Self-driving cars is absolutely the most expensive, and least practical way of solving the problems that the author of this article rightly raises.

Cars in the US are too big, the driver training is too lax, and the engineering standards to which cars are held are far to lenient. There's no such thing as a checkpoint in the US, whereas in most other countries the police can legally stop drivers for a breath test without cause. If America was really interested in road safety, it would address these things.

There it is folks. The one-hundred-percent reliable bullshit indicator.

I mean sure, there is a possibility that Jerry-Trollbait-Normandin does really mean research. Perhaps he means set up decades long trials of cellphone users and monitor the incidence of brain cancers that occur "just about the ear". One would expect a significant uptick since the invention of the cellphone, for instance. So a longitudinal study of the literature around these specific "just about the ear" cancers would definitely demonstrate this beyond doubt.

But we all know he doesn't. We all know, Jerry, that you mean "watch some youtube videos".

That's not research. That's TV. Which, by the way, was once also believed to give you cancer.

David Pumpkins....

Could I interest you in some David Pumpkins? They're not actually pumpkins, they're just SHA256 hashes, that when arranged in a grid roughly approximate ASCII art of pumpkins. Each takes several thousand hours of hash crunching to find, along with even more time for a Deep Neural Net to determine the extent to which they resemble a pumpkin.

If that's not "non-traditional value", then I don't know what is.

Or is "non-traditional value" just doublespeak for useless?

If any of those points were true in any meaningful sense, then people would be using Bitcoin.

They aren't. And when they say they are, and you look closer, you find out that they in fact aren't.

It has no value. It gets traded a bit, mostly by algorithms, and it hasn't died out because there are still a bunch of machines that nobody has turned off yet. They're wasting a ton of electricity, of course, but then so are cat videos stored in datacentres.

But it was this bit that I liked the most in your reply.

Fantastic. I thought we were supposed to care about that, but OK.

This is great. I needed a laugh.

Given how far beyond the realms of any reasonably foreseeable future that technology outline is, I'm pretty comfortable with "impossible".

I also believe that anyone choosing to be frozen in the event of their death has a vastly over-inflated sense of their own importance. Or even, of any human individual's possible importance. It seems extremely doubtful that such a technology even could exist. In a brain cell ruptured by many dagger-like ice crystals, what do you think the chances are of there being sufficient information for reconstruction available in the locations and state of whatever proteins might be around?

Zero. That's what.

This entire industry should be shut down. It's grifters exploiting the incurably self-important.

I would give this a far, far, far less chance of success than one in a thousand. In fact, I would go much further. I claim that cryostasis is straight-up impossible.

It's impossible for the same reason that perpetual motion is impossible - you can't drive the losses in a system down to zero, no matter what you do. Entropy will always win in the end, and those frozen bodies - supposing that they are even intact after the freezing process, which they manifestly are not - will never be re-animated.

Look what happened when they defrosted some of them

Yes, they should, you're right.

However, the reality is that if they were to try that, they would find that most of what they're trying to recycle, can't actually be recycled. That would be... embarrassing.

...some time ago, maybe ten years or so, about a thousand contacts mysteriously appeared in my iCloud-synced contacts app on my mac.

Addresses, phone numbers, names. Everything. People I'd never heard of in my life. Hundreds of them.

You've got to wonder what kind of database design you'd have to use to end up messing up that badly.

The big, big, big difference is that somebody is charging money for access to other people's code that is protected by open source licenses.

Does that clear it up for you?

If I had money to waste on wagers, I'd bet on this lawsuit succeeding.

And those major corps will not succeed, not if their business depends on the quality of the software they write anyway.

Companies that didn't fire developers and replace them with "AI" will take their place.

All of these things are things you can do with a normal computer, except thousands of times less efficient.

Blockchain, NFT, and web3 are all about creating artificial scarcity in a digital world, where scarcity does not naturally exist. Scarcity is not a social good, it is a device to attempt to create value when none existed before. It will eventually fail. This doesn't mean that you can't make money off it in the short term, but eventually somebody will be left holding the bag. When that happens, you better hope that person isn't you.

Ignore it. It will go away in the end.

I stand happily corrected. Thank you.