Thank you very much for pointing me in the right direction. I was able to dig a bit and I think I found it - it looks like they were being a bit of a pedantic asshole about some spelling/grammar thing, the moderator deleted their comment because… yes, it’s a pedantic spelling/grammar nitpick. Then that user threw a massive tantrum and started yelling mod abuse.

Honestly, it’s a real shame that Liam lost faith in Lemmy over something stupid like this. Yeah, there are downsides of a public mod log - really hateful vile shit will just persist in there forever when realistically it should be just wiped out entirely. I think overall it has more benefits than drawbacks, but I certainly wouldn’t say that being opposed to a public mod log is some sort of smoking gun evidence that he abused his mod powers.

So yeah, this one guy behaving like a self-centred jerk actively contributed towards pushing a well-known and prolific linux gaming journalist off the platform. Great stuff, love to see it.

Screenshot:

Yeah, totally - I think it’s designed to be hard to understand, both tech stuff and financial stuff is often made intentionally confusing, in my opinion. It’s not dissimilar to the bitcoin mixers, but it’s still much stronger - the system is automated, you can’t mess it up as a user, you’re less reliant on a single-point-of-trust, and so on.

You might be on to something about quiet periods - I don’t really have the knowledge to say either way. There might be a bit of stuff that goes on in the background for wallets even if they’re not actively conducting “real” transactions. But, I don’t know, really.

The transaction data itself does need to be publicly readable, because otherwise the whole consensus mechanism that the blockchain relies on wouldn’t work.

Javascript doesn’t have strongly-typed variables

From what I understand, which honestly, isn’t a lot - the method used to anonymize transactions and balances is more like obfuscation than anything else. The system uses various techniques to fuzz up the data in such a way that it becomes impossible to trace.

It’s a bit like if you wanted to send a bank transfer for £200 but anonymize it somewhat, you could transfer that money around between a bunch of other bank accounts, before sending it on to the final source. And if multiple people are doing the same thing, it becomes essentially impossible to determine where the money entered and left.

The problem is though that such systems aren’t true encryption in the same way that RSA is, for example - the data isn’t unreadable, and it’s not impossible to reverse, it’s just that there’s so much junk data and it’s such a mess that it makes the true transactions difficult to identify and the end user has extremely strong plausible deniability. However, it’s likely just a matter of time before some state actor finds a vulnerability in the technique that allows them to trace transactions - if they haven’t already done so.

I’m interested to hear more. I’ve followed Liam’s work for almost a decade at this point and I haven’t ever seen or heard of him acting unprofessionally, but I’m quite new to Lemmy.

What abuse of their moderator powers? Is there a link to see the mod log somewhere? Sorry, I know I’m being a bit needy, but I’m not really sure what I’m doing.

I think you’re being way too charitable. Billionaires have zero interest in actually making the world a better place. The charitable foundations stuff is a way for them to avoid taxes, exert control over public policy, and to gain positive PR.

Why is Elon Musk acting like he’s a nazi?

Occam’s razor says, it’s because he’s a nazi.

It’s not money, that’s way too charitable.

It’s because he’s a white supremacist. He wants fascism.

Pretty straight forward.

I’m back to pirating all of my music. I will buy CDs or pay for downloads for artists that I really like or smaller artists, but I am fucking through with the streaming platforms. They just enshittify more and more.

I’m disabled - walking and standing are very difficult and painful for me - leaving the shopping cart as near as possible to the disabled bay without it being an obstruction is the right thing to do. You can immediately get the support of something to lean on as soon as possible after leaving the car.

Just something to consider. I now submit to your judgment for your death penalty :D

Cryptocurrency has basically many of the same problems as traditional banks, it’s just a matter of who is controlling it. Monero is slightly different from most, because it is much more anonymous, but it’s really only a matter of time before even that advantage is lost.

There is no substitute for physical currency if you want privacy and anonymity.

This obviously can’t be true, how did they do it without Photoshop? /s

but what if number isn’t an integer, or even a number at all? This code, and the improved code shared by the other user, could cause major problems under those conditions. Really, what you would want, is to validate that number is actually an integer before performing the modulo, and if it isn’t, you want to throw an exception, because something has gone wrong.

That’s exactly what that NPM module does. And this is why it’s not a bad thing to use packages/modules for even very simple tasks, because they help to prevent us from making silly mistakes.

photons have left the chat

I think that you’re right, with the way that our society is structured, it is unethical. It’s essentially the world’s most advanced plagiarism tool.

However, being realistic, even if no private individual ever used it, it would still exist and would be used by corporations for profit maximising.

In my opinion, telling people that they’re bad people for using something which is made unethically isn’t really helpful. For example, smartphones aren’t made ethically, but the way to get that to change isn’t to change consumer habits - because we know that just doesn’t work - it’s to get organised, as a collective working class, and take action into our own hands.

Why would you even comment if you don’t want to participate in a discussion?

Internet search, e.g. Google, is now functionally almost completely useless. I use ChatGPT basically as a Google replacement.

I will still search for stuff - I use Kagi - but give up after half a dozen results if none of them are relevant and go to ChatGPT instead. Often, ChatGPT is more helpful. But sometimes it just makes a bunch of nonsense up.

ChatGPT is great for when you need to find something where you kind of know at least the vague shape of what you’re expecting and you have enough expertise to filter out any of the lies it makes up.

looking forward to jill stein dramatically revealing that she was secretly evil all along! if you vote for kamala then you know that you’re voting for someone evil but with jill stein, she’s evil and she tried to cover it up! such a trickster.

nothing ever happens

but yeah, the story is a bit too perfect, it strains credulity a bit, but there’s nothing about it that is truly unbelievable