Viewing profile — plywoodtrees

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 a…

You can just mint more coins and use them to pay off the debt, obvious! /s

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…

“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.” - B…

> ... 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 w…

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 Monda…

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-det…

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 scru…

"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…

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 dif…

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…

> Caveat: if something’s “free,” you’re the product. Always great to see this opinion on free news sites.

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.

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 sear…

I'd love to hear what those use cases are, and what the fixable obstacles are.

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 s…

A technical system which in practice cannot be reliably operated securely, and which is prone to no-recourse losses, is worse than alternatives.

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 tha…

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 on…

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,…

Is the lack of reuse something to do with its evolution from QUIC as a loosely ordered UDP-based protocol?

> 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.…

> 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!

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.)