Yeah, this has some general high level good advice, but is so old it doesn't include the new idiomatic ways of using errors.Is and error wrapping for error checking...
Thank you for pushing back against the "crypto anywhere bad!" crowd. T
The USDC payments are pretty tame, and on the networks they have selected performance should be pretty quick and cheap too. For example, payments via ETH Polygon L2 is ~2 cents (https://l2fees.info/) and transaction time is also a couple seconds.
I personally am glad to see them reintroduce crypto now that its matured more for stable payment use cases.
Crypto currencies are an experiment in the "denationalization of money" which was a book written by Hayek - of course he wrote this before cyrpto currencies were even a thing.
I would avoid just picking out BTC (which being stable in supply is prone to hoarding as digital gold and not really used as a means of commerce) and look at what other crypto has to offer as well, such as Ethereum which has a dynamic supply limit that is tied to its usage - in times of high usage such as today, it actually becomes deflationary. As usage slows, it becomes inflationary again which in theory should promote network usage.
We are essentially in an ongoing experiment of the denationalization of money and I personally think it will be fascinating how it will play out in the next couple decades.
Proof of work was the first of the consensus algorithms to be used with blockchains because Satoshi (imo, probably Hal Finney) likely didn't know about Proof of Stake at the time. By the time it was being discussed, Satoshi was already becoming less active in the community.
The claim PoS is not the best store of value is asinine. PoW in BTC has consolidated around a cabal of a handful of miners and the power usage is of course a well-known sounding bell for PoW apologists everywhere.
The truth is PoW was the best they had at the dawn of blockchain, then technology improved. It's really this simple and I'm baffled when people get religious about consensus algorithms. It's as if people would say we need to keep using bubblesort instead of quicksort because bubblesort was discovered first.
Proof of stake is not really any different to the fiat system it's trying to replace.
If a money isn't proof-of-work then it implies that some people can create it without doing work.
Gold's proof-of-work stood it in good stead for thousands of years. It was only some of it's physical limitations that led to fiat beating it. In fact fiat would be worthless if it wasn't boot-strapped into having value by originally representing gold's proof-of-work. Now we have digital proof of work in bitcoin. It doesn't have the physical limitations of gold, and fiat is going to hyperinflate to 0 once again - but this time it will stay there.
"Proof of stake is not really any different to the fiat system it's trying to replace." Please elaborate.
"If a money isn't proof-of-work then it implies that some people can create it without doing work" Have you seen how much work goes into being a validator? There is definitely work being done - just much more sophisticated that guessing a random value...
Agreed on crypto not having the physical limitations and on the trend of fiat to inflate. I just can't agree on the other points.
While it's amazing they've got as big as they have, I have to say I'm utterly disappointed with the quality of the steam interface.
Trying to watch friend's streams breaks half the time, files often get corrupted for downloads, and feels like every other week they change the UI layout.
I don’t care about streaming, I never had a corrupted download and have been using steam pretty much since it existed, and the recent UI change (not a fan, though, it’s now slower than before) was the first big one in years.
You've never had to "verify the integrity of game cache" either? Wow, you must be lucky - 3-4 of the friends I play with have to do that quite often.
Funny enough, as we speak, I am downloading an update for a game. It failed for some unknown reason the first time and tried redownloading now. Time will tell if it will finally "just work" or if I'll have to redownload the entire game. Before you ask, yes I am on an SSD with plenty of space and I have a pretty decent fiber internet connection.
That is fascinating to me! It challenges my assumption based on personal experience - I think I had to repair a game once in more than a decade (dirt rally 2, and it's possible I did something to muck it up).
I did have to reinstall cyberpunk 2077 on GoG multiple times but that was largely because I tried some mods.
But steam on any of my PC's, laptops and now steam deck has never failed me. sorry to hear about your experience and Thx for sharing!
It's been years since I last had corrupted downloads, and I think that was back when Steam used its own download protocol, off colocated Valve-owned mirror servers. As of some years back it's all HTTP-based[1] now and off Akamai CDN IIRC. (I don't mean to say "works on my machine" but trying to theorize why it's so common for you while saying why it's generally more stable nowadays)
Have you ever tried to reproduce this on a different ISP or even hotspot? Wired vs wireless? Maybe there's some transmission corruption going on over the wire that's only caught during final validation? (And thus having to redownload chunks much later instead of inline)
Even chunks are checksummed. Or at least they are in third party implementations. [1]
One thing that happens is some games keep config files in their game directory instead of using a host OS user directory and thus those games will fail validation after any configuration change.
Combine that with mods that break games, but the mod files aren't in the manifest and thus invisible to validation, can create scenarios where users are doing repeated full validations and still having issues.
> You've never had to "verify the integrity of game cache" either?
I've been using Steam for a long time, I do not recall any time that I have had to do this except when I was manually messing around with files and needed to reacquire the originals.
Steam downloads are so terribly slow. I can suck down 100Gb during a cup of coffee using my browser, bittorrent or even the (yuck) Epic Game Store. But with Steam it takes multiple hours. I have tried to diagnose the problem but as far as I can tell it's because Steam uses really aggressive compression and they process each block as it is downloaded. This causes the download to stall and wait for the CPU to catch up.
If anything, it looks pretty damn good for something 20 years old. Facebook, Reddit, and Google haven't aged well. HN isn't even 20 and feels much older.
This aligns with what I've read in Robert K Massie's "Dreadnought". It feels odd to title the book "Bismarck's War" and then come to that lesson. It should really have been titled "Wilhelm's Lunacy".
Wilhelm's obsession with a massive fleet to compete with England lost any hopes of forming an alliance with them and resulted in Germany being seen as a threat. Having a large fleet puts you at odds against England no matter what - that is their last line of defense. It's interesting to think what might have happened had Germany abandoned any aims on a massive navy and focused all those resources on it's army instead. My hunch is no mis-alignement with England and a very different looking world today if that happened.
> It's interesting to think what might have happened had Germany abandoned any aims on a massive navy and focused all those resources on it's army instead. My hunch is no mis-alignement with England and a very different looking world today if that happened.
I don't think so. The biggest mistake Germany made was letting its alliance with Russia lapse in 1891, in favor of trying to snag an alliance with the UK, which wasn't interested in one (Britain favored a policy of neutrality on the continent). This leads France to seize the opportunity and ally with Russia in 1894. A series of colonial issues leads the UK to realize around 1900 or so that not having any allies wasn't exactly a good thing, especially when you've got lots of people you're butting heads against.
Wilhelm was an absolute wrecking ball when it came to diplomacy. His tendency to show support for anyone fighting the British in colonial ventures in the late 1890s (especially the Boer War) couldn't have helped any chance for a UK-German alliance. It's only after tentative attempts to come to an agreement break down in 1901 that the naval arms race actually becomes an issue in UK-Germany relations: indeed, it's not really until dreadnoughts make the existing fleets (lopsidedly in favor of the UK) obsolete that German navy buildup actually poses a threat to the UK. The treaties the UK does enter into are less military alliances than they are colonial tension defusing, and Wilhelm's tendency to do the opposite would have likely made any formal UK-Germany treaty rather short-lived.
The naval arms race mostly takes place after the UK-German treaty attempts ended, and redirecting that money to a larger army would probably have pushed UK even harder into the Franco-Russian camp: during its period of continental isolation, its greatest fear is that of a second Napoleon, who conquers most of Europe and shuts the British out of it. A stronger German army makes that look more plausible, and aligning against Germany helps avert that catastrophe.
> I don't think so. The biggest mistake Germany made was letting its alliance with Russia lapse in 1891
The alliance lapse was forced by then, the issue is that Russia and Austria-Hungary, the two historic German allies, were competing for influence over the Balkans. Bismarck, rather than taking a side or remaining neutral, tried to become the arbiter of that dispute, and led a duplicitous diplomacy towards Russia. That was largely due to his attempt to freeze Europe in a diplomatic state that benefited Germany, rather than acknowledging the changing nature of diplomacy and trying to find new allies and a new balance.
By 1891, German diplomats were faced with a tough choice: either continuing a two-faced policy which was doomed anyway, since Russia was not stupid, or acknowledging that and letting the alliance lapse.
The OODA loop is complete gibberish. It's describing the tip of the iceberg in the most complicated way possible, in an attempt to impress people too incompetent to understand it, written by a man unqualified to talk about it.
It's a complicated subject, over-simplified and then re-complicated to appeal to people who like to put words inside of boxes and connect them with arrows.
Nowhere in the article does it mention NFTs being at the heart of the layoffs. The article later says, "The Ottawa-based company will cut jobs in all its divisions, though most of the layoffs will occur in recruiting, support and sales units, said Mr. Lütke".
No mention of NFTs, though wouldn't be surprised if they scale back on that. I _would_ be surprised if they drop support and development for them completely.
Some companies did work on NFTs because they believe in the space and think it's the next big thing. Some do it for marketing to say "look, we have an NFT story!" If you did it for marketing, there's no reason to advertise you spun down that initiative.
