I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this line of thinking but “dessert with every meal” as an example of late capitalist degeneracy seems cartoonishly austere.
The PS Vita is an apt point of comparison - a beautiful piece of hardware that performed fantastically (and in my opinion much more impressive for its time than the steam deck) - that is considered to have been a complete failure.
Steve Jobs in a university lecture in 1991 (iirc) articulated the vision among him and his industry contemporaries of consumers using thin clients accessing data from the cloud, a reality that took two decades to really come to fruition and that had to wait for infrastructure to catch up - the point being that while some people didn’t see the value of the internet, people in the know were able to simply and quickly articulate beneficial use cases.
What problem is solved via a public tamper resistant ledger outside of the hypothetical? I routinely make purchases outside of a public tamper resistant ledger without issue.
I’d argue that what you’ve stated is just the mechanism by which decentralisation is achieved (you haven’t identified any additional benefits).
This is making a mountain out of a molehill. There's nothing to suggest any pre-conditions for deleting an account have to be removed, simply that it must be possible to "initiate deletion" from within the app.
The issue I've always had with Monte Carl simulation in this context is that it takes more knowledge, expertise, time, and care to accurately perform a Monte Carlo Simulation than to prepare an accurate estimate. It's like saying you can avoid building (yet another) barely functional go-kart by instead building a four-wheel drive. Monte Carlo Simulation sometimes cloaks that the assumptions behind the simulation largely determine the output and are just as (if not more) prone to error as the usual assumptions.
If the burden of accurately estimating an average duration for a blog post is too much for your planner, what are the odds they're going to accurately develop a probability distribution for the duration of a blog post?
In simple estimates there's no need to use a stochastic approach at all. For instance, the example in the post - if you know a blog post takes between 1-10 days (uniformly distributed) and that you need to get one out every ~6 days to get 60 out in a year, you already know the probability is ~60%. If you know there's a skew to the higher end and guess a distribution (as in the example), again you can directly work out that the odds of success are ~35%.
There is value when the estimate is not corrupted by other priorities (rare), when the expertise to accurately develop distributions for activities exists (also rare, particularly for work that isn't easy to sample and re-forecast), and when the plan is complex enough that it's hard to directly predict the impact of your statistical assumptions.
Apple is not using PhotoDNA, but in any event - this is a good article but they misconstrued the '1 in a trillion' quote, as is canvassed in the comments for the article itself. According to apple there is a 1 in a trillion chance of wrongly flagging an account, not a 1 in a trillion false positive rate for individual images, and we know that step to banning include:
- multiple flagged images; and
- human review
The details for those processes hasn't been fully disclosed, and it isn't possible to say whether 1 in a trillion is a reasonable estimate or otherwise.
My understanding is that neither of the major outages in SA in recent times have been related to intermittent supply issues (i.e. the first major incident was related to trips caused by weather, the second was related to a gas using supplier failing to increase supply due to some market regulation minutiae that was subsequently changed).
Without re-litigating the events at Basecamp, surely you're fully aware that other people have a different view to you (i.e. that in their opinion DHH did do something wrong), and surely from that starting point it's hardly mysterious why people would choose not to use the service.
I think the question becomes not 'is the conduct bad enough to stop using the service, despite how good it is?', but 'is the service so good that I should continue using it, despite the conduct?'
To be far these restrictions operate in a fairly narrow domain (Developer documentation) where some restrictions on idiomatic usage are probably warranted to maximise the number of people that can fully comprehend the docs (for example not all languages refer to adapters as 'male' or 'female' and the meaning may not be obvious to a non native speaker.)
Secondly, "This guide contains guidelines, not rules. Depart from it when doing so improves your content."
Monetary emission is already tied to the cost of consumer goods. Central banks make interest rate and reserve requirement changes that regulate growth in money supply. Those changes are aimed, in part, at achieving a price inflation target.
And price inflation, which is the relevant metric (as opposed to monetary inflation) in the context of a claim that the government destroys value, has been extremely predictable for 20 years.
This comes up again and again in bitcoin discussions. Money supply has to grow for price stability and to avoid deflation. This also applied even when there was gold convertibility.
What exactly is your issue with a growing money supply?
This expands the definition of "backed by" into meaninglessness.
I used to be able to trade dollars for gold and vice versa, at a fixed price, guaranteed.
I can't trade bitcoin for 'math'. No-one is storing energy reserves in case there's a run on people converting bitcoin to energy. Bitcoin is not backed by anything.
The modern central banking/inflation/'debasement' conspiracy theorist is interested in a return to a gold standard - that is, paper currency that is backed by reserves of gold, as (kind of, sometimes) existed from ~1850 to 1950, rather than a return to currency actually physically containing gold (or, more usually, a metal other than gold).
They are not the same, but speaking about them at a high level abstraction allows one to pretend that there was some continuous system in place that was abruptly overturned in recent times, for ostensibly nefarious reasons.