gwicks56

"If you took a Tesla or a Waymo and dropped into into a tier 2 city in India, it will stop moving."

Lol. If you dropped the average westerner into Chennai, they would either: a) stop moving b) kill someone

I think it will be more like:

"Pixie, reply to that email for me"

"Pixie, book that car service for me and remind them they promised a free brake fluid replacement"

"Pixie order all the ingredients I need to make my wife her favourite dish"

"Pixel, buy everyone in my family birthday presents"

I will 100% pay for that capability, and as someone that uses GPT4 to basically do my job for me, it really does not seem that far off. And I do think Google has an advantage here over Apple or anyone else, not just in Hardware, but in the enormous amount of data and information they have about both people in general, and specifically me.

Similar. Waited ages in Australia for the Y to arrive, then Elon went nuts, then real competition started to arrive. Everything from Audi to BYD here now, some even have buttons where buttons make UX sense.

Found this thought provoking.

I randomly chose a Spotify playlist recently called "Programming music". Was a few hours in, and was like, "hmmmm, this music sounds weirdly familiar", checked the playlist, it was a few hours of Deus Ex music! It was perfect to write code to!

My favourite series of games by a long margin

I don't think they expect to do they? They are just using an unlimited bankroll to punish people they perceive as their enemies with hugely expensive and stressful litigation.

Worldwide? Definitely. Enough that also have the resources to pay? Not 100% sure, but I would imagine so. I think I read 500,000 Australians alone live in places with very little internet connection, or are currently served with Geo-Sync internet heavily subsidized by our government.

Similar story with my Mum. I bought her a Chromebook, and haven't had an IT support call from her since.

My $20k Mazda won't allow me to rear-end somebody even if cruise control is switched off. Neither will my wife Subaru.

Why would we not tax the source of the problem. ie dirty energy generation via a carbon tax? That would then incentivize all energy use to become greener, rather than ad-hoc singling out individual use cases? A decent carbon tax would eliminate most dirty proof of work mining, as electricity is the major cost

The problem with that approach is that nobody agrees on what is frivolous. So it ends up being counter-productive as everyone squabbles about why their most hated thing is frivolous and should be banned/regulated, whilst the thing they like provides enough benefits that is should be left alone.

Off the top of my head, the things I have seen people argue should be banned due to climate effects: - Eating meat - Plane travel - Cars - Only large 4WD's ( but not cars) - Clothes dryers - Bitcoin - AI - Computer games - Christmas lights - etc

People have been hyping up small modular reactors for as long as I have been alive. They make total sense. And yet, there is not a single one is operation? I don't really care what tech gets us to cheap, abundant power, but given the cost curves of solar and batteries, it's hard to see anything competing.

Both are here, right now, and getting cheaper every year. Nuclear seems to be something climate skeptics points to as a way of doing nothing.

Tether should be making money though right? You give Tether $1b USD, they issue some tethers you can redeem later, and in the meantime, they invest those tethers, in say treasuries, and earn 4% or something? You earn no return, so don't they basically have an interest free loan of 60B or whatever? So unless they are incredibly greedy, they can just sit around making bank, without actually having any good reason to take on too much risk?

With enough energy we can pull CO2 out of the air, and turn into a myriad of useful things[1], not just making $$ off the things produced, but also lowering CO2 concentrations. The biggest cost input is energy itself. We need MORE energy, not less, to solve the problems we have created. Technology got us into this mess, and only new better technology can get us out of it, asking people to live worse lives just seems to me to be a political non starter.

1 (one example) :https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...

If the energy is clean, what difference does it make how much we use? Should a break through happen in fusion tonight, and clean limitless green energy became available cheaply, would you still argue we should use less?

The fact remains that what people say they care about, and what they are prepared to sacrifice for, are two totally separate things. What you are suggesting is essentially an enforced recession ( drop in consumption and quality of life).

Politicians are never rewarded for having a recession on their watch. It's just never going to fly. It's as realistic as we can end war if everyone would just be nicer to one another.

Are you making the argument that we should be striving for a decrease in consumption? Because I can see no compelling argument that that should be so. In fact, we should be using way more energy. It should be green, but trying to tell people to use less is a guaranteed way for any kind of climate action to fail. Cheaper, cleaner, more abundant, is the only way we are going to move forward, people are just not going to sign up to a future we're we use less than our parents generation.

I hope you quit your job after that? No way I could keep working for someone after they did that.

It's not quite so simple though is it? Electic cars require a lot more resource intensive mining to make, and I believe you are looking at around 50,000 miles before a Tesla is better for C02 ouput than a prius? And an electic Hummer is going to be worse for the environment than a Prius no matter how many miles it's driven?

Do you think SciHub has a reason or right to exist? Financial censorship is real and growing.

"He is free to leave Russia any time he likes."

That's not true is it? I thought the state department cancelled his passport?

The most famous must be the Skype story right? Have a bunch of language in the employment contract, which gives the employer the right to take back all the vested shares you have been granted if you are "fired for cause"? Then fire everyone for cause right before liquidity event.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-...

I'm sure Trump could have come up with reason BLM protesters were doing something illegal, and needed to shut down their bank accounts.

Travel. Content is licensed to geographic areas, not people/billing areas.

doesn't the internet route at scale?

If you want to eliminate trust, with Bitcoin and lightning you can. If for you it's too much hassle, you don't have to. Unlike every single other blockchain, in which you have no choice but to trust centralised solutions, because they are centralised. See Solana switching their blockchain off for a while, lol [1]https://coingeek.com/solana-blockchain-implodes-what-happene...

As someone who runs a full node, this is not accurate at all. Space is cheap, bandwidth is expensive. I frequently upload > 1TB a month via my full node, if blocks were twice as big and full, then I would be uploading > 2TB a month. How many people in the world have an internet connection which can handle that? Then you have to process each block, the bigger they are, the most computation needs to be done. Everything is a trade off, Bitcoin has chosen decentralization over throughput, other chains have chosen differently.

Everytime the balance in the channel is updated, a new transaction is created and signed. If one party in the channel publishes an old state ( which they could have more bitcoin than they should), you have to be online to detect it and publish the latest one, in which case they lose all their bitcoin for publishing an old state as punishment.

Technically you don't need to be online 24/7, just often enough to detect the fraud before the timeout, default is two weeks I think. Or you can pay someone a tiny fee to monitor the blockchain for someone publishing an old state for you.

In practice, nobody is trying to commit fraud, because : a) if you get caught you get punished severely b) most channels do not have enough BTC in them

Lightning is for small, instant, fast payments, average channel size is about 0.02 BTC.

The bigger problem is how to maintain up to date backups, and not accidentally publish an old state when recovering from a crash. We're working on it. Taproot bitcoin upgrade brings some interesting improvements we can build upon to improve things further.

EDIT: forgot to mention this is only really a problem if you want to run your own non custodial solution ( which I do). For most people, using a 3rd party custodial solution for their low balance hot wallet seems to be the norm.

All of them is a slight exaggeration. 999 out of every 1000, definitely.

I covered quiet a bit of his work in a Language and Computation elective. I previously only knew him from his political writings. His Linguistics work left me with a deep respect for his intelligence, as well as a deep pessimism that computers would really understand language any time soon (this was 15 years ago).

But people on Hacker News keep telling me Bitcoin has no genuine use cases? I'm confused.