• 7 Posts
  • 939 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • It’s not really that bad, the main thing is anything that’s had time to dry gets way harder to clean so don’t let that happen and if it does soak it for a long time before attempting to clean it. Also anything greasy makes dishes harder to clean and need more soap, and using foil on anything going in the oven avoids the most difficult dishes to clean. Reuse dishes when you can and consider avoiding cooking in a way that will need a lot of them.


  • I guess that would depend on whether and how key signing by the owner is incorporated into the system. The way I imagine it working is, when purchasing a property you can (optionally?) cryptographically sign the document, probably with a hardware wallet that you would then keep in a safe somewhere. The hardware wallet contains the private key, the public key is added to the document which would be further signed by the notary in the same way before being put on the blockchain. You can then do things like sign listings for selling the property to prove to prospective buyers that you are the current owner (they can verify that your signature matches the key on the document, and the document is also signed by a known authority), and sign documents for selling it with your key.

    If the key is lost, then in order to sell the property you would probably have to go through some kind of correction process, and an updated document with the new key/signature or that says a key is no longer being used, and has a reference to the old document it’s superseding, is put on the blockchain. Probably this process should involve extra scrutiny about your identity. If it’s stolen and the thief starts using it, I guess same thing plus legal proceedings, but there should be systems to automatically notify you in various ways if anything is happening (and if the documents are on the blockchain, you can even poll for these notifications yourself without relying on any government servers). If you die and the key is lost, same kind of deal, correction process with a new document uploaded. Actual enforcement in practice of a valid signature being required could mostly be automatically handled by websites for real estate listings; if the latest document says the owner’s cryptographic signature is required for sale, that signature could also be required to even make the listing.

    Validity of notary keys would be a little trickier, but you could have something like a hierarchy of keys that sign metadata about which lower level keys are valid for which time ranges and which of their transactions have been revoked. If the highest level key in the hierarchy is compromised, a new one gets issued and the event is communicated to the public through official channels so everyone can update all their software to use the new one and ignore the old one. Because this is a possibility, and because anything recorded could be superseded by a correction, this type of system would not be suitable for other smart contracts to interact with directly, so unlike something with NFTs you wouldn’t easily be able to trade properties on DeFi markets (which for previously mentioned reasons and others I don’t think would work well anyway).

    My own experience with the process of buying property was that it’s pretty sketchy; most of it happened remotely, and the main way I had of confirming that the deal was legit as advised by my real estate agent was, iirc, stuff like that the title company’s website was highly ranked on google and had a domain name with few letters and listed their phone number, but these things are not a hard guarantee. I do think there is room for improvement.



  • They do not interpret what is or isn’t a fraudulent deed, for example, because that would expose the clerk and the state to liability.

    Well who does? Is it really a situation where the only way to correct mistakes is a lawsuit and there is no system for preventing mistakes to begin with? Maybe some form of cryptographic verification from the owner would actually be helpful here.

    (or in some cases access the records online)

    The main thing is that they could do a lot better than that by guaranteeing access to the records and hard proof they haven’t been altered or removed, and making those records reliably available to people who want to interact with them programmatically, which would be accomplished by putting them on a major blockchain.


  • I’m not sure NFTs specifically are the right solution for this though, because the ultimate legal authority for property ownership remains the state, which could easily get out of sync with transactions that are valid on the blockchain but which are not legally recognized. Like if your crypto wallet gets stolen and someone transfers your properties, or if property NFTs are transferred in spite of creditors having a legal claim to them, the state of the network is going to be superceded by the law, which would end up with a confusing mess and probably adding requirements for the system to incorporate centralized control and reversibility, defeating the point of it being a NFT.

    A simpler improvement would be to require that all updates to property records be simply published onchain, by whatever authority otherwise has the power to manage property ownership (read-only for everyone else). Changes could be made, errors could be fixed, but the record of the state of the system would be permanently and irrevocably available for anyone to view and verify, which is the main thing NFTs would potentially bring to the table here anyway. You don’t need the part where it is a permissionlessly transferable token tied to a crypto wallet.



  • “We’re very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we’re announcing has an NPU in it — but what we’ve learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI,” admits Kevin Terwilliger, Dell’s head of product, in the PC Gamer interview. “In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.”

    They’re just going to try to market it a little differently



  • Assuming you are in the US, your wife’s fears are totally baseless because lawsuits against people for consumer level piracy pretty much have not been happening at all since like 2010 (with the exception of porn video piracy copyright trolls, which still doesn’t happen that much and maybe your wife would be unhappy with regardless). Even when they were, due to industry group backed lawsuit campaigns, it’s civil law not criminal so nobody went to prison, and the few people who actually got stuck with massive fines eventually just declared bankruptcy to get out of paying them.

    This is because said industry groups switched to trying to enforce copyright via ISP, getting ISPs to voluntarily forward people threatening letters, which are mostly empty threats with no associated legal action, so the ISPs are getting sued to try to obligate them to cut off people’s internet access. They want a way of doing it where they don’t have to take consumer level pirates to court, I’d guess because it looks really bad for them and is terrible PR to have regular people who obviously don’t deserve punishment sued for huge amounts of money because they torrented some media.

    You are totally safe if you have a VPN and bind it to your torrent client (which prevents torrents from working if the VPN is off or drops connection), but even if you get such emails from your ISP (I got a few myself) likely nothing will happen for now.