me_again

"zero-error policy" as described here is a remarkable euphemism. You might hope that the policy is not to make any errors. In fact the policy is not to acknowledge that errors can occur!

Wow, I didn't see that twist coming either. A sad reminder that conspiracy thinking can strike even people who are otherwise seemingly very rational.

He had a real gift for making theoretical topics interesting. I read his book The New Turing Omnibus (https://archive.org/details/newturingomnibus0000dewd_q3p6) as a teenager, and credit it with a decent part of getting me into computer science. Rest easy.

The worst case scenario is something like Kessler Syndrome for information.

Luminous, Chaff, Axiomatic, Learning to be Me, The Cutie, The Moat.

The Best of Greg Egan is a perfectly respectable place to start.

I think it's just cheaper to use public domain illustrations than to hire an artist.

Cool!

I didn't totally follow the issues with keeping the data in memory, and it sounds like it is solved now - but you could probably use a cardinality estimation algorithm to estimate the number of unique beacon IDs while only using constant space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count-distinct_problem

I don't think that makes any sense.

I raised an eyebrow at "This was a group of idealists... all in pursuit of a higher mission." It's buying into the whole "SBF was just a crazy kid with big dreams who wasn't too great at counting the money" mythos.

I don't know any of them personally but "This was a group of scam artists in pursuit of a bigger payout." seems closer to the mark.

I think that's a different issue. Amazon has thorny problems with takedowns. Company A trying to get rival company B's listing taken down probably happens 100's of times a day. I believe Amazon uses "proof of purchase" kinda like a CAPTCHA or proof of work - an extra hoop to jump through to reduce the volume of these things they have to adjudicate.

This may seem like quibbling, but I think when large companies do this kind of thing, "greed" is the wrong kind of explanation. Greed is an emotion, or moral failing if you will, humans have. A company like DC is a complex, non-sentient system. It doesn't have emotions, it has interlocking sets of incentives (sales bonus plans, executive compensation based on beating last quarter's numbers, etc) which collectively and incrementally nudge the behavior of their employees towards unethical shortcuts. This tendency can be temporarily reined in by regulations, civil suits, strong-willed executives and employees, or a company culture that prizes integrity and longer-term results. When those restraints don't apply strongly enough, this behavior kicks in. I'm not sure what the right term is, but I'm reluctant to call it greed for the same reason that ChatGPT isn't "lying".

Not making excuses for DC, btw.

But why not take the extra 30 seconds to link (what you consider to be) an unbiased source?

Feel free to provide examples of companies which a) are not 'in the crypto business' (ie they sell widgets, or software, not NFTs) b) obtain the majority of their revenue via crypto.

Crypto is closer to autogyro than automobile in adoption, and there is no guarantee that will ever change.

He doesn't even provide any evidence beyond anecdote that there is a 10x demise.

It's interesting to me how deeply politics gets into everything. You like Twitter more because "it was unbalanced to the left" and now reflects your political views better. My experience is that the first 100 replies to every semi-political post are now right-leaning blue checkmark holders and conspiracy theorists, and now I find it "not very much fun".

Honestly, I don't think the "public market square" has ever worked all that well, not even in a physical market square. You get 2 groups with sufficiently different views and before long it's devolved into shouting, if not a brawl.

Maybe... but I doubt Spotify will exist in its current form in a generation's time.

I don't know any hoarders personally myself, so I many be off-base. But it doesn't seem that they are unable to make any decisions - they are quite able to buy new items without agonizing over (say) which brand of polyurethane to buy. They can decide what to have for dinner or which pants to wear. It's specifically decisions around whether to throw away an item which they find difficult.

This makes me wonder whether there is some other psychological process which makes those particular decisions hard.

I'm saying "it is harder to consume good libraries in C, because it is harder to find them & harder to build them; and once you have done both, you find that good library A and good library B work in very different ways, so you have to do more work to adapt".

And I haven't mentioned the lack of a strong universal string type, the way many libraries typedef their own family of different kinds of integer, the way one library will require you to free() a returned structure and another will require you to call my_library_free()...

It all adds up to additional friction.

You don't have to agree! Maybe I am out of date, I haven't really dealt with this since the mid 2000's. I'd be thrilled to hear this isn't an issue any more.

I think it comes down to ecosystem fragmentation.

A lot of languages now have common tooling (cargo for rust, pip for python, etc) which makes it easier to find and incorporate the libraries you want. Apparently there are tools like https://conan.io/ but they're not as widely-adopted.

C's build system is similarly non-uniform. Many packages use Makefiles, others use different build mechanisms.

C has no universally-agreed error handling mechanism or convention. Whether exceptions or golang's error interface, you can generally assume that a random package in most languages will handle errors the way you expect. In C it's a lot more varied.

Similarly memory allocation - sometimes in a larger application you want to customize how malloc and friends work. How and whether you can do that for a C package is non-uniform.

Mind you the C standard library has a sort() function which will have sensible big-O behavior on pretty much any platform. I suspect this specific problem is more to do with this being kernel-mode code which has a lot of special conditions.

Kind of an inflammatory page, but the .zip TLD doesn't seem like a great idea.

I guess you could change the wifi password after if you're worried the TV is secretly keeping the connection after you disconnect it.

Interesting, perhaps this isn't the best one. It's more the exercise of trying to tweak revenue and spending that I am recommending than this particular site. Otherwise people seem to imagine that the problem is much easier than it is.

I wouldn't claim the US is some miracle of innocence.

You said "countries that depeg". Pegging, in the context of cryptocurrencies and regular ones, means something specific: ensuring that the exchange rate between the 2 is fixed within a certain band. I don't believe that the US is threatened by whether other countries peg their currency to the dollar or not.

The dollar's use as reserve currency is a separate matter.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_circulating_fixed_exch... the only African country with a currency pegged to the dollar is Eritrea. Not really seeing it.

What countries peg to the dollar that you think are in danger of being invaded?

It's interesting to play out what it means in more detail.

Try one of the many online 'balance the budget" games like https://us.abalancingact.com/2022-federal-budget .

Total federal outlays in 1989 were $1,143,744M in today's dollars. That's less than is currently spent on Medicare and Medicaid, ignoring everything else in the budget.

So you'll have to make some pretty substantial alterations.

If Microsoft has made any statement at all, it's not linked or quoted in the article.

Also this incident occurred next to a 4-lane public street, not exactly a workplace environment - Microsoft's campus is not a secluded enclave.

Most likely nobody looked at it. As an interviewer I'll scan someone's GitHub or project if linked on their resume but won't generally do an extensive search for their online presence.

Theoretically yes, but the amount in circulation is in the billions so it doesn't make an appreciable difference.

The more cynical view: many people had no technical need for a chain whatever, but wanted to “rub some crypto” on their project to get some hype-driven cash.