> smart people are naturally attracted to complexity like moth to a flame
I think the general inclination here towards static typing is due to this, rather than any evidence that statically typed languages lead to higher quality software. Engineers just love puzzles. I'm also looking at you, Rustaceans...
It isn't at odds, since in both cases (euthanasia and medically-prolonged end-of-life), it is the human person that is trying to control the ultimate outcome of life. The Catholic approach is to say "let God decide".
To say that disabled people's lives have no value is vile, but that is not what he's saying. It's the unnecessary prolonging of suffering that Ivan Illich speaks against, the pressure to do everything humanly possible to eek out any extra week on one's lifespan, even if that extra week is a miserable one spent in agony. Now that is not to say that we should just jump off a bridge at the mere sight of suffering, but rather discern how our life is meant to be lived while letting go of our need to control everything.
A move from SPA means business logic moves to the backend and becomes hypermedia-driven, so the correct comparison if you want to think about type safety is if the backend server is type-safe. htmx is mostly declarative and its correct use could be statically checked with basic tools--it's not meant to contain complex logic.
I think the point is we chose a life of separation/distance, and now we whine about the relative discomfort of magically flying in the air thousands of miles in a few hours to cover that distance. Instead, we could either choose not to live so far apart or choose to accept the consequences of our actions.
Considering all the layoffs, the closed positions, and job listings suddenly skewing heavily towards "staff" engineers, we are in a buyers' market (ie. the employers have all the leverage right now).
Therefore, Bitcoin code has to have been always free of bugs (malicious or accidental). That has not been the case and will not be the case. The assumption doesn't hold, and double spends are therefore possible.
Even Autopilot can't be trusted in my experience. I've had it slam on the breaks countless times when the light changes (going under an overpass or through a tunnel). I've had it swerve over yellow lines, or onto the shoulder, or into a turning lane while I wasn't planning on turning. The only time I ever use it is when I'm going straight on a highway and I need to blow my nose... then I quickly turn it off.
You've drifted off-course. We were talking about whether or not double spends are possible in Bitcoin and now you're arguing about how banks deal with fraud refunds. peace!
Yes, there are other ways of stealing besides double spends. We're in agreement there.
And I think we can both further agree that someone that isn't us modifies the code of the Bitcoin node we run on our devices. Unless you're still running Bitcoin 0.1, but then you're actually not on the "Bitcoin" network as we know it today. There are pressures outside of your control that make it so that you have to update your node, and you have to run new code you probably haven't reviewed or approved yourself.
The only way to make Bitcoin work as defined by Satoshi is to have the code be 100% perfect and then not touch it, and that ship sailed a long time ago.
Devs can commit fraud without anyone knowing is my point, actually. Picture a scenario like the 2013 Bitcoin fork but with a twist: a dev introduces a bug that allows a transaction to spend bitcoin without corresponding inputs, and triggers it while in the next block spending Bitcoin to buy a coffee, then after a few more blocks for confirmation, publicly announces the bug and the need to move off of the most-work chain. Miners and devs all agree that mining on top of the most-work chain with the bug doesn't make sense and move all the mining to a minority fork that has the bugfix. Minority fork overtakes the buggy fork. Malicious dev has his Bitcoin back and spends them a second time somewhere else. No one's the wiser.
We can argue about the game theory and what exactly would happen if this was attempted today, but the point remains that double spend is possible and the Bitcoin white paper does not address this issue because it assumes Bitcoin code is set in stone. As soon as you consider that the protocol evolves and is subject to human manipulation, the white paper's guarantees all go out the window. This includes the 21 million bitcoin "limit".
It only seems to solve it in theory. However in a world of centralized mining where devs have high influence on how forks are treated, the double spend problem is still a problem. This is because what distinguishes forks can be their “validity”, not their proof-of-work, and fork validity is decided by humans and subject to politics and fraud.
it's possible to train yourself to resist against intrusive thoughts. If you indulge in them, your resistance goes down and they reappear more often and stronger. It's like a muscle.
Laws have to be taken in the context of the culture in which they exist. If the culture is one in which it is normal to produce and watch the sexual abuse of children (ai generated or otherwise), then that culture should definitely not have a law that enshrines the tolerance of this behavior.
And yes, if you allow for the spreading of child porn, you approve of it with your silence. If, on the contrary, you believed it were wrong, it would be your duty to do something about it, such as making it a crime.
To think the top-voted comment is one approving of child porn, and your comment is getting downvoted... we've truly come to a bad part of the slippery slope.
To answer the grand-parent: the victims of this behavior are yourself and the society you live in. The answer to "what happens to my virtue and my relationships if I indulge in AI-generated child porn?" is not "nothing", and the society which tries to experiment with this will reap the whirlwind.
> It evolves in a decentralized and organic manner, devoid of any formal political process or voting.
Just because the voting mechanisms are generally informal if we exclude the formal BIP voting process, that doesn't make them not voting mechanisms. I'll grant you that the politics of Bitcoin can be chaotic and hard to follow (this is intentional), but in times of crisis, the obfuscated leadership structure usually emerges from the darkness. Another example is what happened in the 2013 crisis, where light was cast on where the power in Bitcoin truly lied: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-... . In this example, a couple devs took charge and had the miners abandon the longest chain.
If all these things are not politics to you, in that they are not specifically about governance, power, or voting, again we'll have to disagree. I am definitely not saying "everything human is political" so again we can drop that straw man.
We'll have to disagree. My observation is that nodes have, historically (see 2017), been used as a way to decide which miners were mining "Bitcoin" and which miners were mining "some other thing". The whole point made by Core developers was that "proof of work does not equal consensus if your policy is invalid, and what is valid is what is accepted by all these nodes".
As such and unlike your TV and browser, nodes have been used to influence policy, so I reject your "everything is political" straw man.
> That's incorrect. Non-mining nodes are passive, they do not cast votes.
Well you're right in that it doesn't look like casting a ballot in a box, but in practice they very much do "vote" in the sense that they decide on what rules are valid or not. This is what prevents miners from colluding and changing the rules of Bitcoin, the nodes would reject their chain. This is also what prevents developers from introducing a backdoor into the network by releasing malicious code. Node operators can vote to reject a change by not upgrading their nodes.
Inversely, if there is a rule change and the nodes of the network go along with the rule change (by their decision on what to reject or accept), then this is akin to a motion passing. The validity of blocks is not some ethereal thing, and neither are Bitcoin rules written on stone tablets by God. These things are the result of very human deliberation and code commits (by humans).
Well, which chain is the fork? Who's rules are you using as the arbiter? What kind of node you run and what it outputs has a direct effect on what is perceived as being "Bitcoin", as opposed to "a fork of Bitcoin". Humans are the final arbiter of which one is the fork, whether it's by the nodes they run or by the code they decide to merge into the core repo (sometimes after much very political deliberation).
You vote for consensus rules with your node. A chain with more proof of work, but that is violating the rules that nodes have formed consensus on, is ignored.
We can change Bitcoin's code to keep emitting beyond 21 million units. The consensus isn't there, yet, but nothing physical is preventing that from ever happening... Bitcoin's supply limit is a policy (ie. political), not a physical limit.
cryptography is based on non repudiation, but cryptocurrency is just human-written codebases. You can very much fork/modify/influence/introduce bugs in/backdoor/etc. code. It fails to promote cryptography's qualities to a higher sphere, as the more cryptocurrencies become harmful to society, the more they become governed by contract law. This has been the trend for the last decade, at least.
they're not saying lifestyle expenses are a tax in themselves, but rather the inflation on the lifestyle expense is a tax (ie. "cost of living"), as well as the need for certain expenses to begin with (eg. the need for a nanny because both parents need to work long hours bc of high COL and commute times)
Sorry to be blunt, but it's probably because of how crypto is a Rube Goldberg machine that attracts similar tinkerers as those attracted by Haskell's Rube Goldberg machine aspects. Both technologies seem to be doing a lot of complicated stuff, and so they attract a kind of technologist that enjoys technology for technology's sake.