The case for doing what they did is that it helped a lot of people access books (eg school curriculum ones) in the middle of Covid (not everyone knows how to pirate things).
Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they're coming from, they wanted to help people.
Can you expand a bit on the quality of Google's internal practices with user data? eg what would an engineer on Google Photos need to do to be able to access my photos, if possible at all
Yep, accounting for carbon offshoring lowers the difference (US emissions gain 7% if you count consumption not just production, and China's lose 14%) but it still holds that China emits more per capita.
It's from Preston Byrne (added this in my original comment).
The reason I think it's relevant is that posts like Palmer's attack only the "scam side" of crypto (the 99%) without acknowledging the "new paradigm" (1%) side
Yes there are scams, yes there are pumps and dumps, yes there are insiders who control too much liquidity. But you also have to do justice to the promise of the tech.
It was not previously possible for anyone with an internet connection to take out a loan via a decentralised protocol (MakerDAO), or exchange assets via a decentralised contract (Uniswap), or have a digital proof of authenticity (NFTs). And all of this without middle-men taking fees, opaque leverage throughout the system (see Archegos) and gating access to only certain participants (the richer half of the world who have a bank account).
For permanent storage you should check out https://www.arweave.org/ rather than IPFS + centralised pinning services like Pinata. With Arweave you pay a small upfront fee to have the network store your file forever.
It's the promise of IPFS+Filecoin but actually live and being used (eg by the Internet Archive). There's some decent tooling & docs for it too: https://github.com/ArweaveTeam/arweave-deploy
DeFi protocols don't have KYC/AML systems. All they know about is your wallet, and from that wallet you can buy any token, borrow/lend, add liquidity to a market-maker pool, etc.
Indeed. There was a great article in the FT on this looming battle recently:
> Human society, the historian Niall Ferguson says, oscillates between the dynamic of a metaphorical “tower” and the “square”. Sometimes institutions or leaders control social groups in hierarchical ways, just as church towers overshadowed medieval European cities.
> At other times, horizontal networks shape events, operating like crowds in ancient city squares. The “square” used to work best in small, face-to-face groups, but digitisation now enables peer-to-peer systems to operate on a massive scale.
> Now, however, a “tower” dynamic is entering the frame. On Wednesday, the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers’ bank that, in a delicious irony, occupies an actual black tower in Basel) issued a striking report that lashed out at the “square”.
The French equivalent to Lambda school is https://www.42.fr/ which actually predates Lambda by 3 years and is operating at larger scale (29 campuses worldwide). It's also free unlike Lambda.
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