Unearned5161

thank you for the thought-provoking article, and cheers for speaking out. Makes one think about how many ideas and potentials we've missed out on as a society due to this informational asymmetry. Due to the expert-apprentice power structure.

I think you nailed it near the end where you remark on the absence of any sort of organized "body" waiting to vet you. It's just individuals. Perhaps individuals with strong connections between themselves, but individuals nonetheless. And importantly, individuals who were once at the same threshold that you're now hesitant to cross.

Of course, there are plenty of things that make every one of us different and qualified in separate respects, but I think that sometimes it can be grounding to recall those moments where those differences all but vanish. Moments of commonality if you will.

You should also ask yourself if there's a psychological effect making you think that the people on the other side of the fence are delusional.

Admittedly it's a tough current to pitch yourself against, that search should be a paid service. But that's mainly because the best advertising company in the world is leading the charge on the other side.

The truth on who's more delusional appears murky to me...

Perhaps the argument I left in a different comment will illustrate why inflationary currencies are preferable. Please note that by inflationary I don't mean high inflation, I mean small, controlled, inflation.

> You should use a money that loses value because its purpose is as a medium of exchange and not a store of value. You need to have something in your life that you can reliably use to acquire things you need and exchange them for things you have (new laptop for hours worked). You want a hot potato, you get it, you pass it along to someone else. If you don't want to spend it on material goods and want to save, that's fine, you can instead "buy" a savings, or "buy" an index fund. You're still passing the hot potato around, but it's giving you different things.

Now think of this on a large scale. You want hot potatoes going around. That means they'll be moving at a reasonably fast pace, changing hands and going places. You need your money to move so that it reaches all parts and doesn't stagnate places. That's not to say that savings, like the type you'd do at a bank, are bad for the economy, but that is to say that if everyone were to save a bunch of money under a mattress, that would be bad. That would mean that a solid chunk of currency in the economy is frozen and effectively useless to everyone but its owner until they decide to take it out and spend it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Historical_examples should give you some other examples of situations in which economies have been in deflation.

Again, controlled small inflation is the goal. Yes, this can, in the wrong hands, turn into too much inflation, but this is the same the other way too. These are not static states; they're highly dynamic systems that can spin out of control in either direction. And all things considered, it's easier to deal with high inflation than it is to deal with high deflation. It's playing with fire, but there is no other way, and if you find such a way, I and many others would be rather interested in hearing it.

Something to consider: economists' study, learn theory, and perform controlled experiments so that we can learn about these things. These are not unknowable truths of the economy that we can only roll the die and see what happens. And something that is often not considered by hard currency supporters is the results if things turn sour.

After all, you can have years upon years of nice solid performance of an economy built on whatever, for any sort of reasons, but the true assessment of that whatever as a means to serve as the currency for a nation, is how it performs under stress. Our modern fiat currencies and the ways we control them have been built on the ruins of previous methods and currencies. These ruins are costly and violent to a nations progress. This is not something you want to "wait and see". So instead of just thinking about the functions of bitcoin "during the day", while things are normal and people are behaving well, think also about that same currency at night. Think about what may happen if some exogenous shock hits the economy (not related to the currency itself), think oil embargo in the 70s. How will your economy deal with that? What are the tools at the government's disposal to get the economy repaired and back on track? Do they have any recourse? Do they have to just wait it out? This is beyond human lives at risk, this is human progress, human time.

Therefore, it's not about what people like, it's about what keeps the whole system as successful as possible for as long as possible. Economic systems are complex and unintuitive beasts, this is not an area that benefits from great civilian oversight and control. If your system works amazing for 20 years but then has a horrendous crash that wipes 10 years off of your progress, how good was it really?

You're not buying an inflationary currency. The inflationary currency is what you buy things with. Like commodities (bitcoin)!

Bitcoin (or any other commodity/crypto) being valued well and being a "good" investment is completely detached from its function as a national currency. One does not (and should not) imply the other.

You need something to exchange things with (currency), and you need things to exchange. The currency is the medium of exchange, the journey, not the destination.

=) you're conflating meanings, perhaps due to some of my handwaving. There's a difference between a medium of exchange that loses value, and a medium of exchange that LOSES value. People don't want the latter. That potato is too hot. You want something that loses a measured, controlled, amount of value over time. How much? About 3% per year seems to be a good number that people more educated than me tout around.

I'm also not sure that's a circular reasoning as I provide the reasons why you want a medium of exchange that loses value...

Hmmm... sure, I suppose you can look at it that way. In an inflationary-esque economy, you worry about saving your wealth, so you create instruments to do so: fractional reserve banking, mutual funds, etc. This is a problem with many solutions. On the other hand, in a deflationary-esque economy, you worry about spending your wealth, and perhaps more importantly, getting everyone around you to spend it as well. That problem has less solutions.

I said you struggle, you don't hold on forever, you struggle letting go. As in you eventually do let go, but not as quickly as if it had been depreciating. It functions as a brake on consumption, not a full stop. It slows things down. Slow is not good. Things start to go down when things slow.

That's an odd take. What's bad for the economy is, for the most part, bad for you.

But to answer your question more directly, you should use a money that loses value because its purpose is as a medium of exchange and not a store of value. You need to have something in your life that you can reliably use to acquire things you need and exchange them for things you have (new laptop for hours worked). You want a hot potato, you get it, you pass it along to someone else. If you don't want to spend it on material goods and want to save, that's fine, you can instead "buy" a savings, or "buy" an index fund. You're still passing the hot potato around, but its giving you different things.

Now imagine you don't have a hot potato, you work and you get paid in... idk, something you don't want to get rid of. You struggle with letting go with your currency and so it costs you when you're trying to do exchanges. Similarly, if you're a shop owner or something, people are more hesitant to give you their currency as well. Things get slower, and darker, like a mechanical flashlight that you're spinning slower and slower.

if you would like to continue your mental journey, I recommend reading this:

https://singlelunch.com/2020/10/21/badeconomics-putting-400m...

ooo, read this!

https://singlelunch.com/2023/09/13/the-bad-economics-of-wtfh...

if you genuinely are interested in an answer to your question, I recommend this blog post by Matt Ranger:

https://singlelunch.com/2020/10/21/badeconomics-putting-400m...

hahaha it was a good idea to remove that last sentence from your comment

I'll nibble at the bait regardless:

Your comment of spending patterns is missing the forest for the trees. A modern, capitalist infused, economy works like a big cardiovascular system, or like an engine. That is to say, it's happiest when blood/oil is pumping through it. Therefore, you can compare to a certain extent the different states an economy can be in to its cardiovascular counterpart.

When an economy is struggling with deflation, you can imagine this as the heart pumping slowly. Slower pumps mean less blood going everywhere, means less performance. The less money circulates, the smaller its multiplying effect, the harder it is for suppliers to stay afloat, prices fall.

The opposite of this would be someone walking around with their heart rate through the roof nonstop. Too high, too much blood, too much pressure, dangerous. When money is flowing too quickly through an economy, its effects are magnified, and in a sense, you can think of it as harder for the consumer now, prices rise.

To aid the visualization, step into the shoes of a dollar for a moment, and imagine its journey in these different scenarios. It comes into someone's account from a paycheck, it stays for a while, goes to the candy store, sits there, goes to a supplier of the candy store, etc. Now multiply that journey countless times. See if you can spot the effect that more or less tendency to spend can have on these journeys.

So you see now, it's a pendulum. A delicate balance that must be struck. And there you have the job of the federal reserve and other central banks like it. They are in charge of modulating the accelerator of an economy and making sure that we're neither going too fast nor too slow. Right in the middle is where you get the most stable and efficient economies.

Bitcoin is unsuitable as a currency because it belongs to the same family as other tried and failed systems of _hard currency_, think gold, but now its worse. Due to its decentralized nature, it will never (by design) be controlled by a central bank. And so it will be at the whim of all the things fixed supply currencies are at the whim of. If you want examples of why this is bad, just take a look at basically anything before 1970's.

If you want a more thought out and perhaps entertaining debrief on this, I encourage you to check out this blog post by Matt Ranger:

https://singlelunch.com/2020/10/21/badeconomics-putting-400m...

oop, someone should update an entry in this museum!

https://www.fbi.gov/history/artifacts/ross-william-ulbrichts...

for the record, I appreciated your creative prose and enjoyed the trippy narrative

Neat implementation! Big fan of integrating more NFC into apps. There's something satisfying and reassuring about the physicality of it all.

I'll add a vote to whoever has the time to port it over to android =)

In water yes, but ancient shipwrecks are found all over the place because they've been buried under sediment. That is the case with this one, you'll notice in the article that they say, "the sand protection is leaving", which I take to mean that while it was discovered in 1993, it was covered up with sand and so protected from issues such as water movement, sun, and life forms. The sand is now eroding away and leaving the ship unprotected, hence the move, hence the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_of_shipwrecks

big fan of feedmail [1] for a "dumb" reader. It just delivers it to your inbox. I have a folder set up called "feed" and I can do all the email things to the items landing in that folder. Every email costs a credit, you can buy 10 000 credits for $10, which works out to $0.001 per article.

The only thing it misses is any sort of highlight saving deal, but for those I just save the article to zotero and annotate it there.

[1] https://feedmail.org

What a brilliant idea. I've had learning to read French on my list for a while now, I'm going to try transcription as another way at it.

Ok I did one letter, from a woman in 1814 writing to James Monroe (then Secretary of State) asking for a passport to go to Scotland to get her late brother's property. What a trip! So enjoyable to get into the flow once you've "synchronized" with the persons handwriting. Furthermore, due to the fact that you're reading and re-writing word for word of whatever you're transcribing, the stories you end up reading have tremendous memory-stick. This is not surprising, considering that you are dedicating an inordinate amount of time per page, but it's a welcome side effect when you try and recollect.

I'm not too sure about that reading, I got "The following is the declaration of James Lambert a soldier of the Revolutionary War in South America." rather different

cheers! I was looking for something semi productive to sink a Friday night into

on a more serious note, working through a transcription project for letters and journals that nobody has touched since they've been archived is such a wonderful feeling. Aside from being in front of the physical document itself, your degree of separation from the writer and point is time is vanishingly small!

I always like to observe when they cross something out or make a mistake and think about what could have caused that. Did a friend pass by the door and scare them? Did they get distracted looking out the window? It's all so close and yet so far away :)

for any of the lucky 10000, like me, who were left wanting to see what this game looked like:

https://youtu.be/Nm-PXmOELAw?si=Z-RXbdqNzkSF3cqx

my brief search didn't show me any more obscure Korean only strategy videos, so maybe this one is just for the lowly foreigners :(

While unemployment certainly deserves a conversation of its own, I think the more overlooked aspects of education and democracy will erode our society deeper into a hole by themselves.

I'm rather fearful for the future of education in this current climate. The tools are already powerful enough to wreak havoc and they haven't stopped growing yet! I don't think we'll properly know the effect for some years now, not until the kids that are currently in 5th, 6th, or 7th start going into the workforce. While the individual optimist in me would like to see AI as this great equalizer, personal tutor for everyone, equal opportunity deliverance, I think we've fumbled it for all but a select few. Certainly there will be cases of great success, students who leverage AI to it's fullest extent. But I urge one to think of the other side of the pie. How will that student respond to this? And how many students are really in this section?

AI in its current state presents a pact with the devil for all but the most disciplined and passionate of us. It makes it far to easy to resign all use of your critical mental faculties, and to stagnate in your various abilities to navigate our complex modern world. Skills such as critical reading, synthesizing, and writing are just a few of the most notable examples. Unrestrained use of tools that help us so immensely in these categories can bring nothing but slow demise for us in the end.

This thought pattern pairs nicely with the discussion of AIs effects on democracy. Hopefully the step taken from assuming the aforementioned society, with its rampant inabilities to reason critically about its surroundings, to saying that this is categorically bad for democracy, isn't too large. Democracy, an imperfect form of government that is the best we have at this moment, only works well with an educated populace. An uneducated democracy governs on borrowed time. One can already see the paint start to peel (there is a larger effect that the Internet has on democracy that I'll leave out of this for now, but is worth thinking about as it's the one responsible for the current decline in our political reality).

The unfortunate conclusion that I reach when I think of all of this, is that it comes down to the ability of government and corporations to properly restrain this technology and foster its growth in a manner that is beneficial for society. And that restraint is hard to see coming with our current set up. This is to avoid being overly dramatic and saying that it's impossible.

If you look at the history of the United States, and truly observe the death grip that its baby, capitalism, has on its governance, if you look at this, you find it hard to believe that this time will be any different from times past. There is far too much money and national security concern at stake here to do anything but put the pedal to the floor and rapidly build an empire in this wild west of AI. The unfortunate conclusion is that perhaps this could have been a wonderful tool for humanity, and allowed us to realize our collective dreams, but due to the reasons stated above I believe this is unachievable with our current set up of governance and understanding of ethics, globally.

From someone who had to mentally let go once you started talking about planes crossing each other, thank you for such an amazingly detailed writeup. It's not everyday that you learn a new cool way to divide numbers!

Yes! I have a completely unfounded theory that sounds right to my gut that basically all that matters is time and focus. If you want to learn something all you need is time and focus, you can't get there with just one of those two, you need both.

The night before an exam, I can focus really hard and get a bunch of info crammed into my head, but it's all gone a week later. I haven't tried Blinkist but I struggle to imagine how it's any different.

A long books beauty is the path one takes to get to the conclusion the auther arrived at (over a much larger period of time themselves!), the debate, the details, the story, that's where the real "lessons" are. You can't just rip a page out of here and there, read them and call it a day. I mean you can, you just need to be honest with yourself in terms of what you're really doing.

There are no shortcuts to learning, you are always trading something away.

I like this thought process your brought up here! I hadn't put much time into thinking about the physical separation of generations in organizations like schools. A certain absence of physical heritage if you will... A mini extinction event

Makes you think of other, perhaps smaller, things that may have gotten a gap in physical hand offs. Perhaps I'm generalizing too strongly here, but certainly someone that was a middle school teacher or something before and after covid might have some observations on little oddities that may have escaped the public eye.

love the app, I think it works much better than a simple background with a question on it, and not only because I like to have pretty pictures there instead

an idea: it would be neat to have extra functionality with specific apps, with regular interruptions to ask if you're still on track or what have you. maybe not even a button press, just like a 5 second breather with a message on the screen and then it goes away. sort of like the notifications you currently have in place but for the whole screen. users could modify the message for each app...

look forward to seeing further development!

I'd be interested in hearing what, if any, danger to society spinny hubcaps present

I've been using Kagi for the past 3 months, recently moved to the ultimate plan (assistant + search). I've highly enjoyed my experience, and I think the best analogy I can think of is switching from shopping for food at somewhere like Safeway or Walmart to a local organic grocery store. It's loads of tiny things plus a few large things that I end up seeing as benefits.

One of the things on the largest end for me that I don't see mentioned here very often, is how amazing the development team has been! It's tremendously refreshing and amazing to be using a product, encounter something not working right, write up a feedback post, and see it fixed in the next changelog. That's where the local bit of the analogy comes from. It's small, and I think that's brilliant. It makes you feel seen and heard, something that is absolutely beyond hopelessly lost when using any sort of Google product. You're a part of a paying customer base, you're not some minuscule cog in a massive conglomerate.

The pace of development is also wonderful. Getting new little features released often and watching the ongoing development with things like Kagi Map. I can only imagine this is what it was like to live during the golden age of construction and development in the US, seeing all these new buildings go up all around you.

There's also the search of course which so far has been great. I think it's power comes from the lack of ads of course but also the filtering, which makes it *your* search. Little features like appending @hn at the end of your search instead of site:news.ycombinator.com, or as mentioned by gutt3r_punk, the question mark to bring up the AI summary answer only on the queries that I want it to be on, not every single search on Google.

solid recommend

which makes pressing the back key multiple times take you on a fun adventure in reverse!

I like having things stored locally. I'm not always in a spot with great reception, so waiting for a video to load from google photos or whatever isn't an option.

yeah, looks epic. Makes me think of Superman's spaceship in Man Of Steel , mega clean