How is it logic defying? It seems straightforward to apply on any compositional entity: I could make one with "Apple Executive", "Tim", "Phill", and "Eddy"
While that breaks the Apple executive example, it's still just as easy to explain from a programming perspective: each of the sides could be a trait/interface which is implemented/part of the same entity/Singleton
Yes, but real world entities don't stop being a thing just because you refer to their one specific trait. The god example only works if you assume it works. That's why it's not logical.
Anyway, traits are "is a" descriptive thing, not a referential equality "is". The trinity relations are not "is a" to begin with, or we'd be having many gods and Christian priests are not into that.
Given it is a discussion of an entity that is already defined by properties not shared by any other real world entity its seems not just logical, but reasonably, to assume that it differs from them in other ways too.
I tend to agree traits is not an accurate description, but it is a reasonable analogy.
> The trinity relations are not "is a" to begin with, or we'd be having many gods and Christian priests are not into that.
Sayings "priests" seems and off choice of wording. Why not just Christians, or even "Christian theologians"?
Just because someone comes up with one illogical idea, it isn't reasonable to say it likely "differs in other ways too". Instead maybe establish one unusual thing to be verifiably true before stacking on more.
> Sayings "priests" seems and off choice of wording.
Meh. Priests set the norm for the regional communities.
I really do expect them to try. I am slightly hopeful that this clown show of an administration is too incompetent to pull it off. The judicial branch appears to be bought and paid for, so maybe my optimism is unfounded.
> My point was more that if "liberal" == "clean" and "conservative" == "incompetent apparatchiks" then you're (the royal you) a shill
If I consider all the ones who voted for Presidential immunity corrupt does that make me a shill? It's a decision with no constitutional basis (the constitution grants no presidential immunity, but does grant other immunities, implying if it was intended it'd be in there) and ahistorical (we can find plenty of examples of presidents assuming they or their predecessor could be prosecuted).
That still leaves us in the same place a Supreme Court where the majority is beholden to the current President, not the constitution.
No it doesn't, if you're trained in constitutional law and actually know what you're talking about. Disagreeing with something doesn't make you a shill. Saying everyone who disagrees with you is a $PEJORATIVE_OF_CHOICE does. Maybe even it doesn't matter if you know what you're talking about or not as long as you approach it in good faith.
"The judicial branch is bought and paid for" is a ridiculous shill thing to say because 1) it assumes that smart, well-educated, successful people only believe a thing because of corruption. 2) it obviates the need to address any of the other side's claims on their merits, because they're just corrupt so who cares. 3) it sets up your side as the victors-by-default, because the other corrupt and you hate everything the other side does so by definition you're Good. It used to be a common refrain of the right when most judges and justices and most courts were left-of-center. But now that federal circuit courts are evenly split between R-appointed and D-appointed justices, and SCOTUS has more Republican appointees than Democratic, the judiciary is farcical.
"This is a hallowed, storied institution just so long as it does things I like, and a corrupt oligarchy when it doesn't" is the very definition of shill.
I didn't address that claim because it's a pointless ad hominem. Tell me what I could respond with that would have you say "oh actually you're right, I was wrong, my apologies" even if just internally.
Also, backing up, efficiency is not the only metric we should care about. We learned the hard way at the start of the pandemic that our efficient supply chains were fragile due to lack of redundancy. A government agency may benefit from continuously staffing "redundant" roles in order to have capacity available when unforeseen events occur! Nobody needs FEMA until a natural disaster occurs.
It also boils down to the fact that it's not immediately clear what "efficiency" actually means in this context.
Like, I'm a software person so forgive the analogies, but even within software, I can think of three basic (but related) forms of efficiency: execution speed, energy, and memory. Sometimes something will be extremely fast and CPU efficient but at the cost of a ton of memory.
"Efficiency" is a term that is relative to the thing that you are measuring, and doesn't actually make much sense without that.
To your point, having some redundancy can be efficient, if you're optimizing for uptime. This applies to computers and people, I think.
Institutional knowledge often plays a huge role here, but can be difficult to measure. A team member whose experience allows them to quickly provide needed context that would otherwise take hours/days/weeks to obtain might significantly boost their team's productivity without generating any metrics that demonstrate their contributions.
One neat thing about Go that makes it superior to a shell script is that it compiles a statically-linked binary. One self-contained file! Or N if you support N platforms. Did I mention that cross-compilation is trivial?
As someone who once inherited a static binary (without debug symbols, gotta save those few bytes) that should have been a shellscript: Please don't. If your logic reasonably fits into a shell script, then put it there.
Posix shell-compatible scripts will also likely work on all platforms where you go program would've been run.
> Posix shell-compatible scripts will also likely work on all platforms where you go program would've been run.
While I see your point, writing a Posix compatible shell script is not trivial. Little errors creep in that "work on my machine" because /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/bash, but break the script when someone runs it on macOS.
In my experience, you get a lot of cross-platform compatibility when writing Go for zero effort.
I mean this entirely depends on how things are done where you work. I wouldn't think the back-reference is necessary if all projects have their own repo in some central location (and it's trivial to match the binary's name to a repo).
I don't want to come off too harsh here -- not a personal attack -- but I genuinely don't understand why folks are sharing the output from LLMs. It's usually too long, it's not written by a human (which is why I came to HN), and I could have trivially asked an LLM myself!
I've been ongoingly baffled by the phenomenon as well. Like it's a new technology and all, but it seems incredibly obvious to me that copy and pasting output like that is adding nothing to the conversation (and the hallucination factor makes it, well, worse then useless IMO).
Ponzi schemes usually involve promises to get back X times the money after N time. And in terms of actual cash. So whoever runs the Ponzi scheme needs to keep it growing exponentially in order to create exponential payouts. Eventually, it will grow so large that it collapses.
With Blockchains, they are more stable, as there is no such guarantee. Many people choose to HODL instead, and this gives the coin some stability. As long as there is less interest in cashing out than people trying to cash in, the value is growing. And as long as the value is growing, people cash out.
For a Ponzi scheme with guarantees in terms of currencies not minted by the scheme creator, they are bound to collapse sooner or later. Blockchains could go on forever in theory. However, latter still requires more people to cash in than people to cash out. If there is enough people trying to cash out, maybe larger number of people will panic and cash out as well, leading to an avalanche like race to zero.
Both are united by the requirement for a "greater fool", just with Ponzi schemes, this greater fool is exponentially growing while with Blockchains it can grow linearly.
Bitcoin could be more compared to a national currency like Argentinian pesos. The value can go to zero as it is no longer accepted (people do not want it), but there is no inherited promise in the first place it goes up forever.
All it matters that it will stay more stable than other assets. And we know from economic history that assets tied to nations may disappear overnight, e.g. Cyprus.
Trump wants to make the Fed, which is supported and defended by the biggest military on this planet, hoard bitcoin. It turns out you can buy politicians with money, and Bitcoin supporters have done just that.
Strictly speaking a Ponzi scheme involves a single person or entity doing that, consciously. Bitcoin is… an anarchist self-organising Ponzi scheme? :) It has many of the features of a Ponzi scheme, but largely by accident; there is no _intent_.
Depends on how many coins the creator owns and when he sells. The creater starts with a few bits in a chain that suddenly are worth billions. When he sells be gets a big chunk of that in Dollars and the value of the rest collapses to zero for everyone trying to sell later.
Yeah, granted, the creator of bitcoin _might_ be, effectively, operating a very complex Ponzi scheme, but it seems unlikely. Occam’s razor says that they were a sincere person or group with unconventional economic theories.
The creators of small memecoins often are doing this, deliberately, of course. Some of them are amazingly open about this, often marketing their memecoins as, essentially, “it’s still early” (ie you, the buyer, get to get in before the scheme collapses; like early Madoff customers, you can be one of the lucky ones!).
Eh, crypto is weirder and worse than a Ponzi scheme in a way that deserves its own moniker.
A Ponzi scheme typically involves a small inner circle perpetuating a fraud; even if "everyone knows" it's hinkey, it is ostensibly returning fabulous returns through actual investment/economic activity. Eventually, the insiders stop being able to keep the game going, and go bankrupt, get arrested, flee the country, or some other ignoble end.
Crypto has lost its layer of fraud; it used to be "this thing will be the future of money and therefore have value", but for the last five+ years it's all just been "this will be worth more in the future because people will buy it so you should buy it," a naked Ponzi.
Meanwhile, it is distributed, even if it is highly centralized at every point from mining pools to exchanges. There's no single person who has to go to jail or disappear with his money to collapse the whole system. It's happened dozens of times, and every time it does a new set of criminals steps up to keep the fraud going.
In summary, even if individual enterprises (eg, FTX) are classic Ponzi schemes, crypto as a whole deserves to be the name of its own type of scam.
Just thinking out loud, but the problem I see is that even if you define Bitcoin as a scam, it could very well have been created by Satoshi Nakamoto (or the group behind the name) in good faith. The real issue now lies with the responsibility of companies like BlackRock to clearly and transparently identify what they are selling to the public.
It is also different than a casino: "Even if crypto investing is considered gambling, there is a factor not present in traditional casino games: the time variable of holding. Holding roulette chips has no effect on their value, while in crypto markets, prices change in time. By holding crypto assets for a longer duration, investors can potentially benefit from market fluctuations and price appreciation, making it a unique aspect compared to classic gambling games." [1].
What you say is complete nonsense of the reactionary kind that pervades on this site against crypto, by which at all costs it has to be defined as a scam, against all normal, rational definitions of the word.
If for whatever reason, something my go up in price because there's demand for it despite widely available and mostly correct information about its utility or lack of it, that's not a scam. This is the case with bitcoin. It's growth has fueled interest in a bit of gambling by members of the public about possible future growth. There's no central party running it as something it isn't or perpetuating a core lie by hiding some key information about what bitcoin really is.
People insisting on buying something despite it having an unstable market value and debatable concrete utility doesn't make that thing fraudulent. A scam requires intent and misdirection, regardless of how you and others who share your view try to redefine the word scam arbitrarily. You might as well also call all forms of speculation a scam by the same ridículous logic.
Thought experiment: what would happen to the price of gold by 2125 AD if nobody born after the year 2025 believed it had value outside of its industrial applications?
See my below comment about 16 Psyche, a 140-miles asteroid made of gold floating out there in the sky. By 2125 AD we'll sure find a way to tow it to our shores.
16 psyche is not made of gold and this reply has nothing to do with my question, in fact, my point would still stand if confidence in gold as a scarce store of value disappeared without any change in supply and it went to ~0 (industrial value)
Or shares: they have a value as long as someone else is willing to buy them. Or just like any other type of transferrable representation of value, including precious metals.
Shares have a value beyond that, though; they are a share in an actual company, which has assets and generates revenue (hopefully; granted if you’re buying shares in some SPAC merger that might one day produce a flying car or something, that’s not a million miles away from bitcoin). There is a price floor. One might reasonably argue that nvidia is not worth $3.4 trillion (its current market cap), say, but it is clearly worth _something_, even valued purely on assets and yield. Bitcoin has no floor; you are entirely dependent on other people buying it from you for more than you bought it for, because they believe that someone will one day buy it from _them_ for more than _they_ bought it for.
As long as you have a real share, and are not holding an "entitlement" (e.g. a brokerage firm holding your shares in their street name. In that case, you have the right to the economic benefits of the stock, but not the underlying. To do that your name needs to be on the company's ledger. Anyone can request to directly register their shares and hold them directly with the company's transfer agent.
I mean, unless the broker is fraudulent there’s very little practical difference; most people will go with the broker, as it tends to be cheaper. For that matter, most people aren’t investing in individual shares, they’re investing in some sort of mutual fund, so there’s another party that you have to _somewhat_ trust there.
If Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme because of this, then literally every asset which has resale value is a ponzi scheme.
When people buy bonds, stocks, commodities, or purchase a car, a house, or even an Xbox, they are taking into account the resale value of that asset. If you supposed that when you're done with your house, it would be worth $0, you would be willing to pay a lot less for it. There's nothing fundamentally different here wrt Bitcoin.
A house produces value; you can either rent it out, or live in it (thus avoiding paying rent to someone else). Stocks produce value; the companies make money (and generally either pay dividends, buy back stock, which is just a tax dodge approach to paying dividends, or invest in growth, and will thus eventually be in a position to pay more dividends). Bonds produce value; they are literally loans which (hopefully) get paid back. All of this allows a value to be assigned to them; that value may be greater or less depending on market conditions, demand, future value of money, etc (for instance, if your house is in the middle of nowhere and, by the time you’re done with it, needs a new roof and windows and so on, then its market value may actually approach zero). Things like bitcoin are different in that they do not produce value. You can’t value bitcoin based on X years of expected dividends/quasi-dividends or anything; any value is purely speculative.
To be clear, there’s speculation involved in buying stocks, too, to an extent (particularly buying _individual_ stocks), but ultimately you have a share of some real thing. That is not the case with bitcoin.
Sure, there's some value there, you can use it to make gold-plated contacts or shiny things, but if that was the only use case, it wouldn't be nearly as valuable as it is now.
Gold is valuable because people think it is valuable, and the same hodls true for Bitcoin.
Gold is probably the closest conventional thing to bitcoin, yes, though it does have _some_ intrinsic value as an industrial material, which sets a floor. But yes, gold’s value is basically speculative, and you’re largely relying on a greater fool.
You also shouldn’t buy gold; over any long period it is almost guaranteed to massively underperform the markets. If you had bought gold at its 1980s peak, you would have been down in real terms ever since; adjusted for inflation it has never reached that value since, and may never do. While you can say that about some individual _companies_, of course, you would be hard pressed to find a major index for which that is the case.
> If you had bought gold at its 1980s peak, you would have been down in real terms ever since; adjusted for inflation it has never reached that value since, and may never do. While you can say that about some individual _companies_, of course, you would be hard pressed to find a major index for which that is the case.
The Nikkei 225 comes to mind. It only broke its 1989 peak last year.
You really don't want a financial crisis in banking. All those regulations that crypto folks want to get rid of keep things like what happened to Japan in 1990 from happening with more regularity. Even 2008 in the US was painful and very long recovery, and mortgages were a smallish part of the overall economy.
The claim that we are disagreeing with is that Bitcoin is meaningfully different from any other investment in a way that makes it a Ponzi Scheme. I'm not trying to persuade anyone that it's a good investment, just that it isn't a ponzi scheme any more than gold, oil, real estate etc is.
I don’t think bitcoin is a deliberate Ponzi scheme, but it does have Ponzi scheme-like elements, in particular the absolute dependence on a greater fool to take it off your hands, with value _purely_ being based on what other people imagine it to be worth (ie not backed by any intrinsic value). Gold, yeah, isn’t a million miles away from this, either (as I mentioned previously, historically it is a _bad_ investment) though it does have the benefit of a few millennia of cultural cachet, increasing the chances that there’ll be a greater fool along soon.
Oil and real estate are totally different, though investment in oil in particular _is_ rather speculative; you’re betting on future real demand, but that demand is at least, like, _real_; there are obligate buyers of oil, almost no matter how high the price goes. Real estate, as I previously mentioned, produces value in terms of either rent or not having to pay rent.
The difference is that Bitcoin only has resale value.
The other examples you mentioned generally have some significant additionally value beyond just resale value -- e.g. stocks pay dividends or are expected to at some point, a house is something you can live in or get an income from by renting it out, and so on.
Bitcoin's use is as a store-of-value. That's it's utility. It has the traits of an ideal store of value. Eventually we may use it as money, but that won't happened until it is much closer to it's ultimate value and the value as stabilised enough to use it as a unit of account.
> what could be the supposed benefit of committing each line like that?
If you're making two meaningfully different changes, I would always say two tiny commits are better. Not only for organization, but to make it easier to revert just one change.
> If you're making two meaningfully different changes, I would always say two tiny commits are better. Not only for organization, but to make it easier to revert just one change.
As long as the tests pass on every commit that ends up the main development branch, you can pretty much do it however you want.
But committing per lines changed isn't "making two meaningful different changes", it's saying since they are on two different lines, they aren't related, which just seems wrong.
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