Wow, very sad to hear this. My high school ran a trial project back in 2000 and my class became the first in my country where every student received a laptop to use in all classes. We used Scientific Notebook for math. Being able to solve any equation and draw any graph with the click of a button was a huge boost in my ability to grasp trig, polynomials, logarithms, etc.
I actually went from D-level math student pre-HS to graduating HS with an A+ and went on to get a degree in physics+math at uni. I honestly doubt if that would've been possible if not for SN.
The more I think about it, the more I think that this is actually a pretty genius trade. The price of Tether is effectively capped at 1 USD, so it's not like a short position could blow up in your face. All you'd stand to lose is the interest.
Indeed, I'm personally half of a two-dev team maintaining and developing a system that I'd say falls deep into this category. Our giant legacy codebase has a few warts, but on the whole it follows a few simple design patterns that, once you understand them, makes it very easy to find your way around and change/extend. We also have an extensive domain understanding and direct contact with our user base, so we design, implement, review/test and deploy features very fast compared to any other team I've encountered in the organization. And though the underlying technology is mostly ancient, our product is growing strongly and consistently outcompeting systems with budgets of a different stratosphere in the open market.
The only sane use of On Error Resume Next is surrounding one or two specific lines of code where you dont want to let the ordinary exception mechanism be triggered. For larger blocks of code it's completely insane.
I always thought the classic synchronous message loop in Win32 was actually rather elegant if you took the time to understand the mechanics surrounding it. DoEvents is a bit crude but it serves a purpose in the context of VB6. Cant disagree about the error handling though, thats the absolute worst part of the language.
One major caveat; You're not shorting BTC/USD, you're shorting BTC/USDT. As long as Tether is managed by a shady, unregulated corporation with zero transparency or oversight, that has full freedom to create as much artificial liquidity as they see fit, that seems like a very bad bet.
Crypto is hardly a "sector of the economy". It's main utility right now is lining the pockets of a few speculators.
Traditional centralized ledgering systems do everything crypto does better and with a fraction of the energy use. It also gives governments tools to combat inflation/deflation and manage counterparty risks within the system.
Crypto is a neat idea, but in the end it doesn't really solve anything, and instead only introduces a lot of unnecessary problems.
Except this bubble is a bit more insidious because you have actors like Tether that are most likely creating a lot of artificial liquidity/demand. If there is a sudden loss of faith and enough actors start rushing for the exits, it will look something more like a musical game of chairs of who is left holding the bag of worthless Mickey Mouse dollars, by my estimation.
As a developer, I got some valuable insights from the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willinck. I think particularly the principles of "leading up the chain" is crucial when you're a developer with managers who don't have the necessary context of understanding to make optimal decisions on their own. Perhaps not as easily applied in all company cultures. But in my case, it gave me the confidence to voice my opinion on a few critical issues of strategic importance over the past few years. This year I was promoted to "system responsible" (basically lead dev with technical responsibility for the system) and I think that was in part an acknowledgment of my ability to take ownership of a situation and helping to make sure sound a sound strategy is in place.
Absolutely. In 2010 I used FANN for my Msc thesis research, and found it pretty easy to make my own little training sim for stock price data on top of it. Haven't done any ML work since, but I always scratched my head over how Python became the most popular language for this domain.
PornHub is a certifiably criminal organization with a despicable leadership. Mastercard is only enforcing the morals of any sound minded individual in this instance.
But the way humans raised animals prior to the last century seems a lot less problematic. If we reverted to a more sustainable, regenerative practice of farming, that would surely reduce animal suffering and not damage the environment to anywhere near the same degree. It would also create a lot of jobs. But if you're trying to feed 8 bln people then you will need to figure out ways to reduce waste in the supply chain. Like freezing meat.
One thing I've been asking myself is how much fresh meat gets thrown out from western supermarkets because of expiration. It might be possible to reduce a lot of waste simply by requiring meat to always be sold as frozen.
But much more speculative. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean science can/will achieve it. Brain-to-computer communication seems much more straightforward to achieve from a technical perspective, and has enough potential to revolutionize aspects of our lives on it's own.
Granted, communicating with any type of hardware on the users machine is a major challenge. We've had to spend significant effort just troubleshooting printer issues. If you need low latency, virtualization is likely a non-starter.
The upshot is that the latency between our apps and the application server/database (hosted in the same domain) is much lower than for a conventional web app.
I develop desktop apps that are run exclusively virtualized, and don't really have to deal with either set of problems. From a developer perspective I'd say it's a pretty sweet spot, as you get the best of both worlds to some extent.
You're correct that I didn't just drug myself with mushrooms, but they certainly didn't help. Marijuana was the main cause. And I likely would have stopped myself sooner if it wasn't for ignorant people telling me I couldn't and wouldn't get seriously ill from taking these substances.
As someone who personally struggled with drug-induced psychosis for several years (and met many others with similar struggles), I kindly ask that you stop generalising from personal anecdote when giving advice about mental health and psychedelic drug use to others.