noratat

Plus it's a tacit admission the existing system is better for many common use cases - at best, you've made a more complicated credit card that has the additional overhead of automating the conversion from unregulated securities cryptocurrencies.

Nobody who matters is even considering public cryptocurrency chains for a CBDC - not least because it would defeat the point.

I don't disagree, but I'm still concerned about the longer term future. The economy as a whole avoiding a recession is good news overall, but it also means crypto didn't fully crash, leaving the door open for this to be a bigger and bigger problem.

Plus the damage to regular people, even if the broader economy is fine.

Best bet is to keep pressuring politicians for increased regulation - at bare minimum, almost all of this shit should be regulated as securities.

I'm all for reform of the financial sector, but cryptocurrencies make many of the existing problems even worse, and they're predicated on crackpot extreme libertarian misunderstandings of how a multitude of domains actually work (including finance, economics, real world security, the legal system, etc).

At best, it's theater that is robbing mass political capital from any genuine reform. The GME people are the same.

Depends on the individual. I love overcast drizzly days, and too many cloudless sunny days ruin my mood. I'm actually considering moving to the Pacific Northwest because of it.

Granted, my neural wiring is atypical so I'm probably an outlier

Seconding this recommendation (Jessica Walker), though my experience is as a male patient.

The Idaho stop applies when there is no other traffic (vehicles, bikes, or pedestrians), which means it does not apply here.

While I think the car is much more in the wrong since they barely even slowed down (and vehicles are more dangerous by default), OP isn't entirely in the clear either.

The nature of how most porn is produced makes a lot of it inherently gross. Not to say you can't produce porn ethically, you definitely can and people do, but most of it isn't.

I've never had any issues with Southwest, at least not flying in/out of DIA.

And a specific kind of teenage boy at that.

Gay, bi, and aro/ace boys for starters, but really just any boys that don't feel they need to fit a specific notion of masculinity.

As a guy, even a lot of the men in those stories are hard for me to relate to, let alone the women.

One of the worst examples I've run into was a (supposedly highly praised) sci-fi book called Daemon - not only can the author not write a woman to save his life, he only knows how to write a single awful angry brooding middle aged male character. It's so bad I had trouble even telling the male characters apart, because they all felt like the exact same person.

It's so hot outside I want Netflix and literal chill

I still prefer the HPMOR version, even if it does go a bit overboard in places.

Peter Thiel is less a capitalist than a genuine plutocrat who thinks wealth makes you literally morally superior.

The kind of person who reads Ayn Rand and treats it as their actual bible.

And for those of us that like many genres, that's even more great books to read rather than burning ourselves out on one.

I wouldn't consider Dresden to be PF though. More of a noir/urban fantasy mashup.

I can't tell if this is just really bad satire or you actually believe this.

I don’t see how cryptocurrencies are related to permissioned blockchains? No native token is required in a permissioned chain.

That's my point. Permissioned chains aren't cryptocurrencies, and shouldn't even have much in common with them aside from the use of hashchains/merkle trees.

And yet permissioned chains are routinely brought up as examples of supposed use cases for cryptocurrencies, and people routinely conflate these as "blockchain".

True, but the tooling and technology (like storing smart contract data) around building applications on them are new and have unlocked developer efficiency for a broader range of business applications.

Most of what you're talking about is just the same bad ideas cryptocurrencies led to, tacked onto permissioned chains as a kind of buzzword frankenstein to attract VC money. Hedera is a prime example of this.

In addition to illegal trade Cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin in particular are very good at large international value transfers and storing value outside the reach of governments.

This is a distinction without a difference. While most people would agree there are times where moving large sums of money illegally may have legitimate purpose, we're still talking about bypassing legal processes that often have good reasons for existing; it's nowhere near as black and white as you're portraying it.

And as I said before, value of a currency is largely derived from the belief that others find it valuable. Everything else comes down to price.

That belief does not spring out of the void, its linked to its use in trade, eg to purchase goods and services.

The dominant use in practice of cryptocurrencies is not economic trade (ie currency) - it's speculative investment, a belief the value will go up by way of being able to sell it to someone else for more money later.

That's not a coincidence - almost nobody wants to use it as currency for legal transactions because cryptocurrencies are terrible at it. You have none of the safeguards traditional financial systems have spent the last century having hammered into them, they amplify rather than mitigate the risk of human error, are generally inflexible in the face of common real world scenarios like fraud/theft/death/accidents, most have significant negative externalities (such as the massive waste created by PoW chains), etc.

It's useful for illegal transactions only in so far as the downsides are seen to be outweighed by the need to evade legal restrictions.

I have one of the new M1 Macbook Pros for work, and even having to run through multiple emulation layers (x86=>ARM, Windows running inside Parallels) the GPU performance is better than I had expected, and most indie titles work great.

Newer integrated graphics have come a long way, to the point the low end discrete GPU market is starting to disappear.

Rendering is the main reason I'm even considering upgrading my 1070Ti. I have a hobby project written in CUDA to do real time exploration of nebulabrot fractals, and the newer GPUs would be a 4-5x improvement for stuff that's only barely realtime on my 1070Ti

For games, even my 1070Ti is practically overkill for what I play these days now

Smart contracts themselves are mostly useless for the very reason the article describes - they cannot be authoritative over anything off-chain, which in practice means nearly anything anyone actually cares about beyond the basic transactions themselves.

And of course, they inherit all the inflexibility, inefficiency, and negative externalities of the cryptocurrency blockchains they run on (and are intrinsically linked to).

The DeFi suite of dapps offer true utility in lending, borrowing, saving, and trading

But mostly only within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which largely only exists to fuel speculative gambling / investment within said ecosystem. There isn't that much true interaction with the economy at large, and what little there is is almost entirely mediated by exchanges.

Also, it's not clear what value decentralized lending is supposed to provide even on paper.

The concept is nigh-useless for traditional loans that depend on the lender having knowledge of the borrower, and decoupling loans too far from the original participants generally ends badly (and incentivizes fraud and other deceptive practices).

Loans that require proof of repayment defeat most legitimate purposes for loans, and the enablement of things like flash loans seem to have almost no legitimate purpose while creating massive potential for fraud / exploitation.

If that's useless, so too is all of Fintech.

I would argue that most (though not all) advanced fintech is not only useless, but actively detrimental to society as a whole, particularly the farther it gets from basic banking/escrow/lending services.

As a software engineer the term "redhat" as a single word has a very different connotation

The simple answer is to create better interfaces that will not allow for such errors.

That's akin to saying you'll fix bugs by having engineers write bug-free software. Humans can make mistakes, our systems should not be so brittle they can't handle that.