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edzillion

81 karma · joined January 26, 2015

meet.hn/city/de-Berlin

Interests: Web Development, Open Source, Outdoor Activities, Music, Entrepreneurship, Books, Climbing, Startups, DevOps, Hiking

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edzillion··on An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
Reminds me of the Sybilline books; Rome only ended up with one of the three but made great usage out of what they had!
edzillion··on Dr John C. Clark, a scientist who disarmed atomic bombs twice
You listed: > my death would be inconvenient for my employer

_first?!_

I believe you have your priorities wrong. Most regret not spending enough time with their loved ones. You only get one life after all.

edzillion··on Hacker in Snowflake extortions may be a U.S. soldier
I know comments commending the previous post are also frowned upon but that is one of the funniest sketches I've ever seen. Hilarity ad absurdum
edzillion··on Researchers accurately dating a 7k-year-old settlement using cosmic rays
Interesting. This should also shed some light on the [Dispilio Tablet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispilio_Tablet) - which seems to feature some kind of archaic script (the oldest yet found, if the dating is correct) They have not yet published though.
edzillion··on Sierra was captured, then killed, by an accounting fraud (2020)
10 year old me: who the hell is Spiro Agnew?!!?
edzillion··on Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
Point taken, Mr. Devil. I even agree, up to a point - and I think this might be a major issue in the immediate introduction of a UBI. The reason why is that the incentives will change but there will be many who have learned the system under different conditions and will not so easily adjust.

I've grown up amongst poverty and while I don't particularly like the term (as it tends to be deployed in aid of demagoguery), there really is a element of 'welfare culture' in effect, and having been on welfare myself (and treated like a prince because bizarrely the system was obviously classist: so Ed you're an out of work indie game dev and you're currently learning something called 'Nim'? "well that's just great then have some money". Go in there as a bricklayer and say you are looking but haven't found any work the past few weeks: here are 20 forms). I was always very impressed on the knowledge these working class labourers would have of the welfare system, because in their situation it really made a difference.

Their attidue was: (and who can blame them) fuck the govt they don't give a shit about me, the more I get / the more I can play the system, the better.

UBI from their perspective would be total victory. No more queuing no more forms or interviews, just free money for ever. But what then?

If the UBI was only sufficient for survival / dignity but not enough for luxury I think the psychological topology chances a lot and what could be previously described as 'getting one over on this enemy' now can only be described as your own failure.

edzillion··on Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order
Use phone, ring overworked admin.
edzillion··on US Secret Service: “blockchain is an opportunity to track money”
Whitney Webb's new book also has a lot of detail on BCCI

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51074723-one-nation-unde...

edzillion··on Zillions and Zillions
How very cromulent.
edzillion··on Yale’s 367-year-old water bond still pays interest (2015)
> My third remark introduces you to the Buxton Index, so named after its inventor, Professor John Buxton, at the time at Warwick University. The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans. For the little grocery shop around the corner it is about 1/2,for the true Christian it is infinity, and for most other entities it is in between: about 4 for the average politician who aims at his re-election, slightly more for most industries, but much less for the managers who have to write quarterly reports. The Buxton Index is an important concept because close co-operation between entities with very different Buxton Indices invariably fails and leads to moral complaints about the partner. The party with the smaller Buxton Index is accused of being superficial and short-sighted, while the party with the larger Buxton Index is accused of neglect of duty, of backing out of its responsibility, of freewheeling, etc.. In addition, each party accuses the other one of being stupid. The great advantage of the Buxton Index is that, as a simple numerical notion, it is morally neutral and lifts the difference above the plane of moral concerns. The Buxton Index is important to bear in mind when considering academic/industrial co-operation.
edzillion··on “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of counting-out rhymes (2015)
There is also another interesting unwritten rule of the English language at play here. The rule goes like this:

In a series of words which differ only (or mostly) by the vowel used, the order should be e, i, a, o

- tic tac toe

- flim flam

- ding dong

- king kong

If you doubt it, try saying the opposite and hear how odd it sounds: The clock went 'Tock Tick'

edzillion··on EU-wide maximum limit of €10K for cash payments
Which is Mutually Assured Destruction. I can't think of many occasions in which financial elites would destroy their own wealth in pursuit of political (?) goals.

The one incident I can think of didn't end well.

edzillion··on EU-wide maximum limit of €10K for cash payments
What you are stating was perhaps the previous orthodoxy, but in the last few years even major institutions[1] have come to agree that banks do indeed create money when they create certain kinds of loans; the upshot of which is that 90%+ of money in circulation in western countries has been created through mortgage issuance.

[1] The Bank of England: Money creation in the modern economy https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

edzillion··on Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
Yes
edzillion··on Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
> No one wants an imaginary Bowie album, because it's a glamour-free proposition - a curiosity at best, most likely irrelevant.

They're all going mad for an imaginary Abba concert

edzillion··on Bob Cassette Rewinder: Hacking Detergent DRM
Time it to finish when you get up and it will release a lot of warm (humid) air to help you warm up your house
edzillion··on Bob Cassette Rewinder: Hacking Detergent DRM
Well if you're in the EU then no, unless you can overturn the legislation.

> The Background: In 2019, the European Commission and the European Council jointly approved a regulation that will require new safety measures in motor vehicles starting July 2022, including the installation of so-called "Event Data Recorders," a device similar to "black boxes" in aircrafts.

From what I heard the car company has access to this device at all times and does not need a court order to listen in. They are supposed to only use it when the car has had an accident but it's a terrible precedent.

Edit: forgot the link https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/black-boxes-in-automobiles...

edzillion··on Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
Its pretty old so maybe just useful for inspiration but the old Amiga/Atari game Dragon Lord / Dragon's Breath (Europe) has a very interesting custom magic system in which you can create unique spells using combinations of various alchemical reagants.

FWIW I think it's a very difficult thing to create such a system, without making it a tedious exercise in testing ingredient combinations.

edzillion··on Southern thought, islandness and real-existing degrowth in the Mediterranean
Doesn't Japan have a tradition of long surviving privately held companies? Perhaps there are some lessons there

> Back in 2008, a Bank of Korea report found that of 5,586 companies older than 200 years in 41 countries, 56% of them were in Japan. In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old, according to research firm Teikoku Data Bank. The oldest hotel in the world has been open since 705 in Yamanashi and confectioner Ichimonjiya Wasuke has been selling sweet treats in Kyoto since 1000.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200211-why-are-so-man...

I've often wondered why Japan seems to maintain a culture of high quality artisinal work when the rest of the world is trending toward cheaper, lower quality mass produced goods. Perhaps these are related.

edzillion··on The quest for fusion energy
The linked wiki article doesnt go into the reasons why so many hybrid fission-fusion projects have been abandoned, this technology seems so promising that there must be good reasons why.
edzillion··on Ask HN: Why the web lately is all about JavaScript?
They mean short term financial gains vs long term economic success
edzillion··on Dark Moon: The Inevitable Collapse of Luna
There's no gold in fort knox
edzillion··on How Intelligent Are Cats? (2004)
There has been some fascinating work on human canine coevolution over the past years - I read a paper (sorry can't locate it now) that claimed that humans developed such distinct pupils due to it being so useful to survival for dogs to be able to see which direction a human is looking, for example in a hunting context. That one blew my mind.
edzillion··on I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
The Best Lack All Conviction While the Worst Are Full of Passionate Intensity
edzillion··on pnpm: Fast, disk space efficient package manager for JavaScript
rimraf is your friend
edzillion··on I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
Wendell Dingus

Can we just take a moment to appreciate that name?

edzillion··on Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage
But how cheap is it to determine the leakage factor? I suppose they can just pour in the equivalent water and see if it leaks?
edzillion··on Magnetism in Biblical Times
I was hoping for some mention of the ark of the covenant battery theory https://strangeago.com/2019/11/08/ark-of-the-covenant-was-a-...
edzillion··on Eidos-Montréal Offices shifting to the 4 day work week
If Eidos Montreal is the same as the game companies I have worked for they'll all be doing a ton of unpaid overtime. Work hours as stated on the contract meant nothing
edzillion··on How does the economy work? A new Fed paper suggests nobody really knows
> This is a bad take because if that dollar does not transact, you do not get inflation but you get a lowered velocity.

> However a lowered velocity rises r - g. This exacerbates wealth inequality.

The cantillion effect:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon#Monetary_t...

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