plywoodtrees

Bitcoin is _not_ magically produced by the sun striking the ground.

There are mild returns to scale in running large-scale mining operations and as a result mining power seems to actually be somewhat centralized under the control of a small number of players: https://digiconomist.net/cryptocurrency-decentralization/

Not to mention that "decentralization" is a technical property and not necessarily desirable in itself. Users might care about fairness, avoiding sanctions, purchasing illegal goods, etc, but these are only weakly connected to technical decentralization.

You can just mint more coins and use them to pay off the debt, obvious! /s

The "magical" thing they have is thousands and thousands of people thinking about how to improve the performance/efficiency/availability of their datacenters.

And yes, they pay the costs of those people and take a good profit margin, and yes there are in some ways diminishing returns to go from 3 nines to 6. But most enterprises can't match that depth of concentrated expertise, certainly not most small enterprises.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - Bertrand Russell

Yes, perhaps this pattern of behavior is to be expected from someone who's staked out such an uncompromising position and stuck to it for ~30 years.

But it's also really sad that, in acting this way, he undermines his own goals.

> ... as if she was a brainwashed fool in a startup cult makes no sense. > First, she chose to work there. She was not forced to. She has agency; she could leave at any time.

The whole point of the concept of brainwashing is that people can be manipulated or sucked into making nominally free choices that are not really free choices, or at least not what they would say are in their interests if they were out of that situation.

Whether this is really true for her, I don't know, it's hard to tell from outside, and it gets into slippery concept of free will if you look too closely. But people can be manipulated.

I'm at Stripe and my WLB is fine fwiw. It's busy, but my managers and team do not encourage overwork.

It's 5pm Friday here and I'm about to shut down my work laptop until 8am Monday.

Some countries have this for selected occupations that are commonly bursty. It could be good if it was generally available:

https://www.ato.gov.au/business/primary-producers/in-detail/...

That's a really question that I have considered before, and that deserves a long answer.

One part of it is:

As both a matter of norms and law, we expect and desire more public scrutiny of financial transactions than of speech. In particular, various taxes mean that a large fraction of financial transactions cannot and should not be private. Conversely the great majority of 1 on 1 conversations raise no legal or regulatory issues.

"uncensorable" is a euphemism for "enables fraud, black markets, money laundering, and extortion".

Although there are some cases under oppressive regimes where black markets may be a moral good, on the whole enabling financial crimes is, in my value system, bad.

Furthermore I think regulatory systems will eventually move against this - in fact you see it starting. See https://doomberg.substack.com/p/a-stablecoin-applies-to-beco...

Because of the cost of continuing to maintain software for that small fraction of the user base. Not only the core OS but the toolchain, and all their first party apps. And the difficulty of incentivizing and enabling third party developers to continue to support x86.

The distinction between "gives people more freedom to conduct their business without state intervention" and "enables crime" seems very elusive.

I can see an argument that enabling crime under oppressive regimes is moral. Or even enabling particular crimes that you feel shouldn't be crimes.

I have trouble seeing the legitimate use case for cryptocurrency in first world countries. If the main use case is crime, money laundering and speculation, it will either be squashed or remain niche.

> Caveat: if something’s “free,” you’re the product.

Always great to see this opinion on free news sites.

Sure, it's in some sense "an AWS competitor" but something like a billion times less efficient, measured by throughput, energy efficiency, or cost. So, in practice, no it's not.

Resources and creativity are being drawn into crypto, that could be spent elsewhere, perhaps more usefully. Not to mention vast amount of electricity.

A brute force exhaustive search of all possible technologies is not smart engineering.

I'd love to hear what those use cases are, and what the fixable obstacles are.

I smiled at your characterization. Although, more realistically, our archetype has done modestly well by working for the man, and has 100k-low millions in index funds and company stock, and some comfort with +/- 30% swings y/y.

But let's also remember, that middle-aged character has seen the hype cycles many times before in previous decades, and recognizes the scam. The sky-high and unstable valuations, the co-dependent press coverage, the hand-waving distraction from the absence of realistic uses, the flurry of me-too startups, the enthusiasm of lay investors.

Hype usually indicates pure bullshit, but sometimes something useful emerges out of it. Most often the original projects are decimated.

A technical system which in practice cannot be reliably operated securely, and which is prone to no-recourse losses, is worse than alternatives.

Yes, real mainstream use cases are a good measure of tech success. At least, I'd want to see some plausible early mainstream use and a path for it to broaden.

It's very typical that spruikers of tech hype cycles focus on the amount of press coverage, the number of projects rushing into the space, the amount of developer interest, or highly extrapolated market numbers. It doesn't prove anything about whether the thing has any real value or will be around in 10 years.

Given the allegedgedly vast scale of cryptocurrency deployments, there ought to now be some real uses and I don't see any, other than black markets, money laundering, speculation, and ransomware. Those are always going to exist and may be a stable base but probably aren't enough to justify the hype.

Sure, XML-RPC not the best protocol. Compared to others it's pretty simple, and the mess and number of edge cases is smaller than SSL or TCP/IP.

If C isn't up to implementing an only slightly complicated network protocol, it's not much of a systems programming language, is it?

It turns out, C is fine for writing such systems and getting them working fairly well, but very poor at making them really reliable and secure, and that's no longer a good tradeoff.

Google internally-initiated successful products that come to mind: Cloud (2nd or 3rd in market, lots of revenue and growth), Play Store (also lots of revenue and growth), TPU chip, SDN, Photos, Chrome, ChromeOS.

Google (vs Alphabet) often acquires companies that have a seed of a useful product. Android for example was apparently not in a usable state when it was acquired. 99% of the creative work is making the thing actually work, not in having the prototype.

To say Google's own engineers didn't create Android because they didn't commit the very first line of code is doing them a disservice.

Is the lack of reuse something to do with its evolution from QUIC as a loosely ordered UDP-based protocol?

> The hardware requirements were stunning (280 GPUs and 1920 CPUs for the largest variant)

Stunningly big, or stunningly small?

The CPUs would cost around $65/hour on Google Cloud. I can't immediately find pricing for GPUs on either Amazon or Google, but let's suppose it doubles that price.

It's pretty small potatoes.

Especially if you put it in the context of a project with ~15 researchers.

> My question is: Should we be happy about this? Or should we be sad?

We should have a machine be sad about it for us!

They're citing >>300,000 miles under automatic controls with zero accidents. That's probably better than the human average. (Small sample, I know, but still.)

Sucking cock

Selling services to users through UbuntuOne was a key component of their strategy at the time it was announced.

Source http://thevarguy.com/ubuntu/rethinking-canonical039s-ubuntu-..., various statements by Mark Shuttleworth, etc.

There is a File/Save and File/Open dialog much like people will be used to. You can use that to save and attach files.

One might even say it's "traditional".

Exactly. If Fleming had not discovered Penicillin, somebody else would have sooner or later. But it was still worth doing.

Wow, at least round off the corners!