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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My knowledge is specific to TVA, but I was privy to such an agreement that a Cryptominer I worked for had.

    The Local Utility Provider would bill the company for their usage, but they did not provide the rate. TVA did because of the amount of electricity. This rate is much cheaper than the Utility Provider offers residential customers; economies of scale as well as the inability to store this amount of power meaning it’s “wasted” otherwise. Whenever there is a period of intense usage TVA would provide a 30 minute notice. After the 30 minutes were up the rate provided to us (industry) would more than quadruple, and was actually quite a bit above the residential rate. Residential customers are entirely exempt from this. Your rate, is your rate, is your rate.

    The effect of the above meant that it was a mad scramble to shut everything offline whenever we got notice. Otherwise we were losing money. Regular industry trudged along because their bottom line doesn’t care if their power rate quadrupled for 3 hours a dozen days out of the year. It’s not that big a deal.

    I definitely got to see the sausage being made, and it’s opened up my mind to some of the ignorance around crypto mining. If anything it drove me further away from being interested in it as anything more than a neat tech demonstration that people figured they could trade.




  • Hopefully that becomes more nuanced with time. Did you hack your school? Or an unrelated entity? What color hat, grey or black? Last known activity? Age of the person at the time?

    All questions that need answers presented alongside any history of misuse.

    Honestly I can’t imagine that’s a tenable position to take long term. We’ve seen the U.S. govt rethink it’s approach to IT after it was pointed out their failure to intice applicants was a result of stupidly strict Drug Policy and Dress Code. Who knew that a large segment of the IT field don’t like Business Casual and like to smoke weed? Who knew that people drawn to CyberSecurity are likely to have dabbled on the other side of the line prior to making a career out of it?









  • But you are supposed to reach out and ask for a comment before running a story.

    In certain cases yes. This is not one. What comment could Linus have given that would contextualize the story in such a way to excuse factual information?

    Steve was absolutely vindicated in refusing to ask for comment due to Linus’s behavior. Had he asked for comment, Linus would have contacted Billet prior to the release. Instead, Linus makes a statement that heavily (if not outright) implies that had Steve asked for comment he would have context to know that an agreement had been made between LMG/Linus and Billet Labs before the video dropped. Because Steve did not reach out for comment we now know that this was a lie or an attempt to obfuscate the truth.

    If you are extolling factual information you do not owe the subject a comment. If your work could be damaged (see above) by doing so you do not owe the subject a comment. If a person has already commented publicly you do not owe the subject a comment.

    Steve reported objectively factual information that cannot be excused with any context. The story that was written at the time would have been damaged had he asked for comment. Linus has a public presence and has made his feelings known about previous scandals before, and his actual response was entirely telegraphed in tone, if not also content, by long time viewers.

    There is not some ethics masterclass that would have come to the conclusion that Steve violated journalistic integrity by running this story without comment from Linus. You may not like it, but you’re also not some ethics in journalism arbiter.