Just so you understand me, I have basically zero expectation that anyone is going to choose "my favorite blockchain" for their next big project and send the price soaring. It's just not going to happen.
With that out of the way, what stops the government from implementing their own CBDC and saying "tax revenues SHALL be paid downstream via the US-CBDC Token" and requiring approved vendors to implement it for their US-Gov Receivables? This seems very likely to happen. I would actually bet on it.
You're telling me on one hand, the problem is solved (example TLS) and on the other hand, I need to be realistic about my expectations, since it doesn't solve the whole problem... which seems to indicate to me that your solution is actually not solving the problem you expected me to have, which is there is no effective or continuous transparency about how much money our institutions have in-flight and where it's going or gone, and there is no sponsored route for institutions to "opt in" to such transparency and actually enforce it permanently.
That's what the blockchain is for.
What's un-fixably wrong with the blockchain solution exactly? I fully expect this US-CBDC is going to look nothing like I wanted my blockchain to look (it won't be in any way decentralized at all, it will have some government-sponsored "oracles" instead of user-sponsored nodes, so that it will be a blockchain in name and in function, but you won't be able to mine it, and it won't be "ours" – it might actually go on Ethereum, but I doubt it will and I definitely won't hold my breath. It will probably be super green for the environment, whatever it is.)
So how can you simultaneously believe this is a solved problem, which can't be solved, and yet already has been solved by Blockchain (but we don't need it?)
Don't you want some verifiable continuity in those books?
How do you guarantee that continuity breaches are easy to spot when they're "books" and you can publish as many of them as you want, or skip one if it turns out we don't want transparency somewhere because of "national security"?
This argument always seems to start with "there is no application for blockchain" and then moves the goal post to "that application doesn't NEED a blockchain" when we didn't even want ONLY that one application, we came for the whole package.
Do you really trust the government to publish accurate data if there is no transparent mechanism to keep them accountable for their accuracy? What is your alternative proposed mechanism for ensuring that the books are not cooked? (Is it another law, this time that says "books SHALL be balanced" and links to the RFC that provides specific definitions for modal verbs like MUST, SHALL, MAY, COULD?)
We certainly COULD invent another system that all tax money passes through, which ties out and all tax revenue is required to pass through, but how far will you stretch the spec in the opposite direction just to make sure that we didn't use "blockchain" which I'm assuming you consider as "scam tech" and you are apparently convinced that we don't need?
We're not talking about tax evasion. If you don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets, then banks have all sorts of fees that they ding you for just like the phone company when you travel, and they won't waive them as they have no incentive to keep your business. Folks with lots of money who track every penny are often unaware of the landscape for these fees, because banks actually do have an incentive to keep your business and they do waive them without even asking.
If you think there's something illicit about seeking to pay the least in fees and with the broadest reach, or if you think that paying fees to every company who comes along that gets to play middle-man is exactly the same as paying your fair share in taxes then I'm not sure what I can do to dissuade you of this notion.
ETH is a public ledger. If you publish your address and put your own name on it, any transfers to or from that address will be associated with your public name. This is not something that can be solved.
At least not in ETH itself; even privacy coins like ZEC may have a way to make your identity public and make your history transparent – and it works as designed when you do this, your transactions are public. (In this sense, neither does using a mixer really help at all. It would just show that you've received some money and sent it to a mixer as yourself, if the mixer is also a public known entity.)
I suppose one way to solve this, is to tell people to look up your ENS name, and then sign a message and share it with them – to present them securely with an address that they can use and verify that it belongs to you, only that it won't be tied to your original identity, except by that message (which you'd have to trust them not to share as well.)
> But many (most?) people don't suffer criticism well in my experience - and this seems to be especially true of the people who are most worthy of being criticized.
This is definitely a cultural thing, I brought this up with my team recently, the concept of "negative feedback" and got two different reactions – my feedback to the team was about how we give negative feedback, and nobody at all agreed with that phrasing LOL
Either some people who heard what I said and thought, surely this means when you have done something wrong, and it's not actually negative feedback, but corrective feedback so that you know how to do that thing right in the future.
And the other reaction was, "negative feedback, positive feedback" no such thing it is all just feedback, but watch out for positive feedback because all of it is probably fake, and nobody is fooled by that "compliment sandwich" BS.
I don't think this is a problem for exit interviews, at least not exclusively; the point is that people are either receptive to feedback or they aren't. You can try to candy coat it, but if there's any chance that being direct is going to make the feedback more likely to land, I personally think I prefer the direct approach.
(Then again, I never notice compliment sandwiches, so maybe they work on me.)
The Chetty study says it's not just the home life, it's the whole neighborhood. And whether the majority of families in the area are single-parent homes or not.
The triangle says Confidentiality, Availability, Integrity.
While your concerns are 100% valid, we need to remember too that setting up access in restricted ways and inviting users to understand the protection and remove the correct barriers, or implement the concerns necessary to interact with those for themselves, always runs the risk that some users will find your protections cumbersome and instead find a (totally incorrect) way to baffle them, or otherwise even route around them entirely mooting any efforts to secure a platform.
And every time I hear this played out in conversation, the answer is "that's on them!" But it's clearly a balancing act, it's a trade off; tautologically, when you make the service less accessible then... it is, well, ... made less accessible.
Besides facilitation of the secure access also sales conversion ratios will depend on that accessibility. The crux of your argument stands, the defaults are too open, and we need to do more to ensure that naive users aren't handed a loaded gun to aim at their own feet.
I've been in a couple of interesting discussions about Linux memory management lately that enlightened me somewhat, and I won't claim to be an expert now, but I've been around the low-memory block enough to understand now that, there's no simple right answer to the question of "Do you have swap?"
"The Linux kernel has overcommit baked into the fiber of its being." I've begun to understand that this idea is so deeply engrained in the kernel that in a multi-tenant or desktop workstation, you simply can't extract it back out and "just provide enough RAM," unless you know the performance characteristics and you really mean it when you say "that should be enough RAM." If you don't have any swap and the kernel starts to run out of memory, it's going to start evicting whatever pages it can back to disk.
(Wait, pages back to disk? I told you I didn't have swap) Yes – the linux kernel can page things back to disk even if you don't have swap, remember all of the binaries you're running have originally come from that disk, and the kernel knows it doesn't strictly need to have them in memory until they are volatile, or you tried to read those pages again.
Having some swap gives the kernel something else to evict, so have a healthy amount of swap and Linux will find the occasion to use it for the least frequently used pages that are not already on disk. This will improve your "nearly out of memory" performance.
The second worst thing that you can do is put your swap on fast SSD or NVMe, and it's not why you think. The kernel is making decisions based on a heuristic which is complicated and well-documented, but inscrutable. If the solid disk is 50x faster than the spinning disk that the swap was originally designed to use, then swapping will cost less overall and the heuristic will lean on it as a strategy to keep the OOM killer away even more often. You may find your cache recycle rates going through the roof because things can be paged out to disk and re-loaded faster than should be possible. I don't fully understand this part, but I suspect the answer is "try to use Swap less, and be aware of when you are using it."
The kernel does really not want to kill off your processes, and it has more opportunities than ever to ensure it keeps too many balls in the air when you have asked it to do so. So, find a way to stay ahead of the kernel and know better. If you have a dock widget that tells when you are going above 50% swap usage, you can close some tabs before it gets to be an unrecoverable situation. It's a mystery to me why modern computers don't come with disk activity lights, as this problem we didn't need dock widgets to solve 20 years ago when literally every computer came equipped with one.
The best advice is to have enough RAM for whatever you're doing, and at 32GB "I think you've had enough." At any rate the one suggestion that I could give is, if you anticipate running out of memory (ever, and it looks like you still do), then you should be sure to have a healthy amount of swap, to me that's probably at least 5 or 6GB but YMMV.
But, 32GB for a desktop workstation really ought to be enough IMHO, so try to find a way that you don't run out? If you're eating all that memory up with VMs, try a lighter weight solution for your ephemeral workloads like footloose, which behaves like a VM in the ways you generally tend to want for your dev workloads, (like for example, it can run systemd like your deploy target most likely does, if you're using VMs to match the deploy target). Footloose doesn't impose the "VM's" whole footprint upfront due to actually being a container, so when you run out of memory it will be because your application workloads used too much, not because your virtual machine manager has grabbed much more than it needed.
When I have multi-tenant shared servers that are regularly experiencing low memory conditions, that's now one of the first things that I turn off. I set sysctl vm.oom_dump_tasks=0 and vm.oom_kill_allocating_task=1, because without those and a comfortable amount of swap, I've found the likelihood that a rogue process uses up all the memory and the system becomes completely unrecoverable without power cycling, seemingly goes way up.
The way that the score is calculated, as I understand it, the processes with large memory footprints that are not particularly long-running, and especially not owned by root, are the most likely to be killed. My shared servers are running unicorn for Rails apps, so they almost all look the same under that lens.
I want the process with the runaway memory usage to be killed, so that person becomes aware of the problem when they find their app is down. (There are many better ways to solve this, but in our current system design, there's nothing to tell us that a service is down, so killing some other disused service means it's down until some user comes along and is impacted.) It seems like killing the process that made the last allocation is the most likely way to get this behavior I'm looking for, where the failures are noticed right away.
But I'm not convinced I've fixed anything, even if the behavior characteristics seem better, and I haven't had any servers going rogue and killing themselves lately, I am not the sysadmin, I'm pretty sure the sysadmin just comes and makes the machine over-provisioned so this doesn't happen again, which seems to be the best advice out there. And as I've learned from the discussion around this article, the fact of having a fast SSD on which paging stuff out and expiring it from the swap, all happens fast enough to look almost as memory, almost completely neuters the OOM anyway.
Our whole situation is wrong, don't even get me started; I'd like to solve this with containers, where we can set a policy that says "all containers must have memory request and limit" and thanks to cgroups, this problem never comes back.
This reminds me of the article about the OneDrive team being allowed to introduce ads into Explorer because they don't care at all about the experience of using Windows and they just want more OneDrive users.
(Supporting documentation of the position "why wouldn't they want more OneDrive users"...)
I am not upset. The Urbit folks have hit the repos with renewed vigor, and more people are talking Urbit on Twitter this week than in the 10-20 prior weeks combined. If you're pleased with the outcome too, then we're both glad.
To what ends would you change his mind on this issue? For Internet points, or for a greater good? I don't begrudge anyone with a religious devotion to the other view in this particular matter, if only because we have "known" wrong facts before, based on evidence that appeared to be sound and was considered to be incontrovertible at the time. And even true facts based on sound evidence are not always absolute, or unalterable. You just want it on record, or what?
I am talking about SK, who has never attended strangeloop and admits he did not have any plans to go this year either, who was literally shouting "no platform for fascists" from his twitter account in the immediate time prior to the publicizing of the news of un-invitation.
That's what it means. Not just him, of course, but por ejemplo, and since you asked. If we ever do see Curtis invited to speak at any more conferences, I think we can also expect a repeat performance from the internet mobs.
It's important to consider the audience of this blog post.
Many of the readers may in fact be white nationalists looking to Moldbug for justification for their ideals, and I'd speculate the post is written how it is because it's just not helpful to tell them their concerns are flat-out invalid.
I am not here to defend this position, I am simply here to say I find it to be something other than indefensible.
I can live with his discomfort too (tbh), but the fact remains a lot of people are saying "Urbit is finished as a project after this" and they may be right; but even if Yarvin is a huge racist and deserves to be no-platformed (which, at least to my satisfaction, is not established), Urbit is now bigger than him, and it has been for near two years.
There are other contributors and they are tangibly harmed by this action, now and in the future. I think they will get over it. But I would guesstimate that overwhelmingly most of them are not interested in Moldbug or his politics, and they (we?) are also casualties of this shitstorm.
With that out of the way, what stops the government from implementing their own CBDC and saying "tax revenues SHALL be paid downstream via the US-CBDC Token" and requiring approved vendors to implement it for their US-Gov Receivables? This seems very likely to happen. I would actually bet on it.
You're telling me on one hand, the problem is solved (example TLS) and on the other hand, I need to be realistic about my expectations, since it doesn't solve the whole problem... which seems to indicate to me that your solution is actually not solving the problem you expected me to have, which is there is no effective or continuous transparency about how much money our institutions have in-flight and where it's going or gone, and there is no sponsored route for institutions to "opt in" to such transparency and actually enforce it permanently.
That's what the blockchain is for.
What's un-fixably wrong with the blockchain solution exactly? I fully expect this US-CBDC is going to look nothing like I wanted my blockchain to look (it won't be in any way decentralized at all, it will have some government-sponsored "oracles" instead of user-sponsored nodes, so that it will be a blockchain in name and in function, but you won't be able to mine it, and it won't be "ours" – it might actually go on Ethereum, but I doubt it will and I definitely won't hold my breath. It will probably be super green for the environment, whatever it is.)
So how can you simultaneously believe this is a solved problem, which can't be solved, and yet already has been solved by Blockchain (but we don't need it?)