darkFunction

I also wear this watch every day and have done for a couple of years now. It’s the perfect watch- completely autonomous time, solar powered, classic look while still having digital functions. I love not having to worry about ever setting the time or changing the battery. And it’s waterproof!

The sapphire glass means I don’t treat it especially well and it looks brand new.

I used and loved this framework years ago so happy to see it’s still thriving.

I’d love to start making games with my son now he’s getting older, but I always used to hit a roadblock with the artwork. In this age of AI, can anyone recommend free/cheap ways of acquiring good animated sprites for hobby projects?

Pretty baseless opinion. Julia Donaldson is an easy example but there are a lot of magical modern children's authors.

If it helps you can read 'transferring value' to 'transferring digital tokens which have value on the market', the distinction is irrelevant to the point.

> Whether they have value is irrelevant as far as the technology itself is concerned.

I'd argue that it's not irrelevant. The whole point of the technology is, at risk of more 'marketing buzzwords', a decentralised way of moving value around (moving digitised tokens which have value on the market, around).

I had a look at your post/comment history. It's almost exclusively cryptocurrency focussed. I'm curious why you spend so much time discussing a technology you clearly don't think has a future.

I'm having an honest discussion. You have accused me of being "a gullible idiot", "pompous" and of using "marketing buzzwords" (which words?). You come across as being very emotionally attached to your negative opinion of the space.

Value can be transferred between programs through Ethereum. The tokens you mentioned have value, because people are willing to exchange them for money. So it's not an inaccurate statement. Web3 provides the standardised API through which these programs can communicate.

Ignoring the condescending tone, value is already being transferred between computer programs. Trillions of dollars per year on Ethereum alone. A lot of the volume is undeniably speculation but denying that value can be transferred on blockchain is denying reality at this point.

You may continue to consider the numbers meaningless but the market for on-chain assets disagrees with you.

> what on earth are you talking about?

I'm talking about a global, universal API layer supporting standardised contract enforcement and value transfer between applications. A centralised implementation of this would clearly be a bad idea.

If you don't see utility in this I don't know what to tell you.

> So, honest question: why care about the base layer being decentralized if in the end, you choose to trust those companies? What did the decentralization do for you in that interaction?

My trust extended only as far as a single interaction/asset. The rest of my wallet and the assets within are completely unaffected. A company might rip me off, and I might have legal recourse, or I might not. Such is life. We won't ever be able to decentralise away all trust. A single entity isn't able to manipulate all my assets, or print more tokens, or confiscate my money. The network is solid even if all the 'performers' are not.

To build a centralised 'universal API' on which applications can communicate and exchange value is a terrible idea. Who would own it? But such an API is surely a useful technology.

We do need reliable oracles for external data feeds- prices, weather, news... can all feed into contracts for extra utility. This is a hard problem being tackled by ChainLink and others.

This is a strawman. The entire ecosystem does not have to be 100% decentralised. There is massive utility in a trustless, permissionless, censorship-resistant contract layer connecting disparate centralised entities. A centrally managed registry would never be suitable for this task for a multitude of obvious reasons.

The blockchain facilities standardised transfer across a decentralised medium. I'm not sure how much clearer I can make my point. You could code alternatives to all the use-cases mentioned, but when you have an existing platform on which to interact, why bother? You want the game developers to implement the winery's API?

You burn the token to redeem it.

I think instead of reading what I wrote, you read "you need a blockchain to do this".

The anti-blockchain narrative on here is constantly attacking the strawman of "literally everything must be decentralised".

I'm arguing that a decentralised medium of exchange through which separate points of centralisation can interact is still a useful construct.

You're comfortable with your assets being codified in a thousand different databases in a thousand different representations but the concept of having a common database representing them as "meaningless numbers" is suddenly unacceptable.

That's great! Hey look I would like to send you the rights to my crate of wine. You're the 1000th customer to my site. Or maybe you want to trade it for your in-game weapon. Or I just like you and it's a gift, anonymous internet user.

Of course I could just transfer directly to your Ethereum wallet. But why do that when I could explain you need to sign up to 'winespectator.com', I'll email them to arrange the ownership transfer, and if you're trading that weapon let's both sign up for a pre-agreed escrow service online and pay them a commission to arbitrage. How many forms do we need to fill in, and who is processing that data? I currently own my crate anonymously- only the person who eventually burns the token will need to provide details to the company for delivery.

As always, descriptions like this betray how little engine-peddlers know about horse breeding. Managing a stable has been a thing as long as there's been horses.

> (1) has no I/O functions

Input: User identity, money.

Output: Digital services, site subscriptions, digital assets, in-game items, NFT's representing real world assets held by trusted companies (wine, event tickets, tokenized securities).

None of this requires oracles and exists today.

Your mistake is thinking that just because the base layer is decentralised that we're somehow not allowed to connect to companies we choose to trust, just like we all already do.

Then it becomes interesting because there's a programmable market for these assets/services that didn't previously exist because the underlying value was not represented in an exchangable form. The outputs are also inputs.

Ethereum is the trustless, standardised substrate on which trusting parties can interact.

HackerNews will continue to fail to see the utility of this system for years to come until it's mature and undeniable. It will be an interesting case study into how experts missed the potential of emergent technology in the same way we look back on yesterday's commentators not realising the disruption of Amazon or the internet.

As to your second point, it's unlikely the end user will ever want to transact on layer 1. Layer 2 technology is making steady progress. See l2beat.com for examples.

> No moral questions are seriously considered about whether changing this rule is a breach of the promise made at the time of the constitution of the community.

This is patently untrue. These questions literally split the community. The majority chose a direction and moved on.

I notice the commenters who agree that it seems to be biological are the ones who actually have children.

I have a two year old. He was raised with gender neutral toys and due to the pandemic largely in isolation from the rest of society for the last year with a lot of time spent with both parents. Moreover as the father I don't show strong interest in “typical” male interests like cars or football.

The first time my son saw a digger, he was hooked. He is completely enthralled with construction vehicles- dumper trucks, cement mixers etc. His favourite colour of Play Dough is "mud". He has dolls but they hold limited interest over his toolbench.

Before having children I would have said it was largely societal. But I've watched my son show strong preference to "boy" hobbies since he was able to show interest in anything and it was really quite surprising how "boyish" he turned out to be considering we tried to give him equal opportunity for all activities. Of course you can never rule out external influences entirely but I remain convinced the difference is biological.

Fantastic irony here ;)

Cashless is a dream for government because they can switch the populace to a negative interest rate.

Your first read was correct, there's a guy with no limbs and he's surprisingly fast!

There are paralympic swimmers with no arms or legs who can swim a length faster than me, and I'm a competent swimmer. I wouldn't worry about your foot size.

Oh my god thank you

That's called the mammalian diving response!

Soma became a reality and takes the form of constant distractions and serotonin hits delivered via our mobile devices and TV screens. It's the status notifications, the likes, the latest Netflix series, browsing Reddit in bed. It's pornography and follower counts. We consume the Soma until our pleasure receptors are fatigued then we sleep and repeat the process. Huxley was right and it has nothing to do with pills.

I used to get a very sharp pain in my head, above my ear, when making outbound calls, just before the recipient would pick up. Nobody seems to believe me, and I have never had the motivation to try to prove it to anyone, but it got to the point where I would hold the phone away from my head until the person answered.

It began with a Sony Ericsson, but happened across a couple of different phone brands over the years. Still happens extremely occasionally now (maybe twice a year) with my iPhone.

I'd be interested to know if the signal strength is suddenly spiked when a call is connected.

The author should have written two different articles catering for arbitrary categories of people that you just invented?

A lot of discussion on this thread revolves around whose responsibility it is to ensure clean-up of plastic waste (producers or consumers) while ignoring the fact that companies are using a material that lasts 10,000 years for items that are single-use. That should be outright illegal unless there are literally no alternatives.

Brave attempts to create a new business model since as you rightly point out the current one is absolutely flawed.

Quality content does need to be paid for, one way or another, whether you enjoy supporting it or not.

Unfortunately yes. I save mostly into a pension but also into ISA's (not taxed on gains), so that if the government moves the goalposts I can still retire at my target date and live from this until I can access my pension.

How exactly would developers 'force a new version' without consensus?