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I'm guessing here because I'm not the author but I believe this statement is directed towards the blocklisting entities because they don't provide transparencies or a method to reach them to resolve issues with a domain once it's aquired by someone else. That absolutely is the issue of those entities.

At one point of time when I had to deal with people submitting phishing links to a web service I owned, I learned some of the tricks that phishers use to get around reports, such as using IP geolocation or the accept-language and accept-encoding header to determine if the phishing page should be served.

With tricks like this, it's not a surprise to see why the companies operating blocklists are hesitant to make this process easy; after all, what's to prevent the phishers from temporarily stating that the issue has been resolved to get out of the denylist, and then restarting their campaign again?


If the process required you to verify ID, e.g. a passport + video selfie, some accountability might be possible. But that might be too invasive for many folks.

This doesn't work because there's a nearly unlimited supply of people willing (out of desperation, drug addiction, or just plain poor decision making) to let bad actors use their IDs.

Also, all that info has been leaked a billion times now, and there are tools to allow real-time filter/overlays of faces to make it even easier.

It's what banks are using now.

These two things are concerning, not reassuring.

Still, an improvement over what they were previously using I guess?


If you could get out of blacklists by transferring ownerships then people can “wash” domains by fake transfers.

While I don't disagree and understand the authors concern the bottom line is the author, and others of the same mind, will have to face facts. LLMs are a genie that isn't going back in that bottle. Humans have LLMs and will use them. The teaching angle needs to change to acknowledge this. "You need to learn long hand math because you won't just have a calculator in your pocket." Whoopsie! Everyone has a smart phone. Now I'm going back to school for my degree and classes are taught expecting calculators and even encouraging the use of various math and graphing websites.

By all means urge folks to learn the traditional, arguably better, way but also teach them to use the tools available well and safely. The tools aren't going away and the tools will continue to improve. Endeavour to make coders who use the tools well to produce valuable well written code 2x, 5x, 8x, 20x the amount of code as those of today.


> You need to learn long hand math because you won't just have a calculator in your pocket." Whoopsie! Everyone has a smart phone.

I hear this so often, that I have to reply. It's a bad argument. You do need to learn longhand math - and be comfortable with arithmetic. The reason given was incorrect (and a bit flippant), but you actually do need to learn it.

Anyone in any engineering, or STEM based field needs to be able to estimate and ballpark numbers mentally. It's part of reasoning with numbers. Usually that means mentally doing a version of that arithmetic on rounded version of those numbers.

Not being comfortable doing math, means not being able to reason with numbers which impacts every day things like budgeting and home finances. Have a conversation with someone who isn't comfortable with math and see how much they struggle with intuition for even easy things.

The reason to know those concepts is because basic math intuition is an essential skill.


>t's a bad argument. You do need to learn longhand math - and be comfortable with arithmetic. The reason given was incorrect (and a bit flippant), but you actually do need to learn it.

But...this applies to engineering and/or webdev too. You can't just expect to copy paste a limited solution limited to 4096 output tokens or whatever that would work in a huge system you have at your job, which the LLM has 0 context of.

Smaller problems, sure, but they're also YMMV. And honestly if I can solve smaller irritating problems using LLMs so I can shift my focus to more annoying, larger tasks, why not?

What I am saying is that you also do need to know fundamentals of webdev to use LLMs to do webdev effectively.


> "You need to learn long hand math because you won't just have a calculator in your pocket." Whoopsie! Everyone has a smart phone.

That's a shitty argument, and it wasn't even true back in the day (cause every engineer had a computer when doing their work).

The argument is that you won't develop a mental model if you rely on the calculator for everything.

For example, how do you quickly make an estimate if the result you calculated is reasonable, or if you made an error somewhere? In the real world you can't just lookup the answer, because there isn't one.


This allows you more time to develop a mental model, perhaps not at a learning stage but at a working stage. The LLM shows you what works and you can optimize it thereafter. It will even give you handy inline commentary (probably better than what a past developer provided on existing code).


You still have to manually review and understand every single line of code and your dependencies. To do otherwise is software malpractice. You are responsible for every single thing your computers do in production, so act like it. The argument that developers can all somehow produce 10x or more the lines of code by leaning on a LLM falls over in the face of code review. I'd say at most you'll get 2x, but even that's pushing it. I personally will reject pull requests if I ask the author a question about how something works and they can't answer it. Thankfully, this hasn't happened (yet).

If you have an engineering culture at your company of rubber-stamp reviews, or no reviews at all, change that culture or go somewhere better.


Auth is what you went for when "cloud" or any number of more widely used ambiguous terms are out there? That said I think dialing back the use of technical terms watered down by the marketing team would be fantastic.


The icon for Quad Cities pizza is off by 100 miles or more. Quad Cities is right in the tip of the bend on the Iowa east side/Illinois west side. It is remarkably local. Can't go giving BFE Iowa credit for something they had nothing to do with.


The Cuban bread is 100 miles off too; should be in Tampa, as is in the written listing, but the marker is in Sarasota.


This global warming rhetoric against bitcoin is nonsense right? The current financial system doesn't run off as many or more computers in datacenters around the globe? I don't have objective numbers but I'd lay money credit card processing alone dwarfs bitcoin by a pretty good margin.


YouTube is one of those things that consumes more energy than bitcoin.

That is bad, but it doesn't seem part of the public narrative that YouTube is bad because of global warming. Also the general narrative posits that electric cars are good. They also use a lot of energy. There's nothing inherent about EVs versus bitcoin that suggests one uses clean energy versus another. They both use a lot of electricity.

But so does the banking sector. And entertainment, farming, travel and a lot of the other things 8 billion people choose to do or depend on.

Any usage of fossil fuels should rightfully be a target and held to the same standards.

There is another narrative that we need continual growth and that inflation aids this. And deflationary currencies are bad because they don't help growth. This seems so ingrained in modern politics and economics that I slightly hesitate to question it in public.

Well maybe unbounded growth and exponential usage of resources is the actual problem.

I hope we reach the social limit on unbounded growth before it destroys everything we have. It's literally in physical terms unsustainable. My only hope here is that nuclear fusion gives us a respite for a hundred years or so. But we'd still have the same problem at a different scale if we used that to grow to a trillion people.

I can see that a deflationary global currency could be part of the solution to the problem. And I can see why suggesting deflation is good can be seen as a threatening thing to those that have resources.

So I feel in that light, the bitcoin = global warming narrative is really convenient, even if a little ironic.


While Bitcoin is designed to reward high energy consumption the opposite is true for the fiancial system, since lower energy costs would make the different processing entities earn higher margins.

Thus, the financial system provides much more utility for the energy it consumes than bitcoin does.


Bitcoin rewards energy efficiency by design, which is why the vast majority of bitcoin mining uses excess fully renewable energy.


Yeah, like running old coal powered plants to power mining facilities[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...


The global financial system can handle considerably more than three (3) transactions per second.


There's not really a problematic upper bound for global transaction volume on transactions per second with the lightning network. There are other problems in terms of adoption and infrastructure etc, but the actual potential for humankind to have a single currency global low-barrier payment system is there. But this is more like the early days of the internet. The internet seemed pointless to most people even as late as the 90's.

A future global system could have settlement on the blockchain. Like the current system does at far less regular intervals than the processing power of non-settled transactions.


> There's not really a problematic upper bound for global transaction volume on transactions per second with the lightning network

There unfortunately is, to open a channel you have to make a Bitcoin transaction, and you can't use lightning without opening a channel. Bitcoin processes a max of ~220M transactions per year so to onboard the world onto lightning with only one channel each would take a few decades.

A real layer 2 could solve it, or having some trustless way to use BTC on other chains


It's possible I'm too optimistic on this point. I feel I have a good grasp of how bitcoin works, but when it gets to layer 2 it gets fuzzier. The initial discussions sounded really promising, as they seemed to mirror HTTP on top of TCP/IP. And we all know how much of a slow burning revolution that turned out to be.

But http seems simpler than what I've read about lightning more recently.

Total wild speculation follows:

As for the channels problem, it feels to me like you have something like ISPs or AOL being the thing that's needed to kickstart it. And perhaps the ISPs or AOL in this world are the employers and lightning banks. So yes you need bitcoin to open it, but with an employer you have the potential to have an entity with bitcoin resources and with a reason to send bitcoin to an individual.

Perhaps HD wallets with lightning kickstarter funds apportioned to new employees. This feels similar to the needing a bank account or national insurance number in the UK (social security number? in the US) to start getting paid, or similar to needing an internet connection. Yes you could choose to get paid in bitcoin and have the fees come out of your wage, and this would be similar to getting paid in physical cash today. Or you could get over the slight roadbump to get you onto the lightning network.

What would a real layer 2 look like in your opinion?


A real layer 2 would look more like something built on Ethereum (can see all its L2s at https://l2beat.com).

Essentially it's a separate network that every few minutes takes every transaction and compresses it into a data blob that it saves on Ethereum along with a proof that the computation was done correctly. The Ethereum L1 nodes then only need to verify the proof instead of re-executing all transactions that happened on the L2.

With this design users can go straight from an exchange like Coinbase onto the L2 and never need to use Ethereum, and fees are 10x cheaper because of the data compression. Fees will soon be 100x cheaper as Ethereum is adding extra space just for these L2 data blobs that is much cheaper than normal Ethereum data space.

Unfortunately it can't be done on Bitcoin right now because Bitcoin nodes don't have Turing complete scripting and so can't verify the proof that an L2 posts to Bitcoin.


You know credit card transactions can take days to actually settle right?


>I don't have objective numbers but I'd lay money credit card processing alone dwarfs bitcoin by a pretty good margin.

What, per transaction?


I understand you're referring to the Apple store but in case other non-apple users find this. On the Google Play store at least these are relatively easy to find. Pick your category, games, then scroll the tabs at the top to "Premium".


Could you expand some more on this? Short of active curation of small segments of online, deemed important, snapshots kept alive by constant maintenance (I wonder what the internet archives drive failure rates look like), there isn't a digital medium readily available (to the masses) yet that can survive 100+ years while also storing a meaningful amount of information. There are research efforts like Microsofts crystal thing. But so far no real winners.


Not the person you replied to, but: Documents rarely survive just by being physically durable. They survive first by people making an effort to preserve them. Deja News might be the most complete archive, but it's not the only effort to preserve Usenet.

For example: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-googlegroups

It's a roundabout way to do it, but probably includes enough context on what's missing for a historian to dig into other archives to find it. History is like RAID: given enough parity information, you can reconstruct much of what's missing. That's how we know so many lost texts exist, and occasionally find them: stuff we do have references them and sometimes offers clues on where to find it.

Digital information in particular benefits from getting smaller relative to available storage size. Running a Usenet server used to be a huge financial burden. Now I could hold most of it on a keychain. This makes replicating it across the planet to resist the chaos of human nature easier. It might die in one place, but it's also somewhere else. It would take a world-ending event to wipe out anything you might find in /r/DataHoarder.


this is why i disagree with mcherm. we live in an anti-intellectual age where people seek to destroy information. Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan are treated like criminals, while billionaires who abuse the legal system to silence critics are treated like intellectual heroes.


Active curation IS an excellent way to maintain information. Drive failure rates are the kind of thing that archivists can easily measure (and appropriate amounts of redundant storage can nearly eliminate data loss).


YMMV indeed. How does it go for folks who buy a device second hand, beyond apple care, perhaps because they can't afford Apple's first hand prices. No one is saying Apple shouldn't provide Apple care or first rate service within coverage. This is about a broader picture. As noted in the article Apple knows how long Apple care extends for any given device, and if components have been replaced. It would be fairly easy for them (and their gobs of money) to perhaps do something equitable like disable the replaced parts warnings once a device leaves apple care. IMO they shouldn't display those at all but in the interest of equity and compromise I'd settle for removal after Apple has self selected not to "care" about the device anymore.


Not really defending it as such, just offering my experience.

That being said if I was trying to see it from Apple’s perspective, it does address a lot of problems pretty easily: thieves breaking devices down for parts or coercing users, customers having issues with their devices due to low quality repairs, users buying second hand phones with unofficial parts, various security concerns, etc. Apple do also sell old and refurbished devices also.

That being said, I do think Apple should be solving this in a way that allows unofficial repairs, even if that involves taking your ID and proof of purchase into an Apple Store to get your device “unlocked” for free so you can do whatever you want with it, knowing it may hurt the resale value and impact the device’s security. More than that, I think it should be legally required under right to repair legislation.


I second this. KDE spin has been absolutely fantastic on both my custom desktop (all AMD) and my Framework 13.


I was mulling what to put on my framework 13 that's nearly en route, I think I'm going to give this a shot.


I'm going to echo this. "Please" implies an optional action like when you're trying to be kind to a child. As an adult some people will need you to do things unequivocally. If you can't handle that then that's really unfortunate for you. Please, get over yourself and understand that sometimes business is business and some thing must be done. They aren't optional. Otherwise you may find yourself finding a new job.

Having said that, I think it is wise to try to keep things amicable and only fall back to more rigid language and requests, stated as requirements, only after kinder communication has failed.


It's not that it reads as optional to me, as that it's kinda hard to read without seeing the implied "you should have done this already, without being told".


The tone, trust and context are massively important in these kinds of communications.

I don't think I've ever used this phrasing in writing, maybe because I also hear something similar to what you're hearing when I read it to myself...


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