riskneutral

I've had similar thoughts many times. Browser history and bookmark seem broken to me, and having 100 tabs open (each one with a back/forward button) can't be the best way to do this.

> this was a show for some adversary

Maybe it's a captured enemy aircraft.

> it's possible Skia has some mechanism to composite GL textures it's not responsible for too.

I'm pretty sure this can be done in Skia in C++, so it should be possible with WASM. I think it possible to create a Skia surface using an existing GL texture buffer object.

> Metaverse is like a video game with WAY more money and reach.

Metaverse is like a video game, except every time you play you are forced to have an awkward family and high school reunion (both at the same time).

Another analogy would be the infamous Segway marketing failure. Here [1] is an article from 2015, drawing an analogy between the Segway failure and a different failed VR project (Google Glass).

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-segway-technol...

> The bulk of Figma rendering is Figma-custom GPU code. It's true that Figma uses Skia, but only for some specific graphics algorithms in Skia, not as a general purpose rendering library.

Can I ask why you went that route, instead of just using Skia?

Why would web-based ensure a much bigger market? If you have a one-click installation process, then a desktop app seems much more appropriate than a web page for a programming / data analysis tool.

> i think it's the coolest thing ever ... anyone can write a contract to automate taking out a loan, investing it, and pulling out the money, develop exotic securities, and bespoke arbitration. anyone can do it regardless of credentials or connections; just a month of learning.

That's all fine, until the SEC come knocking. The only advantage in the crypto space is that you try to skirt financial regulations. Establishing a new broker-dealer, bank, etc, requires a substantial capital investment to meet the minimum regulatory requirements. That gives some crypto companies an advantage (for now), since they can skip all that, but you can see sure that established interests are not taking this lying down and new regulations are in the pipeline. Once the global regulation of cryptocurrency is completed, either crypto will be dead or it will have to play the same rules as the rest of the financial industry.

> As a crypto critic, monero is basically the only useful innovation to come out of crypto.

I sort of agree with this assessment. I think it depends on what you mean by useful. Unfortunately, the only real-world, practical use of Monero is money laundering. I wouldn't want to trade a currency or work on a technology whose best use case is helping violent drug cartels conduct their financial transactions.

> DLTs can indeed be incredibly useful, e.g. when multiple parties use the tech as a trusted pseudonymous data log, e.g. drug tracking from production to pharmacies.

Why can't they just use a database? Tracking information isn't a new problem.

> To be very clear, fully collateralised loans are not really lending per se. They are repurchase agreements.

I agree with your assessment. It's an overcollateralized repo agreement. In the the "centralized finance" world, the purpose of the repo market is to provide investors with leverage at low cost. It's similar getting a mortgage from your bank to invest in a real estate property - you give the bank a down payment (let's say 20% down), and the bank lends you the remaining 80% to buy the property. In this way, your initial investment (20% down payment) is leveraged 4 times. Despite your leverage, the mortgage on the interest rate stays low because the bank has a lien on the real estate property so they can recover their loan value by selling the property if you don't pay back the loan.

> I am not even sure what use such 'loans' have when you need to have $2 to take a loan of $1. They certainly solve some issues that Cryptocurrencies introduce for themselves but outside of that world they are useless

But what issues in cryptocurrencies does it even solve? What is the business model of these DeFi businesses? They advertise to crypto investors that they can earn impossibly high rates of "interest and rewards," and there are plenty of crypto HODLs who would be happy to lock up their crypto in a DeFi to earn interest, but where is the demand side? Who needs to borrow $1 worth of crypto while posting $2 of crypto as collateral and paying impossibly high interest? Who needs to borrow cryptocurrency at all? The only purpose I can see of borrowing crypto would be to short sell it, but how many people are crazy enough to do that? I can't help but feel like DeFi is some kind of scam and a reincarnation of the ICO bubble.

The only people who could be making any serious of cryptocurrency for international money transfer is organized crime and money launderers.

Sending remittance payments in cryptocurrency does not make sense for people who are sending their hard earned dollars back to their home country to support their impoverished families. The risk exposure to exchange rate fluctuations, and risk of loss of funds in transit (due to fraud, hacking, losing a crypto wallet, sending money to the wrong wallet, etc), the fees associated with cryptocurrency transfers, and the extremely slow transfer times, all makes cryptocurrency a totally inappropriate product for the demographic that you are suggesting be targeted. You are basically suggesting that crypto bros should get rich off of selling a product to poor people that will only make them poorer. It's disturbing. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me agree with title of this post.

Fortunately, most people have other options available for international remittance payments. For example, you can now transfer money to people using Visa in over 80 countries, all you need is their Visa card number, and the transfer time is 30 minutes or less for Visa debit. All the major retail banks have similar services, and there are plenty of money transfer apps (including a Western Union app), none of which depend on "blockchain technology."

> I would let a billion dollar company fail for an extra few thousand bucks.

This seems quite short-sighted, as the damage to your reputation would cost you more than few thousands in the long run.

I'm sure you could buy a silicone keypad on Alibaba for a few dollars.

If we achieve AGI, then the AGI should be able to produce a formal verification proof of its own safety, similar to how humans use produce formal verification proofs for critical software using automated theorem provers today.

Let's hope it works out that way, and not like this Texas electric grid story.

26bps was the recommended adjustment based on historical analysis at the time. The actual spread in the market is not a constant, and has been below 26bps for a long time. The current LIBOR-SOFR spread is around 12bps. It's all negotiated, so people who earn interest are arguing it should be 26bps and people who pay interest are arguing it should be 12 bps. The market seem to be settling on 3M LIBOR = 3M SOFR + 15-20bps.

CME Term SOFR contracts exist to address this. 1M, 3M, 6M, and 1Y Term SOFR rates are published [1]. A typical 3M LIBOR contract can just substitute it with 3M SOFR without impacting the basic mechanisms, like knowing in advance how much interest you will owe over the next period.

[1] https://www.cmegroup.com/market-data/cme-group-benchmark-adm...

> how does this impact existing contracts?

This has kept lawyers busy for past the few years. The "LIBOR fallback language" was created and then inserted into existing contracts, to address this question. It's like a pull request for a patch. Most of the legacy contracts out there have been "patched" with the "fallback language" at this point, and as of Jan 1, 2022, no new LIBOR contracts are allowed.

Is your whole argument that a solar flare will be predicted with enough notice and the grid will be shutdown in time to save us?

> Imagine the entire US and Canada east of roughly Kansas being dark.

For weeks? Without ATMs, gas pumps, grocery stores, etc? It all runs on electricity. It would get pretty grim. According to risk assessments of EMP risk, 90% of Americans of die after 1 year of not having electricity.

Someone should implement a Planckian locus color space.

I think someone owes you $10K.

I don't see the problem. It's a lambda function template using the std::ranges library's pipe style for algorithims. You are don't have to use the pipe style if you don't want to.

There are ways to speed up compilation. It can be done in parallel, and you can get a lot of cores into a developer desktop these days. Plus you can get unlimited amounts of distributed cores in the cloud. Compilation can also be sped up with pre-compiled headers, which will soon be replaced with C++20 modules which will help compilation improve in the future as compilers improve their support for modules. With incremental compilation, you do not need recompile the whole project after every change. Linking in large statically linked binaries is a big bottleneck, but incremental linking is possible in some cases. You can also break your project into multiple shared libraries (DLLs) , and link dynamically at run-time for debugging. It can then be re-built with static linking for a release build. Continuous Integration systems can also help hide the latency of compilation from developers by continuously running build and test processes in the background on a cluster.

I think you mean "code quality" is always decreasing. The more people that touch a codebase, the lower the code quality gets. As soon as you get more than one person involved, the conceptual integrity and code consistency begins to breakdown. Even with a single individual, if they stop working on the code for a long time, then code quality will decrease when they resume development. The very best codebases are the product of a single mind, developed in a short period of time. These are, necessarily, smaller and more recent codebases, since one person can only do so much for so long. A small team can be cohesive enough to effectively share a common understanding of what "conceptual integrity" means for that codebase. As the team grows, organizational communication and coordination problems take over and codebase integrity degrades. The other enemy is time, because eventually the author(s) of any codebase will move on and it will become someone else's task to inherit and maintain that codebase. That is where the largest breaks in code quality will occur, due to the loss of institutional knowledge. It is very difficult for institutions to retain intuitive knowledge such as what the "conceptual integrity of the codebase" means. The problems are exasperated by the fact that code is rarely highly documented, and it can be difficult to express conceptual integrity in code because it is implicit in the code rather than explicit. The problems are exasperated by the fact that code quality is not the most important objective to maximize for most software developers and organizations. There are more important objectives, like delivering bug-free, working software on-time.

Which brings me to my point that "software quality" is something different. "Code quality" is what programmers obsess over because it determines the quality of their lives. But "software quality" is what defines the lives of their users. I would define high quality software as being performant, efficient, bug-free, secure, correct, usable interface, etc. Fortunately, these objectives can be met without necessarily needing very high code quality under the hood. The core banking software keeping track of your bank balances, or the autopilot software on your next plane ride, are probably written in in some terrible legacy of COBOL, FORTRAN, C, C++, etc, and probably have huge amounts of technical debt. But the objective quality of the software from the user side is very good, and once a critical software component has been written and tested, the preference is to not change it (if it isn't broken, don't fix it). As long as your bank balance shows up correctly and your plane doesn't crash, you don't worry about the underlying code quality at all as a user.

So, in summary, the bad news is that you can never prevent code quality degradation. Any large, growing and aging system will inevitably lose conceptual integrity, have poor code quality, will come with a mountain of technical debt, and will get harder and harder to modify and grow over time and scale. The good news, however, is that you can still ensure quality of the product for the end-user by throwing enough people, grind and money at the problem.

You should choose one or two active recreational activities and do them routinely. For example, soccer, rock climbing, golf, martial activities, running, biking, gym, whatever. You are more likely to meet friends through those activities who also enjoy doing the same non-alcohol activities as you.

Dating and sex also don't have to involve alcohol and are fun activities as well.

Better to get on these things now while you're 23, rather than 33 or 43.

Thanks for the TLDR, I wasn't going to read that whole novel.

> "this system is a blackbox"

According to this inclusive language guide, you should say "this system is a functional testing" or "this system is an acceptance testing."

Pretty soon we will just not be allowed to mention colors anymore in any context. Just refer to it by its hex code. "this system is a #000000 box."