sparkie

43 ms·

361.
by sparkie 4y ago
Kernel is very interesting. It has fexpr-like combiners (operatives) which implicitly receive a reference to the dynamic environment of their caller. The environments are first-class and modelled as a DAG, with the local bindings in the roo
362.
by sparkie 4y ago
A really nice thing about this is there exists a continuous space-filling curve over a tetrahedron[1] where the end connects back to the start, like a Moore curve for squares. There's a clever way to use this curve to calculate the sur
363.
by sparkie 4y ago
The author, being an obvious Star Trek fan, should be asking "What can we do as a species to prevent ourselves becoming the Borg?" He might arrive at an alternative conclusion.
364.
by sparkie 4y ago
"Human" isn't a legal term, and it pre-dates modern laws entirely. It simply refers to a member of the homo species. And who determines whether or not the unborn have rights? Rights are given by god, not some legislature.
365.
by sparkie 4y ago
Pay fines to who? What about the human rights of the unborn babies?
366.
by sparkie 4y ago
Market cap is USD_price * Units_in_circulation. As Tether is supposed to be pegged to the US dollar price, the drop in market cap is a reduction in the # of units in circulation. People are exchanging Tether back for USD equivalents. Each t
367.
by sparkie 4y ago
Yes, money is a technology which allows you to determine the exchange rate of commodities, but money itself is also a commodity and is also subject to the forces of supply and demand. Big increases in the supply of money cause it to decline
368.
by sparkie 4y ago
All these money creating schemes highlight the need for a kind of money which nobody can create. I wonder if anybody has come up with a solution to this yet?
369.
by sparkie 4y ago
You can still somewhat control evaluation with quote and/or list.
370.
by sparkie 4y ago
I play https://taximanli.github.io/kotobade-asobou/ and https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ daily.
371.
by sparkie 4y ago
Some others have already countered the letter on that point, but it's very easy to bury your head in the sand if you are not directly affected (yet!). https://www.financialinclusion.tech/
372.
by sparkie 4y ago
Mail-in voting is substantially different to voting in person at a voting station, and has a much larger attack surface. It should be absolutely minimized or potentially even eliminated or replaced with something more secure. Also, some sta
373.
by sparkie 4y ago
IMO, this is worse than paper votes, because there is a central point of failure - the voting pool manager. The voting pool manager can accept an arbitrary number of public keys from Sybil, who may vote as many times as she chooses. In a pa
374.
by sparkie 4y ago
> I agree that they don't need decentralization, but I'm wondering if the proposed protocols are the superior choice regardless, because of their effectiveness and ready for production-ness. The control over the smart contracts
375.
by sparkie 4y ago
A CBDC does not need decentralization, and can be implemented using a side-chain similar to Liquid (without the federation). Of course, you probably don't want to leave control of the sidechain in the hands of one person or party, else
376.
by sparkie 4y ago
I've wondered why the VList does not have its own article, nor does RAOTS (cited by Bagwell in his VList paper), which is definitely noteworthy. Instead both are limited to one-sentence descriptions in the Dynamic Arrays page. [ https:
377.
by sparkie 5y ago
Not all energy is equal. Consider gas flaring in remote areas, which companies like UpstreamDataInc are tackling. Transporting the energy is impractical. Normally it costs a company to flare gas, but is a necessity because the methane that
378.
by sparkie 5y ago
Correct, but miners are operating on the assumption of revenue now , and not 8 or 12 years down the line when transaction fees eventually exceed the block subsidy. By that time, the network effect will be so large that Wikimedia will not b
379.
by sparkie 5y ago
> My understanding is that bitcoins monetary policy can be changed through code, something a very small group is allowed to do in practice, even though theoretically it could be forked easily. Previous attempts at democratication of deci
380.
by sparkie 5y ago
Miners are not able to adjust the monetary policy of bitcoin, because attempting to do so causes a hard-fork, which would have them mining a chain which has no economic use in the real world. The chain which everybody is using in the real w
381.
by sparkie 5y ago
The majority of miner revenue is a subsidy given via inflation. It's effectively paid for by all bitcoin holders, and is decoupled from usage and fees. Fewer people transacting is going to make no difference. Miners aren't going t
382.
by sparkie 5y ago
> but with monetary policy now in the hand of a select few individuals instead of governments Bitcoin's monetary policy is fixed. It is in nobody's hand, but everybody who decides to run a validating node. Monetary policy is co
383.
by sparkie 5y ago
It is pointless virtue signalling because the primary argument for ending bitcoin donations is about energy usage, but the effect of ending bitcoin donations will have precisely zero impact on the amount of electricity used by the bitcoin
384.
by sparkie 5y ago
I think you misunderstand the Network part of the Lightning Network. It is not necessary for users to have a direct payment channel to Wikimedia in order to donate to them. They just need to have an active channel to anybody in the network
385.
by sparkie 5y ago
"Why Did Almost Nobody See Inflation Coming?" [ https://tinyurl.com/marfwtsm ] > "Forecasting inflation is a staple of macroeconomic modeling, yet virtually all economists’ predictions for the United States
386.
by sparkie 5y ago
Good question. It would depend on whether the newly employed are broadly working "bullshit" (unproductive) jobs, or whether they are adding to productivity. Inflation occurs when there is an increase in available money (or transie
387.
by sparkie 5y ago
I read it some time ago (~2011) and don't remember the details. At the time, I knew nothing of money and took most of the book at face value. However, when I later began studying Austrian economics, it became quite clear that Graeber&#
388.
by sparkie 5y ago
This is still a misunderstanding of Menger. Menger's argument is not that societies were organized around barter at all. He argues that where barter exists, people will quickly converge onto one or more forms of money for organizin
389.
by sparkie 5y ago
> The point is not if barter is used sometimes or if some people, in some circumstances, would start using cigarettes as money, but if that's the main history of money, specifically in the context of early states, as has been claime
390.
by sparkie 5y ago
> debunking the myth of barter coming before credit Not debunked at all. How do people even agree what things are worth in order to offer credit before there exists any prices? The issue with Graeber and others is they are looking for a

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