dachris

Why is this such an issue with crypto?

Wealth status is often very well known for public figures and entrepreneurs. People are driving around in $200k cars.

Is it due to the liquidity of cryptocurrencies that $5 wrench attacks work better?

Except that everyone with a fusor can feed the gold atom a neutron which converts it to unstable Au-198 that decays to mercury. Fun times when you can (theoretically) transmute gold to mercury with stuff you can order on the internet.

Unfortunately, in the end, bad health is likely to come get you anyways, you just have a higher likelihood of more and more healthy years.

A good friend of mine lived healthy, and still went hiking in their 90s. Yet, they had a stroke and are now bedridden.

If you just drop dead after having had a nice live or go through months or years of frailty and bad health, it's all in the cards.

If the internet would go offline "for real" even for days, all hell would break lose. It would not be as bad as electricity going offline, but it's in the same category now. No credit card payments payments (food, gas), no logistics. Prepper stuff.

The real scenario long-term is that quality content like Wikipedia could either be taken offline, be poisoned by AI or taken over or censored by authoritarians or corporations or interest groups. Like social media and parts of the normal internet already.

So archiving is good anyways.

To your actual question - quality non-fiction e-books would be valuable. Wikipedia is a superficial skimming of human knowledge, lots of the real stuff is in books (think medicine, agriculture, algorithms, engineering etc.).

Practically, a home WIFI has a very limited range, so just handing out sheets with instructions to your neighbors would work. And for a wider mesh network, you'd need to make do with whatever evolves in that scenario.

That may be the very long run. Taking it strictly, Russia never had real democracy. And they are trying hard to export that model.

There's this board game we played as kids - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland_Yard_(board_game) where you move around the London public transport system chasing Mr. X (everyone always wanted to play Mr. X) - it was really funny

The paperclip maximizers are already here, but they are maximizing money.

One recent HN comment [0] comparing corporations and institutions to AI really stuck with me - those are already superhuman intelligences.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580681

Migrated a small-ish project from ASP.NET Framework (.NET 4.8) to ASP.NET Core (i.e. .NET 8) including EF6 to EF Core last year. Even though it was pretty smooth sailing (the application was already using MVC), it was still a few weeks work.

Rewrite queries that are not yet supported on EF Core, create some new DTOs, create drop-in replacements for stuff that isn't there anymore, create plumbing to connect some old stuff to some new stuff. Figure out what's the new replacement for XYZ and use it correctly to not break anything. Replace nuget packages that are not maintained anymore or have so few downloads that they are a supply chain risk.

You need to test every endpoint, every query in your application.

And in the Microsoft World you're still pretty ok, overall, it's quite stable.

God forbid you put your money on the wrong web framework (not even talking frontend) in the Java space. There's still Tapestry/Struts/Grails/JSF/GWT/Play etc. applications serving your request out there. Saw some banking website with ".do" urls recently (indicative of Struts).

Unless we get superhuman AI that can do such migrations all on their own, those zombies might have a longer working life left than lots of developers. Many companies just can't afford to upgrade - there's so many systems built over decades that just do what they should do. Why shell out tons of money to just get the same functionality?

I wouldn't go that far (there's still the possibility that things change for the better for whatever reason), but those 60%-70% of the US in global stock indices really do look like single country risk now.

Refreshing to see the negative number/percentage displayed in green though.

Europe somehow is often a bit lagging behind the US - in good and in bad - the obesity pandemic is also just really starting to show here as well.

Scammers upped their game here also in the last few years and especially months.

No week in the local news without a love/crypto/elderly scam going into the 10s to 100 thousands.

Especially in the last few months, in my social circle, scammers really increased in density and quality - fake email accounts, AI calls, real people "you opened a crypto account with us" and "it's your niece Mary" calls.

The fragmentation of Europe might really help here - no one in their right mind will pick up on a call from another state anymore (or some people, even an unknown phone numbers are off limits, for that matter).

Yes, highly recommended - beware, it's 4 long books (which is a good thing), with 1+2 and 3+4 belonging together. And the trees are called Tesla trees ;-)

As well as uranium glass beads, which glow under UV light and are measurably radioactive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_glass

I'd probably not wear those as jewelry.

Yes, the market reaction so far has been very tame, considering that the stock market is supposed to be forward-looking, and there's another 4 (or at least 2) years of the same behavior, policies and politics we've had for just 7 weeks.

Extrapolate that 30 times out in the future, even leaving out feedback loops and nonlinear systems.

I've thought about this for some time now, and am surprised I haven't seen this voiced more often.

The way almost all societies have allowed themselves to be completely dependent on a few providers is mind-boggling.

Someone else 10,000 miles away has the kill switch for your phone, your credit card, your brokerage account, your TV, likely your HVAC if you're into home automation, maybe your car.

Google site:bogleheads.org elderly scams - the list goes on and on ...

I've also got elderly relatives, and even with their pensions secure (European-style pension system), there's lots of people going after their money. Trying to prepare them for encounters with online and real world scammers is an ongoing process, e.g. by recounting the cases that I read in the news to foster mistrust.

I've lost count how often an elderly family member (who is still sharp as a tack fortunately) told me that the "police", "your beloved niece", or "Microsoft" called them.

The real exception is Norway with its https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

A friend of mine has an e-bike with regenerative braking using a rear hub motor.

It seems to have a recovery efficiency of about one third.

We once went up about 1200m in altitude difference, where it was completely empty. After having gone down again, it had recharged enough to work normally for the remaining 20km of our trip, driving in flat terrain.

Windows 12 sneak preview

It feels like this quote from "Ready Player One" (2018 film)

"Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions, we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures"

Industrial civilization will continue to follow along the "Business as Usual" trajectory of the 1972 Limits to Growth publication [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#Compariso...

As a corollary, if a person you're responsible for "goes dark" socially (due to dementia, unable to go out anymore, moved to nursing home etc), do let their friendly social circle know (friends, neighbors) that the person would still be happy about visitors.

I've seen this with a relative with dementia - many people just weren't aware that she had no contact with them anymore due to this.

Indeed. A few years ago I ran across a comparison of old photographs of rural villages (early 20th century) in central Europe vs their present day appearance, taken from similar points of view.

Two things were immediately apparent from the old photographs - less forest - tons of fruit trees

Fitting is also this anecdote I heard when visiting a historical mill. They had a huge linden tree in their yard, and they told us that in the olden days this was a symbol of prosperity, because the original owner showed off that they could afford to plant a useless, non-fruit-bearing - a status symbol.

Coming full circle - the best thing would be if we could plant tons of trees that also produce food - something like the baobabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_digitata . E.g. pigs were fed oak's acorns in fall.

Exactly - there's probably a fluent transition between symbols and painting and writing and then alphabetic writing.

Territorial animals that we are, I'd add "here starts the territory of the Saber-Toothed Tiger Clan" signs to path markings as likely candidates for earliest symbolic communication.

Nice to see that the earliest examples of writing are still somewhat recognizable (as opposed to modern alphabets) - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing - a hand, a foot, a goat or sheep.

Fun thing is, with modern technology we have regressed (advanced?) to a massive use of pictograms - a modern smartphone wielding human, in addition to the alphabet, knows at least a few hundreds or even thousands of pictograms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There's still enough people out there who don't know better, manually (or auto-renew) purchasing new a certificate every year from their hosting provider like it's 2013.

If you're doing ASP.NET Core webdev, it's seamless. Runs in Linux docker containers. Developers in my team have either Windows (Visual Studio) or Linux or Mac (Rider) machines.

Rider definitely can hold a candle to Visual Studio. In my dev bubble there's about a 50/50 split for C# devs (mostly .NET Core) using VS vs Rider

It depends on the type of your contracts - there's also longer-term contracts out there (at lower hourly rates).

You can do any mix of those (if you can find them) - ideally, you've got long-term contracts that cover you basic income needs, and do short-term contracts or product development on top of that.

Regarding the feast or famine cycles - you need a very healthy cash cushion.

And speaking of health, that's a risk in itself. Long-term health issues that prevent you from working as much as you need to will drain your cushion.