> True, bitcoins are resilient for crypto, but why is it that, proportionally, so many of its users are scammers?

How do you know so many use it for illegal purposes—specifically scams? Over 1 million people own at least some Bitcoin. Most of its use is for investment, which is why wallet activity is chronically low. People buy and hold it like gold or any other asset they think will appreciate.

>I can’t think of many situations where digital dollars would fail where Bitcoin is even accessible much less a useful medium of exchange where cash wouldnt be more useful. >

1. That doesn’t have anything to do with the claims that a disproportionate number of Bitcoin users are scammers.
2. People don’t necessarily get into Bitcoin because they think a fiat currency is going to fail. They hold it like an investment because it tends to appreciate over time.
3. Bitcoin’s strength has never had to shine thankfully. That is, governments you and I live under haven’t failed and experienced currency collapse. But, for an example here, it is cheaper and much faster for me to convert cash into Bitcoin and hold in my wallet and travel internationally than engage an international wire transfer. There’s risk involved, of course. But one thing I don’t risk is having any cash I’m traveling with summarily seized without any recourse. I don’t have to worry about my government turning fascist and freezing my accounts to prevent me from leaving. It’s a hedge, like any decent investment.

> > Bitcoin wants to be the dollar bill of the internet but it can’t even remain anonymous.

What an odd pivot. The USD isn’t even anonymous unless you pay in cash. Bitcoin was never founded to be anonymous. It was founded to be a trustless system with a fixed amount of currency. It cracks me up that so many people in this thread are asserting that Bitcoin is private which is why criminals use it, when it is ridiculously easy to track transactions. People even put watches on wallets for fun to write articles about dormant wallets becoming active again, and the world governments have caught criminals when they try to use or move funds after a crime, even years later, because it is all part of the public ledger.

And our bank accounts are equally not private. Bitcoin is at best pseudo anonymous because of how it spawns various wallets by default and doesn’t have a central database of users to lookup real world info about.

>By design every transaction becomes part of the blockchain for everyone, right?

Yes, that’s how it remains trustless and secure. Do you know my bank account number? No? Do you know my Bitcoin wallet address? I could send a payment right now and use a one-time wallet. This isn’t as big of an argument as you think. If anything, it disproves that Bitcoin is an attractive target for criminals because it isn’t truly anonymous. You have workarounds at best.

Not OP, but it’s Henry Blodget.

I was amazed to learn this as well.

Amazon needs to mass fire it’s management, including all the way up the chain. This doesn’t just happen because of employees. Someone was signing off on all this supposed overhiring.

So why are the employees bearing all of the cost alone? Fire the managers which make more than them and undoubtedly cost the entire organization a huge amount of money between recruitment/on boarding, salaries, severance, and naturally opportunity cost.

r/technology is really more for people who dislike or distrust or don’t understand technology. It never ceases to amaze me how many people who don’t work in Tech hang out here and insist things which are quite plainly wrong.

GPT is a novelty for me, just like copilot. I throughly believe that the people professing it’s usefulness in the workplace—including but not limited to dev work—are generally lower level. Chat GPT went down today and a ton of people remarked how they can’t do their jobs now. It’s right up there with the meme about the same every time StackOverflow goes down.

That’s one big thing I professionally fear from AI models or whatever we are going to call them. The cutting of corners including in code literacy. It’s my old man yells at cloud moment. People dabbling in coding and development when they are more like analysts than anything else (no shade to analysts, but it is an entirely different skillset and focus).

The people who rely and extensively use things like GPT and copilot will be the first made redundant when good old Sam Altman realizes his stated dream of having AI “employees” out compete and replace hourly or salaried humans.

I truly fear that a good chunk of people are fucking themselves right now. Especially junior level people. This is the time they should be learning and instead they turn to spyware which has an end goal, per Sam himself in an interview, to replace them.

These aren't sign ups; they are Daily Active Users. And even if that were the case, the trend from the last several years is clear; upward. Reliably upward.

​

And what seems more likely? That Meta is attracting more DAU by forcing them to create basically interstitial accounts for third party activities?

Or that Meta is successfully converting people into DAU as they implement more features and relent on more dumb choices (like re-integrating Messenger back into the Facebook app rather than requiring you to use a separate app)?

​

Reels, for example, has experienced explosive growth on Facebook. I don't understand why people use it given the user experience, terrible ad injection (including in the middle of short form videos), and basically rebranded content. But people are using it. A lot. And their profits show that. Meta is printing money still despite it all. They aren't firing people because of financials, no matter what they say. Their books are public since they are publicly traded, and their books say they are a growing moneymaking machine.

>I doubt it…there is a lot of dead wood in Facebook to get rid of.

You're correct; in Mahogany Row.

Firings should have started and ended there. Instead they will just fire everyone else and foist the work upon whoever remains behind so they can do the job of more than one person.

It really chaps my ass that the media keeps referring to it as "laid off."

They aren't being laid off; they are being mass fired.

These companies aren't hurting because of the economy. Meta is still posting profits; they just aren't growing as fast the do-nothing ownership class would like. They are still throwing tens of billions of dollars away every year to chase some pipe dream of a person who is deeply disliked by basically everybody for being a duplicitous weirdo.

​

Laid off also implies no fault of the employees, but that isn't what the actual implication is. How many of us have seen reassurances that it is just the lowest performers being fired? That's not being laid off.

​

"Lay off" the executive team for starters.

​

It should be abundantly clear to everyone that workers assume all of the risk in enterprise.

The technology subreddit is actually very anti-technology in general I’ve noticed. Case in point, the anti-cult of personality around here with some people dominating so much.

This particular project could enhance many human lives in ways previously locked behind the category of science fiction. Let’s just slap the big scary names of some investors on this thing to get the clicks.

Of course bad rich people are involved with financing. That’s how capitalism works. There is no ethical ultra rich capitalist. They all do horrible things to become and remain rich and powerful because they do not create anything; only take and hoard. Naturally their involvement is bad, but it isn’t the tech that is bad. It’s the economics. It’s the politics.

Throw a French style party and let near fully paralyzed people independently mobilize operate to some extent again without the subtext being “how is this going to be used to enslave the entire colony of worker ants.”

A sad state of our economic situation unfortunately. People will be paying high cost, no benefit (for them) mortgage insurance in lieu of that full down payment for at least 10 years. Considering the average lower premium these days (given prices) is around $1,500/yr that shit really adds up once one realizes they still need property insurance and taxes paid.

I’ve seen many people in my life get excited for an FHA loan since they can afford the tiny down payment, only to realize they can’t actually afford the true full cost because of PMI + escrow.

But if it helps escape being locked in renting then it almost always makes sense.

> a piece of paper is much more secure than a database.

Hard disagree. Just require authentication with something like a Yubikey for the best of both worlds. People can take vaults all they want, but they are never getting in it without both the master password and a Yubikey and a biometric component if also enabled.

Unless they kidnap you, in which case you have bigger problems on your hand.

Or one is talking about seed phrases for crypto wallets, in which case they better stamp it into metal and hide it well.

Paper burns and you’ll be locked out for a good long time if not forever. Yubikeys can have a duplicate kept in a safe deposit box. Can’t do that with a paper book in active use.

The BitWarden example isn’t even comparable. It is 100% user error to use an unknown login portal based off an explicit paid advertisement result in Google.

A paper password book user would fall for the same scam but for whichever targeted sites. They are, in fact, more likely to get scammed because they lack an app like BitWarden which can identify and fill the actual portals thus removing the potential for error.

Password managers with a Yubikey are probably the strongest option for most people honestly.

Complaining about this is no different than the people complaining about taking ownership of their Apple account keys and then being permanently locked out despite the numerous warnings.

These machines are supposed to be destroyed and parted out. Not resold as-is. Otherwise IT departments would remove the activation locks.

I, for one, want my enterprise laptop to be totally useless if someone swipes it at a hotel.

Do you also blame Apple for rendering iPhones inoperable if the actual owner reports them as stolen to dissuade theft and prevent data recovery?

And yet these companies are posting quarter after quarter of record profits.

SWE work is typically about results, not time on task.

Stop and listen to yourself a moment. Why would Microsoft waste all that time, money, and effort? Microsoft will have to pay Activision a $3 billion break up fee if they can’t get the deal closed for any reason.

The truth is that Microsoft is very obviously waging a lobbying battle behind closed doors while also waging a public relations battle. And look at how many good little fans come out of the woodwork to lap up their bullshit just because they hope Activision—one of the largest publishers in the world—will have their games “for free” on Gamepass.

Microsoft is trying to appease watchdogs by making very public gestures to support competitors for at least 10 years. But that doesn’t mean much because Microsoft is becoming a gaming as a service company. Sony can’t compete there yet and seem so very dedicated to platform lock-in since they are too dysfunctional to compete. Nintendo occupies its niche and not much else, let alone offer a real competitive service to anything MS is trying to do. I mean—have you tried Nintendo’s online services? Whole division should be turned inside out for the gross incompetence.

Microsoft is going for lock-in. That is why they have slyly allowed Xbox live gold conversions to get 3 years of Gamepass for basically nothing. It is why you can get a console with Gamepass and pay a single monthly fee in a lease to own scheme. They are abusing their position and locking people in. Azure alone makes more profit than Xbox entirely generates as revenue.

And people think the gravy train will never end 🙄

It gets so much worse than that. Think you can trust your financial advisor? Think again! It depends entirely on the product they may be pushing. A fiduciary can act as a non-fiduciary to benefit themselves exclusively in some cases.

For example, some insurance agents are required to act as a fiduciary for some products. But not others. So they can pivot and trick people who, for good reason, think the agent is still required to act in the customer’s own best financial interest.

Our system is setup such that the working class is easily stolen from entirely for the benefit of the wealthy. By design. And they use us against each other to accomplish the pilfering.

Yeah, watching Kevin blathering and lying before Congress about FTX to downplay his own involvement was infuriating.

He was defending a self-proclaimed fraudster. He was blaming Binance and insisting that FTX would’ve made it without their interference. This, at a time when there is serious talk about clawing back payments old FTX leadership made to people like Kevin while the ship sunk.

The current (disaster-leadership in a good way) CEO has hinted this is still on the table. So that grifter Kevin has every reason to play ball and back SBF’s bullshit still.

What a piece of human garbage.

Financial reports? Those morons should just insider trade like Buffet and the rest of Berkshire Hathaway.

> You could store your data on your own hard drive for free if you want. And encrypt it. No one is forcing you to use iCloud.

Not with iPhone, at least not all the data which iCloud collects. Apple also doesn’t allow third party apps to have such deep system access.

Also, what’s with the corpo apologetics and strawmanning? Capitalists will never love you.

Right, companies wouldn’t provision jet mobile hot spots to employees if mobile internet didn’t work just fine and dandy. 5G is more than capable for typical people, including gaming. The folks who raise that particular issues are usually into hyper competitive gaming which is nowhere near widespread appeal for normal usage. I’m not even talking very big demographic jumps; most people don’t play games so dependent on the lowest latency possible because competition for fun fucking sucks after a long day working in competitive environments.

It is, of course, region dependent. People in the boonies are going to suffer the most, but that is also true for “landline” style internet service.

$700 million on production, $300 million in relentlessly and proactively attacking the audience with accusatory statements. Amazon calls that marketing.

The rights alone were $250m just for the indices more or less. That’s why they have to do all this bullshit dancing around because they didn’t purchase the rights to a lot of actual LOTR writing.

It seems so rotten that any other studio is accuse of money laundering. But this is Amazon; they are just more or less incompetent with filmmaking. They fucked with WoT in much the same way.

Amazon thought they would try a new marketing tactic known as fan baiting to get contrarians consuming their show. It didn’t work, and Amazon is covering their tracks because they overcommitted to this nightmare.

I’m a firm believer in giving a show at least 3 episodes to unpack. I think Amazon wishes more people did thag because they are still hiding their viewership data while HBO acts with transparency and gloats.

It is weird, then, how the competition doesn’t do it well.

Reels and Shorts, for example, really aggressively push rightwing content out of nowhere. I’m a leftist and subscribe mostly to leftist content creators. TikTok has no problems showing me mostly content from that spectrum. But Shorts? It almost entirely ignores my subscriptions directly and instead pushes me elsewhere. For example, I subscribe to a game streamer. Only one. So naturally Shorts shows me almost exclusively videos about guns in video games as rightwing propaganda is narrated on top.

Reels wasn’t much better when I tried it.

It seems that the competitors all have certain things they want to push—rightwing nut jobs in YouTube’s case and coronated internet celebrities in Instagram’s—and everything else falls by the wayside.

TikTok hones in quickly and makes feeds truly unique. That is why it is so good and dangerous.

>stepping up practically overnight to deliver free internet access for an entire country when the need was dire and footing most of the bill.

The US government paid for those. A significant amount of them, at very least, and continues to pay.

Starlink was possible life the same reason Musk’s other, non-Twitter ventures were possible: government welfare.

>Clearly, all those lurking anonymously through social media, dropping political shittakes as they go, are light-years ahead in morality, civility, and general value to humanity.

As opposed to being born rich and buying your way into the companies that made you most famous, dropping political shittakes like a pleb?

Cry us a river.

Huge difference between stacked/forced ranking and performance reviews.

Stacked ranking is when employees are forced into arbitrary boxes and then the company cuts a certain category loose by termination. Managers will be will told “your team has 10 people, you MUST review and rank someone as a 1 then fire them.” The manager has little choice. Some companies offer leeway if teams are very small, but others like Amazon are cut throat because they haven’t lost massive class action lawsuits from their employees yet like GE and Microsoft did.

Amazon is being very transparent in what they are doing here. They aren’t doing performance reviews. They are cooking the books to cut an arbitrary number of people for performance issues because it sounds better than I ranked layoffs. In this case, they have just instructed managers to forced rank everyone they want laid off into the bottom tier.

Hence forced distribution.

Edit: a key component of forced distribution is that you can technically meet or exceed your company demands and still rank in the bottom tier because company policy forces someone to be there. So a team of high performers who all exceed will have an arbitrary percentage ranked as not meets or equivalent.

This really happens. Companies really get sued. Although probably not in this environment considering corpos have well and truly captured the courts.

Stack ranking, aka forced distribution, should be illegal. Funny that the companies that pioneered it in America inevitably left it by the wayside after each lost massive class action suits against them for the practice.

Because of that, many of these companies will bend over backwards to avoid using the terms even though it is precisely descriptive.

The people who need to be managed out are all of upper management and their HR enablers. Workers should have a say in how their company is run but a lifetime of capital class propaganda has made people have automatic negative responses to things like that. Like Pavlov ringing a bell for his dogs.