are they that hard to find in your country? for me it's way more likely to find a VGA cable around than an HDMI when i need it

what about a esp32-s3?

almost like there's a few bilion dollars difference in their budgets

Sure but it's been 15 years and the quality of the espeak command is equally horrible. I would have expected some changes ... especially considering even the free TTS inside Google Chrome is actually pretty decent, that could just be extracted and packaged up as a new version of espeak.

a global pandemic?

Ohhhh yeah, lol. I always forget that really took off in 2020 (since it's called COVID-19). What even is time anymore =/

Anecdotally, though, it seemed like a lot of healthcare providers at the time moved to having better online appointment systems and remote visits, which made scheduling a lot easier for me. Probably a heavily YMMV situation though.

lol'd at someone's attempt to put an xss on one of the restaurants

the usb port can still very very easily spoof itself as a keyboard/mouse and automatically accept any prompt

Stablecoins are not stable at all.

tokens like LUNA went to 0 and USDC, USDT and others depegged which isn't really convincing as a micropayments alternative, in fact it is extremely dangerous.

Stablecoins are more stable than BTC and ETH, so they have quite a bit more utility than one might think, given your comment.

Nope, what are they backed by? Nothing other than 'attestations' and 'trust me bro'.

Tether is a fraudulent ponzi, USDC is not stable and is backed by meaningless attestations, Luna is, well gone all the way to the floor.

Even if we take USDC on ETH there exists the uncontrollable volatile gas fee tax which is pointless for micropayments.

'Stablecoins' (or 'stabletokens' are inherently fraudulent and dead on arrival and is only used to pump the price of BTC in the which is the case for Tether.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...

What is USD “backed by”? It’s not gold and it’s not any USG promise to pay.

Stablecoins don’t need to be backed by anything to be stable. I agree with most of what you say, but that doesn’t actually refute my point that stablecoins are, in fact, more stable than most cryptocurrencies. They are more than stable enough to use for a payment aggregation layer for a few days.

I even agree with you about Tether being a fraud; I still use USDT every day (with that knowledge) because it is, well, stable. One day it won’t be, but most days, it is.

At least we know it was backed by _something_, fiat is the worst system except all the others.

Yet USD is legal tender for US taxes and there is a shared interest in using USD rather than some risky unknown potemkin token like 'stablecoins', which nobody accepts or wants.

And you cannot pay US taxes with your stablecoins, so there's that.

> Stablecoins don’t need to be backed by anything to be stable...

So then we will get a LUNA situation of being backed by 'algorithms' then everyone is screwed when the token inevitably goes to zero.

Recommended Reading:

https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/stablecoins.html

> rather than some risky unknown potemkin token like 'stablecoins', which nobody accepts or wants.

I know many, many people in many countries who accept stablecoins as cash-equivalent. I think perhaps you underestimate the market.

Stable coins are pegged to $ so they need to be backed by it (or other assets denominated in $) pretty much be definition

The USD is backed by US Military, The Secret Service, ~165 million highly educated wage earners, a long tradition of capitalism, and millions of accountants making things more complicated than they need to be. Long term trends towards socialism and marxism are serious threats to dollar valuation though.

We have very different definitions of “backed”, then, and are probably talking at cross purposes.

Very little gas fees on L2 and it's settled to Ethereum. Tether is a scam, but USDC is pretty well backed and regulated.

aren't we already doing that everyday?