Apple is the biggest company in the world by a pretty significant margin[0]. The clout they wield is absolutely insane and they could kill many things if they were so inclined.
'Verified' ticks in general are so bizarrely mismanaged. See also Twitter removing the status of controversial political figures. I feel like they should be totally open access to anyone who can provide irrefutable proof of identity, rather than these odd status symbols.
Maybe it's different in other countries (I am in the UK), but I feel as if there isn't enough content for a recommender system to even be useful. I feel like after browsing through the catalogue a few times, I have a rough idea of most things I would ever possibly be interested in. There's just not that much there. Either that, or the recommender system is working too well and I never see anything beyond what Netflix wants me to.
I have to agree. As far as I recall the Netflix search engine has never found the exact title I've been searching for. Even the recommendations it then shows me are so far off piste that they're not really even close to what I'm looking for.
At least with Amazon Prime there's a high chance they'll at least find the title one searches for and if I am really motivated I can pay a few bucks to watch it.
Netflix just draws a blank.
That's not to say I haven't watched some entertaining things on Netflix, but they seem much better suited to TV series than movies, and I almost feel like I found decent things to watch inspite of their recommendation system, not because of it.
An ML tool from Netflix? It feels like the last thing I'm likely to use.
I would nominally agree with this logic, but surely the exact same applies when voting? Should people not bother voting because they are just one in a sea of many?
In the United States I would say it depends where you live. I'm a Democrat in a forever-red state. My vote for President will never matter as long as the Electoral College is there.
I still vote for state-wide and local matters and that is where my vote really does count.
Buying the cheapest Casio can also be a status signal, similar to the CEO of Goldman Sachs wearing a Swatch. Buying a truly cheap watch is a signal of 'I don't care' (which may be true, or may be affected), whereas getting into expensive watches can get very complicated. There's plenty of stories from investment banking about the signals that watches send, from my understanding people are more likely to poke fun at a Tag Heuer than a Casio.
To ask a very amateur question, why do people think Bitcoin specifically will succeed? Aren't there dozens of coins out there which have fixed some of it's most glaring flaws?
Out of all the coins, Bitcoin has the longest history of being an OK place to park money. History is probably the largest factor in people's decisions about which coin to park their money in. The fact that other coins solve various technical problems will continue to be a small factor as long as Bitcoin continues to avoid running into a disastrous technical problem.
First mover advantage is one rationale. It's a household name around the world, far moreso than any other crypto. My 80 year old grandpa who doesn't even know how to use a mouse or send an email is aware of the hype around Bitcoin.
There are also some advantages to being "simple". Competitors (like Ethereum) have more sophisticated features (such as smart contracts) and may scale better. But none are as battle hardened. Andreas Antonopoulos did a great talk "Bitcoin Security: Bubble Boy and the Sewer Rat"[1] describing how the platform has survived what's now ten straight years in the wild, exposed to the continuous pressure of hostile attacks. It's scarred and ugly as a result (with amputated opcodes and inelegant hacks) but he argues those are symptoms of resilience. And it is still being improved upon to adopt new ideas emerging from the space (eg. Lightning, Schnorr signatures) just at a slow and very cautious pace.
I can run (and sync) a full node on regular hardware, which isn't easy for more I/O intensive coins that have accreted a magnitude of order larger blockchain history. The HN crowd might appreciate the more traditional, native-looking UI of its client software over some of the Electron-like alternatives from other coins (which sometimes lack basic features like viewing history). It focuses on doing a few things well, namely being a wallet and sending and receiving units. That will always be a use case for transacting or storing wealth, and if that's all I'm doing, then I'd rather not have any other cruft.
You asked a really good question, and I personally suspect Bitcoin will eventually get supplanted by something else over the long term (as happens with any tech!). At some point the advantages gained from a clean, ground-up rewrite will surpass the stickiness of its global adoption. But I've come to believe that will take a lot longer than I initially anticipated.
We're already seeing vastly improved power efficiency out of alternative consensus mechanisms like Proof of Stake, and its still very early days for this industry and its technology.
While most of my comparisons above contrast Bitcoin to Ethereum (its biggest competitor) you are correct there are oodles of alternatives to pick from. Some purport cleaner tech stacks and demonstrate superior transaction volume scalability (like EOS).
Analysts have said crypto today is reminiscent of the plethora of startups seen during the dot-com bubble. The survivors were companies that hadn't even been invented yet (like Twitter, Netflix, Google depending when is your cutoff) and the boring but steadfast ones (like Amazon, eBay, Yahoo). So if you accept Bitcoin as falling in the latter camp there's some comfort in placing your bets there compared to newer, more "unknown" options.
Satoshi's paper is literally titled, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", but it's generally considered to have failed at that. (Even most Bitcoin events don't allow you to pay in Bitcoin, for example.)
Bitcoin folks now talk about it as "digital gold" or "a store of value", which is fine, but very different than what it was set out to be.
I understand, the P2P layer has moved to lightning layer atop Bitcoin. Works very well. In terms of adoption of P2P transactions, we will have to wait till more widespread adoption. And most who have bitcoin will be reluctant to spend it for coffees and would rather let it appreciate in value for now.
> I understand, the P2P layer has moved to lightning layer atop Bitcoin. Works very well.
I can appreciate how off-chain overlays can allow Bitcoin to achieve transactions at scale. What I don't quite get is why this kind of recentralization[1] is good for Bitcoin. It feels like the endgame may be a kind of "worst of both worlds" solution — no longer decentralized, but still not as efficient as centralized solutions.
Unless: Can Bitcoin users prevent off-chain transactions, to avoid Lightning?
Bitcoin has proven to be a poor "medium of exchange", but that is OK because buying and selling Bitcoin is easy enough for it to be a practical place in which to park money. I.e., it has proven to be a satisfactory "store of value".
Gold is a poor medium of exchange, too, but that has not prevented it from being a satisfactory store of value.
(Yes, I know that gold actually was a common medium of exchange at one time; it was displaced centuries ago by the greater convenience of paper money.)
Some visionary types hoped Bitcoin would disrupt government-issued (paper) money and governments and banks generally. The fact that these hopes were dashed does not mean Bitcoin will not remain an OK place to park money.
Sure, if you compare it to scenarios that aren't remotely the same. I think we were supposed to take it as an obvious given that this applies to scenarios where the side giving away the power is watching the side that was given the power.
They didn't set out to explicitly prove 1+1=2, they just got around to it after 2 volumes, it didn't require 2 volumes of background. A direct proof of 1+1=2 is pretty short in most logical systems.
Great talk. The definition of observational equivalence is very elegant. I instantly thought it made no sense or must be a partial definition, then the simple example given on the next slide explained it perfectly.
For many roles at a hedge fund, being able to do mathematics quickly and intuitively is a valuable skill. Not sure why an economist applying for an MD job would need to be tested on that, though.
[0] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...