Months ago I would have said “yes, it’s possible”. Now, it’s become pretty clear LLMs are a dead end. They’re trained to simulate the internet and can’t do other things with any reliability.

It’s still possible with whatever the next approach is to making computers smarter, though. Natural intelligence exists, and we’re made out of the same stuff as everything else, so artificial intelligence must also be possible. And, without the limits of recent evolution, it could probably be made far better than us.

Don’t forget that pandemics used to be a goofy sci-fi trope, too.

Americans for the most part are only dimly aware there’s an outside world in the first place. The amount of covering up that needs to be done is minimal.

That show would have been way darker if Perry had ever employed the fact he’s a venomous mammal.

Actually, it was a missed opportunity not to go with a female Perry and have an egg-hatching subplot. Their version of the platypus really didn’t do much.

Weirdly specific question, OP.

I kind of feel like anything gets grosser as it ages. IIRC urine also start to break down and have more ammonia, which has a smell.

That feeling when you survive the apocalypse only to get stung by a platypus and regret that you survived.

I’d expect them to stay out of it at this point, actually. They want to expand into the pacific, and the US and East Asian democracies want to stop them. Meanwhile, Australia also has affinities with now-distinct Europe, isn’t directly in the way of any of that, and depends heavily on China for trade.

And, even if it did become involved, dealing with a Chinese occupation isn’t going to be as hard as a nuclear winter or the total breakdown of modern civilisation.

I did split the question in two.

They are not in NATO, actually. That requires proximity to the Atlantic. They’re Western though, that’s true. Being in a city could be a bit of a risk.

In South America or southern Africa you’re going to deal with waves of people trying to expand in from the north. No way of life escapes that unscathed. Not to mention, the projections for food scarcity on other continents aren’t nearly as rosy, if there’s soot in the upper atmosphere, maybe because of the higher population to start with.

And then there’s poverty as a whole separate dimension of things. Here or in Australia I’m pretty sure the capacity to build things like generators will continue. In the third world there’s absolutely no guarantee.

Where would you move to ride out a potential WWIII?

Australia. There really is no better place in the event of nuclear war. It’s a continent-island, meaning easy to defend, it grows and can build just about anything, and being in the southern hemisphere it should be safe from nuclear winter.

Specifically, a rural property somewhere agricultural. Maybe Queensland or Tasmania.

If you could move anywhere to minimize the impact on you of the worldwide rise of fascism…

That’s almost a different question, though. Whichever European country is the most securely democratic. There’s lots of non-war ways fascism can suck aggressively.

I mean, Satoshi mined his ~1000000BTC, but from a functional perspective I don’t see how that’s different from just having it hardcoded in the genesis block (or equivalent in another system). It definitely doesn’t make Ripple BitConnect, or one of those janky “stablecoins”.

The problem with relying on “actual cryptography” for privacy is auditability, like I mentioned above. When there was a bug in Bitcoin that allowed someone to give himself a bazillion BTC, we were able to catch and revert it immediately. If there is a bug like that in Monero, we won’t know until after it’s circulated as much as the premined Bytecoins did.

It’s a problem, sure. If you want auditability at the expense of any guaranteed privacy, again, Ripple. It’s is totally transparent, assuming you keep a backup of all the old closed ledgers. And uses computing power more comparable to an old-fashioned bank account than to Bitcoin.

But thinking that cryptocurrencies are all p2p, and that Bitcoin dominates the market because they don’t know this one simple thing, are both telltale signs of a novice.

It’s never been my main squeeze, but I’ve dabbled since the early days. Do with that what you will.

Little at this point. That’s bound to change eventually. Just ask Nicole from Toronto.

Cunningham’s law helps. You can make a stand-alone website that’s slop and hope an individual user doesn’t notice the hallucinations, but on Lemmy people can reply and someone’s going to raise the alarm.

I haven’t been “told about” shit. I actually have a math background and know cryptography, and I’ve read more than a few whitepapers.

Monero does it better with actual privacy. Ripple does it with the least overhead of all. Eth changes so much I’m not even sure what all they have going on.

Mixers give a very false sense of security, relative to actual cryptography. People seem to think if you mix enough it’s the same, but actually there’s like a million holes in that, not to mention the trust in whoever’s doing the mixing.

They frequently have centralized issuance, security, development, governance… you name it. It only takes one centralized part to bring down a project.

So? Anything worthy of the title is open source, so if someone goes evil it just forks. Monero itself started as a fork of something else IIRC. The actual algorithm isn’t centralised in any of the big cases I can think of, not counting vapourware scams.

Bitcoin? It’s a first prototype that unnecessarily guzzles computing power, and has no privacy features whatsoever. We don’t drive the Model T anymore.

They’re all p2p, I don’t know what you’re talking about there.

Public service announcement that crypto isn’t intrinsically dumb, but that the most popular cryptos are, and most of the fans definitely are.

Interesting, I hadn’t heard that. Was it taking over from other forms of tobacco, maybe? Cigarettes definitely are easy to manufacture and smoke, compared to the other ones I can think of.

What does canned food smell like, though? How about cigarettes and low-quality plastic products for the 60s.

Before 1900: Shit smell gradually replaces cigarette smell the further you go back, peaking in intensity sometime around the black death (in Europe). Actually, coal maybe needs to be in there somewhere.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard the quote IRL, but I’ve known libertarians and they’ve seemed fine. If all you disagree about is the particulars of economic theory it’s not really worth getting worked up about.

I imagine this person being young and male, and possibly liking cryptocurrencies.

Is it guaranteed they’re voting conservative when they say that?

Yeet is from a Vine (that’s like TikTok from 2010). I’m pretty sure it was only surreal at the time, just as the action of throwing the bottle into the crowd was in the first place.