ftlio

I worked at a custom millwork firm and had a knack for value engineering projects. After making the switch to SWE, where I assumed everyone knew how to do this, I've realized that there only seems to be two kinds of SWEs as well, exactly as you've described. It turns out that value creation is hard.

There are plenty of contractors who know how to deliver an optimal solution and who make incredible money.

I think specifically for multiplayer, you could handle non-visible chunks on the server and figure out a better way to update the client with what it needs, rather than requiring the client to handle the full simulation.

I know it’s a well optimized piece of software, but when you get into something like the space mod with multiple worlds, where chunks you might not deal with for a long time still tax you, you can see how there’s conceivably a lot that could be done.

So, yeah, wrong to say “under optimized”.

I’m also aware that they haven’t been optimizing for a massive multi-world server with tons of clients. I definitely don’t mean it as a dig or that they aren’t top class.

I see potential for playing with your Switch on a beefy community server, where the server is responsible for UPS.

Edit: I guess the client also has to run the simulation, never mind. It seems like overall, Factorio is well under-optimized though. For a game that has been out forever, it still has a huge ceiling.

There's a space mod that has you jumping to different planets and allows you to ship things between them on rockets (or, more hilariously, effectively shooting them between planets). Definitely seals that vibe.

That same mod also uses a tech tree mod that actually makes the burner phase slower, so you pollute more in the beginning to boot.

There’s also the overall economic argument that Proof of Work is actually just the least obscure version of anything else: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

Overall I’d just argue that because PoS doesn’t involve external resources to create blocks, the cost of producing a block won’t be well understood and thus there will be opportunities for rent extraction - which we’re already seeing with Lido staking.

Miners in Proof of Work don’t control the rules. There have been multiple attempts to exercise hash power as political control in Bitcoin that have failed. There already exists precedent regarding the political power of running your own node with incredibly low capital requirements relative to mining.

Ethereum is already in a battle over what consensus rules actually exist. Large scale staking enterprises such as exchanges are signaling their intent to follow extra-protocol conventions, and if they control a supermajority of staked ETH, they control the right to slash. The only way to have a voice in it is by acquiring $50,000 in ETH.

Consistent 51% attacks rely on Bitcoin already being more-or-less worthless. If it is, then yes, the cost of terrorizing the network will be low. The same follows based on Vitalik’s argument for why PoS is supposedly too expensive to attack.

The difference is if you want to terrorize Bitcoin, you need to find energy and compute at relatively low cost compared to everyone still on the network. With Ethereum, you just need to acquire ETH.

Considering he thought Bitcoin block space was too scarce, and now not scarce enough, and considered people running their own nodes a “weird mountain man fantasy”, but has now built a political topology that depends on something like Bitcoin’s UASF and thus on people running their own nodes, I wouldn’t trust his predictions much.

The attack surface of Ethereum’s PoS is pretty huge, and derivative staking already has a runaway accumulation problem. Bitcoin’s entire critique of money is based on not being something like Proof of Stake.

There's still a lot to figure out in the space, and the blockchain adjacency always makes things feel like a land grab or first-mover obsessive. I don't think that much matters though. The majority of us will still keep our identity in centralized providers, but the real win is on the overhead of developers and the overall security model of identity on the web as the methods and registries get fleshed out.

Something important to track is the OIDC-SIOP v2 spec [1]. As this gets adopted by libraries and services that people are already using to handle their auth, it becomes effectively easier to "turn on" self-custody of identities for your users. I imagine there will be a lot of different options in terms of methods and registries to choose to accept, and the centralized providers of today will probably have a large say in what methods and registries get accepted.

Ultimately there are a lot of use cases enabled by deferring to the user for their identity and potentially other verifiable claims about themselves. The most obvious use case is phones using their secure elements to actually provide a password-less UX on the web while also allowing developers to skip dealing with user authentication. Less obvious (to most people) are things like verifying you own some NFT, or verifying that you have Bitcoin in some escrow so you're likely not a bot willing to get blacklisted on some platform.

This is the step that's required to create the real land grab over semantic User space - where "JoeSchmoe" really is the one and only.

[1] https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-self-issued-v2-1_0.h...

The speculation is on that the alignment of central banks globally is towards savings debasement and non-custodial property. HODL is a rallying call to exit the current monetary infrastructure into the next one, one that specifically allows for a free market for money. Bitcoin is a bet on that transacting with bitcoins will ultimately be cheaper and with a vastly better security model than all existing infrastructure, from the concerns of a nation state down to microtransactions.

They're not speculating that it will go up for no reason. The investment thesis is that it solves real world problems, and that everyone who thinks it doesn't sounds like someone comparing fax machines to the internet in the 90s.

What was money's killer app? Bitcoin is money from the ground up. It's going fantastically fast. As for smart contracts, these are the basis of Bitcoin. A permissionless ledger inherently requires smart contracts. Their killer app is a a distributed ledger. There are already a few different contracts that can be made on Bitcoin that allow for different custodial schemes.

What people are selling as far as DAOs, NFTs, and "smart contracts" where they mean are better and more sophisticated than Bitcoin, can all be favorably described as the application of Bitcoin's critique of money to the issuance and governance of other tokens representing other forms of property, and are inherently more complex. Least favorably described, they are scams to boost leverage powered attacks. The middle of the road might be that they're the naive notion that building more complex constructs on top of what Bitcoin defined is immediately achievable without compromising invariants that matter for useful money.

All to say that the "killer app" critique of Bitcoin probably ins't the best lens, and that if it's more complicated than custody and payments, especially for people where that isn't readily available, it's probably further out than is survivable for a single company requiring the kind of trajectory of those that create "apps".

That's the whole problem that Lightning solves with other tradeoffs. There are no centralized entities.

For the last 8-10 years it's been the same thing. Bitcoiners believe you can't sacrifice its finality, but can scale at a different layer. Other "blockchain" people believe something different.

It is a weird line in the sand to me that something must either happen on a blockchain or not be the right solution, pretty much regardless of whether that blockchain's finality guarantees are worse if understood at all.

In my experience, most IDE users don’t know that Emacs is effectively an IDE that can do all of the same things, and even more. When you show them, then the complaint is that it’s a hassle to configure, and I don’t really know what to do with that. I like configuring my text editor.

I’ve worked with tools my entire life and the main difference between Emacs / VI and other IDEs is they’re tools you can hone infinitely and truly make an extension of your mind, as opposed to IDEs which more fit the “choose the best tool for the job” mentality, which I appreciate, but does not apply to text editing to me because of how Emacs / VI shifted my mindset.

Emacs still feels 1000x more modern to me than any IDE, especially VS Code. And I agree that text editing / better IDEs really are not the problem in software development.

Whatever's next is just user-level PKI and DNS.

Can I roll a private/public key pair and use it to authenticate everywhere as the user BabyFarkMcgeeZax? Can I authorize Spotify to BabyFarkMcgeeZax/playlist?

In theory, I can use an OAuth provider for this kind of stuff, but then who owns what? Why can't I host my own content wherever I want and allow different permissions to it? Why can't I delegate certain things to some provider and revoke it when I want? How does anyone get paid for being such a service provider, especially with the idea that the data is host proof in some cases and thus can't be monetized?

Blockchains / tokens are trying to answer this question. Most are data that doesn't fit on a blockchain or are issuing tokens with arbitrary monetary policies and following them up with bad fiscal policy.

Thus far most of Web3 just requires some algebra to see a database that doesn't solve these problems.

> I think Bitcoin was a really interesting idea in the pre-iPhone era, but for a variety of reasons it just didn't pan out.

It’s panning out just fine. Everyone who thinks Bitcoin is old news presupposes that you can do something like Bitcoin, but better. There’s no evidence of this in any non-Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

This also ignores that Bitcoin is improving every year. Tools like Liquid and Lightning are incredibly sophisticated, first principles based approaches to real problems in finance, banking, and fungibility. That fly by night securities called "cryptocurrencies" with shallow liquidity claim that they can do better, but always fail to deliver, hasn't undermined anything about Bitcoin.

I agree with the parent post. This is great for crypto. Maybe all the web developers who think they can do cryptography better than cryptographers can go do something else now.

Based on how I've seen it mismanaged, the only way I see it working is hiring "provisional VPs". In the same way that you might have hired slow and fired fast in the beginning for competent ICs, you need to do the same with the now executive management skillset that's required to break off and scale whole divisions of the working organization. The other side of that is you need to equip them with the actual subset of the talent they need, and not hold back some employees who were there in the beginning for special considerations.

The ICs have been there for years, knife fighting with the market and the competition, and then someone comes in from some adjacent market or some other vertical entirely, and the expectation is that all the work done to go from zero to one needs to be fit to their agenda, and not the other way around. Everyone who has lived it knows its backwards, and yet I've seen the trigger get pulled on this so slow that it had a measurable effect on the exit.

There’s cool cryptography going on in Ethereum, but it’s not helping economize anything useful. At some point you have to notice that all of the “cool new stuff” in Ethereum for the last 7 years all seems to disappear once greater fool liquidity has been exhausted.

Meanwhile adtech is making the internet awful, and thus stories increasingly show up about how bad Google has been getting as well.

I used to read all the white papers for all the new coins, and was definitely on the side of Ethereum as an interesting experiment when it released, but nothing has happened to make me think a premined securities play hasn’t turned out to be a scam.

Second, I love this keyboard, but it isn't wireless, which I think is a fair requirement. I personally like my keyboards to be wired, but can see why someone might seek out something like the Logitech keyboard.

Even with the browns, in a quiet office full of laptop keyboard users, any mechanical keyboard is going to seem loud. Mechanical keyboards always had the multiple benefits for me of: 1) more like the thing I grew up using, 2) loud enough that maybe they'd prefer I work from home :)

Except that Bitcoin miners have tried and failed to exercise any such power because it doesn’t exist. The most successful attack was creating a short-lived arbitrage opportunity between the massively pumped Bitcoin Cash and regular Bitcoin, which was able to slow down Bitcoin blocks as miners swapped chains until Bitcoin Cash backers either ran out of cash or dumped. All you had to do to not suffer from the attack was to just not do anything related to Bitcoin Cash. It was ultimately about extending the advantage of “ASIC Boost” miners by delaying a patch.

The opportunity for miners to collude is completely offset by the fact that if they try to leverage their equipment somehow to delay or otherwise impact the main chain, you can just choose to mine instead to make better profits. Thus far there hasn’t been a single effective counter-play for miners that isn’t just “mine more Bitcoins and thus further secure the network” that isn’t just day trading with extra steps.

Also who are these centralized miners anymore? Pools are centralized, but I’m a nobody who can mine profitably with very little capital involved. I can submit whatever block template I want. I haven’t been invited to any meetings.

HN is still high quality content. Tech as a culture is defunct, but building stuff, and a network of builders, will never go away.

I worked in construction/manufacturing as labor, then in a CNC engineering capacity, then as middle management, then at a vendor for manufacturing as a software engineer.

All were progressively less work, but my god consumer tech isn’t even close. The people working the hardest seem to be the most keen on useless bureaucracy and bridges to nowhere somehow.

I’ll never go near it again. I also don’t think I’ll ever not be adjacent to manufacturing & construction again. “Tech” people are insane.

There is no solution to the Peter Principle. That's actually the thesis of the book. I'd argue that management that can't promote from within has likely already reached the position of their incompetence as well.

There are lots of reasons and every situation varies, but my experience is that the reason people don't get promoted has way more to do with bad management than bad potential managers in the pool.

I can't think of anything I care about that's on Netflix. I also can't imagine cancelling it... There's always something. Between my wife and I both barely caring, they have my money for years. I imagine they'll survive, and if content doesn't turn around, they'll be bought in some final round of media conglomerates mergers, where I'll be even less able to get rid of it.

Most Americans consume media most of the time, yes. I know people who haven't read a book since high school, but can tell you everything about either sports or celebrities, and often both. Indexical knowledge of sports and/or what celebrities have been up to for decades. This is what Americans do.

This is beyond the time they spend watching TV and movies. I would say for 90% of the people I know, this number is accurate. If you point it out, it's as if you're telling someone they need to lose weight. It's just not allowed by anyone besides Grandma or Grandpa anymore.

Are there a lot of businesses in the space not attempting to service lots of new coins that are generally characterized by lack of novelty, lots of marketing fuel, or where if there is novelty vis a vis cryptocurrency, it isn't highly questionable?

For better or for worse, it seems the case that most businesses in the so-called cryptocurrency space are working with some pretty dubious "assets" with some pretty dubious backers, which would make your parent comment pretty accurate.

You can find interesting people saying things, but most of them will be appealing to their audience by complaining when their ingroup gets any negative commentary, and quote retweeting shade at their outgroup. It's like some weird version of British Parliament where the stakes are as low as which obscure philosopher is actually more like this philosopher than that one.

Yes, the idea that you can't hold "the neoliberal view" of your household, and "the communist view" and the "romantic view", and the "spiritual view" all together for all their benefits and tradeoffs seems worse to me than even subscribing to one holistically without this imperative.

I've had this called out as absolutely faux pas if not totally asinine by people who are deep into philosophy, but I'm doing great, a lot better than some of them born with silver spoons.

> If you think of Bitcoin not as competing against Visa, but as competing against the bank settlement network, then it makes a lot more sense.

Yes, this is Bitcoin precisely. If you then lock your bitcoins in different schemes with different security models or transaction amortization tradeoffs, you carry the risk of the scheme, not the settlement layer and unit of account. You can experiment with different forms of commodity money, fiat money, and all the monetary policy therein and the proof will be in the pudding of who ends up with more of the underlying, finitely scarce coin, but you can never risk anyone's coin that doesn't join the scheme.

BEVs are also a better way of economizing wide scale distribution of storage throughout the grid. With one battery per car, you do run into load shifting issues (everyone generally charging at home during the same night time interval, even if that interval is half a day), but as it's not that hard to take the same tech in the car and strap it to the wall, as opposed to hydrogen, you get what is probably a way bigger ROI per cell.

Of course that requires some coordination from the same kind of entity that is apparently wasting money already on energy transportation and storage.