knuthsat

29 ms·

271.
by knuthsat 6y ago
The environmental impact of Bitcoin, given it's current electricity usage is magnitudes less than what countries do with that same amount of electricity. Bitcoin is a non-issue. edit: http://www.withouthotair.com/ I&#x
272.
by knuthsat 6y ago
But other forms of payment are also non-issue. It's like trying to optimize my internet usage. Instead of having 200Mbit downlink active all the time (because I'm streaming random bits), I'll reduce it to 2Mbit because of ene
273.
by knuthsat 6y ago
This article is just bad. Bitcoin's dirty baggage is magnitudes less than anything else companies and countries do to this world through not just air pollution but environment destruction, water pollution etc. I'll keep arguing ab
274.
by knuthsat 6y ago
I'm not sure where I said what you believe I think. My opinion is that using more electricity than Argentina is not as dramatic as the comments make it out. Bitcoin is never going to be as destructive to the environment as these countr
275.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Using fossil fuels for electricity is very nice. Imagine all the forests that stayed intact in remote places of the world that just started burning oil.
276.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Cool, I guess this fast function in our code that is measured in ms is of same badness as this slow function in our code that is measured in days. Given that we are not interested in what these functions do, my choice would be to optimize t
277.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Yet the amount of environmental destruction and pollution done by Argentina to support their massive livestock industry is something Bitcoin will never achieve.
278.
by knuthsat 6y ago
That's US where everyone drives everywhere. Now we do the same for Europe or China and the effect on the whole world ends up much less.
279.
by knuthsat 6y ago
The amount of environmental destruction and pollution done by the farming industry or similarly land invasive industries is incomparable to bitcoin. It has an effect on so much of the ecosystem that it's just silly to put Bitcoin in an
280.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Adjusted for your own seat, assuming a full plane. You can read about the calculation in the linked book. http://www.withouthotair.com/c5/page_35.shtml
281.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Absolutely. In the large scale of things optimizing already efficient fossil fuel machines does not bring much savings compared to optimizing heating and cooling and buildings that are using that. Not to mention the enormous amounts of ener
282.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Our biggest environmental footprints as individuals are heating and cooling. Having an electric car is nothing compared to it. Take one intercontinental flight and again, having a fossil fuel car for a year does not exceed the emissions of
283.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Whenever I encounter arbitrary precision libraries I want to try them out on extended Dudeney's digital century puzzle. This is from TAOCP 4A part 1: > Dudeney's Digital Century puzzle.) There are many curious ways to obtain th
284.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Yes, but saying that the core tenet was lost is a bit dramatic. The guys working on it were still interested in other aspects of cryptocurrencies that bitcoin does not implement. Bulletproofs coming out in 2017 meant that Monero had ineffic
285.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Yeah, although a bunch of work on Monero is still a result of work from people that worked on Bitcoin. There's some independent research there but AFAIK Bitcoin people did not stop working on confidential transactions or fungiblity. Ju
286.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Was employee #1 (not at AMZN) and saw the origin story change in front of my eyes.
287.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Yep, the livestock industry is going to abuse this until it no longer works.
288.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Idiomatic says nothing about code design. Code design is far above what idiomatic means. You can still have dependencies where you shouldn't have them. Your services can still be designed without composability in mind.
289.
by knuthsat 6y ago
I have no idea why people with money want to change the world.
290.
by knuthsat 6y ago
You can create an OO mess in Go and Rust that is equivalent to this too. Dependency injection is a nice name for factory functions + dependency list + topological sort, but people still use it horribly, injecting dependencies everywhere, no
291.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Should have worded is as "lack in moral character"
292.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Well, if a law was put I'd definitely include all of the public servants in executive positions, which includes congress, mayors and alike. It's going to be a much different crop of people wanting to work for the public, because e
293.
by knuthsat 6y ago
I have a problem with that. It shows moral corruption. It's not corruption in the legal sense but outlines the issue of why the pardons do not make sense. ex-POTUS is still an influential individual and is just profiting after the bind
294.
by knuthsat 6y ago
The fact that all a POTUS does after presidency is enrich oneself, it's quite clear where the motives are. The moment when POTUS is unable to profit off of his presidency is the moment where these things wouldn't happen. POTUS bec
295.
by knuthsat 6y ago
A lot of stuff can succeed me. I'd prefer to have a free choice in what to do with my time than to restrict it heavily with a child. I know what my parents sacrificed having me and my siblings. The world today is not build for nuclear
296.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Well, Bitcoin is a research project. Bitcoin to finally become cash equivalent needs to be untraceable, the transactions shouldn't have known inputs and outputs and energy efficient. AFAIK, a lot of people that worked on Bitcoin found
297.
by knuthsat 6y ago
I did say exactly that. Currently I want to spend time on my stuff and my partner's stuff. I do not want to pause that and spend all the time on my children. I'm enjoying life so much, the traveling, personal hobbies, that I do no
298.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Problem is that children suck up all the time. So I would pretty much wait until I want to spend time on children and not on my stuff or my partners stuff. I'd probably have children when I'm retired, whatever age that be.
299.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Coming from a language with phonemic orthography it's pretty easy to pronounce.
300.
by knuthsat 6y ago
Tools and stuff around the code will still not allow an effective environment. Code design is a huge bottle-neck. I've been a part of 10+ engineering teams that have all the right tools and stuff, everything around the code is really f

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