askmike

There has always been some level of misalignment between the (beauty of high) quality of products made by craftsmen and the value of these products by whoever consumes them.

If you zoom out and look at other industries, we've seen this before many many times: Fast food completely commoditized the food industry. There are still extremely skilled people making the "highest quality" food. For example those at michelin star restaurants, these businesses typically don't make money by selling food anymore, they stay around for other reasons (hotel needs a fancy restaurant with a famous chef). We've seen the same when it comes to many other products: toys, furniture, most electronics, etc.

Nobody can swim against the forces of capitalism here, just not enough people care about high quality hand crafted software (the only people that really do are people right here in this thread hand crafting software). Sure there will be some corners of the economy where people doing everything by hand will keep their head above the water.

Think of it this way: back when people were sending letters to each others and responses took weeks, people (non professional writers) put a lot of thought into writing these letters. I'm sure if you show these people the average (non AI) emails we've been sending each other the last few decades they will complain about all the slop too (including how we all converse to each other right here). But you can definitely argue that this exponentially increased communication and sharing of ideas has outweighed our decreased ability to write properly (in self defense: I'm not a native english speaker).

This obviously sucks for those who care about high quality hand crafted software, but this is going to open the floodgates in terms of the accessibility of software development. And it's yet to be seen whether this is going to take all our jobs away or not. What's very much true (like the article says) is that the future job of software dev is going to look different, and the change is coming fast.

The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. Especially in a world where AI plays a bigger role in the development of the medial sciences.

Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.

They are quants with a deep experience in trading that started to develop general LLMs as a side business, that does not mean their experience is baked into their models.

I think most comments miss the point on why many small businesses don't have websites:

It's not about it being hard to create and manage a website, it's that the vast majority of customers use social media platforms (as well as platforms like google maps) to find out about shops and F&B. For many businesses having an Instagram page will draw a lot more people than having a random website.

https://mijnrealiteit.nl photography blog

https://askmike.org tech blog (slightly outdated, but working on it)

> Here's a thought experiment: Would you feel good if someone read your blog and learned something from it? Probably yes. Would you feel good if they passed along something they learned to others, likely in their own words? Probably yes. What if they couldn't recall, or didn't choose to reference where they saw it? Probably still yes, although (speaking personally) my ego would probably prefer they did credit. What if the reader who passed the learning along was the ai?

This is definitely an interesting way of looking at it. If your blog ends up in pre-training data, it will become part of the AI. Or if not, an AI might still fetch it when a user asks something specific. It reminds me of voting in a democracy, which many people consider a right and a duty - but in reality a single vote is hardly going to swing any election.

> But then I stopped because I had no return from it. > The main reason was to get back into the habit of writing, and by extension thinking. ChatGPT has weakened my thinking capacity.

I can definitely relate, and find this true as well. While a (monetary) return has never a big focus for me. It's still hard to keep going over time with motivations around self improvement, accountability, etc.

To summarize the current Dutch personal income system: besides income from salary and income from own business (these are taxed quite high), income from investments (stocks, passive investments, real estate excluding your first home) is taxed quite low. The amount is simply a percentage based on the value (as per the start of the year) of your investments.

So in the Dutch tax system there is no difference between realized and unrealized gain. As such it doesn't matter when you buy/sell your investments. It doesn't impact your tax burden. The effect you get is that everyone's wealth just slowly erodes away, just like with inflation (unless your yield outpaces that).

But with this new law that all might change.

These laws may very well be terrible, but no need to mention on an internet forum you want to help (hire?) someone to mass murder people involved in making them. Jokes and sarcasm don't always land as intended.

As to a more constructive path: bureaucracy all over EU is definitely considered a big problem (for startups, and for many others) and there are a bunch of movements aimed at addressing them at all kinds of levels. For example look at the eu acc movement.

Reminds me of MSN back in the day. When I was a kid, there was a big trend of rushing home after school to log into this chat messenger on the computer, everyone would be online for a couple of hours at least.

What do you mean things in node breaking? JS is extremely backwards compatible.

I think everything I wrote a decade ago in node still runs fine.

> I dont care which part of the world you are from and how the date settings differs. Months are only show up as Jan, Feb, March

Except for the vast majority of the world that doesn't use the English language.

> Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program?

Where do you think your income and bank balances are tracked and stored? On pieces of paper?

Coinbase shady stuff around listings has been an open secret in crypto, everyone knows about it. Dates all the way back to LTC listing and probably earlier.

What article is claiming is based on a misunderstanding of how Bitcoin works, this really is an odd way of thinking about it.

If half of all people stop sending bitcoin around, the amount of electricity used doesn't go down by 50%. So you sending or not sending bitcoin doesn't impact the electricity spend by miners at all.

Miners mine to secure the network, there is not a certain amount of electricity needed per transaction.

This really dips into conspiracy levels: Tether has many customers who can redeem USDT for real dollars. Many companies do this and are very open/vocal about this. Our company has done this as recent as late last week.

USDT is the fuel that powers a lot the crypto ecosystem. Good luck trying to move USD around between different places in the crypto ecosystem (especially outside office hours). While possible it's complicated, slow and has terrible uptime.

The biggest crypto markets in the world are quoted in tether.

Agreed very much. Especially in crypto you see a lot of (more than luck) success with quants/traders with no prior trading experience.

While I agree and want this to work (in an economic model that works well for everyone, so not a cashgrab). It might be fundamentally hard or close to impossible.

What makes open source tick is (a) a culture around freedom on an almost philosophical level (free software movement) and (b) extremely low entry bar for anyone to use and participate. And it works in a way where any type of monetization is hard (it's hard to attach $ value to open source things). I hope I turn out to be wrong, but it's very hard to wire in any $ incentives or routes while keeping it actually open source.

If you want to write software and get paid properly when someone uses it, there is a whole existing industry for this (paid software).

From the Tea website:

> We’re not changing how open source works—it’s still free. web3 has introduced powerful new paradigms that allow value to be compensated without direct payment. Creator economy, meet open source.

The money needs to come from somewhere, the only way I can see this work is if you change culture in a way big companies (the only ones that can pay without it limiting their usage) that use open source software are willing to somehow pay money.

Any other type of economic system where people pay for tokens representing a part of some open source project without any cashflow (or future cashflow) is dangerous.

SWIFT is just a messaging system, they can probably still use Telex which is the precursor to SWIFT.

In this situation he describes something that has been happening for a long while (years), and almost everyone active in the space is familiar with the scam. But what people don't know is that right now (still) it appears to scam people out of 6 digits per day.

Adding an explainer of what's happening might get rid of your irritation, but it might just irritate many other readers coming there for the meat. All the other posts are about the same topic, so this blog seems to more document details of what's happening as opposed to explain the basics to everyone.

The money wouldn't be lost, they have a good relationship with Tether who can simply freeze and reissue.

Citibank wants that too: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-...

> A billboard is something that tons of people can't help but notice.

That's an interesting definition of a billboard. So if there is a billboard next to a road, and the road goes under construction for weeks/months it ceases to be a billboard for that time? Or if most people leave a village and it empties out.

> This requires installing a bunch of software, identifying peers on the Ethererum mainnet, asking them for their idea of the latest block, determining the most-worked-branch, validating its entire history, looking up a particular contract, determining its state at that block, extracting some text from it, and then somehow displaying it, for one person to see. At least that would be the somewhat trustless and decentralized way to do it.

Trustless and decentralized are not the same thing. I agree that would be "somewhat" trustless (Do you trust your OS? Do you trust your compile toolchain? How deep does trustless need to go?)

Instead, this is a webapp with a link to a blockchain explorer. It's trivial to check another blockchain explorer or your own node if you want.

I updated it: ad price was <$0.01, gas fee was $6.83

EDIT: I got outbid, I didn't post any NFT ad

> Anonymity? People are unsurprisingly very in favor of KYC so we can apply anti–money laundering and terrorism laws.

This doesn't scale any further than a website ran by a company providing services. Most eyes are on DeFi which is a world of smart contracts and dapps - which at some point (hopefully, because else there is little point) will run without anyone having any authority to change/stop them.

> For it to be trusted you have to insure deposits. Those fly-by-night exchanges going poof with everyone's coins aren't what the public are looking for. I have never met a human being who is anti–FDIC (what insures bank deposits in the US up to $250k).

It's not about being anti FDIC, it's about forcing all software to be managed by an American company that is registered and managed in a very particular way.

> For it to be used as regular currency you have to have price stability. No one wants to go to the grocery store and find out that they lost 10% of their budget on the walk over.

I think we are at the stage where very few people actually believe everyone is going to stop using any type of fiat and store all their wealth in crypto currency, even for everyday spending. So in that perspective this is like telling people not to buy an iPhone because Apple stock might go down (they are very separate).

> People don't know how to manage private and public keys. Anyone who has built SaaS knows that reset password requests are one of the most common issues users have. Now they're being pitched something that losing a file or losing the password to that file loses all of their money (???) Of course you want a third party!

Yes, not everyone cares about this but some do, that's like saying there is no point in WhatsApp to be e2e encrypted or Signal to exist at all because most people don't care if authorities read their messages.

> Immutability? Well that's fine until there are exploits. And then you either have to live with a DAO losing millions of dollars or you have to hard fork. The former is terrible publicity and bad for the people who hold most of the money, while the latter violates the spirit of the whole thing. Guess which wins?

We are early days for sure, the "ETH hardfork" one in that instance but there are many instances where it didn't.

For sure, I guess you can say it will there for as long as at least one person in the world (or in space, not sure on your timeline) keeps running the node software. It doesn't rely on any companies or currently existing groups of people.

> My worry was that the chain of trust is broken by definition - as soon as you store things outside the chain.

From the chain perspective they never really leave the chain. They are either locked (most L2 solutions such as Bitcoin Lightning) or they are held by someone else (most centralized custodians, including exchanges). So the worst that can happen is that the locked/held coins get "stolen".

If the whole world uses DigitalOcean for NFTs sure, but maybe we end up in a world where there are many providers. And not one that controls everything (by which point it's not centralized). Similar to right now many crypto is stored in exchanges but not one exchange holds all.

> Other blockchains technology that support higher throughput are providing exactly the same capabilities for a few pennies

There are many networks that claim to do this, but we have yet to see how this is going to play out. A big question here is if these networks are in practice as resistant to attacks and decentralized as (post DAO) ETH.