There’s physical dependence and there’s psychological dependence. Most drugs can cause both, but hallucinogens in particular are usually thought to cause only psychological dependence. Whether that makes them less dangerous is debatable, but the fact is, they can still cause addiction if used carelessly.
Now to your main point... dopamine hits aren’t inherently good or bad. They can, however, also make things addictive, and drug abuse is indeed a good parallel here.
You can plot all activities on a spectrum of dopamine 'cheapness'. On one side of the spectrum is slot machines, various drugs, and doomscrolling. These generally involve little effort, and involve 'variable ratio reinforcement' which is where you get rewards at unpredictable intervals in such a way that you get addicted. Generally, after a long session of one of these activities, you feel like crap.
On the other side of the spectrum is more wholesome long-horizon activities like a challenging side project, career progression, or fitness goals. There's certainly an element of variable ratio reinforcement in all of these, but because the rewards are so much more tangible, and you get to exercise more of your agency, these activities generally feel quite meaningful on reflection.
Playing pinball is somewhere in the middle, probably on the cheaper side of the spectrum. Introspective people can generally reflect on a session and decide whether it was a good use of their time or not.
I really think that 'how do you feel after a long session of this' is a good measuring stick. Very few people will tell you that they feel good after a long session of social media scrolling or short-form content.
Another good measuring stick is 'do you want to want to be doing this?'. I want to want to go to the gym and gain 10kg of muscle. I do not want to want to spend hours on tiktok every day.
If we look at the effects, no, I don’t think so. I see how pinball could be optimized for addictiveness, but I don’t see a lot of people devoting all their free time to it.
Now, it is more nuanced than that. Is addiction bad for us? And at what point do we say we’re addicted to something? For me personally, when I can’t stop doing something (say, watching YouTube instead of working on a project), I won’t be happy long-term. It would be more gratifying short-term, sure, but I’d say it’s still not good.
One question is, even if I unwisely stay up all night doing something (reading comics, say), how do we decide whether to blame the thing for tricking me, or whether it's my own responsibility? Another question is, do we even know our own minds and truly know when we're being unwise? I note that many binges that I would have beaten myself up over at the time were in retrospect great, and the worthy things I assumed I should have been doing instead were actually pointless. So this suggests to me that having an authority dictate to, e.g., comic publishers "you are tempting the public into unwise habits, desist" would be a bad thing because the authority doesn't actually know what's unwise much better than we do.
We can look at intent: comic publishers want to make them interesting and capture your attention for some time, but do they make them addictive? And we can also look at the scale – if a product is reliably addictive across a wide audience, it might be bad for society, not just for individuals. If both criteria are met, it’s probably reasonable to blame the “dealer” of the thing in question.
But I agree that we should be able to decide for ourselves what is good for us – delegating it to authority isn’t a great solution, it should always be our own responsibility. We should, however, be especially cautious when making decisions about things that are known to be addictive for others.
I’m trying to understand how “burning” works here. If I understand correctly:
1. Someone has a domain, example.net. They set up a did:web:example.net, and a handle @example.net pointing to it.
2. They deleted their account and let the domain expire.
3. I register the domain, but can’t set up did:web:example.net again. But I assume I can still set up did:web:mynewdid.example.net, and then point @example.net to that DID instead.
I won’t have access to the original account, but I will be able to use that domain as a handle for a new one.
(This, of course, is only my assumption. I’ve been able to switch my domain from one did:plc to another, but I haven’t tried it for did:web.)
Let’s assume we live in a hypothetical sane society, and company owners and/or directors are responsible for their actions through this entity. When they decide to delegate management to an LLM, wouldn’t they be held accountable for whatever decisions it makes?
The sales problem being there isn't anything viable to compete with the established players. Europe has the capability, even without immigration from the US, it just needs a kick to make good enough products.
The EU should also create a new regulation to force everyone on the continent to move away from American companies. That’s one way to give the local startups a market to sell to.
I’d be interested in arguments that EU providers could be equivalent to Azure … is it realistic to move a large university across for email and other cloud services? Might be the right time to start campaigning for institutions to divest from US tech stacks…
(1) Europe has a fragmented market; linguistically, product wise
(2) Silicon Valley is in the United States
(3) The United States has a very large amount of capital to throw at companies
(4) even if you managed to succeed in the EU your shares will most likely be bought out from under you if you raised capital
(5) all of the above re-inforce each other over time
Once you have that kind of an advantage it is very hard to lose it.
It is worth noting that only one of the “big three” clouds is in Silicon Valley - indeed, much of the original development work on what became AWS was done in South Africa!
> And sure, you can form an Estonian company. But then you have to try and fly under the radar with regards to the 'permanent establishment' rules.
It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you want to do some tax optimization shenanigans, then yeah, don’t think it’ll work for you (if you’re in the EU, at least). But if you just want to set up a small to mid-sized company without dealing with German bureaucracy, I think Estonia is your best bet right now. I don’t think (IANAL) you would get into trouble for having a permanent establishment – you’ll just have to still deal with the DE tax office. But if EU-INC really can unify the processes for all countries, I’m all for it!
> The whole process is so clearly setup to discourage people from actually forming companies.
By the way, it’s really backwards in Estonia. I’ve seen zero sole proprietors when I was living there – everybody just opens an LLC.
This. In Russia, employees of all sorts of organisations are “encouraged” to vote for a particular candidate or party (not always the ruling party, though it doesn’t really matter for different reasons I won’t get into).
As far as I know, these votes have gone mostly unchecked before electronic voting, but after that, they’ve started voting straight from the workplace computers. There were, of course, a lot of straight-up falsifications as well.
That said, our pen-on-paper voting isn’t too legit either :’)
I don’t think it works for curl though. You would guess that sloperators would figure out that their reports aren’t going through with curl specifically (because, well, people are actually looking into them and can call bullshit), and move on.
For some reason they either didn’t notice (e.g. there’s just too many people trying to get in on it), or did notice, but decided they don’t care. Deposit should help here: companies probably will not do it, so when you see a project requires a deposit, you’ll probably stop and think about it.
Now to your main point... dopamine hits aren’t inherently good or bad. They can, however, also make things addictive, and drug abuse is indeed a good parallel here.
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