tzone

I think people have outdated ideas on AI code quality. Latest ones (i.e. ones after Claude Opus 4.8) are a game changer. They now write better code than a lot of engineers. They are also able to understand much larger overall context and make less mistakes then most engineers would make.

Difference between something like Opus 4.8 and even 4.5 is massive, not even talking about difference between Opus 4.8 and Sonnet or Composer.

What i see online is that a lot of people are using cheaper models, stuff like sonnet or cursor composer or even latest cursor grok. But they aren't the same thing as using the best models. The difference in quality and correctness is huge.

have been doing "racing to debug" things with AI for quite some time too. Have to say, before Opus 4.8, there wasn't even a comparison for anything slightly complex.

Opus 4.8 has been the turning point though. I am not winning many races compared to Opus 4.8, especially if it is something more complex.

I think if everyone was using Opus 4.8 (or better) for every single task/question/etc, you would have much different overall sentiment. I don't think you would have many AI disbelievers left.

Because 90% of those UIs is written by these new AI models. That is how they are able to churn so much new user facing stuff all the time. The fact that it works at all is proof that these new AI models are actually pretty decent.

Trend is pretty clear pretty much across all western countries. Even among ones that have supposedly highest quality public education like Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc...

People are getting too stuck on US specific issues and missing that this is a pretty global problem.

I think it depends on what counts as doing nothing. Every time I cut my hair, I sit in a chair for ~30minutes silently without doing anything. My barber knows I don't like small talk so he just cuts my hair and that's it, there is no conversation.

I would say it is very enjoyable 30 minutes every time I do it. I don't think anyone would describe that kind of experience as hard to do?

I am surprised to see that there isn't a lot of information about performance regression testing.

Correctness testing is important but the way SQLLite is used, potential performance drops in specific code paths or specific type of queries could be really bad for apps that use it in critical paths.

Most important property of blockchains is verifiable transparency. That is a huge deal and yes, most financial and government systems would be much better for people if they were built with that type of verifiable transparency.

Decentralization is important but isn't as important. There are many successful chains that aren't decentralized at all and are quite useful.

Most top/real projects in blockchains aren't immutable. Pretty much everything is upgradable/changeable, including blockchains themselves.

Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems. They all contain various levels of trusting different entities.

It is the transparency and verifiability that is the key idea and most important improvement that blockchains bring.

That is sort of my point. I think "repeatable read" is a fools gold. You think you wont need to do locking, but it is too easy to make incorrect assumptions about what guarantees "repeatable read" provides and you can make very subtle mistakes which leads to rare, extremely hard to diagnose correctness issues.

Repeatable read type of setups also make it much easier to accidentally create much longer running transactions, and long running transactions/too many concurrent open transactions/etc can create really unexpected, very hard to resolve performance issues in the long run for any database.

Here is my issue with this. We are assuming you need to read a "consistent snapshot" in some type of real time application. Because if it isn't real time, you can always have those snapshot type of querying on "replicas", since that is a lot easier to implement correctly without sacrificing performance.

So assuming you are looking at reading "consistent snapshot" in the context of a real time transaction. If the data that you want to read as a "consistent snapshot" is small, locking + reading is good enough in most cases.

If the data to read is too large (i.e. query takes long time to execute, and pulls a lot of data), you are going to have ton of scaling issues if you are depending on something like "repeatable read". Long running transactions, long running queries, etc are bane of all the database scaling and performance.

So you really want to avoid that anyways, you would almost always be much better of changing your application logic to make sure you can have much shorter, time bounded transactions and queries and setup better application level consistency scheme. Otherwise you will at some point hit scaling/performance problems and they will be an absolute nightmare to fix.

I have been advocating for the longest time that "repeatable read" is just a bad idea. Even if implementations were perfect. Even when it works correctly in the Database, it is still very tricky to reason about when dealing with complex queries.

I think two isolation levels that make sense are either:

* read committed

* serializable

You either go all the way to have a serializable setup, where there are no surprises. OR, you go in read committed direction where it is obvious that if you want have a consistent view of the data within a transaction, you have to lock the rows before you start reading them.

Read committed is very similar to just regular multi-threaded code and its memory management, so most engineers can get a decent intuitive sense for it.

Serializable is so strict that it is pretty hard to make very unexpected mistakes.

Anything in-between is a no man's land. And anything less consistent than Read Committed is no longer really a database.

Funny coincidence, this is also a great way to get ChatGPT to produce correct solutions when it produces incorrect stuff on its first try.

If you have never seen a 10x engineer you either have never worked with truly talented people or you haven’t worked on actual hard problems.

There aren’t just 10 or 100x engineers , there are even infinityX engineers when you work on actual hard problems because some of those can only be solved by handful of people.

High availability + uptime is now necessary for any business no matter how small. If you need to run 24/7 available high uptime services you can’t avoid distributed systems one way or another. (Distributed systems vary by complexity of course but anything that has some failover type of mechanism is going to be a distributed system )

Also, industry is now transitioning where even small business might need geo distribution , not just for compute but also for data. That is going to make distributed systems even more complex even for the small guys.

Cloud services have made a lot of this stuff easier for average Joe but you can’t really avoid dealing with at least some fundamental concepts of distributed systems

I have been wondering for a while now, how does Forbes still maintain its brand?

It has now been at least two decades that it has had close to zero credibility, but somehow in general population it is maintaining its brand as a legit publication

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/decentralized-finance/st...

Ethereum was dominating TRON until very recently and this does have to do with huge increases in Gas prices on Ethereum

While I am no huge volume arbitrageour/market maker, I actually make a living running arbitrage systems and market making systems specifically for stablecoins.

I do consider to know what I am talking about, considering my systems make hefty profits and have no real exposure to volatile crypto assets (or even long term exposure to crypto in general, my profits are in real world dollars). This is why I know that USDT has actual real utility and it is currently best instrument in its category. USDT is indeed somewhat shady but it’s premise and utility are all sensible and it is hugely profitable for its founders. They have zero reasons or incentives to do suspect things that could risk its peg.

If something goes horribly wrong for USDT it is going to be due to incompetence and not because of some long term planned con.

Nah, most of USDT is on TRC20 because gas fees are way cheaper there and most of the exchanges support withdrawing USDT using TRC20.

So all arbitrageurs, market makers, etc, transfer USDT between different entities through TRC20 network. USDT on TRC20 started to increase only after Ethereum gas fees got ridiculously high and it became too expensive to use even for pretty high volume market makers.

People who have no idea how crypto markets work always get riled up by these tweets. Contrary to popular belief, there is generally huge demand spike for USDT when crypto market has flash crashes, not other way around.

More USDT got issued because there was opportunity to make 0.1-0.2% on each new USDT since demand for it was that high (i.e. people were paying real USD to buy USDT at a premium, imagine that).

USDT (and USDC) demand spikes during crypto crashes because people actually cash out to these instruments because they are so widely used and trusted by actual market players. People aren't cashing out of crypto ecosystem during most crashes, money actually stays in crypto networks.

I sometimes wonder how many of the commenters actually read the article itself. All the discussion in comments is about residential properties when in the article it clearly says:

" Another concern the report outlines is that the U.S. anti-money laundering regime is focused on residential purchases, when a significant portion of the cases GFI reviewed involve commercial real estate transactions. "

Or another:

“When you talk about residential real estate, the heart of it is identifying who is the beneficial owner, [because] if you find out who the beneficial owner is, it also tells you who the criminal is,” Kumar told ICIJ. “In a commercial real estate investment, you don’t have to own the majority stake to be a criminal. You can own 2% of a $500 million property, and you are [still] laundering millions through it.”

In case of human rights, what would more advanced mean other than one that is more fair to all humans of a particular society or country?

More advanced human rights just simply means more fair human rights, it has nothing to do with chronology or recency. There are plenty of examples of countries that had more advanced human rights in the past and regressed and made things worse over time.

Easy example: Russia had much better human rights for LGBT community not so long ago, however, it has regressed and gotten much worse over last 10-15 years.

Honestly curious, which other cultures have more advanced and fairer human rights setup compared to "western civilizations"?

McAfee could easily have had plenty of dirt on ton of powerful people. He would have given up all that info for reducing his sentence in the US.

It is not super crazy to think that there would be plenty of people who would have rather see him die vs get extradited to US.

Companies pay different amounts based on the location due to market price differences for software developers not because of differences in cost of living.

If you relocate to Zurich or Vancouver from SF, highly likely most companies that re-adjust salaries will decrease your salary even though cost of living is pretty high in both of those places.

While information is public on blockchains and everyone has same level of access to it, transaction execution is not democratized.

The premise of this whole reverse-exploit is that there are people who are extracting value by getting preferential treatment with their transaction execution by doing deals outside of the blockchain itself (which are hidden and not public by default).

That makes absolutely no sense. HFT and overall arbitrage games in traditional markets are way more wild and complex than all this.

Sandwich attack is more than just "front running". It is both "front running" and "back running" combined.

In the list of: "practical suggestions" in the article, they talk about literally everything except for weight-loss and getting in shape.

Weight loss and proper exercise will probably deliver 99% of the improvements for 99% of the people. Stressing about heat, radiation, micro plastics, or other random stuff seems like extra stress for not that much benefit.

Most people in Western world are either out of shape, or straight up obese. It makes sense that, that will have huge negative effects on fertility.

There seem to be quite a lot of misunderstandings in this post. Not sure how familiar author really is with inner workings of crypto markets.

First thing first, is Tether sketchy? Yeah, pretty sketchy. But not for the reasons provided in the article.

USDT is the most traded asset against other crypto because it is the easiest vehicle to use for all sorts of arbitrage. USDT is available to trade with on every non-US exchange and it is the easiest asset to move around. As overall market size increases, it makes sense that demand for USDT is increasing because it is used in most of the trading/arbitraging/etc...

When looking for highest USDT/USD trading volume, it isn't Kraken that you should be looking at, but Curve. Curve is a DEX that does largest amounts of stable coin trading volume. Curve also has incredible liquidity depth. Right now, you can go there and exchange: 10 million USDT to 9.99 million USDC in a single transaction. USDC can be cashed out for USD very easily and is regulated not just by regular US regulators but also NY financial department too, which is the most aggressive regulator to ever exist probably. If you wanted to, you would be able to cash out billions of USDT to other NY regulated stable coins in a single day.

While USDT is certainly very sketchy, it is the dominant market player specifically because of its sketchiness (and due to it being the first one). USDT's independence from US regulators is a huge plus for most of the major non-US crypto players. Those players would be more worried about holding USD (or USDC) directly, because they are more worried about US government freezing their funds, rather than Tether going insolvent.

I think you are few years behind from current state of the ecosystem. You can easily go from Eth -> renBTC (on Ethereum) -> BTC (on Bitcoin chain). None of those steps require KYC/AML or any kind of registration. You can move 100s of millions of dollars that way with very minimal slippage or fees.

It is very easy these days to go between Eth <-> BTC without any KYC/AML.