I'm loving it more and more, but Stacker News has me in it's hooks.

The article points out that lightning nodes never control user funds but then says -- in a parenthesis -- "except the one-way control to route a payment along a user-specified path." But that is false. Lightning nodes don't control user funds even in a "one way" respect. The user's funds remain on the user's device until the payment to the intended recipient is complete. Only after the payment is complete does the routing node acquire what used to be the user's funds, and at that point they don't belong to the user anymore. Since the routing node only acquires money that rightly belongs to themselves (per the terms of the smart contract) and never touches user funds, it is not true to say that they have "one-way control" of anyone else's money.

It is true that the government recently argued that you don't need to control someone else's money to transmit it. They gave the example (see page 30 of this document) that if party A puts money in a lockbox, gives that box to party B, and pays them to deliver it to party C, party B still counts as a money transmitter even if they never touch the actual money and only touch the box containing it.

But FinCEN has actually considered the government's example and explicitly denies that such a courier counts as a money transmitter: "FinCEN does not treat as a money transmitter an armored car business that solely engages in providing secure transport services, including currency and other valuables, for the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Mint, banks, and private companies, so long as the armored car business cannot be viewed as participating, or having a stake, in a financial transaction." source

So the government's example falls apart. Routing nodes do even less than a courier. They do not even control a "locked box" containing someone else's money. They only ever have their own money in their own node. I hope the courts laugh off the government's claim that you can transmit money without controlling it; if that claim stands, then almost everyone is an illegal money transmitter because if the government was right, it wouldn't matter whether or not you touch someone's money, only this would matter: if the government sues you, they win as long as they can find some time when you helped someone complete a payment faster and cheaper than they could have done it on their own -- even if, in the process, you never touched their money.

I teach middle school students English for a living and will thus answer this question from the lens of English educators.

I find myself increasingly relying on ChatGPT as a tool to complement my teaching and learning. Just yesterday, I was unceremoniously tasked to come up with a reading comprehension exercise for the graduating students in my school. The tried-and-tested method would be to look for suitable articles in periodicals like Readers’ Digest, but I decided that writing my own passage would save me much time and hassle. So I wrote one personal recount on the way home.

This morning, I logged on ChatGPT, asking it to make “suggested edits to my writing” and give inputs like readability level and word count. ChatGPT edited my writing within minutes. I had no qualms using it to set comprehension questions given that I was the creator. I see ChatGPT as polishing a raw diamond.

In fact, I think ChatGPT will lead to an increased focus in writing skills because we all know that if we give it rubbish inputs, we will yield garbage outputs. I am keen to hone my skills in prompt engineering and have already prepared materials to teach my students about how they can get ChatGPT to “TL;DR” and “ELI5” (literally the prompts that I use) articles from legitimate sources. I’m having more fun at work!

You might have to be a parent to appreciate this one.

TMI, but our daughter finally pooped on the potty on her own volition. It's been months of battles over this and now we might finally be free of diapers.

I think its also important to figure out how to communicate the rules to the members, especially the new comers. Getting banned is one way to learn but there might be better ways.

Btw, I think we are currently treating (or we could/should be) SN as one Bitcoin maxi community. That's IMHO the best way to get things started, but there is potential for SN to grow into a platform with many communities.

I think it is to early to say. On the one hand, BRC-20 uses bitcoin so in that sense they are increasing adoption. But the question I think you are asking is this TYPE of adoption good for bitcoin growth. I don't think higher fees are gonna hurt adoption long term but short term it may. Who knows. Honestly, I don't see the value of this stuff... yet. I try to be open minded and I haven't looked into it deeply. So far from what I've seen it is a waste of time.