Ironically, I had to locate the X and close two video ad overlays in order to calm the screen enough to enjoy the article. And even then, the right part of my screen was flashing ads, and every few paragraphs an ad was shoehorned into the text.
And yeah, don't have adblock on my work PC which is probably why it's so insufferable.
Advertising the kind of industry that you'd really like to shove into a plywood submarine and set its bearings for the Titanic.
When I was a young kid in the early 1980s, my grandpa had a large book about Darwin's voyages and the Theory of Evolution. The book probably dated from the 1950s or 1960s and contained countless photos of fascinating creatures, reproduced with all the printing technology of the era.
Whenever we visited him, I would flip through the book and marvel at the creativity of nature.
These photos made me feel a little bit in the same way.
Tried it out on some REST response from a local test server.
And, well, as much as I applaud the effort, I also think that I'll stick to my text editor for browsing JSON data and to jq for extracting data from it.
My text editor because it's easy to perfom free text search and to fold sections, and that's all that I need to get an overview.
Jq because it's such a brilliantly sharp knife for carving out the exact data that out want. Say I had to iterate a JSON array of company departments, each with a nested array of employees, and collect everyone's email. A navigational tool doesn't help a whole lot but it's a jq one liner. Jq scales to large data structures in a way that no navigational tool would ever do.
Also, there is the security issue of pasting potentially sensitive data into a website.
> Cryptocurrencies were meant to put an end to such things
Yeah, well, Communism was meant to put an end to poverty and class injustice. Brexit was meant to restore glory to Britain. The Catholic Church was mean to put an end to vice. Things don't always do what they say on the tin.
As the Bible puts it: "For every tree is known by its own fruit".
Specifically, if the fruit seems consist of nothing but speculative bubbles and billion dollar frauds then that may be the true nature of the tree.
Did a my first paid software development pretty much exactly 30 years ago, specifically I was hired to port a word processor from the Amiga to the Commodore 64. So my experience is mostly related to the word of 8-bit home computers, already a dying world by then, and I wouldn't be able to tell how working in an office was like as a was still in school at the time and it was a side project.
Still, a few general observations about that particular corner and that particular time of software development:
- There were multiple successful 8-bit platforms, all of which were very different from each other. Different makes of CPU, different custom chips, different memory layout. You could be an expert in one and an absolute novice in others.
- The platforms were more constrained, by magnitudes. A very limited color palette, far fewer pixels, far less RAM, and far slower CPUs. For a semi-large project, it could even become a challenge to keep the source code in memory and still have room for the compiled machine code.
- On the upside, the platforms were also far more stable and predictable. A Commodore 64 that rolled out from the factory in 1982 would behave identically to one built five years later. Every C64 (at least on the same continent) would run code in exactly the same way.
One thing that followed from the scarcity and from the stability is there was an incentive to really get close to the metal, program in assembly language, and to get to know the quirks and tricks of the hardware. Fine tuning an tight loop of assembly code was a pleasure and one could not simply fall back on Moore's law.
It was a simpler world in the sense that you didn't have to check your code on a number of machines or your UI on a number of window sizes. If it worked on your machine, it could be assumed to work everywhere else.
Another thing that I remember is that there was more friction to obtaining information. The internet wasn't a thing yet but there were text files flowing around, copied from floppy to floppy, and you could order physical books from the library. But a lot of learning was just opening up other people's code in a mchine code monitor and trying to understand it.
Some of these things started to change with the Amiga platform, and once PCs took over it was another world, with a plethora of sound cards and graphics cards and different CPU speeds that people had to deal with.
Asbestos solved an actual problem, as did freon. Both also created larger problems and were eventually banned. We could have given them some more time, I guess. Maybe, if given another fifty years, the freon industry might have (waves hands) fixed its issues with the ozone layer. Or maybe not. That wasn’t the trajectory, anyway.
Back in 2022, we’re now looking at a technology that has not, for all its promises of a glorious future, has not produced anything but centralized Ponzi-as-a-Service platforms, a way for organized crime to move money, and smokestacks. At least asbestos and freon had some utility.
> Asbestos solved an actual problem, as did freon. Both also created larger problems and were eventually banned.
I'd argue there's a bit of false equivalence in this paragraph, but for sake of argument:
Leaded gasoline also solved an actual problem, and the industry innovated/evolved beyond that.
Facebook solved an actual problem, and created many more. I still recognize its value even if I refuse to use it myself.
I'm sure there are edge cases, but history is not generally on the side of those who have pre-emptively banned things before they come to fruition.
The problem I see with this current line of discussion is that most proponents of banning throw the baby out with the bathwater, and pretend this is all a single product called "crypto".
Banning "crypto" would be like banning insulation because of the issues with Asbestos.
In all fairness, I don’t think “crypto” should be banned as such. Partly because it’s a loose and descriptive term, unlike asbestos, which is well defined and tangible. So a blanket ban wouldn’t work.
And also because it’s not necessary; existing regulation will get us most of the way:
- if you are, in effect, selling a security, let this be regulated this like any other security
- if you are, in effect, running a bank, etc.
- if your coin X acts like an intermediary for transferring money to hostile jurisdiction Y, then regulate transfers to X like transfers to Y. Forbid these if necessary.
- if your manufacturing process is needlessly wasteful then forbid this manufacturing process (globally) under threat of forbidding your product
If you need to cross a border to fetch your hard currency (or equivalent amount of goods) then what is the value add of using crypto compared to, say, opening a bank account in Montevideo and making a bank transfer?
They have dollar-bill-sniffing dogs on the ferryboat to Montevideo, so being able to cross any border rather than one specific border is a pretty big win. But actually, lots of Venezuelan refugees right here in Argentina buy Bitcoin to send to their families back in Venezuela, or the families of other Venezuelan refugees who pay them, and all the black-market currency changers are trying to get into Bitcoin now. A lot of them are still confused about the difference between Bitcoin, Tether, and Binance, though.
I'm still kind of baffled here why Montevideo was brought up (not by you but above) on a thread regarding Paraguay. Montevideo is in Uruguay. The border between Paraguay and Argentina was used specifically because it is so porous and doesn't work well for sniffing dogs. Getting to Uruguay on the other hand would require a ferry or boat, or a swim. If I'm not mistaken.
You can get to Uruguay by bridges, too, but it takes a lot longer if you're coming from Buenos Aires or going to Montevideo, and you can't get there from Paraguay without crossing into Argentina or Brazil first. Montevideo was presumably brought up because Argentines bank in Uruguay, not Paraguay. Nobody banks in Paraguay.
I have availed my self of using a Paraguay bank. Seemed fine to me. I do not have a account there. They exchanged my USD for any peso I like just fine.
Is there a reason why no one banks in Paraguay? There is a dude standing by the bank with a shotgun waiting to blow the head off of any robber, I felt very safe there and their service was quite professional and honest. More so than the street exchangers. I wouldn't have hesitated to open an account there if I needed to.
The dude standing by the bank with a shotgun isn't going to accompany you even to your AirBnB, much less until you leave the country. He needs to be there to keep people from robbing the bank, but it's not his problem if someone follows you home from the bank and robs you there.
There may be other reasons. Here in Argentina 21 years ago the government confiscated all dollar-denominated bank deposits and replaced them 1-to-1 with pesos, which you weren't allowed to withdraw more than a few at a time, so you had to watch helplessly as your money lost 75% of its value overnight. If I had to guess which South American countries something like that would happen in next, I'd pick Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina again, in that order. But that's not because I have deep knowledge of Paraguayan politics, so I could be wrong.
I brought it up because it’s close to Buenos Aires and because I’m under the impression that Uruguay is a pretty well run place. I’m assuming there to already be a lot of connections, personal and trade, between the two metro areas. I’ve never been to either and anything beyond geography is guesswork on my part. Anyway, thanks for the clarifications :)
The presumption absolutely no one will trade you crypto in your own country and you can't just mail out or in cash somehow seems like a pretty steep one (particularly in Argentina where black market trade of USD and all array of other stuff is rampant); but you must surely see the different between having your cash stored in a private wallet vs a bank account with a country that quite likely has tax and other legal treaties with your own.
I can't imagine it would be a warm feeling for someone with tax liabilities in Argentina to have a white-market bank account in a friendly country nearby.
Also my girlfriend points out that possibly there's less financial surveillance in Paraguay, and if you travel to Uruguay everything is more expensive, whereas Paraguay is poor so everything is cheap. But still AFAIK nobody here banks in Paraguay because you get robbed there.
Sure, index funds are freeloading a bit in the sense that they don't allocate any resources to scrutinizing the prospecta of each individual company, they just assume that other market players have done they homework.
This would be a problem if every investment was passively managed but that's not the case and it will never be. If we ever came close to that, then actively managed funds would outperform the passively managed ones by large margins.
Exactly, those that are interested in the performance of a specific company will invest and effectively have the same proportion of power as if the passive investors didn't exist.
Skimmed most of it but still learned some useful stuff. Will keep it in my bookmarks.
Also, would suggest mentioning gitbash in the Windows section. You get it for free with git so it's easy to come by, even in corporate environments where obtaining permission to install software is hard. If combined with something like ConEmu, it's actually pretty nice.
And yeah, don't have adblock on my work PC which is probably why it's so insufferable.
Advertising the kind of industry that you'd really like to shove into a plywood submarine and set its bearings for the Titanic.