You assume that we're dealing with a rational person who has all their senses intact.
The deal would likely take months for the world to see if it's successful. He can get nominated next year if he keeps his own house peaceful too, else he should forget about a rational nomination + award of the Prize.
You're not dealing with anyone. There's a chap in the white house you don't like, and you want to have a pre-emptive go at him. Either he doesn't say anything, in which case you forget you said this. Or he is upset, in which case you feel justified in this. Or he's happy for the winner, in which case you feel like if he mentions it at all he must be upset.
If there's no way for you to change your stance based on any outcome, then it's pointless to say.
> I am actually dealing with a person though, and have set out a falsifiable case.
As have they? We have many tests for determining whether or not a given person's senses are or not intact.
> Same, but it's also true for anyone else.
Note I said show. If you happen to live in a world where you feel you've been devoid of such empathy then I feel for you, but such an environment of narcissism is hardly representative.
My cheat code for 100 kWH is an EV that supports V2H. It's becoming supported in more cars, so I want to buy an EV as my next car. I don't anticipate battery savings and new tech reaching me faster than replacing my aging car with an EV, hence this path.
I'm in South Africa if relevant, and range anxiety is being alleviated by competition in the vehicle charging space, and municipal grid charging still comes to about 70% cheaper than fuel.
I was initially going to reply to someone, but maybe this is useful as its own parent.
In my finance experience, the answer to the "why blockchain" question is settlement. Every banking system (local, international) has a settlement process.
Settlement is where bank counterparties have to tally up who owes whom, and pay each other. That process still takes time internationally, and is complex because of the parties involved.
A more concrete example (I've audited interbank settlements for a local bank in my country):
When I buy something from Amazon as a crossborder transaction with my Visa, my bank and the merchant/bank that Amazon use enter into a counterparty obligation, where in a direct way they'd have to pay each other, incl moving funds between countries.
If these 2 banks are the only banks in the world, they can both tally up the transfer of funds to each other, and then pay each other the difference. That'd still take time, right?
Now, we have hundreds of counterparties, using different systems, Visa, MasterCard, Amex, local clearing houses for EFTs, etc. There's also merchants like Stripe who'll be doing the processing, central banks who also ultimately settle currencies among each other.
They all have to wait for proof of funds clearing at some level.
If I'm doing an international transfer to my friend, their bank won't want to just credit their account instantly because the time it'll take for them to receive settlement of those funds isn't instant. Else they're going to pay the cost of a deposit that isn't there (let's assume my friend earns interest on positive balances).
The process is that the banks have to recon each clearing house's balance, aggregate that to a list of values like:
* Amex: owes us R200m
* Visa: pay them R300m
* Clearing house: etc.
Typically the bank's treasury department then effects those transfers. Don't know about other banks, but the bank I audited, it was done by a person daily, their responsibilities are to ensure those settlement aggregates are received/paid, and to resolve differences.
Beneath this person, at that bank, was a team of people who did recons all day. This was in 2012, so hopefully things changed, but I know that team still exists.
Once settlement's taken place, there's another team that verifies international settlements and then approves transfers to my local account. As a data point, it used to take me ~7 days to receive my salary from a US employer while in South Africa.
With crypto, my experience has been that settlement gets delayed, virtualised and distributed because you have a single layer (or still fewer layers across chains).
You send me USDC from wherever, we already don't involve:
* Payment processors like Visa
* Central banks as no balance of payments processes are affected
* Banks who need to reconcile cross-payments and settle them
Instead, if we're using an exchange (if you're using a local exchange), the funds arrive in the exchange's wallet shortly. The exchange has a constant flow of users buying and selling their local currency. They're in charge of settlement between their wallets and bank accounts.
I'll sell my USDC into my local currency ZAR, and if I withdraw it, the exchange keeps ZAR in local banks, and they send me that money immediately. My crypto salary would be in my bank as ZAR in 30-60 minutes.
Now, I said that crypto delays settlement. My exchange will eventually run out of fiat currency, or need to rebalance. They'll trade some other counterparty exchange, and settle that transaction through SWIFT/equivalent. That settlement will take the 5-7 day process. They just delayed it for their client.
I said it's virtualised because they've skipped the whole process of moving net flows and relied on a central entity, the blockchain, to do that. Ultimately it's a faster process than that backoffice of the bank.
And distributed. Every exchange or remitter has now become their own micro clearing house, and they participate in the banking system by earning their own fees, running their own process.
They only need to interact with each other at higher levels if they need to convert their USDC to US dollars. Interestingly that process happens at one place, but as long as cash and tokens move bidirectionally, the process can get relayed to the point where only a few US banks need to deal with the issuer of USDC.
I would consider it a deferred tax. You pay iff you are caught by the tax man with interest (and a potential bonus of a tax free holiday in a state sponsored facility). Better arrangements may be available if you are rich enough so you can get experts to arrange your taxes being legally deferred effectively after you died.
It’s another wrinkle GP didn’t get to. If you are paid, how to launder the money? Presumably you’d get a shiesty lawyer to buy you a nail salon ala breaking bad.
There's going to be a lot of undoing actions that were taken because of an old bully who thinks the world is a celebrity game show.
Surely tariffs for 3 more years are less damaging than buying a sinking ship?
South African right wing farmers sold a story of a genocide and reverse racism, now they wish losing business because their exports are more expensive from the very tariffs that are a negotiation tactic to get their government to abolish or repel sine laws.
I'd imagine semantic versioning to be more subjective with a language that relies on a social contract, because if a user chooses to use those private fields, a minor update or patch could break their code.
It does feel regressive to me. I've seen people easily reach for underscored fields in Python. We can discourage them if the code is reviewed, but then again there's also people who write everything without underscores.
How about when you have to communicate with people?
I had a terrible handwriting as a child at school, and I liked how the girls' handwriting was often very neat, so one year I decided to reteach myself how to write.
My handwriting became neater, but much slower. I never recovered the speed, so this bit me in university.
I used to joke that I never finish exams, so I make sure that everything I write is correct. I'd always do better than people who finished the whole exam.
I was introduced to computers late in life, at 16 in the early 2000s.
When I got to university, typing was a struggle. One day I saw someone typing fast. I decided to learn.
I think for me, the biggest benefit is mostly when writing long messages, more than typing. Having most conversations async at work means fewer pauses between reading and replying.
It also sometimes looks silly watching someone play hide and seek with their keyboard, because I've met people who punch in a few jets, then go hunting for others as if they've moved position.
I speculate that it's because the MSSQL tools have been maintained as part of Azure Data Studio, and were in better shape.
ADS is being sunset, and I was surprised when trying to install the Postgres extension on VS Code to find that it had its last meaningful contribution 6 years ago [0]. It couldn't work on newer VS Code versions.
I use ADS with both Postgres and MSSQL, prior to this announcement, I kept using ADS because there was nothing to migrate to.
You’re right—the old PostgreSQL extension was outdated. The team recently forked our modern MSSQL extension (I’m the Lead PM) to build a new one for PostgreSQL. It’s a fresh start, built on the same foundation we’re actively improving.
We’re still working on bringing over some Azure Data Studio features to the VS Code extension, especially around import/export (like flat file and DACPAC). I’d love to hear what else you think is missing.
They built the postgres plugin in a way that nobody could usefully contribute to unless they worked at msft - like the rest of ADS the level of control they tried to maintain meant nobody wanted to work on it.
That is seemingly true of a bunch of tools. I am using an official Microsoft Python library - the repo is public on GitHub, but all of the CI or other backend integration is behind the Microsoft curtain, so it is impossible for the public to actually participate. The cherry on top is that the team that used to support the tool was impacted, so now nobody can maintain the thing.
The SQL Server driver for Django. Originally maintained by someone from Nebraska, Microsoft then took ownership of the project (now lives under the Microsoft GH organization). The last commit was 11 months ago. Has not supported a current release of Django for over a year now. There are almost certainly security implications for sticking on the now deprecated Django 5.0. The issues are begging for anyone at Microsoft to do something. Several pull requests sitting there with the ostensibly required updates to make it compatible with the latest Django LTS.
You can find workarounds, but it is an awful situation. Now the community is probably going to have to re-fork the library back to the public for maintenance.
I am clearly not a bean counter, but if Microsoft wants its database to win against the free options, they could do their best to ensure popular libraries can seamlessly connect.
Microsoft also loves to sideline some author so some PM can say "look at this OSS project we now control!!!!" and then add controls and processes that nobody gets to even know about except for MSFT and then weird, inevitably a few years later its just a disaster area.
Yes, I've generated crypto wallet vanity keys on GPUs (OpenCL) and I'd say it's about 10-20x faster than a CPU depending on which kind of key and how the code's written.
The deal would likely take months for the world to see if it's successful. He can get nominated next year if he keeps his own house peaceful too, else he should forget about a rational nomination + award of the Prize.
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