George Carlin had a classic bit on the topic of evolving names for PTSD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp8IyaKCs0
2,671 karma · joined September 1, 2021
https://github.com/kevinloch/
I've seen a domestic cat play with a mouse until it's dead, then act like it doesn't know what to do with it. An old stray cat (that had rejoined domestic life but didn't have the energy to catch and play with the mouse) would then get up and eat it in two chomps.
Blade Runner was a masterpiece in those areas (when combined) and defined it’s genre/aesthetic.
The question is not whether cryptographically secured algorithmic money will be a part of future monetary systems but who will control the algorithm and/or how will different systems compete with each other.
The transition from paper fiat dollars to electronic (credit/debit cards and later NFC apps) for ordinary everyday payments which began in ernest ~1990* is still not complete (30+ years). This is despite the fact that it is only a different method of payment, not a change in monetary system like gold/silver -> fiat was.
Why would anyone expect a transition from fiat (paper and/or electronic) money to crypto to only take 10 years?
* one of the places I worked in high school in 1988 was People's Drug (CVS). While we did have the primitive early electronic swipe terminals for credit cards, they were only used by the cashier for pre-authorizations (replacing the earlier method of calling an 800 number). The pre-auth step could take several minutes. We then had to imprint the card on carbon paper vouchers with the mechanical "click-clack" machines and write down various information on the vouchers with ballpoint pens. Fortunately very few customers used credit cards due to this long tedious process. Payment by check wasn't much faster as we had to write down driver's license number and address on the check by hand.
In 1990 or so the first gas stations started to accept payments at the pump. Before that you had to walk inside and pay with paper money or the old slow mechanical credit card method or checks. For the first few years they only accepted debit cards at the pump, not credit. A few grocery stores started accepting debit cards around the same time as the gas stations.
- Any store I notice as I walk by might be gone in 2 years
- Any store I walk into is likely to be gone in 1 year
- Any store I actually buy something from has about 6 months left...
(this only applies to small stores. The anchors can live on in zombie mode for decades)
Before 1GB HDD’s the file system overhead was a much more dramatic effect so it didn’t really matter to consumers which prefix convention they used or how they rounded.
SI prefixes should be (and are) the rule rather than the exception. It only made sense to measure ram in base-2 units because they are manufactured according to base-2 addressing.
HDD’s have never used base 2 addressing.
Another example is network media. Serialized data transfer speed is measured in {K,M,G,T}b/s (bits) or B/s (Bytes) where a Gigabit is exactly 1000000000 bits and Gigabyte is exactly 1000000000 bytes.
In the early days of computers ram was extremely scarce and expensive. It was such a limitation that it was usually the very first question you asked about a computer’s capabilities.
I remember in 5th grade asking a fellow student who’s parents had just bought an Atari 800 “How much ‘K’ does it have?”
This intense focus on ram may have led people to assume that it’s odd nomenclature would apply to anything computer related.
The Fed itself directly created 8T USD since 2009 (QE). Some of it in the past two years even went straight to consumer's pockets via the Treasury in the form of stimmies and forgivable PPP loans (helicopter money/MMT).
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
That's a non-trivial amount, 41% of total M2 and 61% of the increase in M2 since 2009:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Where did the rest of the increase in M2 come from? Fractional reserve lending by banks -- at interest rates artificially suppressed by Fed policies specifically to encourage lending/money creation.
Before the Fed was created in 1913, USD was created by fractional reserve lending by banks at market determined interest rates and the marginal increase in monetary gold and silver from mining output (typically 1-2%/yr).
This historic monetary system was dynamically unstable as mining output was uncorrelated with natural business cycles and unbackstopped banks were subject to runs during downturns. The Fed was created to solve these problems, specifically the panic of 1907.
Over time it's mission evolved from being a lender of last resort to actively targeting employment and consumer prices. Since the 1987 crash however, this official mandate was effectively replaced with one targeting asset prices - primarily stocks and houses (wealth effect targeting).
Normal business cycles were now increasingly distorted by the fed Fed responding to (or not wanting to hurt) asset prices for fear it would psychologically affect consumer and business spending and eventually employment.
This lead to a new instability: bigger booms created or exaggerated by easy Fed money, followed by bigger busts during the tightening phase.
Each boom/bust cycle led to more micromanagement by the Fed and thus more instability. Since 2008 (QE), and especially after 2020 (helicopter money) they have gone completely off the rails as seen by the M2 chart above and soaring consumer prices. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon - Milton Friedman"
Revealing your existence to alien species could be one of the dumbest mistakes you could make in the universe. Especially when our technology is not even capable of interstellar travel. Thus any species that comes to visit us will be more technologically advanced. If they are more advanced it likely won't be by 10 or 100 years, but possibly one million years or more.
We would be sitting ducks. There are many ways this could go badly:
- They could be so advanced as to consider us a useless nuisance. They could treat us the way we treat ants.
- They could be inherently nice and rational (by our standards) but correctly see us as a threat to them as our technology advances in the future. Our tribal tendencies (culminating in war) are on display constantly. At best they would just keep their distance. At worst they might wipe us out for their own self preservation.
- Even a benevolent species could be disastrous for us if they transferred technology before we were ready for it.
Remember, it's not scientists who will control our interstellar diplomacy, it will be politicians and generals.
I hope there are lots of copies of it in government survival bunkers around the world.
I wonder if they keep an offline copy on ISS?
> § 97.403 Safety of life and protection of property.
> No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its disposal to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available.
I've seen this happen (or at least appear to happen) in real life where an obviously bored dealer was consistently hitting the same 1/3'd of the wheel and players were taking advantage of it. After a while a suit shows up and starts giving heat not to the players but to the dealer. Chatting them up with nonsense conversation to distract them out of their zone. This wasn't a pit boss/supervisor but casino security - guys that emerge from back rooms to give heat to card counters in blackjack.
The distraction worked: the now very awake and nervous dealer was no longer hitting similar areas and the players moved on to other tables.
While this sounds like just a lazy intuitive explanation, it calls out the key component - a lack of information about the outcome - that can help avoid the paradox in more complex situations.
This is in contrast to the three-door problem where information is gained by opening the first door. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
In North/South Carolina beaches cruising in modified pickups where the front suspension is jacked up and loud mousing blasting is very popular. It's a non-stop car show every night, especially on the weekends.
It's entertaining if you are just there for the week but I wouldn't be surprised if the locals hate it.
Just don’t expect any general solutions, you have to solve them numerically if they don’t simplify to a common type.
While inexpensive to implement and coincidentally well matched to narrow-gamut encoding like sRGB, it significantly mangles red/yellow/green colors.
Filters that approximate the CIE 1931 standard observer effective band pass curves would be better (and work well with wide gamut encodings like rec.2020)
Here’s some detail I posted in a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31107643#31111607
The sensitivity curves for Kodachrome are narrow and a good match for the CIE standard observer RGB effective bandpass curves (ignoring negative red values):
https://125px.com/docs/film/kodak/e55-2009_06.pdf
Keep in mind the response chart is log and what we are looking for is the -3db bandpass.
If the Sun were replaced by black hole with the same mass as the Sun at the center of the Solar System we wouldn't automatically get sucked into it. A very cold Earth would continue to orbit the black hole exactly as it does the Sun today. Only if the Earth's orbit were perturbed by some other body would it have a chance of joining the black hole.