The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!"
I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."
One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False":
"""This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him."""
Have you ever heard of "The Narcissist's Prayer"? It goes like this:
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did...
You deserved it.
Tether defenders are really working their way through the steps here.
18 months ago, it was "That didn't happen." (Tether is 100% backed by USD cash.)
6 months ago, it "wasn't that bad." (It might not be 100% USD cash, but it's cash-equivalent assets like short-term commercial paper.)
Now that there's strong evidence the commercial paper is just fake money shuffling between Tether/Binfinex/other shady crypto investments we get "that's not a big deal." (Look at the way banks work! They only need 4% collateral! Tether's probably got at least that much...)
Next step is finding out that their actual liquidity isn't capable of holding up under a real-life stress test, and the defenders will be talking about "not my fault." (This was a once-in-a-lifetime crash, they couldn't have foreseen it, crypto's still way better than the fiat banking system!)
When thousands of people lose their retirements in a gigantic defi crash, it'll be "you deserved it." (Everyone knows crypto is risky, you shouldn't have believed Tether was the same as USD.)
I'd like to throw my two cents in here: strength training.
I started having problems with RSI about five years ago, and I tried and failed to get relief from quite a few different things, including the Mindbody Prescription, but what ultimately helped me the most was arm and grip exercises: pull ups, deadlifts, farmer's walks.
If you're going to do _anything_ for 8 hours a day, even sitting, you should be taking measures to make sure it doesn't impact your health.
I'll provide the short version, and will encourage the exchange team to do a proper write-up once they feel ready for it. But to provide proper context, keep in mind that everything below is considered with a trading exchange in mind.
Distilled down to bullet point material, the change is driven by:
- language ecosystem; support libraries for Erlang are, regrettably, not that well maintained
- familiarity; the team maintaining and improving the exchange stack are not Erlang experts but know C++ pretty well
- hiring pool; finding good engineers who know Erlang is impressively hard. Intersection with engineers who have been exposed to financial exchanges is ... well.
- performance; as I've been explained to, the underlying data structures in Erlang are designed for maximum concurrency and share-nothing model (the Actor pattern in its pure form). These impose constraints that happen to hit the hot paths pretty hard. And related to that...
- memory model properties; exchanges rely on data structures whose critical paths cannot avoid invasive operations. Routinely working around your runtime's central assumptions is not exactly a best practice, regardless of the language used.
I will let our exchange team tell the complete back story, in their own style and with their view from the trenches. Known interest probably helps.
I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."
One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False":
"""This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him."""
https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/