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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2024

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  • Yeah, even though I hate the whole thing, I can’t deny it brings me joy to hear about “VPN use surge”, centralized sites dying in favor of shady clones, etc. I’d take total wild west any day over somewhat-free-but-very-polite-mild-and-centralized status quo of yesterday’s internet. The only problem is that there’s no guarantee people actually go that wild. They already did with VPNs, but regarding big site alternatives - I’m not so sure.


  • 💡 Lifehack: Unclog Your Sink with… Your Own Urine? Science Says Yes!

    If you’ve ever had a rough night and ended up vomiting in the sink (hey, it happens), you may have found yourself with a gross, clogged mess. But before you reach for the plunger—or worse, call a plumber—consider this weird but effective trick: pee in the sink.

    Yup, you read that right. According to fluidic chemistry enthusiasts and some Reddit plumbing veterans, urine can actually help break down and dislodge vomit clogs.


    🧪 The Science Behind It

    • Urea & Ammonia Action: Your urine contains urea, which breaks down into ammonia—a compound found in many household cleaners. When urine sits on the clog, the ammonia can start to denature the proteins in the vomit (like partially digested meat, dairy, or stomach mucus), helping to loosen the goop.
    • Temperature Matters: Fresh urine is close to body temperature (98.6°F), which is actually warmer than most tap water. This warmth helps soften fatty or gelatinous chunks that may have solidified in the drain.
    • pH Balancing: Vomit is highly acidic (thanks to stomach acid). Urine tends to be slightly acidic to neutral, and when mixed together, they may chemically neutralize some of the acidity, reducing corrosive buildup and helping dislodge bio-sludge stuck to pipe walls.
    • Flow Dynamics: A good strong stream of urine can generate a pulsed pressure wave, which some claim helps to dislodge partial clogs. (Think of it as “hydro-jetting on a budget.”)

    🛠️ How to Do It

    1. Remove your pants.
    2. Stand over the sink. (Yes, aim is important.)
    3. Let it flow.
    4. Brag to your friends about your eco-friendly DIY plumbing hack!


  • In my opinion Luanti is a living proof that top-down extensibility aka “we make monolithic engine in C++ and then provide some APIs for scripting via bindings for some scripting language on the side” doesn’t work well. You can’t change main menu, you can’t fix player controller (and the default one sucks), you can’t write your own renderer, etc. Because developers didn’t imagine someone would want that (actually they probably did, but they simply don’t have capacity to provide this). Good extensibility/modability should be automatic, on binary level. Like what you get by developing in bytecode/JIT-compiled languages like Java/C# or in old Unreal Engines where everything was done in bytecode-(de)compilable special language called Unreal Script.



  • Well, I don’t really know what exactly they’re doing, but there are people like Elon Musk that probably have ways of converting cosmic volumes of crypto back and forth to/from fiat. I’d just assume that crypto -> fiat is more of a problem for individuals currently but huge businesses and corps can make it work in high volumes. So maybe Steam could make it work too for games. And then crypto becomes massively backed by games. And then maybe someone else big jumps in. And then someone smaller can also jump in, and then one day crypto might be backed by so many things that you don’t even need to leave ecosystem, because you can already buy pretty much anything there. But again, this is just assumption, I don’t know how exactly this should work. Perhaps big corps can register a crypto-branch of their business somewhere crypto-friendly.



  • If exchanges close, websites stop accepting them, and you can’t withdraw to fiat

    You can still trade with people directly on forums/chats, like before exchanges existed.

    Trading on non CEX is a massive pain as well

    Why?

    If exchanges close, websites stop accepting them, and you can’t withdraw to fiat

    Even in the worst case scenario there is a possibility of anonymous crypto-only exchanges on darknets.

    Storing for long time on cold wallets makes you vulnerable to volatility, which isn’t good for high amounts.

    Agree, long-term storage on external wallet isn’t a good suggestion.


  • AML and KYC

    Ofc KYC is everywhere. But that is only relevant to inputting fiat to crypto. Are there precedents of exchange asking its user about the address where he sent his crypto? Even then, what exactly happens if you answer them with whatever, like you donated to some guy, or it was a present? Regular money laws don’t apply to crypto -> crypto transfers, they are not subject to whatever taxes for presents, charity, etc, and even if they were, that wouldn’t be for the sending side.


  • Also, do you realize that even if all exchanges are taken down, this doesn’t in any way harm crypto in general or any of your independent wallets? I mean, you should only look at exchanges as places to input and forex trade crypto, but you should always output it to your external wallets in the end for long-term storage. If some day some exchange suddenly asks any of its users to explain why they did send money to a certain address, that would be the death of this exchange. You don’t need to explain, it is not bank, there are no taxes to pay (you already paid all the taxes before you converted your money to crypto), there are no laws that could make this demand legal. Move to the next exchange.



  • No, they don’t know who that wallet belongs to and even though they may hypothesize its yours they don’t have any way to prove it. Moreover, anyone, including sellers can use unlimited amount of wallets and register them at rate 1000x faster than even the advanced CIA group would be able to tie even a single address to a particular person/company. So if Steam operated in crypto, it would take days/weeks of some of the most advanced feds in the world to try to prove that you bought something from Steam using your crypto. And they might even fail at that if you or Steam’s wallet are handled carefully, and they wouldn’t even know what exactly you bought.



  • Then explain how exactly is this incorrect. If you buy and smuggle weapons for example, feds do undercover operation and pretend to sell guns, they set their own wallet, they track transactions, they co-operate with exchanges and have access to KYC data, they see you sent from exchange to wallet X, and then wallet X payed for weapons to their undercover wallet Y. What they achieve here is: they just see there is some chance that wallet X also belongs to you and maybe it’s you who are buying those weapons, but they can’t use this as proof of anything, what they can do is start spying on you from other vectors: your regular bank accounts, your social media, or even IRL to check if they can find any real evidence. That’s basically all. This is not at all a concern for people who don’t run international multibillion crime syndicates, etc. And also this all is extremely irrelevant to original topic. Because those games aren’t even illegal, it’s basically just a fkin preference of payment processors to demand Steam and Itch to take them down. If Steam operated in crypto, no amount of transaction tracking would make it possible to enforce something like this, because this is not law enforcement to begin with, it’s not illegal games and they are not taken down due to any legal concerns.




  • Crypto goes somewhere that they don’t like? Crypto is seized when it reaches an exchange and they ask for ID and source of funds

    I don’t understand. Lets say I have a normal bank card, I paid taxes for all the money I got there. Sometimes I buy crypto using p2p on some platform using this card. I trade this crypto with some other crypto on the same platform. Periodically I send crypto to my personal wallet from there. From my personal wallet I buy porn games for example. At which point someone comes in and seizes anything?


  • Does the paradox of tolerance concern you at all? The idea that if you let shitty people have a say they’ll eventually use the bit of tolerance you give them as a tool to take away tolerance of others.

    Basically, in theory if you let the nazis have a political party they might win and ban all the other parties, so to keep it fair arguably you should ban them first.

    I personally feel the correct way to deal with this in current society is to counter propaganda takes instead of trying to silence them. But even better would be to move away from nation-states altogether to more decentralized forms of societies. Compared to even 100 years ago, nowadays we have a lot of technology that makes off-the-grid living much more accessible: efficient solars, modular building, biotoilets, 3d printing, starlinks, etc. The biggest thing that still requires a lot of infrastructure and governing is healthcare imo.

    Now applying that to games that are pretty obviously hate games, like the ones the other commenter mentioned, the raping women into obedience game, or a game where you kill a bunch of gay people, the implication is that those games should be banned.

    I kinda just wanted your thoughts on the concept. Like for example a game where you play as a school shooter. All good?

    Those are not necessarily hate games, but they can be. Rape can be a crime and it can be a kink. And it’s a very popular kink among women themselves. There are whole genres of consensual noncon porn, where people roleplay rape for fun. Big part of BDSM is also all about enjoying those twisted power dynamics. Yet something like this can definitely be a hate game as well done by someone having strong feeling of hatred towards certain groups of people: be it women, gay, trans, black, etc. I’m not sure I’ve ever played actual games like that, and I also would expect them to be low-quality slop, but either way, if you think someone’s trying to push some hateful propaganda through the game, you’re free to call them out, leave negative review, write a post or record a video criticizing it.


  • Crypto is great. As long as you stay within its ecosystem

    Making crypto backed by more and more things (like games) makes staying within its ecosystem more comfortable in the long run.

    Not to mention your still beholden to the traditional payment processors the moment you want to get your money out of crypto and back into an actual usable form.

    the moment you need to sit on the line where you’re transferring in and out real money to crypto crypto to real money on a small scale with frequent processes. You just end up right back where you started.

    Yeah, but there are already tons of widely-known legal services everybody uses like Coinbase, Binance, etc, which make it easy to P2P from card to crypto and it’s impossible to control money flows after it turns into crypto, which means controlling how people spend their money like this would be impossible. But yeah, regarding big players like Steam adopting crypto and converting into/from real money on large scale - and what payment processors can do about this if they are pissed off - this is something I have no idea about. But people like Elon Musk probably do this a lot with incredible volumes of money.


  • Out of curiosity do you think there should be a line? Where would it be? Maybe like only explicitly illegal content is ever removed?

    For me the line would be fictional-vs-non-fictional. So if a game contains photos or videos of actual people being hurt or abused IRL, that is illegal. But anything fictional is fine. For shocking/kinky stuff, there might be some special tags, and tag-based extra warnings like “this game contains scenes of …, do you want to open the page?”. So when you find and open any game with certain tag you get a warning corresponding to this tag. After confirmation it might remember your consent and enable some flags in the options to not bother you next time. But you can go into the options any moment and hide it all again if you decide you don’t want to see this kind of stuff in future. Also, before you enable/consent to this content, it probably shouldn’t be randomly recommended to you.