I agree with all this. However, even though I still use Macs for everything, it's been clear to me for a while that Apple 'Pro' users are not tech people. There is a big difference in keyboard necessity between a developer and any 'Pro' user. Key travel, actually having real keys, are all a big deal to devs.
I think Apple lost their function and form way a while ago. It's never coming back. The new Mac Pro is the latest example of this. I bought a 2018 MB Pro 13" last year and the touch bar is a waste of space in my mind. We see now that Apple is ditching the scissor keys, but regardless, their design decisions for a while have just been wanting to have something look cool instead of a balance of looking good and functioning great.
Driving, for me, is a massive exercise in being mindful. My goal, however, is not to mind the suffering of others but instead, to take those inputs, not associate with them, and let them go.
For instance, some driver doesn't want to get in the queue at the back, so they drive up and cut over in front of me or a car or two up. There are a lot of thoughts on that that could go through your mind. These range from "no fair" to "jerk" to other things.
But, I've come to realize the best way to deal with that is to detach. You can either not let the person in and then go down that range of thoughts/emotions (primarily negative) or just let them in and not dwell on it. Observe it (assuming it's not jeopardizing anyone's safety) and let it go.
This is a very simple exercise, but it has the potential to be carried on to larger experiences in life. I'm not here to judge if you don't think it is, I just know what makes sense to me. And this is not something I have come up with on my own. This and similar techniques have been highlighted in quite a few books I've read, people I've listened to at various events.
This for me is a much deeper discussion and I think completely personal to the experiencer. I tend to fall on the side of being mindful of yourself and the struggles/suffering of existence are of your own doing and choices (obviously, this is a simplistic statement, but to me true on a high level).
I've been listening/watching quite a bit of Naval Ravikant podcasts/videos. I think he has a lot of good wisdom to digest and he definitely covers this subject. I highly recommend anything of his you come across. https://nav.al
Yah, CW is a joke. He has TrueCrypt partitions from, supposedly, Satoshi that have all of Statoshi's millions of bitcoins on it/them. He cannot (yet) decrypt any of these, but his claims of being Satoshi will be realized when he can decrypt. See?! I do have the private keys! Never mind it's 10 years later.
Just thinking about that is ridiculous. CW is worth $500m and some change and that's not enough..?
As for bcash, don't forget about Ver. While I get where he's coming from with having so much time and money invested in btc and such, along with wanting to have a 'cash' type coin, it's just not reality. Bcash has never stood on the solid foundation that btc has. It can't. I don't disagree with the btc people that the btc blockchain is too slow (as is) to handle massive transactions. And that being the case AND also the fact that is has not been hacked in over a decade, you just have to concede that it is what it is. It's the worlds oldest and most stable blockchain and the value is not in small transactions, but hodl.
So, SV is a fraud, bcash is welcome to try its hand at massive block sizes, but will ultimate, just be a side show.
I keep going back and forth between POW and POS/DPOS... Some chains to think about in regards to their governance, txn volume and throughput: Tron, Eos, and Eth, and IOTA. (I personally, think Eth is already v1 tech..). These are the guys I'm watching through 2020.
I've waited for this for a few years.. Until I stopped caring last year. Alas, I'm underwhelmed. Mostly in the form factor.
I had an Intel beta machine from yonder. Apple sent everyone an iMac that year we had to send those back. I had that and a MacBook Pro for a few years until I got a 2009 Mac Pro. Had to retire that when OS X upgrades stopped working on it. I loved that machine and put it through its paces for many years.
In 2014 I got a trashcan Mac Pro and that's probably been the most beautiful Mac I've ever owned. I know a lot of people don't like it, but it's been quietly humming away on my desk for years. It takes up about a 7" x 7" corner of my desk. It's perfect. I love stuff that doesn't make a sound and gets out of my way.
The new form factor, I'm not into at all. It's great that it's expandable and powerful, but it just doesn't do it for me. I've been doing Mac and iOS development for so long now and thrown so much money at them that I think I'm just burned out. I mean, how much 'best ever', 'amazing', 'sensational', every year can you take? I no longer drool every time Ive speaks and the video for it had me yawning. I've seen it before, even though I haven't. Yah, no one else makes that design, I get it. But, I am now asking myself, so what?
It seems like they have been less 'pro' the past years and now they're extreme pro. I'm just average pro I guess. They didn't design this machine for me and that's ok. I'm just underwhelmed by everything Apple now.
"What's not affordable is spending most of your income on rent, and this is hardly a choice for most people right now."
Not a choice? Don't you enter into a rental agreement via choice? I've never met anyone who's said they were forced to rent some place.
I don't necessarily disagree with the housing shortage, but there's reasons for that. Look at state, local laws and nimby's that pass and influence local zoning restrictions. San Francisco is a perfect example of that process gone awry.
Want affordable rent? Then you can still choose not to live in one of the areas that is anti-housing.
No, you need to enforce the immigration laws in this case. Increasing the 'incentive' to use illegal immigrants is increasing the incentive to break the law. Typical thinking I suppose. Don't go after the people that break the law, let them break it and create another law to penalize them. This makes no sense to me. And don't say "they're doing it anyway" - that's bullshit. Fine these businesses and arrest the owners for that.
There is no need to tax the rich more even tho this is the penalty du jour. This will do nothing to fix any of this. People need to stop taxing the rich and work to getting rich themselves (taboo here on HN of course).
Your flipping burgers job or grocery bagging job or ditch digging job should not be a career. Because of the fact that those are not careers firstly, and secondly, because they will be automated away. You need to use that as a stepping stone to something better. It is not easy to get rich - it is a long road. But it is one that you should use to better yourself so you can achieve.
There is no incentive with universal income. None with welfare. Sure, let the government provide a minimum safety net, but (as I have learned the hard way) your family and close friends are the ones that should be helping you out. Not the state. Minimum wage is a state imposed artificial penalty pushed on businesses. As a business owner, costs are my enemy and while I offer to provide fair wages for those I employ, having the state impose an artificial cost make business harder. If it continues to get harder, it cannot be maintained.
So, if your goal is to put businesses out of business (who employs you then?), then min wage and tax increases along with cost increases will keep doing that. I'm not talking about mega corps, I'm talking about real businesses. More people need to start their own businesses to see how clear cut all this is. There's a reason companies flee states like California - because the costs to run a business there along with the high taxes make it a difficult place to live. And that's the truth. Just ask anyone who has left..
I never bought the right to repair cry. I'm a tinkerer - always have been - and an iPhone owner. I bought my phones and knew what I was getting into. I don't think I've ever thrown away any of my old 'unrepairable' tech - I've mostly passed it on to relatives, traded it in, or recycled it. There are all kinds of way to mitigate junk in the environment and you can always...... just not buy.
It's incredibly hard to build a successful product. Just look at the Pebble or other Kickstarter graveyard entries. I would never in my right mind tell Apple to build anything - if I could, I'd be richer than them. I know they have their reasons for designing things the way they do. As a consumer, I am thankful for amazing tech that pretty much works as expected. Telling them how to build their amazing products, which would just make them worse, is the pinnacle of narcissism.
First issue with the post: "Blockchain is also the driving force behind cryptocurrencies, allowing Bitcoin owners to purchase drugs on the internet without the hassle of showing their identity."
Let's see, there's this thing called _cash_ and you don't need an id to buy drugs with it as well. Weapons can be purchased easily with it. Hits can be put out on people with it. Basically, anything bad in the world anyone would want to do that requires a payment, can be done with cash. The biggest 'offender' in this - the US dollar.
Next: "Put another way, blockchain is a database—one that is never backed up, grows forever, and takes minutes or hours to update a record. Sounds amazing!"
Bullshit - in regard to backing up. Of course it doesn't need to be 'backed up'. It exists in its entirety across the globe, replicated on many thousands of machines, in many different countries. Hmmm, sounds like 'big replication' problem solved. (Marc Andreessen likes it anyway: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/)
The fact is, it is amazing because it's been running like this for over a decade now with NO HACKS, no data breaches, no hiding of anything based on this scandal or the next. No one company owns it. No one government owns it. And it's worth billions of dollars (meh). It does sound amazing to me.
"Blockchain should make your system more trustworthy, but it does the opposite. Blockchain pushes the burden of trust onto individuals adding transactions to the blockchain. This is how all distributed systems work. The burden of trust goes from a central entity to all participants. And this is the inherent problem with blockchain."
Snooze, bullshit... It is a FACT nowadays that the centralization of the internet has been bad for it. Even the inventor of it has come out against it. Putting trust in a third party is never a good idea in my mind. Strong encryption exists and it empowers the individual to USE IT. When I make a bitcoin transaction, I sign that transaction as valid. Me. I don't need a bank or a government or any other third party to make this happen. This is lost on many people, but having the freedom to transact securely and encrypt YOUR data is about as important of a concept as there can be nowadays. There are many government and corporate entities that do not want you to have this capability (I'm looking at you 'Senator' Feinstein..). You may have to trust Apple to provide 'secure' environments to run your/others apps, but they are not working in your interests and will change course as soon as it suits their profits.
Anyway, this is a stupid article, to be blunt. It's from someone who is rallying against the marketing of blockchain and instead of taking on those messages/issues/marketing directly, he falls into the same trap as the rest of the naysayers.
If you talk to a _real_ blockchain/crypto developer/advocate, they will probably tell you this: "if you want to make a immutable, open, distributed transactional database that isn't blindingly fast, then using a blockchain that has cryptographically signed transactions might be a good idea.". Ethereum has taken this a step further with smart contracts, which, have more or less worked.
But NO ONE I know or talk to on a day to day is saying use a blockchain for your app database needs. And anyone who does, does not know what they are talking about and should probably be fired from any development position they hold.
What is happening right now in this space is the smart people have their heads down and are cranking on the next generation of tech that everyone will be using in 5-10 years. The smart investors see this as well and are all positioning themselves as we speak. I personally stopped working on _legacy_ tech last year and am 100% exclusive on crypto and blockchain products.
I have already seen this movie before twice: the first episode was called the web, the second was called mobile. So, hate if you will but it won't change anything. The early adopter wave is at the end and we'll see more mass adoption in the coming years. Good luck!
TLDR; stupid article, known inaccuracies, known typical trolling content. Move along..
Oh yay, someone posted this! I’ve been a subscriber to the primitive technology channel for quite some time. The things this guy makes are truly awesome. I put his videos sometime for my kids because they’re actual worthwhile to talk to them about what he’s doing.
I often think of perception of time when I watch him work. Tens of thousands of years ago, when humans worked like this, their concept of time was completely different than ours. I’ve read comments by the guy that says some of these projects have taken many weeks. With our instant gratification culture, it’s good to reflect on his achievements and timescales.
I’ve also practiced making fire with hand drill and it’s hard. But when it works, it’s awesome. A primal connection to the past.
I recommend watching the video on how he makes lime. Really good stuff.
Even with technical higher-ups, you're not guaranteed a fair fight.
I've worked with Engineering VP's/CTO's that are pressured by deadlines and promise unrealistic features. The key element needed in this is a 'leader' that can push back and manage expectations.
I have a few buddies using a bot from Crypto Profit Bot (https://cryptoprofitbot.com) and they definitely make profits. Sorta varies though depending on the strategies used.
I played around with this late last year and was able to tune my bot to anywhere from 4% on up. Some trades were ridiculous with 20% or 30% when the bot caught the pumps. Of course, 4% means I was not scalping (a lot of people prefer just 1%-2% on trades) and was in it longer term; trades usually lasted days or longer.
I was with a bot group last year and there were guys that made well over $100k. But, that's all they did, they just had to babysit it and adjust the settings. Too labor intensive for me..
There is an add-on on CPB called Feeder which is pretty cool. It looks at the market and adjusts the settings of the bot it works with (Profit Trailer). It can get a bit complicated tho..
Anyway, this is still an interesting space. I turned my bots off in Feb when things started going south, but I'm thinking of starting them back up now that the market's recovering. I have this feeling that we're gonna beat last year, so now is probably a pretty good time.
Brave, huh? I guess I will give him some credit for owning up to this, sure. But his only repercussion from helping create this is 'guilt'. And from the looks of his wealth and new ventures, I don't think he wastes any time with his guilt.
This is the big picture and it most aligns with how I feel about this emerging space.
There's a problem with developers and cs people and that is that they are looking at one small spec - the blockchain data structure. From there, the work their way up through sensationalist headlines and shout "blockchain is crap, it should go away, we don't need more 'money', this whole space with its ico's is a scam!", etc, etc.
But it's not a scam. It should not go away. And, it is the future.
No one I think is debating that the 'blockchain' (I'm referring to the bitcoin data structure here) is slow. Anyone that holds on to that nugget is entirely missing the point and needs to grab their 56k modem and 386 and go hunker down in the closet, because that's their mindset.
Bitcoin (and other tokens) are not valuable because of their slow data structure. They are valuable because, like the article says, they are permissionless and globally distributed (immutability is also key and not mentioned).
If you think that is not important, you are fooling yourself. It's a revolution just as big as webapps were over non-connected desktop apps. Just as mobile was over desktop web apps.
Take my super high level case of 'blockchain' medical company (I use this when I talk to people about why this next wave is important).
Currently today companies own your medical data. If you move from one medical provider to another, in order to get your history over to the new provider, the new guy has to either call or request a fax of that data and then double enter it into their system. Maybe this exchange is automated but I doubt it.
What happens when you leave that company? New company has to go through the same laborious process. And so on and so forth.
This is today's problem: silo'd data 'owned' by various companies out there. The end user/customer has little power because they own nothing. They are at the mercy of that data because companies do not want to share (they want to corner markets and destroy competition) and companies do care enough about securing 'your' data, so thieves then break in and steal it. It's funner for them to build teams, have company parties, tout their prowess and expertise in the press. Securing data and making it interoperable - not very fun or profitable.
What (smart) people are working towards is turning this equation on its head and encrypting and distributing globally all the data. So, instead of using 10 medical companies throughout your life, the potential is to use a distributed system that stores your data in some kind of 'blockchain' (zoom out an think an immutable record of your entire health history) that only you have the full pub/private key(s) to. (Yes, wallets and keys are a potential problem here and we'll have to work more towards making recovery easier. This is a big, deep topic in and of itself.)
This is not far fetched. We already use ssh keys on remote servers where root has the ultimate permissions and then we can add/remove users at will with their own keys and permissions. So, we understand conceptually how to use pub/priv keys with regard to access. It's not a stretch to start figuring out how to apply this to global data and companies and teams have already been doing this.
Of course, the 'old' medical companies would have to use this system as well and they probably will go kicking and screaming since the data to _them_ is not as valuable because they are not in control anymore. But to _you_ it is. It really is _your_ data and you can take it wherever you want over your lifetime.
This is a total paradigm shift of how tech companies will need to operate in the future.
Tokens, blockchains, dlt's, yah, they're all buzzwords. But so are saas, elastic ip's, spa's, and load balancers. There was a time when you didn't need any of those things and now, they're part of everyday life even if you don't know it.
So, hate if you will, but I already know people working on things like this. Tokenization, dlt/blockchain/dag, gloabal pki access, true micro txn's - these are all things already in play and we'll see more and more of them in the coming years.
I think Apple lost their function and form way a while ago. It's never coming back. The new Mac Pro is the latest example of this. I bought a 2018 MB Pro 13" last year and the touch bar is a waste of space in my mind. We see now that Apple is ditching the scissor keys, but regardless, their design decisions for a while have just been wanting to have something look cool instead of a balance of looking good and functioning great.