Idk, after having been in the crypto space in the past, I’m still pretty tempted to call it almost universally a scam.

Regardless of the environmental impacts (which has been solved by some blockchains, like you said), I just think it exposes users to a completely unacceptable amount of risk for very little gain.

You’re required to be in complete charge of your own data security, and if your private key is stolen, you lose your life savings with no recourse. If you make a minor slip up and give permission to the wrong website, you’ll lose everything in your hot wallet. If there’s an error in a smart contract you use (which has happened many times), then all the money you’ve given to it could be taken from under your nose. You can’t even, like, refund transactions – there’s no consumer protections at all.

But like, to what end? What’s the actual benefit of using crypto? Sure, you can make anonymous transactions with XMR, that’s a tangible use case. But what’s the actual benefit to using something like Ethereum?

I am one of those people who’s pretty concerned about AI, but not cause of the singularity thing. (the singularity hypothesis seems kinda silly to me)

I’m mostly concerned about the stuff that billionaires are gonna do with AI to screw us over, and the ways that it’ll be used as a political tool, like to spread misinformation and such.

I’m pretty the curvature of the universe has actually been measured to be very close to 0, within margin of error, which would suggest an infinite universe. (It doesn’t prove it by any means, though. The curvature could just too small to measure.)

However, the observable universe is indeed finite, due to the speed of light being finite.

Is there any way to validate these claims?

I think it could end up being a problem that we face in the future, but probably not an insurmountable one.

For one, I suspect that clean data sources will always be available, though it could become a lot more expensive to obtain. As an extreme example, you could always source your data by recording in-person conversations.

Also, as AI improves, I’m guessing it will be able to handle bad data more gracefully, and that it should be able to train to the same effectiveness while using a smaller dataset.

I agree on all accounts. I currently have to force myself to use lemmy, through the unfinished apps and the slightly frustrating UX. If it wasn’t for my belief in the core idea of the platform, I’d be back on reddit by now. If someone doesn’t strongly care about decentralization or whatever, then I don’t see why they’d stay here as it currently is.

I don’t know, it’s been difficult to access a lot of information without reddit, especially when reddit makes up half my google results. I hope people start using the fediverse to share information, but we’ll have to see if it catches on.