrible AND widely accepted.

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twovests OP wrote

Yeah, it's basically just transport encryption.

With basic SMS, anyone with $100 or so of equipment (like, police, or even a bored and resourceful child) can fake a tower and force-downgrade your encryption to read your messages. Your cell provider also sees your messages.

At least with iMessage or whatnot, you can rest assured that only Apple can open your messages. And, I assume it's not standard to open them (for analytics and marketing) unless there's a warrant.

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twovests OP wrote

I agree with you and I think it's great when coinbros feel threatened, but I also am pretty sure most of the cryptocoin hype people don't understand it either. I think most understanding goes as deep as "Here's the benefits of decentralization, cryptocurrencies will bring those benefits I swear for real, and you can get in on the ground floor with snakeoilcoin NFTs."

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twovests OP wrote

Also proof of ownership only works as long as people recognise that proof of ownership as valid

Yeah, that's one of the main issues. You'll still need to rely on traditional legal systems.

In the most generous interpretation, NFTs can help with that? A little? "Here's a hash of the document, here's a hash of the document with my signature on it, and here's that same hash on the blockchain, which can be independently verified."

The second main issue is that you can do most of that without any cryptocurrency shit! The only benefit is that it becomes harder to fake and easier to verify.

But the third main issue is that that's not even how it's being used! NFTs aren't storing hashes of some piece of art, it's storing a URL to a centralized platform. This URL can change (and absolutely will when the platform goes down.)

So, in even the most generous interpretation of NFTs, they have little value. And that little value is completely undermined by how they're used in practice.

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