Calamity

Although it has nothing to do with me, what a pleasure it was to read your comment.

Indeed, I truly don't understand how simply enabling parental controls onto mobile devices handed to kids which then gets advertised to each website/app that they use isn't sufficient.

You make it an opt-in feature to "self-broadcast" that this device is being used by a minor. Solves 99% of the use cases. And for the remaining 1% — the really determined teenager — they'd never be stopped by this anyway. They'd social enginneer their way to access somehow.

The combo of mise + UV has made my development environment setup/recreation so seamless. We've come a long way.

(Props to your work on mise)

I mean, okay sure, but modify the counterexample they suggested slightly and then it's the same thing.

If GM promised to "rent out" (instead of buy back) the cars it sold to Hertz as a backstop (if not enough customers are renting), then the comparison is apt.

One of my favorite thought nuggets from Douglas Adams

how well does this actually pan out for you?

Interested if you could elaborate further here or have some pointers to good references. I feel like I'm at a turning point in my life where I'm starting to see things a little differently. Sometimes bewildered by how little knowledge or control there really is.

Thanks for the input Troy. Although I can see the reasons for it, transfer restrictions seems to me a little like the company has too much control over its shares - but like you said, they aren't "privately-traded securities". If I owned a restaurant with a buddy and wanted out, I imagine I wouldn't be able to just sell it on to somebody else without my buddy's consent.

Yeh, definitely - I appreciate the input nonetheless!

Sure, but you can still track those individuals through the block chain and freeze all their other "classic" assets in the US. All I'm saying is that the argument that it's a good "anonymous" form of currency is not all that true. That's not to say that there aren't other currencies out there that prioritize anonymity (e.g. Monero), but when we're focusing on Bitcoin here.

Yeh, I had actually briefly looked into after writing that comment and found the same - interesting that Paul came up with his own version of LISP to do it in.

If you wanted to remake it in a modern framework though, what stack would you personally opt for? I think Postgres or MySQL for the database is a no-brainer, but what about the quickest approach for the rest (bar of course simply cloning the repo ;) )

Thanks for the input oblib! Will check it out

And actually, re: "The only real, pragmatic usecases are fueling ransomware, drugs and illicit cross-border transactions", arguably, will all the KYC checks needed now along with all the coin tracking software being developed to track the blockchain, that's not longer the case.

Yes, you're spot on. Thanks for catching that. It was late, brain slipped up on me ;) Shame it's too late to edit - it does make it confusing

Thanks for the pointer! Will look into it

That's fair enough haha! I guess just looking for a pet project to get started with.

Say you wanted to recreate hackernews as a toy project - what stack would you use nowadays to achieve that most efficiently?

Interesting, thanks for the feedback. Didn't even consider the whole innate multicore support.

Here's perhaps a controversial and less heard argument:

The core concept of bitcoin is that it is decentralized and away from the prying "government". That's what also gives it its "safe haven" allure in much the same way as gold. The question is, is this really to society's benefit? Just think about this past year with COVID - if government didn't have the ability to impact the financial markets and everything was strictly down to human emotion, I'm sure we'd be in a worse place than we are now. Same goes for 2008. Through its actions, the FED is trying to actively avert financial distress - its goal is stability. As a corollary, if you believe that bitcoin will be there to save the day if the entire modern financial system collapses, then I believe you would be sorely mistaken. I'm not sure how such a technology and government infrastructure dependent currency would be usable in a world that has descended into chaos.

I mean just think about a world where Bitcoin is the only currency. So the mega-wealthy are suddenly some early hoarders of the currency who, by holding onto their currency, see their overall wealth INCREASE (through depreciation and constriction of the monetary supply). A currency's main role should be to promote and facilitate financial activity and trade... They sit their with their thousands of bitcoins whilst the rest of the world is transacting in smaller and smaller fractions of bitcoin.

Imagine back in Medieval times: A king sits on his throne with a pile of gold behind him. If he chose not spend it spend and simply kept taxing his people, he would not only accumulate more gold, but the value of every piece of gold would suddenly increase (in the peasant's economy) as the entire peasant population had less gold to do trade with (depreciation). This would further encourage hoarding money instead of using it - i.e. the whole reason currency depreciation is harmful to financial activity.

Thanks for the brutally honest reply :) I guess part of my question is Django still as relevant today or is it losing 'market share' and finding devs to help out in the future is going to prove a lot more difficult.

Unless PWAs really took off, in which case, you wouldn't need to develop for the custom linux phone - you would just need a supported browser.

So, by the same token, do you observe the galaxy you're approaching age quickly? On "fast-forward" if one could imagine that?

I think you would just get a lot less research overall. It might lead to a better fraction of research being of higher quality, but in absolute terms, it would be a drastic cut.

R&D is always going to be a sunk cost, especially when exploring "new frontiers". Funding people to "waste their time" going down different uncharted paths - with most of them leading to dead-ends - is still the only way to have a few return with new insight from those paths that led to new and wondrous areas.

You can already see this at the scale of "what" government chooses to fund. For years they have funded cancer research which has made many advances, but they did not fund "ageing" research anywhere close to as much. Recent advances in the latter have shown this to be a promising field, but imagine the advances we could have had had this been funded to the same extent that cancer research has!

This would indeed be great, but the impact on one's career of reproducing another's work would have to be equivalent to that of the original publication on the original author's career. Otherwise, nobody will want to spend the time certifying another's work.

Could have this so that it's a multi-stage process where all involved parties become authors on the paper, but this would need a substantial shift in what academia is today.

Having the citation's impact on one's H-index decay with author position would cause an interesting stir to the "academic game". I wonder if we would start seeing supervisor's bully for first authorship.

Indeed - something often misunderstood as always recorded from the perspective of a third party observer.

Quick follow up question. If you did depart and travelled at near-ligth speed to another galaxy, arrived there in a few seconds and then looked back at the earth - would it appear as only a few seconds have passed for the earthlings back home as well?

By the same token, if you are actively watching another galaxy as you travel at near-light speed towards it - will you be watching that galaxy "age" at an extremely fast pace throughout the journey?

That's beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

Solipsism fitting into camp a)?

I always wondered: If you believe in only "One" - one consciousness, one unity - does that de facto make you a solipsist?

True, but that ability to relate a certain feeling to an internal issue (e.g. thirst or hunger) is somewhat of a learnt behavior. It was part of the childhood ride that has now long been forgotten.

This still, however, doesn't solve the issue that those signals "exist" somewhere from a certain point of perspective. I think sight highlights this to me the most clearly. Although vision serves a purpose in deciding motor function, it also simply exists. I don't "feel" that I see - I simply "see".

Going back to how you phrase it - who or what is "feeling"? Everything we do or think may be mechanical, but there is a distinction between I and my dog. I am not riding the dog-life roller-coaster, I am riding my own human-life roller-coaster.

If I cloned myself, I'd be happy to state that both versions would think and behave as me, but I would only exist in one of them.

Although I understand what you're pointing at, I think you have focused too specifically on feeling or reason (i.e. thought). I am willing to go as far as to say that all our actions, thoughts and feelings are mechanical/predetermined - but this all doesn't cover "existence". That's where I believe consciousness truly lies. It doesn't think or decide what to think, nor does it decide how to feel and it does not plan or take actions. It does, however, experience it all. Your life-story is a roller-coaster and consciousness is that thing going on for the ride.

IMO, the true nature of consciousness sits at the same level as the nature of the universe. It touches on what it means to simply "exist".

Having said that, I'd be happy to know what others think.