jbstack

Apples and oranges.

You're talking about prevention, but this is about cure / treatment.

Once you have already have Alzheimer's, exercise isn't going to save you.

If you don't pay your debts or taxes then even items that you own and which are in your possession can be taken from you, thanks to the rule of law. Conversely, if someone comes along and takes it from you without legal justification, the rule of law allows you to claim it back. That same rule of law ensures that you are entitled to the gold you own that isn't in your possession.

Drawing the line at possession is arbitrary. Either way your ownership is governed by law, and is only as good as the strength of that law.

Unless you are suggesting that the encryption algorithms underlying Bitcoin have been broken (which would be absolutely huge news with all sorts of far reaching consequences), then it's clearly the former.

How's that? HFT lowers the barrier of entry for ordinary participants who just want to invest their savings either directly or through something like a pension fund, because they get all those benefits I mentioned, and those benefits are useful when you are only executing a trade once a month or year.

It only increases the barrier to entry to people who want to do HFT themselves on a smaller scale, because they now can't compete on latency etc. But it's a bit of a circular argument to say that it's a bad thing that engaging in HFT increases the barrier of entry to HFT.

In any case, and to reiterate, I wasn't refuting a claim that HFT is a bad thing, I was refuting your original claim that it's pointless. For something to be pointless, there has to be no purpose to it whatsoever, which means it has to have no benefits.

It's a bit unfair to call it pointless. Empirical studies have shown that HFT increase liquidity in markets, leading to narrowed spreads, market depth, faster execution speeds, cross-market informational efficiency, etc. All of these are generally beneficial to other non-HFT market participants.

Now you might counter that it also brings some negatives (e.g. fleeting liquidity, market manipulation risk, etc.) and there's certainty some validity to that. But none of this supports an argument that it's pointless.

More generally, activities aren't pointless if you are earning money from it which pays your rent, puts food on your table, etc. A large portion of the world works mainly for this goal. It's perfectly valid to tell your grandchildren "I spent my life making sure we'd have enough money for you and your parents to live comfortably", and we shouldn't look down on someone who does that.

Sounds like you're defining processed food, whereas this is about ultra processed food.

For me, processed food might include something like unsweetened peanut butter where while the only ingredient is peanuts, it's still been through a process of grinding so that it's no longer in its natural form.

At the other end of the spectrum an example of ultra processed food would be a factory packaged item with a long list of ingredients which includes ones you don't recognise e.g. chemical names or E numbers.

I have the same policy. It's not worth risking your life just to save a bit of money or try some gadget that is only made by a no-name brand. Often you keep these devices very close to your body or head (e.g. earphones) where they can do a lot of damage if they suddenly explode.

I learned this lesson over 10 years ago when I was visiting a night market in China with someone. He was so delighted with how cheap the portable chargers were that he bought a bunch to give to his friends/family back home. When we returned to the hotel one of them started emitting smoke. From that day I've only ever bought reputable brands, and even then I worry about it.

Nonetheless, there's a fundamental legal difference between ownership (e.g. of the notes and coins in your pocket) and a chose in action (the right to sue the bank for the money which you don't own).

If you own something and someone withholds it from you, in the general case that's theft. Because theft is a criminal offence, people generally won't risk doing it. With a chose in action, you have to sue in a civil court for damages. In the meantime, the bank might go bust, you might lose your case, you may give up without even going to court because the amount they've kept isn't worth the time and legal costs of recovery.

You've probably heard the phrase "possession is 9/10ths of the law". If the government introduces a no-warning one-time $5000 levy, they still have to recover the money from you. The effort of doing so is on them and they have the burden of proof. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Maybe you'll decide to leave the country before the legal process concludes. These are some of the advantages of ownership.

When the money is in the bank, the bank and the government can simply agree (without a court's involvement) that you owe the $5000 and there is nothing you can do other than try to sue the bank (and likely lose) because you never owned the money in the first place. The burden of proof shifts to you and it's unlikely you'll ever see that money again.

> I think people would be outraged if someone told them it belonged to the bank.

You might find it interesting to read about 2013 Cyprus bank levy then. The government unilaterally raided people's savings accounts, taking between 6.75% and 10% as a one-off tax with essentially no warning. When you put money in the bank you are implicitly accepting the (small but real) risk that the government will come along and say "I'm having some of that" and there's nothing you can do about it.

More anecdotally, I once had to help a family friend sue a bank for several tens of thousands of pounds in the UK because they refused to pay him back his balance when he closed the account and refused to explain the reason. It took a little over 6 months to get the money back. While researching the case, I discovered countless other cases in which businesses had gone bankrupt because of delays in recovering their money from the bank. Under UK legislation, banks can and do do this if they have "suspicions" of money laundering (which can be triggered for any reason whatsoever - the suspicion doesn't have to be reasonable). Not only do they not have to explain to the customer what those suspicious are, they are legally required not to. They can hold onto your money for up to 31 days and this can be extended to up to 6 months by a court order after a hearing which you will be excluded from and likely not even know took place until after the fact.

Legally you do not own your money in the bank. Instead you own a "chose in action" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chose) which is the right to sue the bank for the money. Although it sounds similar to outright ownership, it's not the same thing.

So to clarify, does this mean you don't plan to go down the route of having a "community edition" vs a "enterprise edition" with missing features in the former?

This whole comment is predicated on the idea that something is only worthwhile if it will lead to a "venture scale startup" and that to do anything else is to "waste the best years of your life".

I, for one, am glad that not everyone shares your ethos. Conversely, I'm also glad that there are people out there "building agents". Diversity is a good thing. Encouraging everyone to only do one thing is a bad thing.

Very subjective. I made the switch to Linux from Windows 7 over 10 years ago and even at that time I found Linux to be orders of magnitude better in almost every aspect, and those few areas where it was worse (which, aside from games, I'm struggling to even think of any now) were well worth the trade-off.

I think you missed the point. Linux was already good: it didn't become good because its competitor became worse. Rather, the competitor becoming worse gives some people the push they finally needed to make the switch.

Knives are dangerous if used dangerously. Let's ban knives.

The part I'm not convinced about is that the self-deception actually works. In order to achieve it, I have to go through the thought process of "I have papers to grade and a mess of work to do which are important and have deadlines, but actually if I don't do them it won't hurt anyone". Once I go through that thought process, I now know that the task isn't genuinely important. Writing it down at the top of some list doesn't change what I know. Somewhere else on that list is the real important task (the one that will cause harm if I don't do it) and my brain knows which one it is and will try to procrastinate it.

> If someone is waiting for you to do something that you have promised, then it acquires a kind of urgency and importance even if it wouldn’t harm you not to do it in a timely manner.

I don't agree with this though. If someone is waiting for me to do something that I've promised, and I don't do it, I'm going to suffer the harm of stress, guilt, shame, etc. related to breaking my promise and people thinking I'm unreliable. I think this idea only works if we define "harm" in a very narrow sense to exclude the types of harms that come from the "important" task that we're going to deliberately avoid doing.

> The procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

This is the reason this method has never really clicked for me, despite coming across the concept in various procrastination blogs. It's the more important tasks that need doing the most, and this method aims to avoid doing those in favour of less important tasks. Yes, the article acknowledges this:

> At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.

But the offered solution is to put fake important tasks to the top of the list: tasks which have deadlines and appear to be important but really aren't. I don't think the human brain is stupid enough to trick itself in this way. If I put a fake task at the top of my list, I'm going to know its fake (because I deliberately put it there for the reason that it's fake!), and it's going to be the actual important tasks which get neglected instead of the fake one.

The same way you assess results in a programming language you have used before. In a more complicated project that might mean test suites. For a simple project (e.g. a Bash script) you might just run it and see if it does what you expect.

There are plenty of scenarios where you want to work with a new language but you don't want to have to dedicate months/years of your life to becoming expert in it because you are only going to use it for a one-time project.

For example, perhaps I want to use a particular library which is only available in language X. Or maybe I'm writing an add-on for a piece of software that I use frequently. I don't necessarily want to become an expert in Elisp just to make a few tweaks to my Emacs setup, or in Javascript etc. to write a Firefox add-on. Or maybe I need to put up a quick website as a one-off but I know nothing about web technologies.

In none of these cases can I "use a toolset I'm experienced in" because that isn't available as an option, nor is it a worthwhile investment of time to become an expert in the toolset if I can avoid that.

Does the CPU really spend a lot of time rendering text output if I don't use a GPU to do it? My guess is that it would take away a vanishingly small fraction of the time available for useful computation - but maybe I'm wrong?

Can someone explain to me why I should want my terminal to be hardware-accelerated? I use my terminal to get stuff done by running commands and viewing the output. Sometimes I might run a TUI but I've certainly never found one that required a GPU to run. If I want to run a full-blown GUI I run it from my WM / DE. Am I missing something here?

Will Chat Control be retrospective? I.e. once it's implemented will governments have access to all previous communications or just those from that point onwards? Also how does it work geographically? Is it based on my location, where my phone was made/bought, something else...?

I completely agree, but what can actually be done about this? It feels like it's too late.

> If the sanctions weren't effective Russia wouldn't be insisting on the lifting of the sanctions as a part of any Ukrainian deal.

If the sanctions were effective Russia wouldn't be offering entirely one-sided deals that it knows nobody is going to accept, because it would be desperate enough to get those sanctions lifted that it would actually have to concede something in a deal.

> Ukrainian sanctions work.

The only reasonable definition of "work" is "stop the thing that motivated the sanction from happening". With that definition, sanctions rarely work (or if they do, not in a very effective way). Russia is still at war with Ukraine. Iran is still developing nuclear weapons. North Korea did develop nuclear weapons.

> I hope the world gets more decentralised

It's not looking too likely. You have Google's planned app developer verification, the UK's Online Safety Act, the EU's plans to interfere with E2EE, EU privacy rules causing sites to be riddled with popups, money laundering rules making banking increasingly more tedious, power concentrated in the hands of a few nation-state sized tech companies, countries becoming more authoritarian even in the West.

As an anecdotal example, I'm currently living/travelling between various EU countries, where a few years ago I would have expected a great deal of online freedom. Instead I now have to constantly change my VPN exit point to get around various restrictions depending on what site I'm using and what they have decided to block based on location.

If we can't even get these things right in the so-called free democracies of the West, what hope is there for the world in general? I'd like to be optimistic about this, but it's hard to find reasons to be.

AI models are trained relatively rarely, so it's unlikely this would be very noticeable among all the regular traffic. Just the occasional download-everything every few months.

See: "Also, when we block an IP range for abuse, innocent third parties can be affected."

Although they refer to IP ranges, the same principle applies on a smaller scale to a single IP address: (1) dynamic IP addresses get reallocated, and (2) entire buildings (universities, libraries, hotels, etc.) might share a single IP address.

Aside from accidentally affecting innocent users, you also open up the possibility of a DOS attack: the attacker just has to abuse the service from an IP address that he wants to deny access to.

I think there's some truth to this (utility is overall more important), but also some falsehood (looks matter too). Aesthetics affect your enthusiasm and therefore your productivity. This is why, for example, most people would rather work in a room with large glass windows overlooking a lake than in a room with a small window overlooking a factory even if they are functionally the same.

At no point did I ever point to a video and say that it shows genocide, so your first line is invented. Here's a more accurate version:

Him: "Here is some evidence that some videos have been faked" Me: "The fact that some have been faked doesn't mean there aren't real ones"

So yes, it's the right fallacy.