plywoodtrees

5 ms·

1.
by plywoodtrees 1y ago
Bitcoin is _not_ magically produced by the sun striking the ground. There are mild returns to scale in running large-scale mining operations and as a result mining power seems to actually be somewhat centralized under the control of a small
2.
by plywoodtrees 1y ago
You can just mint more coins and use them to pay off the debt, obvious! /s
3.
by plywoodtrees 3y ago
The "magical" thing they have is thousands and thousands of people thinking about how to improve the performance/efficiency/availability of their datacenters. And yes, they pay the costs of those people and take a good p
4.
by plywoodtrees 4y ago
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - Bertrand Russell Yes, perhaps this pattern of behavior is to
5.
by plywoodtrees 4y ago
> ... as if she was a brainwashed fool in a startup cult makes no sense. > First, she chose to work there. She was not forced to. She has agency; she could leave at any time. The whole point of the concept of brainwashing is that peop
6.
by plywoodtrees 4y ago
I'm at Stripe and my WLB is fine fwiw. It's busy, but my managers and team do not encourage overwork. It's 5pm Friday here and I'm about to shut down my work laptop until 8am Monday.
7.
by plywoodtrees 5y ago
Some countries have this for selected occupations that are commonly bursty. It could be good if it was generally available: https://www.ato.gov.au/business/primary-producers/in-detail/...
8.
by plywoodtrees 5y ago
That's a really question that I have considered before, and that deserves a long answer. One part of it is: As both a matter of norms and law, we expect and desire more public scrutiny of financial transactions than of speech. In parti
9.
by plywoodtrees 5y ago
"uncensorable" is a euphemism for "enables fraud, black markets, money laundering, and extortion". Although there are some cases under oppressive regimes where black markets may be a moral good, on the whole enabling fin
10.
by plywoodtrees 5y ago
Because of the cost of continuing to maintain software for that small fraction of the user base. Not only the core OS but the toolchain, and all their first party apps. And the difficulty of incentivizing and enabling third party developers
11.
by plywoodtrees 7y ago
The distinction between "gives people more freedom to conduct their business without state intervention" and "enables crime" seems very elusive. I can see an argument that enabling crime under oppressive regimes is moral
12.
by plywoodtrees 8y ago
> Caveat: if something’s “free,” you’re the product. Always great to see this opinion on free news sites.
13.
by plywoodtrees 8y ago
Sure, it's in some sense "an AWS competitor" but something like a billion times less efficient, measured by throughput, energy efficiency, or cost. So, in practice, no it's not.
14.
by plywoodtrees 8y ago
Resources and creativity are being drawn into crypto, that could be spent elsewhere, perhaps more usefully. Not to mention vast amount of electricity. A brute force exhaustive search of all possible technologies is not smart engineering.
15.
by plywoodtrees 8y ago
I'd love to hear what those use cases are, and what the fixable obstacles are.
16.
by plywoodtrees 8y ago
I smiled at your characterization. Although, more realistically, our archetype has done modestly well by working for the man, and has 100k-low millions in index funds and company stock, and some comfort with +/- 30% swings y/y. Bu
17.
by plywoodtrees 8y ago
A technical system which in practice cannot be reliably operated securely, and which is prone to no-recourse losses, is worse than alternatives.
18.
by plywoodtrees 8y ago
Yes, real mainstream use cases are a good measure of tech success. At least, I'd want to see some plausible early mainstream use and a path for it to broaden. It's very typical that spruikers of tech hype cycles focus on the amoun
19.
by plywoodtrees 10y ago
Sure, XML-RPC not the best protocol. Compared to others it's pretty simple, and the mess and number of edge cases is smaller than SSL or TCP/IP. If C isn't up to implementing an only slightly complicated network protocol, it
20.
by plywoodtrees 10y ago
Google internally-initiated successful products that come to mind: Cloud (2nd or 3rd in market, lots of revenue and growth), Play Store (also lots of revenue and growth), TPU chip, SDN, Photos, Chrome, ChromeOS. Google (vs Alphabet) often a
21.
by plywoodtrees 10y ago
Is the lack of reuse something to do with its evolution from QUIC as a loosely ordered UDP-based protocol?
22.
by plywoodtrees 11y ago
> The hardware requirements were stunning (280 GPUs and 1920 CPUs for the largest variant) Stunningly big, or stunningly small? The CPUs would cost around $65/hour on Google Cloud. I can't immediately find pricing for GPUs on e
23.
by plywoodtrees 12y ago
> My question is: Should we be happy about this? Or should we be sad? We should have a machine be sad about it for us!
24.
by plywoodtrees 12y ago
They're citing >>300,000 miles under automatic controls with zero accidents. That's probably better than the human average. (Small sample, I know, but still.)
25.
by plywoodtrees 13y ago
Sucking cock
26.
by plywoodtrees 13y ago
Selling services to users through UbuntuOne was a key component of their strategy at the time it was announced. Source http://thevarguy.com/ubuntu/rethinking-canonical039s-ubuntu-... , various statements by Mark Shuttle
27.
by plywoodtrees 13y ago
There is a File/Save and File/Open dialog much like people will be used to. You can use that to save and attach files.
28.
by plywoodtrees 13y ago
One might even say it's "traditional".
29.
by plywoodtrees 13y ago
Exactly. If Fleming had not discovered Penicillin, somebody else would have sooner or later. But it was still worth doing.
30.
by plywoodtrees 13y ago
Wow, at least round off the corners!

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