100 years of whatever this will be • Hacker News Board

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#671

Post by Vetch » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #413

Vetch wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This captures the backwards compatibility and long range entangled dependencies aspect of change resistance. It misses the aspect of organizations that is agent like, capable of homeostasis. Unlike static code, when things change, such systems will actively seek policies and apply levers of control to maintain the present equilibrium. Like biological agents, I'd argue any persistent and stable organization of humans…

in a vacuum yes, the legacy system doesn't have any of those agent-driven issues. given enough time and freedom from interference, you can incrementally fix it or rewrite the whole thing from scratch. but if you leave out the context of users and management, it doesn't really matter how you choose to fix it or whether you do at all. in reality, you have customers that are very upset about the sudden spike in observab…

> in reality, you have customers that are very upset about the sudden spike in observable defects...a bunch of bugs introduced by your refactor

That's what I meant to capture by agreeing there is overlap in terms of backwards compatibility and entangled dependencies.

The difference is entrenched social systems have greater agency that goes beyond change induced instability and into being able to actively predict and favorably mold their environment.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#672

Post by serverholic » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:04 PM UTC

_9omd wrote: post #590

dmitriid wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you have proved how revolutionary the internet would be in its early days? Yes. Yes, you could. 10 years after ARPANet was made public you already had things like France's Minitel. Blockchains? They still have zero use cases: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... > You have to be open minded and extrapolate Ah yes. "Revolutionary tech", and all you have to do is blindly believe in it…

This zero use cases rhetoric is really low effort. Here are some just off the top of my head. sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks) permissionless payments (funding wikileaks) private/anonymous transactions (Monero) event tickets (good use of NFTs) synthetic assets (anyone/anywhere can speculate on TSLA) decentralized asset exchange - AMM decentralized prediction markets DAO - a new way for peopl…

How a tech enthusiast doesn't think these are all extremely interesting is beyond me.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#673

Post by kazinator » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

nfw2 wrote: post #615

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes of course - problems, needs, not complaints.

what is the difference? isn't a complaint essentially just stating that you have a problem

"Complain" sometimes takes on the nuance of unproductive whining (repeatedly bringing up problems that others in the situation cannot fix), entitled attitude (why aren't things such and such: everyone around me should accommodate to me), excessive focus on minor things (I hate this whole situation that I can't change, and I can make that constantly known by harping on minor aspects) and such.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#674

Post by strange_things » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

Mods, please ban me. I can't stop checking this site but it keeps disappointing me. please just ban me

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#675

Post by virgildotcodes » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #572

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just hit people with sticks, they are bound to hit back. I don't understand your example.

I know several people that it would be VERY unwise for almost anyone to attempt to hit them with sticks. Do they get to do larceny as much as they want in this system?

No, because in this perfectly rational world a bunch of weaker humans would inevitably band together to overcome the stronger stick man.

This is exactly how things would go, which is why in human history warlords have never been a thing, and violent, oppressive men have never built empires.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#676

Post by thepra » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

pjkundert wrote: post #39

This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theor…

Seems nice in concept, but Rust and Node.js is a bad and limiting in execution

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#677

Post by intuitionist » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

edot wrote: post #576

asdfman123 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you must ask: who is really driving the public debate to throw out centralized banks? I saw a Winklevoss on Twitter saying something along the lines of "cash is trash; crypto is the future." Makes sense that he wants to pump up crypto, because he has a large financial stake in it. There's always going to be someone on top of society making the rules. The question is this: who do we want it to be? How can we make…

I want to be ruled by people who bought into Bitcoin in 2012 or earlier. They know how to govern best.

I believe Plato says something very similar.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#678

Post by pjkundert » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #497

pjkundert wrote: post #39

This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theor…

The fact that holo introduces a shitcoin when any payment channel (lightning, some USD service, etc) would work means I'm not going to take it seriously.

A cryptocurrency that will continue to work reliably and without a bound on aggregate transaction rate in the face of network Partitioning is … a “shitcoin”?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#679

Post by Ntrails » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:10 PM UTC

colonelxc wrote: post #616

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the entire platform (gmail, etc) is funded by ads, then removing the ads destroys the platform. In that space, advertising is a necessary evil, and the best we can do it try to make it less onerous. But if you're supporting your platform by any other means, you can just go without ads entirely. And DeFi is all about finding ways to support things that you like without giving untrustworthy middle men like Google or…

Advertising clearly wont "go die in a fire", no matter how frictionless the payments are. There was a conversation on hacker news just a few days ago about 'smart' TVs all getting ads, spying on the user, etc. This is an example where people do have a way to pay for TVs (no need for microtransactions, TVs cost hundreds of dollars already!). But the TV makers have decided they can make more money by adding Ads, so why…

>This happened with cable TV too. You pay for the TV already, as a subscription even, why do you also get Ads?

Drives me batshit that amazon does this on Prime. Play the fucking film you bastards

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#680

Post by pezzana » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #649

pezzana wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're listening to the wrong people. The world's currencies are being weaponized against other countries and against citizens. It's a project decades in the making. You may not feel part of that yet, but if you express any opinion in public you may. Centralization of money is "evil" because it sooner or later you're going to find yourself on the list of undesirables. When you do, centralization (and the technol…

Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the powerful. That is not a project decades in the making, it's a natural consequences of our power relations. There are lots of reasons to want a decentralised currency system or at least one not run by nation states but Bitcoin is a terrible example of one with so many flaws, and 'defi' and 'crypto' is plagued by hucksters and scams. I'd rather the devil I know at t…

> Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the powerful.

You're fighting a strawman. What I said was that money was being weaponized. Examples:

- currency-driven economic sanctions (other countries)

- civil asset forfeiture (citizens)

These are new developments enabled by the dollar standard (1971), payment technologies (2000-), and the ever expanding power of government (particularly US, post-9/11). The advent of the hydrogen bomb (1952) means that countries can no longer contemplate direct warfare and have been turning toward economic warfare increasingly in the last several decades.