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sk55

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Studying Information Systems

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In all fairness, there is more than just cost when choosing a provider. Elastic has had higher uptime than the AWS alternative. I had to switch off AWS Elasticsearch hosting because it kept going down.

If we assume that all companies are imperfect, then what is the right mental model to navigate this world?

I think Wabi-Sabi helps us deal with this reality. Here's a cool explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M759yNSOTMs

"Wabi-sabi rejects the pursuit of perfection and embraces the reality of imperfection. The philosophy behind wabi-sabi can help us escape the hamster wheel of chasing an ideal life and teaches us to appreciate existence as it is: perfectly imperfect."

I think Wikipedia is a great start to finding content at a general level.

Though, vertical specific niches often have better sources of information. For e.g. Examine.com currently seems better for nutrition and supplement information. Or even an old school reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for algorithms.

LiteFS 4 years ago

They don't have ACID guarantees with this setup.

Many financial positions (in DeFi or the real world) require you to have additional funds in order to move between different positions.

An example in the real world...say you're an employee at a large tech company with a bunch of stock options. You want to exercise those options and sell them. In order to exercise those options, you need money that you do not have. Luckily, your brokerage offers a service where they'll exercise the options for you and sell them. You're essentially borrowing their money very quickly to get out of your position.

In DeFi, you could use a flash loan in order to deleverage in a position. So instead of selling a small increment of your position and paying back your loan multiple times, you can instead take a flash loan and pay everything back at once to deleverage.

Rather than viewing it as “trustless” you can view it as “trust minimized”. Then it might make more sense. Trust with your counterparty falls on a spectrum.

You trust your friend, but maybe not an anonymous online individual. So you might use the blockchain to accept payments from the anonymous individual whereas with your friend, you might accept a check or Venmo.

Using blockchain prevents the domain from being seized. This is helpful for service providers so they can maintain uptime and it also helps users who might rely on a service.