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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • Even if you copy the Mona Lisa down to the subatomic level, the original would still be seen as a one of a kind thing and would be vastly more valuable than the copy.

    Because it’s not about the physical object.

    It’s about the hope that it can be, one day, sold for more money than it was bought for. The same thing happens every day with all sorts of things where the price vastly outpaces the utility of the thing.

    If you buy milk, you buy it to drink/eat/use it. So you pay for its utility. A litre of milk is worth its nutritional value. There’s no speculation or anything like that going on, and thus, the price is pretty low and pretty stable.

    If you buy valueables (art, diamonds, stock, crypto, NFTs, …) the object itself is usually not useful or at least not nearly as useful as its price. Yes, there are some technical applications where you need gold or diamonds, but if that was the only thing they are used for, they’d be much, much cheaper. Art, stock, crypto, NFTs, stamps, and many similar things, on the other hand, have little to no direct utility. Nobody would buy the Mona Lisa because they have an empty bit of wall in their living room that would benefit from a bit of art as decoration.

    These things, which are inherently worthless (if they were priced by their utility). The only reason for them to be “worth” a lot is the expectation that someone else will pay more for it in the future, for the sole purpose of finding someone else who’ll do the same.

    It’s just a morensocially accepted form of gambling, nothing else.

    And for that, it doesn’t matter if the thing being sold is a link to some picture of a bored monkey, a piece of paper with some paint on it, a banana ducttaped to a wall, or some shiny rock.




  • Es hieß auch “in eine Führungsposition”.

    Was faktische Macht und Führung angeht ist die Linke ein antikapitalistischer Buchclub mit PR-Abteilung.

    Hier in Österreich waren die Grünen auch immer die tollen Antikorruptionisten. Bis sie unabsichtlich den Bundespräsidenten gelandet und plötzlich eine reale Chance auf Mitregierung bekommen haben.

    Dann haben sie postwendend die antikorrupten Idealisten (wie z.B. Peter Pilz) von allen wichtigen Posten und teils sogar aus der Partei entfernt und durch umgänglicheres Personal ersetzt. Und wie sie dann tatsächlich in eine Schwarz-Grüne Regierung gekommen sind, haben sie direkt mit dem großen Koalitionspartner mitgestimmt die Untersuchungsausschüsse zum Ibiza-Skandal einzustellen.

    Wart bis die Linken eine realistische Chance auf eine echte Führungsposition haben und dann wirst auch sehen wie schnell der Wind sich dreht.


  • Beware, there’s a difference between “push notifications” (which is what your links are talking about) and “notifications”, specifically with the “notification history” feature.

    Push notifications are a mechanism to transport messages over google services. What that does is that the backend service of some app (e.g. the Signal server) can send a message to an app that’s currently not actively running to tell it that there’s something new happening, e.g. a new incoming message. This goes via Google services because that way, the app doesn’t need to be constantly running. Google services then wakes up the app and allow it to do something with that info, e.g. display a notification.

    The alternative is that the app is constantly running, constantly actively checking for new messages and thus constantly consuming power.

    This can be e2e encrypted by the app, and then Google can only see metadata.

    Notifications, on the other hand are the things that show up on your phone when you swipe down from the top navigation bar. These notifications can be read in plain text by any app on your phone, including the OS. If you have Notification History enabled, they can be backed up (again in plain text) to Google’s servers. And any old app you have on your phone can silently do the same. That’s why Signal allows you to hide the text content and/or sender name for notifications.