@jonny @nev @zenhob

long before all of that started, there were two restaurants on Rideau St. in Ottawa called "The Restaurant Next Door", and "The Restaurant Across The Street" which was across the street. i think the Restaurant Next Door might have been next to Nate's Deli or the Rideau Bakery. that end of Rideau St. used to have some local culture. it's all just chains and high-rise condos now.

@stelclementine @1337 @zenhob As an IT guy, blockchain and crypto seems interesting, possibly revolutionary -- taking money out of the hands of politicians and bankers, and making it a hard asset like gold, but instantly portable and nearly infinitely divisible -- all made possible and enforced by code.

As someone who breathes, and is consequently concerned about the environment, it's a trainwreck.

Only time will tell what happens to it.

@stelclementine @1337 @JustinDerrick @zenhob Yes but there was a time - not many months mind you - where too many tech enthusiasts insisted that you should put your stuff on the blockchain, until they realized it is a slow, expensive, pseudononymous, world readable database with very little payload size full of bugs and exploits. So they stopped insisting on it.

The new machine lying fad even has governments singing its praises.

@leeloo @1337 @JustinDerrick @zenhob

B̶r̶i̶b̶e̶s̶... Gifts to shady politicians.

@davey_cakes @1337 @zenhob It's still 'timing the market', which is generally bad (see: day trading) but sometimes it seems obvious that a correction is overdue (see: TXF.TO or XIT.TO 2023-2025).

I actually held my tech stocks through the 2022-2023 slump, because it felt like there was no real reason to jump -- no structural issue, no obvious over-valuation or bad direction -- and more importantly, no where else to go and put the money that looked way better.

@JustinDerrick @Dataless @zenhob @artemis
I agree. Though I suppose then they’d all try harder to hide their money in anonymous accounts and invest in “crypto for billionaires”

They’ve got everything propping up unaffordable international housing prices now

Honest question: If the wealthy’s billions disappear what happens to the economy?

They could still personally buy as much lifestyle as they want

If their cash hoard was not sloshing around in the real world would that be bad or good?

@ravelin @zenhob Do any exist?

I'm pretty sure everyone either does it themselves, or is a thin wrapper around the index of someone who does on the back end.

There's no user-respecting search engines that focus on delivering quality results rather than selling ads anymore.

And you can't create one, because everyone is so busy blocking AI crawlers with cloudflare and anubis and what have you that it's virtually impossible to build a "good" web crawler in 2025.

Without the index, your search engine is toast.