throwdecro

Does that $65K represent a trade against USD or a trade against Tether?

Being somewhat generous, I don't think it's because they didn't understand the probabilities, it's because they didn't think about the impact of what they were doing at all, beyond the problem they needed to solve.

I.e., the only thing they were considering was whether the number entered at the start of the test would show up in the right places at the other end of their system. They simply didn't consider that an actual phone would be shut off along the way.

Does R2 have fewer expensive footguns than AWS?

I wish they'd offer to remove the touchbar from the laptop I have.

> Your machine has excellent resale value, because it's a Mac.

If the laptop is from Apple's garbage era of 2016-2019 who would pay good money for it? Macs don't unconditionally have excellent resale value, the resale value depends on the quality of the item.

Sure, but anyone holding that much wealth could expect some kind of "advanced persistent threat" working against them to either destroy all of the backups, or transfer the coins to /dev/null after extracting any passcode from the owner. The keys and anyone that knew how to use them would need a high level of physical security. The "costly militarized facilities" would still be necessary, contrary to the author's statement.

> Who does it now?

France sent a warship to escort its gold from the US to France. Wasn't free, probably wasn't cheap.

> Which is widely available and effectively free

What? Who is going to fight off people trying to obtain or destroy that USB drive to increase the value of their own holdings (i.e. speed up deflation by reducing available bitcoin), or extract the passcode from its owner, for free?

EDIT: I realize this is the plot of Goldfinger, but the author did invoke Fort Knox, and the strategy of destroying stores of value to increase the worth of your own stash makes sense.

Who actually wants this? I don't want to stare at digital copies of people I'm trying to communicate with, whilst trapped in a digital maze designed by someone trying to keep me engaged. If the "digital twin" is exactly the same, there's no point, and if it's not exactly the same, it's just weird (i.e. "uncanny").

This "metaverse" is some kind of deranged trap. Social media is a hellscape of misunderstanding and conflict already. A further layer of indirection and reduction in "humanness", in the form of "cartoonifying" everyone, is going to further erode society's foundations.

There's a difference between "software developers" and "FAANG software developer" though, which is a source of great cognitive dissonance when people see that industry averages are only slightly above $100k/year but FAANG compensation is like 3-4 times that for basic engineering work.

Both are paid a premium, but FAANG is paid a massive premium, and there isn't much precedent for collecting that massive premium continuously for 30 years.

EDIT: Actually in that spreadsheet I would argue that the $250K compensation is too low, the 10% return on investment is too high, and the 30 year timeframe is not sustainable.

The idea that the FAANG gravy train can last 30 years is not realistic.

If at least half the letters in FAANG aren't blown away in that time period, it would suggest a tech environment so stagnant that it would be impossible to justify the compensation.

And lasting 30 years at a surviving FAANG company is such a low-probability prospect that it's not something reasonable to include in any future planning.

Very few FAANG engineers can actually expect this outcome.

EDIT: Removed shock word "preposterous", sorry about that.

This is a rant I can appreciate. Two subjective takes on the same subject:

1) As JavaScript became ascendant, it seems like developers lost their fear of dependencies, for some reason I don't understand. Dependencies came to be seen as "time saved" rather than "something out of your control that can hurt you."

2) When dependencies don't fit together, things fail in a way that makes it look as if the code is simply wrong. Yet everyone working in the environment ends up conditioned to run to google with the combination of (circumstances, error string) to find someone who has figured out what the actual dependency issue is. It's automatic behavior. At some point it would make sense to include automated googling in the CI pipeline just to add some necessary information to the errors.

I wish articles like this provided some data as to what "affluent" is. How much money does the 48 year old have, and how much "house", that retirement looks to make sense to them? I'd rather have the dollar figures than the people's names.

These people are stupid, and solutions like "a combination that only they know" or "disciplinary collars" are also stupid. You wouldn't want to rely on entirely novel, oppressive, and essentially untested ways of maintaining your power, when the price of failure is that you're the hated target of everyone around you.

Patton: Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man. If mountain ranges and oceans can be overcome, then anything built by man can be overcome.

> These people are frankly stupid.

Agreed.

I'll give Huffman a bit of credit (in some areas) for getting down to basics like being able to see without glasses, or ride a motorcycle. But I don't picture him still having that motorcycle in his possession for more than 5 minutes after he really needs it.

I especially don't picture Huffman running anything ("...I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge...") in a collapse situation, for the same reason we don't see bosses in the failed states that exist right now running tech companies. They're different skills.

Finally I can't imagine a situation where you'd need armed guards that didn't also involve the guards simply throwing the "owners" out and keeping the stuff.

The super-rich would be better off practicing fighting, starving, suffering, and learning how to survive with nothing. I can't imagine any of them being able to keep what they've prepared in a chaotic situation.

EDITED TO ADD: Actually Huffman's stupidity completely overwhelms any partial credit I just gave him. He thinks he'll have an advantage in a traffic jam because he'll have a motorcycle and he can breeze past it. "I need to own a motorcycle because everybody else is screwed". He actually believes "ownership" would still be a thing, and no one would just take it from him.

EDITED TO ADD 2: I'm surprised the parent post is being downvoted, it is absolutely correct.

> How does bigness harm consumers in this case?

It's up to the book to make that case. My point is that the issues you describe (misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content) are not mentioned among the problems that trust-busting is meant to solve. Other problems are mentioned.

> What are the problems then?

As stated in the review, and presumably in the book: that "the very bigness of present-day companies — especially those in the tech sector — does not just harm consumers, but that it also threatens innovation and undermines the power of government."

The problem that trust-busting is meant to solve is the bigness, and its impact on the government, innovation, and consumer markets.

It's not like the need for military protection goes away with Bitcoin. People will attack each other to get what other people have, justly or unjustly, the same as they always have done.

> [W]hat if all social networks limited the number of accounts to 999,999?

That's interesting. It opens the door to the possibility that social networks might pay people to leave, in order to open spaces for more long-term-valuable customers.

This is a fantastic review. These books are going on my list.

> leet code is not relevant to the type of position I'd be looking for

Leetcode is relevant to getting the money though. It may be the case that inexperienced new hires with Leetcode proficiency make significantly more money than CTOs in the positions you're considering.

There's a little bit to see though. In one of the emails, Matt Fischer mentions that he had already warned on 7/6 that the numbers weren't meaningful because of farmed and/or incentivized accounts. But by 7/19 Tim Cook had apparently forgotten this and was pleased to see the numbers, and had to be reminded again.

Yeah it's strange, the content is about typography, but something about it is really hard to look at, at least on Mozilla Firefox. On some pages e.g. the typography-in-ten-minutes page it looks like the first paragraph is slightly, but not obviously, larger than the subsequent paragraphs.

Everything seems stretched vertically, and the stuff in all-caps is borderline A E S T H E T I C with the horizontal spacing.

I was making a stronger claim. With bounded personal risk (i.e. the money lost is their clients, not their own), and unbounded potential for profit (i.e. a percentage of any profits), money managers have an incentive to make riskier bets.

The "norm" (average) for money managers can be achieved by having half the money managers lose money to the other half. This works well for them, because when they win they win, and when they lose someone else pays. Money managers can go big or go home, and keep trying, because in the long run they're not eating the losses.

But people betting their own money on the same strategies actually lose their own money when they lose.

It's possible that gambling for profits or having a soul-crushing workaday job are both undesirable ways to live.

The only "smart money" is "other people's money".

The problem is that ordinary people are replicating the strategies that professional traders use, without realizing professional traders bet other people's money, keep the profits, let their customers eat the losses, and reboot at-will with fresh "other people's money" when they go bust.

Who's "mark"?

This is a great write-up, but one thing I don't understand is why the effect of withdrawing the BGP prefixes was instantaneous (if I understand that correctly), but it's taking hours (so far) to re-announce the prefixes. Why would it take so long to flip the switch back the other way?

I guess they didn't have an "emergency ingress" plan.