jrek

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this line of thinking but “dessert with every meal” as an example of late capitalist degeneracy seems cartoonishly austere.

The PS Vita is an apt point of comparison - a beautiful piece of hardware that performed fantastically (and in my opinion much more impressive for its time than the steam deck) - that is considered to have been a complete failure.

Not at all, in the sense that if you were asked THAT question, you’d easily be able to come up with a convincing answer.

Steve Jobs in a university lecture in 1991 (iirc) articulated the vision among him and his industry contemporaries of consumers using thin clients accessing data from the cloud, a reality that took two decades to really come to fruition and that had to wait for infrastructure to catch up - the point being that while some people didn’t see the value of the internet, people in the know were able to simply and quickly articulate beneficial use cases.

Whenever I make a small project I live in fear that the NYT will threaten to give me a million dollars for it.

What problem is solved via a public tamper resistant ledger outside of the hypothetical? I routinely make purchases outside of a public tamper resistant ledger without issue.

I’d argue that what you’ve stated is just the mechanism by which decentralisation is achieved (you haven’t identified any additional benefits).

This is making a mountain out of a molehill. There's nothing to suggest any pre-conditions for deleting an account have to be removed, simply that it must be possible to "initiate deletion" from within the app.

The issue I've always had with Monte Carl simulation in this context is that it takes more knowledge, expertise, time, and care to accurately perform a Monte Carlo Simulation than to prepare an accurate estimate. It's like saying you can avoid building (yet another) barely functional go-kart by instead building a four-wheel drive. Monte Carlo Simulation sometimes cloaks that the assumptions behind the simulation largely determine the output and are just as (if not more) prone to error as the usual assumptions.

If the burden of accurately estimating an average duration for a blog post is too much for your planner, what are the odds they're going to accurately develop a probability distribution for the duration of a blog post?

In simple estimates there's no need to use a stochastic approach at all. For instance, the example in the post - if you know a blog post takes between 1-10 days (uniformly distributed) and that you need to get one out every ~6 days to get 60 out in a year, you already know the probability is ~60%. If you know there's a skew to the higher end and guess a distribution (as in the example), again you can directly work out that the odds of success are ~35%.

There is value when the estimate is not corrupted by other priorities (rare), when the expertise to accurately develop distributions for activities exists (also rare, particularly for work that isn't easy to sample and re-forecast), and when the plan is complex enough that it's hard to directly predict the impact of your statistical assumptions.

The poster said "I'm legitimately quoting", which doesn't sound like an admission to me.

Apple is not using PhotoDNA, but in any event - this is a good article but they misconstrued the '1 in a trillion' quote, as is canvassed in the comments for the article itself. According to apple there is a 1 in a trillion chance of wrongly flagging an account, not a 1 in a trillion false positive rate for individual images, and we know that step to banning include: - multiple flagged images; and - human review

The details for those processes hasn't been fully disclosed, and it isn't possible to say whether 1 in a trillion is a reasonable estimate or otherwise.

My understanding is that neither of the major outages in SA in recent times have been related to intermittent supply issues (i.e. the first major incident was related to trips caused by weather, the second was related to a gas using supplier failing to increase supply due to some market regulation minutiae that was subsequently changed).

I think this supports the point - in either case the syntax for the action is 'get wood'.

Without re-litigating the events at Basecamp, surely you're fully aware that other people have a different view to you (i.e. that in their opinion DHH did do something wrong), and surely from that starting point it's hardly mysterious why people would choose not to use the service.

I think the question becomes not 'is the conduct bad enough to stop using the service, despite how good it is?', but 'is the service so good that I should continue using it, despite the conduct?'

You have to understand - it was REAL subtle.

To be far these restrictions operate in a fairly narrow domain (Developer documentation) where some restrictions on idiomatic usage are probably warranted to maximise the number of people that can fully comprehend the docs (for example not all languages refer to adapters as 'male' or 'female' and the meaning may not be obvious to a non native speaker.)

Secondly, "This guide contains guidelines, not rules. Depart from it when doing so improves your content."

Monetary emission is already tied to the cost of consumer goods. Central banks make interest rate and reserve requirement changes that regulate growth in money supply. Those changes are aimed, in part, at achieving a price inflation target.

And price inflation, which is the relevant metric (as opposed to monetary inflation) in the context of a claim that the government destroys value, has been extremely predictable for 20 years.

This comes up again and again in bitcoin discussions. Money supply has to grow for price stability and to avoid deflation. This also applied even when there was gold convertibility.

What exactly is your issue with a growing money supply?

This expands the definition of "backed by" into meaninglessness.

I used to be able to trade dollars for gold and vice versa, at a fixed price, guaranteed.

I can't trade bitcoin for 'math'. No-one is storing energy reserves in case there's a run on people converting bitcoin to energy. Bitcoin is not backed by anything.

"Dollars used to be backed by gold and it was still fiat money." - This is just plain wrong.

Fiat is money not backed by a commodity. What commodity was it again that backs Bitcoin?

The modern central banking/inflation/'debasement' conspiracy theorist is interested in a return to a gold standard - that is, paper currency that is backed by reserves of gold, as (kind of, sometimes) existed from ~1850 to 1950, rather than a return to currency actually physically containing gold (or, more usually, a metal other than gold).

They are not the same, but speaking about them at a high level abstraction allows one to pretend that there was some continuous system in place that was abruptly overturned in recent times, for ostensibly nefarious reasons.

I think you’re right on the supply side of the equation, that the profit motive applies upward pressure. But the constraint is on the demand side - if I increase or even maintain my interest rate, the number of borrowers that are able to service the loan drops and the amount of bad debt increases. That’s in addition to the general disincentive to bring forward spending caused by deflation, which has already reduced the pool of borrowers. If I lower my interest rate I’m making less money but still taking on the same risk (if I calibrated my reduction in the rate to that effect). I might then mitigate the risk by tightening my lending requirements. Or I can choose to just stop lending. The result is a simultaneous drop in interest rates and in available credit. The central bank can try to boost lending by dropping its interest rates. When rates get near or below zero things get weird.

I'm on board with your socialist sensibilities when it comes to housing - but when the same effect is occurring throughout the entire economy the result is a depression.

Growth in money supply =/= inflation. If price stability is what you want then the money supply has to increase as production increases to avoid deflation.

The availability of credit is a separate question from the interest rate, and may indeed fall.

Rising real interest rates directly impact borrowers and their ability to borrow, as their debt burden increases without any changes to interest rates. Borrowers are therefore both less likely and less able to borrow. Lenders may simultaneously decide not to lend. Japan is a good case study and has suffered from both phenomena. But interest rates in Japan are very low and fell substantially as soon as the economy got stuck in a deflation rut:

The charts below are illustrative if you set them both from 1979 to now:

https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/bank-lending-rate

https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi

The opposite actually. The Real interest rate is the nominal rate minus inflation. So negative inflation of, say, 2% pa, effectively adds 2% of real interest to any loan, since 100k of principal today will be worth ~111k in 5 years’ time. In response lenders and central banks are likely to decrease interest rates as, firstly, the money is appreciating in real terms anyway and, secondly, the appreciating value of money makes it harder for debtors to repay debt, so people won’t be able to afford high interest loans. Compare that with high inflation periods where repaying the principal gets easier, since the 100k you borrowed five years ago is only worth ~90k in today’s money (with 2% inflation).

A lot of western economies experienced the inflation side of the equation in recent history - see the 70s/80s in the us, when both the inflation rate and interest rate were very high. In reality the Real interest rate is generally less variable than either inflation or nominal rates.

It's supported by both logic and experience.

It's easy to see logically if we flip the relationship. If house prices are steadily increasing (equivalent to inflation, where my purchasing power is decreasing), I want to convert my money into a house as quickly as possible. If house prices are decreasing (equivalent to deflation, where my purchasing power is increasing), I want to hold off as long as possible.

In recent experience, the rapid deflation of bitcoin has coincided with its identity pivot from medium of exchange to store of value - because why would you spend an appreciating asset?

That's not to mention the other side of the coin that deflation is necessarily accompanied by decreases in nominal income (because all the products you sell are cheaper in dollar terms, by definition) and nominal salaries.

And as coliveira stated, the economy depends on spending - and that applies just as much to an open free market economy. To suggest that the desire to want people to spend is somehow a feature unique to planned or state-run economies is nonsense.

As someone with a 2020 intel macbook air (i5) that uses it occasionally for gaming here and there, I can tell you that the reported performance in this database, if accurate, is a substantial improvement.

For anyone joining the community for a recurring fee, at what point does it make sense for the members to just make a free offsite?

Where does this notion that classifying phones as a 'general computing device' magically strengthens the anti-trust case against apple come from?

"Consumer rights" is nebulous and meaningless in this context. No legal right is being infringed upon. It is not against the law for a private business to control its platforms, in fact its something that private businesses routinely do and have done long before apple came along.

Marketing and PR is also unremarkable and not peculiar to apple. iPhone customers are absolutely not being lied to in the relevant sense - there is no representation that an iPhone will allow you to run any software outside that approved by apple in the app store.

"The customer should be able to do whatever they like" is a nice sounding dogma, but has no legal basis and isn't supported by standard practice for many products. Your example only demonstrates a power imbalance if we assume that the customer has already been forced to own an iphone for some reason. In reality the corporate and the consumer have the same power - the corporate to develop and offer a product on its terms, and the consumer to either accept that offer or to purchase a different product.

Developers demonstrably do benefit from apple's strengths. Their revenues are overwhelming on the back of an ecosystem built and maintained by apple essentially from scratch. If developers didn't benefit, they wouldn't develop for ios, simple as that.

The point is, the developers are on the same boat as apple, so sinking it is a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. And there already are 'others' - it's not apple's fault that they're shit.