The neural network can render bugs as part of the natural scene as actual bugs, wings and all. You won't know the difference between bug and bug.

Why do they only last 5 to 7 years, and what happens with the satellites when they reach end of life? Do they fall down and burn in the atmosphere? Or do they stay up there as zombie satellites?
Or do they only last 5 to 7 years because they fall back to Earth?

X-D

Freaking incredible. It never ceases to amaze me that some people who are so successful in life and are very well off, easily in the top 0.1%, are willing to take the risk of criminal prosecution to enrich themselves even further. It's just never enough.

Humans make mistakes and have incentives that are not necessarily aligned with the common good. Bitcoin has neither, it's just a protocol like http.
-There was the great depression in the 30's where many people lost their savings because banks couldn't meet withdrawals.
-There was the savings and loan crisis in the 80's and 90's resulting in government bailouts covered by tax payers.
-Countless banking crises in developing countries with failed banks and people losing your savings, that you never heard of because its not in the news.
-European banking crisis in the 2000's, again taxpayer bailouts.
-Currency crisis like just recently, leading to devaluation and loss of value through inflation.

Believe me, the banking industry is very far away from perfect. Bitcoin is almost perfect in what it does.

You're right that if you own Bitcoin, you should self-custody, not leave it on a centralized exchange, and that that carries risk and responsibility. It's easy to fuck it up and lose your keys. You have to know what you're doing, use a hardware wallet, and store the passphrase securely and ideally with some redundancy.

There is no incentive to hack Bitcoin and break it. You would have to invest so much money, and by hacking it you would temporarily crash Bitcoin, so you could get access to all the Bitcoin that is then worthless. Also, because the blockchain is publicly available, anyone could and probably somebody would simply setup a new Bitcoin network with the rollback state from before the hack. As I said, it is practically indestructible, even if hacked, for which there is simply no financial incentive.

Bitcoin is value because it is that neutral financial base layer that anyone can trust. Not sure if you've heard, but the role of the USD as the international reserve currency is being challenged. One of the reasons being that currency can be weaponized, as has been done with sanctions against Russia. So China is now trying to push the Yuan as the alternative reserve and international trade unit, among the BRICS countries. But of course China has the same issue - they could also weaponize their currency at some point and start using it as leverage. And India is a rival who is not interested in adopting Chinese currency... the obvious thing here is that Bitcoin would be the ideal reserve currency of the world, because it is absolutely neutral, decentralized, transparent and trustless. Nobody wants to see it, because Bitcoin has a reputation and people are not well educated on it. But when you consider the facts, it is true.

But don't take my word for it. Free market economy works. There is a reason why a Bitcoin is worth 25K USD at the moment. So obviously the current market does think that being able to participate and owning part of such a network has value.

Say that you have a group of people, let's call them Arnold, Beatrix, Charlie and Dave, who regularly go out on activities. To keep things simple, someone always takes the bill; They go to a restaurant, Arnold takes the bill. Next week they go to the cinema, Beatrix takes the bill, etc.
They track these expenses on a ledger, and once a year they go through the calculations and balance it out, by paying each other out whatever they owe. Overall, it's a big time saver opposed to everyone paying his own bill every time they meet.

This ledger is now pretty important. If it's lost, nobody will know if they owe or are owed money. Trivial perhaps in a group of friends, but the stakes can get very high, if they are actually all millionaires, or billionaires, or corporations, or states.

The ledger is a physical object. As a piece of paper, it can be lost, stolen, or burn up in a fire. You can digitize it, but then you have just moved it to some storage medium that is also a physical object that is subject to theft and other risks, like malfunction or earthquakes.

You also have trust issues. Who is going to care over that ledger? Anton? What if he makes modifications to it? With sufficient records, it will be hard to tell what was real and what wasn't. Is everyone going to hold his own copy? Then if multiple people make modifications to it, it's one person's word against the other. Trust is a huge issue.

Because there are trust issues, we have banks who take care of such financial matters for us. But behind every bank, there are also just people, who make mistakes, who are not always ethical, and who then have the control over your ledger. A bank might decide to not let you access it on Sundays. Or after working hours. Or that because you're not credit worthy, you don't get to have a ledger at all. Also banks are big and messy. They fail, they go bankrupt, they need hundreds of thousands of employees and office spaces and a huge, inefficient bureaucracy with outdated technology to function.

Bitcoin fixes all of this. As a decentralized ledger that lives on the Internet, it is practically indestructible. It is accessible to all, there is no single authority that can deny you access or tell you how or what to do. It is neutral towards every participant and therefore can be trusted by all. It enforces the correct behavior and is tamper-proof by force of it's mathematically proven protocol. It is up 24/7 and processes transactions every 10 minutes.
This is one important reason why Bitcoin has value. There's more.

Bitcoin is priced in dollars simply because it (for now) still is the world's reserve currency and thereby the standard by which almost everything else is priced? No mystery there.

Nonsense.

The Internet is used plenty by cyber criminals. Anything that is useful will be used by criminals as well. Estimates say 85% of emails are spam or malicious.
Should we stop the Internet now? Will you stop using email?

He still has a point.
In 2009, you could buy a Bitcoin for 10 cents.
By 2011 it rose to 30$, a 3000% gain.
By 2013 it was worth first 230$ and 1240$ by the end of the year.
By 2017 it was at almost 20.000$
In 2021 it reached the all time high of 63.558$

Bitcoin also experiences spectacular crashes of up to 80% throughout this time, and every single time, people have said that Crypto is dead. But if you look at the data, the trajectory is clear.
One of the reasons for this high volatility is that nobody really knows what a Bitcoin and Crypto in general is worth. But if you know how it works and what it does, you should realize and appreciate that it groundbreaking tech. The Internet brought forward email - and it made everyone independent of physical letters and post offices. The Internet brought forward music streaming, and it disrupted the music industry. The Internet brought forward video streaming, and it revolutionized how we watch TV. The Internet brought forward social networks, and it completely changed how people interact and how they consume media. Bitcoin is Internet money, and the Crypto beyond it even more: digital Ids, tokenization of value, trustless verification, decentralized organizations, the list goes on.
It is foolish to cynically brush all of it off just because Bitcoin is 60% down from it's all time high.

Double standards are warranted when it comes to countries that are clearly autocracies, such as China. In China, the communist party has complete power over business. There is no separation between corporation and the state in the sense that corporations have to follow all orders, such as handing over all information on request, without question or checks and balances.

In a democracy with civil rights, a corporation can refuse, or demand a court order, or simply go to court against the government. There is no such thing in China, or Russia, Saudi Arabia, Emirates and other countries, for that matter.

Yes, this can also work as a reminder to all you rich folks in Dubai, that you are in fact living in an absolutist theocratic monarchy without civil rights.

The heat death of the universe is an unproven hypothesis. Why do you claim such a thing is possible without evidence?

This article reminds me of why I stopped watching Linus Tech tips. I used to watch it sometimes, but stopped caring after seeing a sort of yearly retrospective video, in which Linus got weirdly emotional, seemingly reflecting on the consumerism that his channel tends to propagate. He seemed genuinely upset about constantly promoting the latest high-tech gadgets, and the economic but also ecological impact that that sort of consumerist behavior entails. I began to be genuinely impressed by that sort of self-criticizing reflection as the video went on.

But towards the end of the video, all that built up sentiment culminated into a "well, but it's how I make money, so I've decided to just stop thinking about it - fuck it".
I couldn't help but LoL the most disappointed laugh ever to leave my face. Here I was thinking these guys were actually starting to care about the finances of their audience, or the ecological impact of the throwaway tech-gadget culture, but in the end they just shrug it all off because it makes them money. I couldn't help but be reminded that this is the same mentality by which oil companies and so many other problematic entities that are destroying the planet operate.

Somehow this one video ruined it for me.

Keep in mind that the real mystery is not, if there are aliens out there or not. The real mystery is why we haven't seen them yet.
The idea that we are alone in the universe, or just our galaxy for that matter, is egocentric and improbable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Seeing how our planet keeps warming due to industrial emissions, global pandemics due to genetic engineering of viruses and ever more lethal weapons of destruction, I think I'm starting to get a pretty good idea why civilizations destroy themselves at roughly our point in time, before they can boost off into a golden space age.

THIS is so true. It's annoying as fuck.
I also frequently turn on subtitles because the music and sound effects are frequently too loud compared to the dialogue. Also, frequently I can't understand the accents, such as strong African American slang, or Irish, or some mid-western US redneck talk where I don't understand shit.

I would probably pay for YouTube premium if it cost a reasonable price, between 4-6 bucks, maybe even up to 8. But why does it cost as much as Netflix when YouTube crowdsources all of their content?

I think it's pretty clear what consciousness is. Consciousness is what it feels like to be a human with the nervous system that we have, and with the sensory inputs, such as sight, hearing, smell and taste. That experience of being such a creature with those traits is what our consciousness is.

Am I wrong?

Non-geoblocked article:
https://archive.vn/f2J9J