danield9tqh

I really liked this, thank you

Sounds like the opposite of housing from a national security POV. If a Chinese national buys a house in the US, then the US has 'control' over their property. The US would want Chinese nationals to buy houses in the US.

Thanks for providing some nuance on the banking accounts. It's helpful to be able to compare crypto's impact (which I still think is substantial) against a realistic situation instead of the "centralized strawmen" that seem so common in crypto arguments.

The article mentions the Lebanese pound has "lost more than 90% of its value". For an equivalent loss in value from holding USDT that would mean that each USDT is only backed by 10 cents of value? I mean there are certainly arguments to be made about how much value is actually backing USDT but to claim that it's only 10% seems way off. I think people would be shocked and there would be crypto-wide panic if USDT dropped to 85 cents on the dollar. If USDT 'collapses' that does not mean that one USDT is worth 0$ only that the value drops enough that it causes a structurally significant sell-off. This is what people worry about, not USDT becoming worthless. If I'm Lebanese, yes I'll take the USDT

To give maybe a good parallel take a look at clients of Bernie Madoff's fund. This was by all measures considered a 'collapse' and a 'disaster' but when all was said and done clients still recovered 70-80% of their claims. Granted it took a long time ~10yrs or so but still a very far cry from 10%

USDT is hosted on Ethereum. The value of the USDT coin does not come from cryptocurrency as you've correctly pointed out, it comes from centralized authority backing USDT. But what part does come from cryptocurrency is the decentralized tracking of account balances. If it were't for the Ethereum blockchain, the only alternative would be to get physical USD into the country or for a Lebanese individual to open up a bank account denominated in USD (which is most likely illegal and impossible). So crypto is actually part of the solution here. Hope that makes sense

Assuming 8hr work days and a 250 day working year for humans. No such constraints for robots. That's 2,000 hrs/yr for a human vs 8,760 (assuming 24/7) hours for a robot. Obviously there will be other costs for robots (downtime, electricity, repair etc) so no telling whether it will be worth it in the long run but the hour calculation there does seem a little off.

I think that's fine because WASM isn't meant to write code in. It's just a source language for other compiled languages. I'm assuming the javascript complaints you're talking about are because people actually have to write javascript code?

If smartphones are any indication, VR on the go will happen eventually, without a doubt. If it's not this model that popularizes it, it will be some other model.

what idiot is going to take his oculus go with him on the go?

I really think you are underestimating people here

I don't think the 'past' link conforms to current best design patterns. We should refactor it so that it automatically posts a comment on the article.

Unfortunately from reading the first couple of chapters it seems like this textbook doesn't do an excellent job of favoring graphics over formula. It's acceptable but really nothing stellar. I don't think it does the title of 'Applied Category Theory' justice. It is still very much theoretical.

Once you've accepted that reality = reality and that to discuss reality, humans always need to revert to models, then any further discussion of the nature of reality seems like a dead end. Because any way you try to discuss it is a simplification. Maybe it's more accurate to just accept that we're firmly in the realm of models and forget about trying to define reality itself. So in that way it becomes kind of pointless to discuss the nature of reality.

Yea I totally agree, partial function application certainly complicates things. Instead of `called` vs `not called` like you said, a function can have any number of states depending on its number of arguments.

I will give you my two cents on its benefits though and let me know if you agree or disagree. I would compare it to taking a step up on the ladder of abstraction. Computers are powerful because they are programmable. If we take the example of a value like an integer, in a computer we can make it anything we want (0, 1, 2, 3, 4 etc). Functions are how we program a value. We say for example

speed(distance, time) { return distance / time; }

The value of the speed depends on these two variables (distance and time) which are programmable.

Partial function application is just a continuation of this idea. It's obvious that `values` are programmable, but why can't functions be programmable as well? After all, we gained a lot of power from letting values be programmable maybe the same will be true for functions? Using the previous example lets say we want a function to calculate the speed of runners in the 100m dash. We could write a new function for this

speedOf100YardDash(time) { return 100 / time; }

but we already have logic for calculating the speed and we don't want to reuse it. So the idea of having a `programmable` speed function starts to look a little better.

speedOf100YardDash = speed(where `distance` = 100)

Obviously, this plays into your criticism of 'pedagogical examples' being simple, but I think the idea is even more valuable with more complicated code. Why? Because with simple examples it's easy it duplicate code without much consequence. The value of speed and division are not changing anytime soon. If we have more complex functions, however, this is where we absolutely want to avoid code duplication. Because if we write a complex function multiple times it's more likely that one of those implementations will be written differently or eventually diverge from the other one.

What do you think?

As a strong proponent of functional languages, I would have to agree these are some good criticisms. FP solves many problems it cannot solve is code readability. Readability will always be a problem no matter what paradigm you work in. This is why I both appreciated and disliked this article. It brings up many valid points about how FP can be (and is often) written illegibly. But on the flip side, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Just make the functional code more readable.

> Write stupid code

Also really agree with this. As engineers our job is not just to write something that works, it's to write something that can also be read and understood by others. This is why simple solutions to problems are praised over complex solutions.

Like saying how is gold supply finite if you can break a piece of gold in half. When Bitcoin forks the value is split between the two forks. If the market cap of Bitcoin before the fork is $10 Billion, the combined market cap of both sides of the fork afterwards will still be $10 Billion. There are double the number of coins because of the fork but now each person who had one coin has two and each coin is worth a fraction of what is was before. It's an increase in supply but an increase that is perfectly distributed among the previous holders.

Debt can absolutely be issued with Bitcoin. What's to stop someone from saying, here I'll give you 1 BTC today if you give it back to me tomorrow? The reason you've probably heard that debt cannot be issued in Bitcoin is because debt cannot be issued in a 'safe' way. In other words if I give someone 1 BTC today, I can't be sure that they will give it back to me tomorrow. But that's just the nature of debt and has nothing to do with Bitcoin.

This makes sense to me, that's something I hadn't thought of so thanks for sharing.

But I still don't see how it differentiates BTC from USD. Because issuing any debt in the first place would inflate the value. So then when you stop issuing debt, the value would get deflated to what it would have been originally. I think this is how the Fed tries to control deflation as well. They print more money, not to distribute it but just so that they can hold it and burn it when they need to control inflation. Either way, both of these scenarios seems like a wash to me. You're just making money so that you can destroy it later.

The only argument I can see here is the idea of having 'wiggle room' within the money supply. In essence a way to control the irrational volatility of the market. If everyone is screaming sell sell sell!, the Fed has a limited amount of room to destroy some money and calm people down before panic takes over. BTC doesn't have that. But even this seems to me like a much weaker 'check' than the author suggests.

> Even if demand for the dollar plummeted, the Fed could in principle keep burning money until a dollar is scarce enough to be worth the “right” amount

This seems like the crux of the argument of the difference between the dollar and Bitcoin in the author's view. To me though this statement doesn't make sense and is very misleading, and someone please correct me if I'm wrong. The Fed CANNOT just keep burning dollars because they don't have all the dollars. Individuals hold those dollars. Yes, if individuals just started burning their dollars the value of the dollar would adjust to the "right" amount, but who in their right mind would burn their money for the greater good? In light of this, the Fed doesn't at all seem like a "check" on inflation or deflation. The dollar is still subject to the same supply and demand properties of Bitcoin.

It's interesting this xkcd seems to be making the point that complaining about the increase in pace from the previous generation is as old as time itself. This conclusion is plausible, however I would be interested to hear opinions from earlier than the 1800s. If you consider the past 300 years in the span of human evolution, it's miniscule. On that timeline the 1800s seem much more closely related to modern day. My point being that decreasing attention span could still be considered a relatively 'recent' phenomenon.

This does worry me a bit though. There is probably a reason they are difficult to test, because they go against the React DOM pattern of a component only having control over the DOM nodes inside it. Call me a purist but this seems like a deviation from React's functional roots and going against the very problem React was trying to solve in the first place.

Although I agree with most of the author's points I think he underestimates the value of ease of use by programmers. SQL syntax can definitely be daunting to some and difficult to understand complex queries. There is room for improvement in that regard.

I would have to say asking Sam Altman for advice. Most founders simply don't think to do it and it ends up hurting them tremendously in the long run. You're on the right track.

Hello Sam, what is your opinion on REST APIs (A CRUD based model) vs RPC APIs (a more functional based model)?