I think if marketed properly it could still do well. But more as a niche 'artisanal' strain than the mass produced ones like we have today.
Just in the last 50 years, thanks to modern science, cannabis production has evolved heavily. This resulted in far more (ie 3-5x as much) THC concentration per kg of weed than in the 1970s. This is important if you are doing mass production because of transportation costs that go into the economics of any business at scale. But it also means that the cannabis plants of today have been heavily selected throughout the years. So having access to an 'OG' seed would certainly be valuable both for research and marketing purposes.
The Liquid Death marketing strategy: take the "weaker" version of the thing (that doesn't have the active ingredient) and enshroud it in badass imagery and prose.
I tried to vibecode something similar last weekend. Got tripped up by Claude's safety classifier. It wouldn't let me build any features that track/audit process executions , not through custom kernel hooks nor even using off the shelf software for it.
You terrorist. And internally they're doing biological warfare and terrorism simulations. For science, of course.
"The worry is that, while right now you need to be a skilled virologist to know what components to order or how to grow and spread a bioweapon, AI tools might eventually make it possible for a rogue state, or a rogue group, or an individual, to do all this without virology expertise.
For a while, Anthropic tested whether Claude could assist a terrorist in developing a biological weapon in the obvious way: It assigned testers who had, say, an undergraduate degree in chemistry but no real virology training to try to use Claude to plan an effective mass terror event. Then it scored the attempt by how close it might have come to success.
Early in 2026, it noticed that Claude, attempting the task by itself, did better than a human aided by Claude did at coming up with a workable plan."
Claude wouldn't let me make a DHCP client that would make 1000s of leases. But Gemini in the WebUI with 3.6 Thinking gave me a decent python script in one shot. I didn't realize testing DHCP servers was such a sensitive security issue.
Meanwhile, they're simulating bio warfare with their own, unaligned models 'just to see if they can do it'. And not a single person thinks 'hey, if that's possible, maybe we shouldn't be doing this at all'...
Wow, interesting. My agents on open weight inference have been completely nerdsniped by the idea of tracking and auditing process executions. They talk of nothing else.
I've never had a smart phone and all my work is in front of computers. I was a bit worried during COVID lockdowns that I'd be forced to get one, but didn't have to in the end. Occasionally it can be annoying in other ways for example:
1) you buy a piece of hardware (printer, cctv cameras etc.) that can only be set up with a phone or you have to work harder to find the web interface.
2) Banks - banks really suck.
3) Companies I work for who use VPNs where you need a SMS or authenticator, however this is usually easy to get around with a web authenticator and some companies have let me use a YubiKey instead which is actually much less hassle.
4) Car parking meters where they discriminate - I tend to avoid these ones.
5) QR code restaurant menus - hate these but usually can get around it by just asking somebody for a paper menu.
6) Phasing out of 3G causing low reception - this is annoying because there are fewer good dumbphones that have 4G modems. Also I hate Android and Android based phones which come with facebook app and social media stuff installed so I'm a bit more limited in options. However, I managed to get an Alcatel flip phone which has 4G and it's a bit buggy but reception is now good.
I'm surprised that I'm able to get by, given the enormous pressure everyone is put under to use a smart phone, but it gives me hope that it hasn't worked and you can still get by in society without them. It would be pretty terrible if everyone HAD to agree to a google or Apple EULA just to be a functioning citizen.
PayPal once quietly added my European card (EUR zone) as USD. And when I paid for a product in EUR, it "thoughtfully" (for them) converted the amount twice using their special currency exchange rate.
You can't do without airports and airlines, but why PayPal still exists in 2024 - I don't understand.
Because they have a ton of users. People who don’t have credit card numbers saved on autofill so PayPal is more convenient. People also think it’s safer because the website doesn’t see your card number
I struggle to see how it is convenient. At least on Android, when you pay for something, it doesn't use the installed app, but makes you login in the browser. And they still don't support 2FA or Passkeys properly, making me to receive an SMS almost every time.
I can't answer that because I rarely use paypal myself. In fact they banned one of my two accounts (personal, business) for using gift cards which makes me uninterested in using the other one more than once a year.
That aside, I've seen many normal people use it for the reasons I described: They don't want to type in their card number and they think it's unsafe to type in their card number. It's (literally) all in their head so don't think too hard about it.
The practical alternative is Apple Pay, but you can't use it on Android.
>You can't do without airports and airlines, but why PayPal still exists in 2024 - I don't understand.
What don't you understand? In the US, the party that says "the government should not interfere with business" wins a lot of elections and the party that says "the government should protect consumers from corporate harm" wins way fewer elections.
So we have almost no consumer protections, so it's largely not illegal or risky for a business to fuck over their consumers which is very profitable so most businesses fuck over their consumers in various ways.
What does this have to do with the government? My point was that PayPal is terrible and why is there no widely used alternative to it? I know there are alternatives, but usually only about 5 people use them. And somehow in Germany (and it seems in the US too) everyone still uses PayPal.
Yeah it's the US's fault if a corporation misbehaves in Europe. It's so sad that Europe cannot legislate or do anything about it. PayPal is just inevitable I guess. Wait no, Europe is more than capable of doing that but they don't care about it either. Hence why they also don't do anything against Ryanair. Oops!
IIRC they even use multiple different wordings and layouts for this dialogue, depending on what "mode" of Paypal you're using (e.g. if it's a pop-up or if it's a full page redirect; I dunno how to describe it technically). I have to use it a lot and even I've been tricked a few times. It's literally theft and I can't believe they get away with it
Farcaster has been a nice refreshment for me. Currently a lot of developer types are present on the platform and I've seen lots of insightful conversations there.
I looked it up and apparently there is a "$5 sign-up fee", and posts/reactions are not free too:
>To sign up, users must pay a $5 sign-up fee, meant to prevent the creation of spam accounts. Further, users can only post a limited number of “casts” on Farcaster apps, which are tied to packages called storage units. Storage units, which go for $5 a piece, grant a user 5,000 casts, 2,500 reactions, and 2,500 links or photo posts within a one-year period.
(some shady website)
Yeah, that will surely make millions of users to sign up /s
Yeah, I don't get it. Social media sites thrive on interaction. Giving users a reason to hesitate before interacting is going to snuff out a lot of the casual interactions that make a site feel "alive".
Neither of those statements is true. Bitcoin seized by US government is often sold off in auctions[1]. Tether seized by the government could also be redeemed for fiat eventually, following due process.
EDIT: I see now that you were actually comparing the case of USDT freeze against Bitcoin seizures. Nevertheless, Tether doesn't simply get to keep the USD value of the frozen tokens. US government would want to recover that.
Tokens are frozen "in-place" pending investigation. It differs from how it works with btc, because the government does not have control of the private keys that manage the addresses in question - so they go to Tether who controls the smart contract that manages the transactions of the tokens.
This, in practice, means that the US government controls the mentioned tokens for the moment. What happens with them depends entirely on the outcome of the investigation.
US govt could also create a govt wallet and force usdt to transfer the tokens there I imagine, if they want to proceed with seizure. They'd likely will need some legal framework for this but it's easily doable. Then us govt can auction it off as they like.
I spent a good chunk of my youth in the kafana, AMA :)
Joking aside, my feelings about it are mixed. I have fond memories of good laughs and parties with friends, but also can't help but notice a lot of black outs and hangovers the day after :) don't get me wrong though, if you are a tourist, you should definitely experience it.
There are no criminal charges involving Coinbase or Kraken. Litigation by SEC yes, criminal charges no. There’s a very meaningful difference there. The first type can ruin your business, the second put you behind bars too.
Traditional banks aren't trying to prove that people should trust them. People already trust them, and even if they don't, they're already regulated enough that consumers know the government will step in to bail them out.
So you tell me someone has 88bn us dollar or real assets somewhere stored away safely?
Somehow I doubt that. That would mean someone invested this in a save and independent way with enough return to keep it inflation save and apparently has no other idea on how to invest that even more magical.
Most people can't redeem USDT from Tether... Read their terms. You can only redeem USDT for USD if you bought directly from them, and even then it needs to be more than $100k. If you fulfill those two requirements, they'll let you redeem if they want to. They state in their terms that redemption is entirely at their discretion, and they can just say no if they gambled the reserves away.
Happy to see this whole thing finally coming to an end, its a nice wrap to the dead market we've had for the past 2 years. I'm excited for 2024 in crypto!
The rumour about Binance indictment by DoJ has been going around for 1-2 years now. Its one of the last remaining pieces of major news that could have potentially negatively affected the industry. After two years of prosecutions, regulatory uncertainty and general poor market conditions, its only now starting to feel like there's light at the end of the tunnel.
Not really. SEC investigations are civil, not criminal. They might end up paying a fine, but there is no risk of jail time or anything similar. Also, while I like Kraken as an exchange, its market share is not significant enough for it to matter in the big picture.
SEC investigations address both aspects, when it gets past investigation to litigation, they do civil litigation themselves and refer to DOJ for potential criminal prosecution.
That’s pretty unlikely to happen at the moment though. I’m far from a Tether fanboy, but in this interest rate environment they are likely making boatloads of money just by sitting on a nice chunk of T-bills.
There are now lots of efficient cryptos and some that can run on a single wind turbine. But I am with you, hoping the energyvore ones die as fast as possible.
The efficient ones are still outright scams if not blatantly illegal. All cryptocurrencies should die. After more than a decade it's clear by now that blockchains are a useless technology and the investors are getting more and more desperate to pass the bag.
More specifically now you can get actual real money by putting your savings in a bank account (and most people are struggling to pay the increased cost of living), there's less incentive to throw it away in a casino.
A lot of the inflation seen in the U.S. is corporate profit-taking such as when the automakers used the chip shortages to steer buyers towards the highest-end models they prioritized for production while less profitable models were back ordered.
That matters because cryptocurrencies don’t help at all with the inflation consumers are seeing, while adding more personal risk and an exchange rate to arbitrage.
You have an interesting worldview. Corporations take profits to pay their employees. They do this with or without inflation and always have.
How would a crypto "help" with inflation? In the same way the Dollar "helps" with the inflation of the Euro?
Cryptos don't add to personal risk, people do that. If you think cryptos are making an impact, you should understand that the entire crypto economy is a rounding error in inflationary impact.
I think you misunderstood the point: when a large portion of the cost increases are due to companies raising their profit margins, changing how you pay for it won’t affect that.
That’s a separate factor, though. It’s definitely one of the reasons why cryptocurrencies never became popular but in the case we’re talking about it’d just be making a bad situation worse rather than the cause for it being bad.
It is. If you’ve never learned economic except from cryptocurrency marketing material, inflation simply refers to the prices of goods and services increasing, not any one specific cause. That can happen due to real changes in demand or supply, government policy changes, or other factors like changes in the labor market. It’s key to understand why inflation is happening because that tells you both whether it’s a problem - almost all serious economists think modest inflation is good for keeping the economy moving – and what kinds of fixes might be needed. For example, a crop failure will cause a spike in prices but if you don’t have reason to expect a late frost to happen again you probably don’t need to make structural changes; if some industrial component costs more because mines are running out, you might need a larger intervention.
In this case, prices went all over the place during the pandemic and the question is how they recover – companies are a lot quicker to raise prices than lower them and if you look at the business press there were a lot of record profits reported - the most since the 1950s when American companies were reaping the profits of uninterrupted production capacity selling to post-WWII Europe:
That's _part_ of how inflation works. The current inflation cycles is numerous different issues compounded (corporate profit seeking, money printing, supply chain issues, extremely high employment rate, pay increases). I know crypto bros like to say it's only money printing, so they can point to their fake money and say "you can't print money here", but the world isn't so simplistic.
There were reward halvings in 2012, 2016, and 2020. I thought the 2012 halving was the most uncertain, as it was the first and the market had little liquidity.
Actually ... since the trial ended, FTT went from ~$1.2 to ~$3.5 and has stayed up. I have no idea how these people expect it to pay out. Even if FTX restarts, they will almost certainly cast off such liabilities with the approval of the bankruptcy court.
Just in the last 50 years, thanks to modern science, cannabis production has evolved heavily. This resulted in far more (ie 3-5x as much) THC concentration per kg of weed than in the 1970s. This is important if you are doing mass production because of transportation costs that go into the economics of any business at scale. But it also means that the cannabis plants of today have been heavily selected throughout the years. So having access to an 'OG' seed would certainly be valuable both for research and marketing purposes.
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