deafcalculus

Teamviewer (remote desktop software) on Linux uses Wine. At least it used to; haven't used it in a while.

Developing countries aren't going to be too happy about this. If a large number of a country's citizens adopt this, it forces that country to lose its independence over monetary policy. Since Libra is not controlled by the local government, this is not a fixed exchange rate regime, it's effectively dollarization and can have far reaching consequences.

IMHO, the Libra is at the same time too ambitious (in aiming for full capital convertibility across nations) and too timid (in entirely giving up monetary independence). A libra-usd, Libra-euro, libra-inr, etc. which allows countries to retain monetary sovereignty would have been easier for governments to accept. But then, Facebook can't say it's a new currency and circumvent KYC and other local regulations. But who knows? Stranger things have happened. The euro is a currency without a state. Maybe the time has come for denationalizing money.

The TC article says that every Libra issued is backed by USD and other currencies in reserve. So, no independent monetary policy. This looks a whole lot more like full-reserve banking than a cryptocurrency. Are they calling it a cryptocurrency to avoid KYC requirements and other banking regulations?

How does Libra work? It sounds more like a traditional currency, except it isn't issued by a nation, but by a bunch of companies. The peg to a basket of currencies suggests that it'll operate like a currency board regime. Do they completely give up monetary independence by backing every Libra with a dollar in reserve (or a basket of currencies)? Or is the plan to make Libra eventually float and have some decentralised mechanism to set interest rates?

I've been a Firefox/Safari user for a long time now because of concerns about Google, but I don't really get what this outrage is all about. As I understand it, Chrome is moving to the Safari rules-based model? Can someone explain why this is such a bad thing? It's not like Chrome is stopping all ad blocking.

They are limited to 4 cores. In the new lineup too, when G series comes out later, they'll be limited to 8 cores (one cliplet for CPU and one for GPU).

Yep. Intel iGPUs have good open source Linux drivers too. I had hoped that AMD would have some basic graphics in the IO die, but it looks like that won't happen.

Will it be possible to use 8 cores effectively given the thermal limitations of such a thin device? I wouldn't be surprised if the 6 core model gives about the same level of performance for most workloads as the 8 core one.

The graphics API isn't that big a deal anymore. It's often a pretty small part of the engine codebase. Many games, especially those built on the popular engines like Unity, support both DirectX and Vulkan (and Sony's API too).

Good luck finding a cable that supports what you want. It might only be a matter of time before we have to have chips in the cable to indicate what it can and cannot do!

True, but hardware compatibility isn't the only thing wrong with Linux desktop. There's a lot of broken stuff on the software side too (ex: X windows as the article points out). In fact, hardware compatibility hasn't been that much of an issue on desktops in recent times. We have a couple hundred Linux desktops (not laptops) at my university, and what I find is that if you're using last-gen Intel CPU with iGPU on a desktop with Ethernet, hardware compat isn't much of an issue at all.

PS4 is basically a modified Free BSD. So, "fixing" Linux desktop is probably doable, but extremely difficult to profitably do. Valve seemed interested when Windows introduced the App store and seemed to be going App store / Play store way, but now that Microsoft is losing interest in Windows, they don't have as much incentive to pursue Linux.

Capitalism seems to be capable of producing far more than it can consume.

If the central banks sold off all the bonds they bought with QE, that'd cause deflation, not inflation. In fact, the japanese central bank is printing money and buying up ETFs. It's too soon to say if this is a success, but thus far, hardly any inflation!

The Next Big Thing is more rent seeking by the likes of Google and Facebook. Wouldn't be surprised if Apple chooses to get into search or social media in some way.

You ought to put some in t-bills and FDIC insured CDs. Putting all of it in index funds is too risky.

Nope! Most cryptocurrencies are even more deflationary and are designed to benefit the protocol designers and early investors. That doesn't mean we should stop trying! I haven't seen any good arguments for why a cryptocurrency cannot possibly work. Once the dot-com phase of crypto ends, there may be more serious efforts to make a currency that's actually useful. I'd argue that people in Greece could use one right now if there was a sane way to bootstrap the process.

It solves the problem of not having to rely on a central bank to maintain the value of currency. It may seem unnecessary in the US, but pretty damn useful in countries like Zimbabwe where the privilege to print money has been abused. The opposite problem of deflation (a la Japan) seems more likely to hit the US. As population declines (and with it the demand for housing), it'll become necessary to destroy money with negative interest rates to reach the target inflation, boost investment, and check unemployment. But that's damn difficult with currency notes. And there'll be political opposition to any effort to target higher inflation or fiscal policy that has the government borrowing and spending more. The behaviour of UK and EZ governments and their austerity policies (especially towards Greece) do not inspire much confidence. An alternative currency might start looking attractive when that happens. Bitcoin is even more deflationary and won't help. But some other cryptocurrency could.

It's also a matter of principle. There are some who don't like the idea of central bank monopoly. A competing currency could be beneficial even if the only thing it accomplishes is keeping central bankers more vigilant and honest.

Linux support on laptops is much more mature than it was 5 years ago. I'd still avoid anything with an nVidia Optimus setup, but Intel graphics has had decent drivers on Linux for a long time now.

I was a little worried about hardware support, so I bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed. Pretty much everything worked out of the box. But my friends tell me that the Linux experience is good with other laptops too.

The deflation problem with Bitcoin will keep getting worse because the mining reward decreases over time.

The US also has a good chunk of rare earths. It was a shortsighted move to allow the mining equipment to be sold off to China for a quick buck. But there's still time to fix this.

> Comments about gaming are valid but I think instead of buying Intel just go with a better GPU and you will win there as well.

This hasn't been true for quite a while in many games. Modern engines often do utilize 6-8 cores (they have to to get it to work well on the anemic CPUs in ps4/xb1). Assassin's creed, for instance, struggles to push 60 fps on Ryzen 1700X[1]. Of course, one can always drop settings to slightly above console quality and enjoy 60 fps. But, the idea that GPUs are almost always the bottleneck in games is just a myth.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG9Bsv-d8HM&feature=youtu.be...

Fair point. I'd argue that youtube has way higher network effects than an ecommerce shop and that Google paid a comparatively smaller 1B$ for a richer global market than the 16B$ that Walmart paid to grab a bite of the Indian market, especially with the political risk involved. I'll also wager that Walmart could've spent a lot less by getting exclusive deals on new smartphones along with deep discounts to quickly grab a huge chunk of the marketshare.

I could be wrong. With the absurd amounts of QE that went on for so long, maybe valuations that price in earnings decades away are justifiable.

Walmart could've started out on their own. They wouldn't have been far behind because e-commerce is still new in India. But no, they spent billions buying a glorified smartphone shop that people will desert the moment they stop offering deep discounts.

Maybe Softbank wants to sell it to a bigger fool? They invested in Flipkart, a competitor of Amazon, and then sold it to Walmart. But I gotta admit, they'll need to find extraordinarily dumb money to buy their stake in Uber.

I really hope he doesn't change on code quality standards.

The biometric scanners probably have big security holes too. In fact, it won't surprise me if the JTAG is left enabled and anyone can read/write the firmware!

Aadhaar needs something like TrustRank or a Web Of Trust where identity and citizenship isn't binary but a continuous number (probability) based on who and how many vouch for your identity. A lot of citizens, especially in rural areas, aren't documented very well. It's best to acknowledge that uncertainty in the system and deal with it.

The public discussion around Aadhaar is very confused. There's hardly anything wrong with a universal ID for every citizen. There are already several in India (Driving License, Passport, Voter's ID, PAN card, etc.). The real privacy issue is around (a) the govt. collecting biometric data, and (b) how much the govt. / third-party service provider learns about you when you authenticate your identity using Aadhaar. The UIDAI doesn't even want to discuss the issue in the open ("trust us, your data is secure. No proof of hacking whatsoever."), and the use of non-open-source software and closed biometric hardware is troubling. If biometric scanners are using proper encryption, who holds the keys? (My guess, the manufacturers have it, and lots of people who shouldn't have it do have it). What's needed is consensus building, maybe through a public consultation, about what the majority of people are willing to disclose to the govt. Biometric isn't an absolute necessity for Aadhaar to achieve it's stated goals. That said, recent polls show that the percentage of Indians who trust their govt. is way higher than in the west, so the govt. can probably get what it wants while playing nice.

There's also very little discussion about how secure the biometrics are. There's no info about what services are considered sensitive and need more than a fingerprint. Fingerprints maybe fine for 5 years, but I have a hard time believing they'll be constant enough for secure identity verification over 80 years. What happens when biometric fails and a significant chunk of the populace can't sign, don't remember their date-of-birth or any password, or even their full name? Again, something like a web of trust would've been helpful.

How did you design / pick the transformer? Some notes on that would help an unrelated hobby project of mine.

Apple can always use that cash to buy back its stock. Spending it on Tesla has to get better returns than buying back itself for it to be worthwhile.

Politicians hate to accept mistakes / policy errors. It's no surprise that Modi doesn't want to say out loud that the note ban did not go as he had hoped; some positives, but not worth all the trouble, and he'd probably have abandoned the exercise had he known the outcome, but he isn't going to say that. Perhaps a lot of people expected him to be a better statesman and feel let down. Anyway, time to move on and clean up the balance sheets of banks before the next recession that many are predicting hits.