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The USD doesn't frequently lose all or nearly all value as we see from cryptocoins. My $10 today will be worth $10 tomorrow barring nuclear war or an apocalypse.

And 1 bitcoin in your possession today will be worth 1 bitcoin in your possession tomorrow, barring a successful and very expensive attack on the network.

You have little assurance that the buying power of $10 today will be the buying power of $10 tomorrow. If the tariffs had gone through as initially advertised, that would certainly not have been the case.


And anything beyond 3m you put into real estate, stocks, or bonds anyway. Real rates have mostly been positive; and if not, that's the result of an economy wide equilibrium process that can't be undone risklessly by some magic beans.

Sure but the USD has two order of magnitude more total value, and probably more than that in day to day usage.

So there's an implicit question there which apparently you and everyone else missed.


Why do you think the USD has so many orders of magnitude usage? Nobody missed the question, that was the point: for currencies, stability is what makes them useful. You don’t have an incentive to hoard dollars hoping they’ll go up in value, so you spend them and boost the economy. Other countries use dollars because they have the same benefit: I can write a contract with you saying what we’ll pay over the next year and be confident that neither of us is going to be widely inconvenienced by the kind of swings Bitcoin has.

Remember that guy who spent 100BTC on a pizza? It’s a funny story but that’s why nobody uses Bitcoin for normal transactions.


> Why do you think the USD has so many orders of magnitude usage? Nobody missed the question, that was the point: for currencies, stability is what makes them useful.

Hint: cause and effect. You did miss the point and still do probably.


Gotta love crypto people putting "looking smarter than you" over actually explaining what it is they mean. If you've got a point to make, don't just hint at it, say something and then we can have a discussion. This just makes you look petty and like you're only in it to stroke your own ego.

> Gotta love crypto people putting "looking smarter than you"

Oh I'm sorry, that was your shtick. Apologies!

Also, I'm not a crypto person, I made some gains and sold a long time ago. I just have to laugh that you think one pointing out that an argument is weak makes one a part of the opposite tribe.


You can say the same thing for literally every political figure throughout all of human history. People have said this throughout all recorded history.

Please read a book.


Some people in the us government are very afraid of China.

Whether that fear is justified is a totally different topic


Why yes, let's let a totalitarian state become a superpower and start dictating the international order. I'm sure Xi Jinping will prove to be just as cuddly as Winnie the Pooh; nothing to worry about here.

I bet you're from the USA, so this may be hard for you to understand given your context, but as someone from LATAM, let me tell you: China can try really hard to be evil - they will have a LOT of work to be worse than the US.

That's mainly because the USA's flaws have been covered in far more detail, and has also played a bigger role in Latin America. Once those countries start to deal with China more you may find your observations were biased.

You're right, but that's not the point. Being afraid that another state will become the leading superpower and "dictate the international order" when your oligarchical country has been doing the same thing for the past 70~ years, and not in a "cuddly as Mickey Mouse" way, is HILARIOUS. The doublethink is off the charts! hahahaha.

America has been truly 'oligarchal' for approximately the past one month, whereas China has been a totalitarian state for the better part of a century.

Why not compare the Allies with the Axis next? The US was segregated, right, so... hey, same difference! /s


The US has a pretty extensive 100+ year history of imperialism, destabilization and violence in LATM [1], which is where they are from.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...


Everyone knows that.

A surprising number of people don't seem to know the first thing about China. Hey, it might not help that China doesn't allow a fifth of the world to learn the history of China.

But let's talk again in four years. The way things are going in America, I may agree with you guys by then :(


How many democratically-elected democracies has China overthrown through bloody dictatorships?

CCP's dictatorship bloodily conquered China, population 1.4B, 20% of the entire planet's people.

USA has also rescued hundreds of millions of people (including China!) from bloody conquerers, as in WW II.


You're arguing with folks who just want to be angry, not listen to facts or sage observations.

(it's not like the US is innocent; we have made a huge number of terrible mistakes attempting to maintain the Pax Americana. I fully acknowledge while being fairly sure that China could and would do far, far worse than the US)


This speculation that China could do far worse is totally unfounded given that they've had plenty of time to push buttons militarily that the US and the Soviet Union had already pushed with much less military power.

What democratic government did they overthrew? Because the ROC was no more democratic than the CCP... and Taiwan didn't have real election till the 1990.

If this kind of take is what I missed by never installing TikTok, I don't regret it.

Also, China did try it only a few decades ago. Murder, starvation, horrific torture, reeducation camps, brainwashed children denouncing their parents... impressively evil. Not that Tiananmen Square or Uyghur ethnic cleansing or kidnappings of expat dissidents are so much better.


Should we become a totalitarian state in order to compete with another? That feels like McCarthyism/Cold War/ “authoritarianism is fine as long as it isn’t communism” vibes.

I can see why one would think that; China is very successful in the world market (or, getting there) despite it not having a free market as such (although it has freed up a lot); despite, or is it because, it being a totalitarian state it is quickly catching up to the US, being the 2nd economy of the world; they still have like $10 trillion to go, but charts like https://www.statista.com/statistics/1070632/gross-domestic-p... predict China will overtake the US by 2030 at the current rate.

And there's nothing the US can do. Cutting government spending and starting trade wars with neighbours is not going to stop it. Building up a totalitarian state with deep government influence into businesses is not going to work and will be actively resisted, since Big Government is so against the principles of the current regime's voters - and China has been working on this for decades now. Free market won't work either, as it's already very free in the US itself - but the aggression of US companies in their sales practices, tax dodging, and privacy violations have caused their foreign customers like Europe to raise the defenses.

TL;DR, while I can see how totalitarianism can in theory create a strong economy, it isn't going to fly / work in the US.


Some people can't handle the idea that China has more people and are roughly as resource rich as the US, so if they work hard like we do they will naturally have the bigger economy.

As someone actually on this end of the spectrum, I agree with you. The thing that I feel makes my brain and my methodology special is that I can make a single pass through a body of work and internalize just enough of the information.

This then ends up as something analogous to a table of weak pointers. I keep a sort of abstract digest of the information in the mental database and I use it to go look up hardcopy when it becomes necessary to actually reference.

The result is something akin to a vector database. I can look at a problem and apply many different approaches simultaneously. The mental machinery autonomously eliminates the worst paths through my knowledge graph and I'm left with a few pretty good options.

Actually memorizing all the information my mental database links to would be explicitly detrimental to the process. This pushes the signal/noise ratio way too low, and more importantly wastes time I could spend indexing a larger amount of information.

Perfect recall just isn't necessary for the way I solve problems. Reference books exist for a reason. every machinist ever has a copy of the machinist's handbook for a very good reason.

The process is all about knowing what is possible and drawing paths through the graph of possibilities. The details aren't relevant until the implementation stage when you'd be accessing reference materials anyway.

I find that spaced repetition does increase recall. I don't think that's in dispute. But better recall does not make you a better engineer. I don't think it's something even worthwhile in the general case, unless you're specifically trying to build a deep specialization.

People in general really dislike this notion. People want to believe that hard work and dedication makes an Einstein. The idea that it's just how some brains are is, I dunno, unfair?

But it's a tradeoff. There's a huge psychological burden involved. I won't get into it, but it's something Einstein spoke about. I'm also no use on my own. My abilities have led me to specialize deeply in generalism; I have no real specialization in any one field. If I had to operate on my own, it'd take me ten times longer than with a couple of specialists behind me. But with a good team, the amount of work we can put out is scary.

No, not everyone can learn to think and operate this way, sorry. My brain is wired different and you probably don't want it, it really, truly sucks. But that's a good thing. A healthy mixture of perspectives and abilities is what makes a successful team/company/project. You can't really get by with just a generalist or just a specialist. You need both perspectives.


> The process is all about knowing what is possible and drawing paths through the graph of possibilities. The details aren't relevant until the implementation stage when you'd be accessing reference materials anyway.

Well put. But in that case, couldn’t you utilize SRS to memorizing high level concepts (e.g., coarse characteristics of various algorithms as opposed to how they are actually implemented, etc)


Probably, but that's really only helpful if you need that piece of information regularly. In the way that I work, it's not necessary. If a particular problem domain pops up frequently enough that I'd need to drill on it, the act of working the problem provides the repetition.

In general, I don't find techniques like this helpful. My brain is just really good at holding the overall concept of what I read. Once I've digested the information, the abstract is logged in the database forever. But that's just the autistic nature of my brain, I think.


The C# Linux experience is spending five minutes googling how to install the dotnet SDK on your distro because they're all different. Then you install the IDE.

We're a windows shop at work, but because C# is portable, I get to use Linux to do my development. It's really nice


Sad Debian noises.

Most of the time, `sudo apt install dotnet9` (or whichever metapackage version you need) just works. And then you open up a VS Code or a Rider it's ready to go, but yeah.


I used to work on a game where one of the mechanics was that you could write your own C# scripts. In a text box. We compiled the code in the game engine with Roslyn.

You don't need an IDE for C# any more than you do for any other language. You can use literally any form of text editing. We use IDEs because they make the job easier.


I mean, there's really no justification for the Get-Help cmdlet. The -h flag has been universal for decades. If it were a replacement for 'man' it would be defensible, but not when most programs do not acknowledge -h

"You can go through some ridiculous effort to hack windows into being good" does not make windows good or acceptable

Ridiculous effort? It’s the same amount of effort as flashing a Linux ISO. You have to flash an ISO to install the OS anyway, and you have to use some kind of tool.

It’s literally one checkbox. Check the third screenshot: https://rufus.ie/en/

Any anyway, being logged in to a Microsoft account doesn’t make my Windows experience bad. It’s not unacceptable to me to need an account to use Windows 11. Personally I’m gonna need to be logged in to access my Xbox digital content anyway, and if you’re not gaming on Windows I don’t even know what we are doing on this platform.

But anyway there’s a workaround that’s no more difficult than an ISO flash for those who don’t like it.

Windows 10 users won’t stop complaining about small issues like this and they had the same types of complaints with Windows 10 and previous versions.

I think it would be better for them to just switch to Linux and stop clinging to Windows 10 like they clung to 7 and XP way beyond their expiration dates.


>Ridiculous effort? It’s the same amount of effort as flashing a Linux ISO.

I suggest you leave that little bubble you're in behind.

Imagine your average user, who just wants a damn PC that works for web browsing, writing up word docs and watching a few movies or using their Spotify and browser to visit YouTube. Now imagine asking them if they think the ISO effort is easy. If you like, also imagine the average slightly elderly user who's put effort into making themselves learn the essentials of a typical Windows PC, has finally gotten comfy with its layout, and then suddenly, their stupid little taskbar is in the wrong place because "fuck you user, that's why" courtesy of Microsoft.

Do you think these people would or even should think "flashing a Linux ISO" is as simple as wiping one's ass? Do you think they would even know what such a step means? They shouldn't need to given the broadly spread user base for Windows machines.


The average user you describe doesn’t care if they have to login using a Microsoft account, and probably need to do so anyway if they have any Xbox content or a Microsoft 365 license.

Mac computers are the same way. While macOS lets you use the system without an Apple ID, you’d be hard pressed to find a consumer user who isn’t logged in for one reason or another, whether it’s the Mac App Store or iCloud Photos or something like that.


W11 Bluetooth is utterly broken. W11 will not recognize the bluetooth devices that I make and sell.

W11 is a great upgrade for my business and I am endlessly thankful that Microsoft is forcibly ruining my employee's machines one by one with forced updates to W11.

My other favorite feature is that w11 natively keylogs my employees and sends screenshots of our entire proprietary codebase to Microsoft. I find so much value in this feature. It's never been more efficient to leak customer and business secrets!


> W11 Bluetooth is utterly broken.

Works on my machine. I highly doubt that the millions of people using Windows 11 all have broken Bluetooth. Maybe you need to fix your hardware that you designed?

> with forced updates to W11

Windows 11 hasn’t been forced upon you. You can use Windows 10 after the support runs out at your own risk.

But again this isn’t a change for Windows 11 specifically. Every OS connected to the Internet has an expiration date in which you must upgrade it. If you don’t like this on Windows 11 then you don’t like this on 10 and 8.1 and 7 and XP. It’s not a logical reason to dislike Windows 11 specifically compared to its previous versions.

> natively key logs my employees and sends screenshots of our entire proprietary codebase to Microsoft

This sounds like a wild overstatement. Are you referring to the optional preview Recall feature? The feature you can easily disable and isn’t even on by default for corporate machines? [1]

The one that only does processing locally?

> Privacy and security are built into Recall's design. With Copilot+ PCs, you get powerful AI that runs locally on the device. No internet or cloud connections are required or used to save and analyze snapshots. Snapshots aren't sent to Microsoft. Recall AI processing occurs locally, and snapshots are securely stored on the local device only.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/...


I use XMeters. It's okay. You have a little customization to which meters to display, but it does pretty much everything I'd like it to. Per-core bar graph, memory utilization, and disk and network up/down rates.

The config ui is unbelievably slow with a very early windows 7 aesthetic. But I've seen that screen maybe three times in as many years. It's fine, I guess.

The main.taskbar widget seems perfectly cromulent though. No noticeable impact on system resources, and the updating feels plenty snappy. I'm happy with paying a few bucks for this widget.


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