friend_and_foe

But they're non profits...

Electricity cost, for one.

It's a graphical interface as opposed to running inside a terminal.

Dehumanizing people, what an awful human being.

> hammer and sickle

Why am I not surprised.

His coworkers probably treat him the way he complains about because it is usually his fault and he's insufferable at work.

I personally love TUI software, you don't have to worry about GUI toolkits, mouse focused interaction, you can run them remotely over SSH, they're often composable, and composability is much easier, and who doesn't like the hackerman aesthetic?

Some things I don't like about modern TUIs is developers getting away from the purpose of them, portability. Often you'll find really beautiful TUIs that require installation of custom fonts for icons and other overcomplicated stuff like that. They can be nice, but generally they sacrifice the practical benefit to a significant degree.

One I discovered yesterday, not really a TUI, more of a shell but still, extremely powerful, is kalc https://github.com/bgkillas/kalc which is a complete scientific and graphing calculator in the terminal. It depends on gnuplot for graphing, which is unfortunate since it is a GUI program, but there we go with composability again! It's fine and works and does what it needs to, so not really a big deal I guess.

I also use Helix editor and sc-im daily.

To find more:

https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

https://github.com/toolleeo/cli-apps

Yes. I'm an avid qutebrowser user, and I have a voracious appetite for learning, reading, and perpetually unfinished projects. So I created a tool to help me organize information in qutebrowser very effectively and I use it daily. It's basically like OneTab but for qutebrowser. The entire UI is just HTML files, since they're browser native and simple, and can be opened in any browser you like. No unneeded complexity.

https://codeberg.org/mister_monster/tab-manager/

I also wrote a little script for converting Firefox open tab export text files into HTML compatible with this tool, I haven't published it yet, I want to implement doing that with chromium based browsers as well before I do, but it will basically enable you to import your open chromium and Firefox tabs as sessions in tab-manager in qutebrowser, and it's not limited to that, since it's just HTML you can open it in any browser you like. If you care about that just check my codeberg in the future some time and see if it is there.

If you've worked in environments dominated by unions you most certainly know that that story wasn't fabricated. I had a friend that worked show sites, comic con and stuff like that. She told me that in some states, when they set up a kiosk they weren't allowed to plug plugs into wall sockets because it required someone in the electricians union.

I'm glad you made a lot of money. Were you worth that kind of money? The guy walking around plugging plugs into the wall in my example was most certainly not. I'd rather just not do business than do business in environments where bureaucracies create pointless busy work to keep people paid.

It could have been a lie. It was most certainly not a threat.

So this decision hinges on construing his statement as a threat.

If anything makes the consortium trying to get rid of the NLRB look right, this is it.

Remote work is the future of work that you don't need to be physically present at a location to do. You'd be surprised by some things you do need to be physically present to do, even if it's only sometimes, so there will be a lot of "remote but you must live within X miles of location" type jobs.

For the rest, it's kind of like uber. Anyone with the right skills and equipment can do the job from anywhere, but you're self employed. This doesn't work out for everybody, it drives pay down. Why pay SF wages when workers don't have SF cost of living? It's going to work a lot like call center outsourcing, information workers will be where they're competent and cheap, and it doesn't matter where in the world that is. If you've been freelancing a while you know what's coming. If you've been a salaried employee, get ready to make trade offs. Sounds great to be remote, and it is, but you're competing with people all over the world for that job, and many of them don't need a quarter million dollars a year to do the job.

I personally think it's a fantastic thing. A lot of people don't like it when pay goes down. I personally don't care what my pay is, only what my standard of living is, and if I live somewhere cheap and have a higher standard of living with lower pay I'm happy. Costs do need to go down, and some of you reading this are ridiculously overpaid (and many of you know it) which is not sustainable and wasn't going to last forever no matter what happened. A good effect of this is that if you do work that requires you to be somewhere it will come with a premium, physical workers are going to be getting a pay bump without having to have a union negotiate it for them or a cartel agreement to keep pay high.

A lot of people don't like change. Any change creates some who benefit and some who lose out. But it's happening and can't be stopped.

Well, with people doing whole home solar, that wouldn't be an issue. You'd just need an inverter to power some appliances in the kitchen. At the very least, LED lighting hardwired into the home would drop electric usage by double digit percentages.

On a slightly unrelated note, why do we manufacture "bulbs" that contain their own ballast/inverter that screw into a 110 socket? Why do we sell everything with an external or built in adaptor, to plug into a 110 socket? It seems to me it's just legacy compatibility layer middleware, I can't think of anything outside of a kitchen that actually needs 110. Why don't we just start building houses with 12v connections for LED strips, since they run on that anyway? One inverter in the garage, some low voltage wiring around the house, done. It seems it would be cheaper, more efficient and more versatile to do this rather than wire a whole house for 110/220 and then every appliance have it's own AC -> DC and step down transformer to account for the fact that our electricity needs have drastically changed since 100 years ago.

I'm pretty sure that's the target with this: want to pause to see something that was shown quickly? Perfect, sit through this ad.

I've got s pretty great solution to this kind of stuff, one that works for me anyway.

If I want something that doesn't exist bad enough, I make it. I release it to the world for free. When I need an improvement, I make the improvement. If you need an improvement, make a PR. If it's a feature request, unless I think it would be interesting to implement, make the tool more well rounded or I will find utility in the proposal, I don't do it.

I don't maintain beyond that. Sorry not sorry. If it's popular enough that a community forms around it the community can maintain it. If someone or some company comes to rely on it, they can maintain it. I made a thing, I gave it to the world for free just because, that's it. I don't owe the world anything and I'm not a charity.

So is it unethical or immoral to copy your VHS tape you bought to a BluRay disc?

You would've been right like 15 years ago, but it's changed a lot since then. I live in a place with a pretty sizeable homeschooling community. I didn't come here for that, coincidentally I want to do that for my children as well, it just worked out. Most of the homeschooled young people around here are better mannered, more decent, cleaner, less prone to behavioral problems, and have a larger knowledge base. The days when homeschooling == creationism are coming to an end. There's still a bit of that, but not asuch as you'd expect.

You're right that kids have to be exposed to different people and they need to learn critical thinking and to think for themselves. School does not teach them that, school teaches them that when the drug dog comes into the classroom they have no choice but to comply. School teaches them that they need go go along with social expectations unless they want to get bullied or shunned. School teaches them that it's cool to fight in the bathroom and put the video on TikTok. People teaching their own kids, well that depends on the parents. I can give my kids way better critical thinking skills than school can. Someone that thinks the world is 6000 years old maybe can't, but it has always been that way, we were just pretending it could be different, and what is staring us in the face right now is the reality that that just isn't true. Always and forever, kids will learn to the degree that their parents care about their learning, no number of behemoth institutions will change that.

It is. And how could it not? It's mostly a single payer babysitting program.

Teachers can't do anything about unruly children except call the police. A whole class has to slow down to accommodate the below average kids. We spend our first year in school playing around and singing the ABC song and drawing purple and green dinosaurs. Educational science has advanced far beyond the Prussian model, but we have to navigate a bureaucracy to change anything, there's no way to keep up. And their chant is "we can fix it for more money."

We live in a time now that you can access any and all information that is known to the public on a whim for free. This is very new for us, so people don't know what to do with it. You can, right now, with just a laptop, give your kids an education that even 2 generations ago most people didn't even know enough to be able to dream about, for free. You can educate yourself on any topic to any degree of depth that you like. Institutional education is obsolete. People will be competent from now on to the degree their parents care to teach them. That is with or without public schooling.

I'm putting together an education plan for my infant son, that I intend to release to the world once he has had a little go at it, for free. It uses FLOSS software and publicly available information, I'm going to rely heavily on Anki. I intend to teach him how to read starting at the age of 2, and I expect that by the time he is 5 he will have a handle on reading, a decent vocabulary, and basic arithmetic at least, I'm shooting for basic geometry as well. Writing and typing also. My goal is to have him educated at a high school level by the age of 12, with just 3 hours a day of "schooling." I'm pretty sure I can do it, the bar is very low.

> Personally I don't see holders as freeriding.

The network has ongoing costs and only people that spend money contribute to, unless there's a tail emission. In that case, in addition, everyone holding contributes to maintenance of the network to the degree they benefit from it's maintenance in the form of debasement of their savings, which go directly to the miners keeping the network alive. Holders are free riders in bitcoin, game theory wise this is a fact.

> No blockchain will be able to both accommodate retail transactions of 50,000 tx/s like VISA and also be decentralised

This is a statement of fact but has not been thoroughly demonstrated. The 2 bottlenecks to throughput are 1) block size, and 2) network latency between nodes. Block size is only an issue for decentralization if you have to store all historical data forever to get theaximum security guarantee possible. Mimblewimble eliminates this requirement, and therefore enables the same decentralization regardless of block size. At that point, block size is only limited by how fast transactions propagate across the network, that is, latency, and verification of them, which is trivial, within the block time. You can have 1GB blocks in mimblewimble and have the block chain shrink one block to the next with no sacrifice in security guarantees.

All transactions count.

> Yes, monetary exchange is public to everyone. But the source/destination of the exchange are as anonymous as we need them to be.

You don't really believe that do you? This is a system built on cryptography and we just accept that our finances are open to anyone, to be blacklisted, to make a single mistake and our entire transaction history can be tied to us, and even, other peoples history can be erroneously tied to us, weust behave with the most rigorous sterile technique or anyone anywhere can know everything we have and everything we have ever bought. You believe this is all we need?

You can voluntarily remove anonymity for example in Monero with viewkeys, and selectively remove it with transaction keys for individual transactions. You can confirm issuance is not being violated with range proofs. Greg Maxwell's bulletproofs are formally proven, and implementation has been thoroughly audited.

Fees are an issue. If I have a not insignificant sum in bitcoin and I can't move it, bitcoin is broken. I've saved nothing, I've thrown it down a well. I don't like to talk about this because my above points are the cause of it and the solutions I talk about that exist already resolve it, so it's not something that we need to go into depth on. But, I did an analysis about this a while ago that I published on nostr and I think that bitcoin fees will rise asymptotically to reach the median transaction value, which is a positive feedback loop. It's not a problem until it is, and it is already a problem for a lot of people.

You can stop fractional reserve banking. It began because moving and protecting gold was expensive. Moving and protecting cryptocurrency is cheap, people don't need custodians, but we are getting fractional reserve bitcoin because it is artificially kept expensive. The tools exist to alleviate this, you can, right now, have astronomically higher amounts of commerce on a layer 1 chain directly than bitcoin provides, and I'm not talking about some sham scamcoin like iota or whatever. The solution was developed at blockstream! It was initially a BIP!

I've studied bitcoin for over a decade. Deeply. I can talk about ECDSA and the emergent consensus behavior that emerges from the architecture. I can talk about the economics and monetary policy in detail. I like to think I've got a pretty good handle on it.

I know it's not the first attempt at internet money, but it is the first form that didn't require a central intermediary for all transactions. That's what sets all this apart.

I can give you a number of shortcomings and I promise you I've heard what you have to say, and thought about it too. I'm hoping you have something new for me, I enjoy changing my mind.

To start, let's commit blasphemy: the hard cap. It's a bad idea. So is a percentage debasement rate, as is the supposed target of central banks. I'm partial to continuous, linear debasement, which translates to a geometrically decreasing debasement as a percentage of supply. For one, holders free ride the network. Two, no other asset anywhere ever behaves this way. Bitcoin is the most scarce thing in the universe, and that's a good thing until it's not. Something that's always predictably scarce temporally but, taken to infinity, has no hard limit, is superior IMO as long as there's no feedback loops in the supply change.

Bitcoin cannot handle enough transactions. Lightning is just fractional banking with extra steps. Again, you're not here to sell layer 2, you're here to convince me (or at least make the case) that this is a strength.

All monetary exchange for all of history is public to anyone.

For the strongest security guarantee, all history must be stored forever by everyone participating in consensus. Note, if this were solved, block size would be a non issue. It is solved actually, believe it or not, just not in bitcoin.

That's what I've got off the top of my head. Bitcoin isn't the best it could be, it could be the best if everyone's commerce was private and historical data was not needed to ensure security. My other point, hard cap, is more contentious and we could argue that one for days and make no progress.

Note that I did not mention PoW, ASICs, fees, block size (although one of my points alludes to the possibility of getting rid of that entirely) or any of the usual surface level talking points because I don't think they're worth going over again. I tend to like PoW and think trying to prevent ASICs is counterproductivr, as far as fees go, they're a symptom of a couple of the problems I laid out above.

I don't get it either, when I experience what you talk about I just laugh and sometimes ask my friends how they feel about it. Remember, it's normal to them. It's also amusing to see how TV advertising has evolved (or devolved to be more accurate) since the last time I saw a commercial.

Specifically, Markovian means that the probabilities of potential future states are dependent on the current state only. This is memoryless (more specifically, it has what's called the Markovian property) because no past states have anything to do with the next state.

You're right about the article.

This word you used, "independent" has a term in these kind of probabilistic systems, its called "memory". A system is memoryless if the next outcome is not dependent on previous outcomes. A coin flip is such a memoryless system. The odds it will rain on a particular day is not independent of pervious outcomes; such a system is not memoryless. All the examples in your comment share this property and so the reasoning doesn't strictly apply to memoryless systems.

The author is not making this point, and early on, he calls coin flips "Markovian" which is synonymous with "memoryless". Independence is assumed in this article.

People won't go back to piracy. Most of the people that subscribe to Netflix weren't really pirates. Maybe they had a friend that would burn them a DVD on request, or got the number of some guy who sold bootleg DVDs. They'd probably use these services for a couple of movies a year. Most peoples direct experience with piracy was downloading Metallica songs on limewire when they were 16. It's been a long time since then. There's a whole generation of adults who largely only know TV as it exists today, that is, streaming services.

The ones that were pirates, I never understood why they left. I have yet to pay for a single streaming service in my entire life, or cable, or any of that. This was always going to happen, I saw it coming for years before Netflix even had a viable competitor. And on top of that, the diminishing quality of the content, I've reached a point now that I don't pirate because I don't watch any of it. To be fair to them, my TV watching was always very minimal, I'm an easy guy to alienate. Still, I can't imagine people who know how to pirate actually paying for what passes for entertainment these days.

Yes, someone is factually wrong. The likelihood that it's you is about 50%.

Past a tipping point that could make earth uninhabitable is going to create a financial crisis as bad as the 2008 great recession, to paraphrase.

If the end of the world is only as bad as the 2008 financial crisis I'd say we lucked out.

There are reasons why you'd choose bitcoin over your example, ethereum. For one, supply of ethereum is not deterministically predictable. As money, that makes it less compelling. Some other technical details are very short block time means network splits, orphaned blocks, reorgs are very common. In the short term, ethereum finality is not as reliable.

Generally I agree with your point though. Money over IP can takeany forms, and the likelihood that the first form it took is the best it could possibly be is miniscule.

> ...and this makes it incredibly unlikely Bitcoin will ever be outcompeted by a government or private market alternative.

The premise of the article. I don't believe this for a second.

Imagine the delusional hopefulness one would have to have to believe that something will, for eternity, not be superseded. Nothing in the history of humanity, or even life, remains unsurpassed from it's inception. Yet somehow this thing is unbeatable.

There are cryptocurrencies out there that meet all of the criteria that is laid forth in the article as the reason for this conclusion. True, most, I'd say almost all, don't, as the article does point out, but some do. So what's the secret sauce that makes those currencies incapable if it isn't simply these criteria laid out? Is it magic? Is it some emergent property we have yet to comprehend? If so, why not say it in the article? No, the article says those traits are all you need to draw that conclusion and yet, there's no compelling reason why that's the case. It's hand waving.

The criteria not mentioned is network effects. But we know, network effects are not an insurmountable obstacle. So the conclusion still does not follow. Those criteria are a must, and network effects make it incredibly difficult to supersede bitcoin, but not impossible.

I say the opposite: bitcoin's demise is inevitable. Not because I don't like bitcoin, don't believe in it, think it's a scam. I am a bitcoiner. But because nothing lasts forever, bitcoin isn't perfect, and there are people out there trying to make it better that aren't getting their PRs merged and/or making it to consensus to become a part of the network software.

I can think of at least one cryptocurrency that is better than bitcoin in every way, that meets all the criteria in the article, but just doesn't have the network effects. And to surmount that, the technical superiority, the benefit to the user to switch has to be so compelling that network effect diminishes. It's not enough to be marginally better, it has to be astronomically better. Maybe that one I have in mind doesn't have that, but you can bet that one will be made that will have that eventually.

So to continue on the example we are running with, you don't believe disagreements like this need to be serviced. So the status quo as it was, say, 20 years ago was perfectly acceptable? Or would you like the status quo today, after the disagreement was serviced in favor of one side of the issue? Basically, are you conveniently deciding that it's not worth discussing now that an outcome you like (I don't know what outcome you like) has become reality, or do you genuinely not give a shit one way or another because it's a non issue to you?

On another point, what constitutes a manufactured disagreement and what constitutes a genuine one?

Over counted, probably not considering the thin margins of election outcomes. Wrong? Yes, half the population is wrong. Which half is wrong depends on which half you're asking. We are all probably wrong about a lot. This cooperation we do in spite of it helps us figure that out.

I wonder, who is even making these decisions?

Who is windows for? Is it for gamers? Is it for office workers that were raised on windows at school? Do people just use it because it comes preinstalled on their computer?

Why would anyone with a modicum of self respect use this system any longer? Gone are the days when you had to be a nerd to want to use something else, when dislike of windows was about how Microsoft behaved in their commercial dealings, when it was an ideological decision. It is a practical matter now, people wholly uninterested in tinkering with their computer are getting sick of it at this point.

An operating system is supposed to get out of your way and let you operate the machine.