I feel this article is saying people from UK/US/etc. want to maximize upside, and people from DACH (Germany etc.) want to minimize downside.
I was a bit shocked when I talked to an Austrian colleague once and they told me they wanted to get into investing, but losing any money at any time was completely unacceptable. They had looked at investing in S&P 500 ETFs etc., but felt they must have misunderstood something, as they didn't understand why anyone would invest in anything that might go down, even temporarily.
So the thesis of the article definitely feels plausible to me.
If you invested in the S&P 500 in 1968, you'd be waiting until 1992 before you saw any return on that investment after accounting for inflation, and the inflation adjusted S&P 500 was on a net-losing streak for the whole period from 1968 to 1982 before it started going up again.
People believe the line will always go up, and maybe it will, but it's still at least possible for it to be on a quite painfully downward trend for over 12 years at a time.
I'd argue it's also not at all irrational to worry that we may be on the precipice of a similar situation right now, or perhaps even on the precipice of the situation at the end of the 1920s, where it would have taken more than 35 years for the S&P 500 to recover from its previous highs.
Your colleague is probably more risk-adverse than is rational (and I would say more risk-averse than most Austrians or Germans), but I would also argue that a lot of people blindly throwing all their retirement money at the S&P 500 might not realize just how much risk they are exposing themselves to.
Real estate, gold, crypto, in that order. That's where people from DACH invest, also valid for rest of the Europe. Mediterranean people additionally invest in lottery tickets. I wouldn't exaggerate saying people are keeping their gold bars in their otherwise empty investment apartments.
European banks play very negative role because they aggressively upsell their investment funds and schemes so for many people stock exchange means investment fund with management fee which oftentimes losses yet the growth, if happens, never catches up with the market growth.
> But if you have side effects and need something to happen exactly once it seems a lot more useful to communicate this, rather than pretending you did the thing.
I think it depends on whether the sender needs to know whether the thing was done during the request, or just needs to know that the thing was done at all. If the API is to make a purchase then maybe all the caller really needs to know is "the purchase has been done", no matter whether it was done this time or a previous time.
And in terms of a caller implementing retry logic, it's easier for the caller to just retry and accept the success response the second time (no matter if it was done the second time, or actually done the first time but the response got lost triggering the retry).
> Because jj's conflict resolution is fundamentally better
I don't know jj well so its merge algorithm may well be better in some aspects but it currently can't merge changes to a file in one branch with that file being renamed in another branch. Git can do that.
Apple refuses to remove things without clear replacements, for better or more often worse.
The 6k XDR has been replaced, apparently they've got something coming for the Mac Pro. I don't know why it wasn't the Mac Studio update last year. Maybe we find out at WWDC this year.
> Replacing human hesitation with machine confidence removes the one safeguard that has prevented nuclear war since 1945. Until militaries implement documented human authorisation...we are blindly automating our own destruction
In the scenario described there literally is a human in the loop: the president is a human?
> You end up working for shitty Fortune 500 company, work on useless/mindless shit, grind for 8 hrs, collect paycheck, eat, sleep, and repeat.
I used to think like this but what if it isn't the case? Maybe the market is making the right decisions after all? Maybe contributing a tiny amount to a successful business really is worth more to society than contributing a huge amount to a project with barely any customers, and that's why we get paid more working for large companies?
(Not suggesting OP's projects have barely any customers, I am more talking about my own forays into small business.)
I'm obviously biased as a small business owner, but I think that logic assumes that the market is perfectly efficient, when it obviously isn't. Large companies have massive advantages in so many dimensions.
As a simple example, imagine that I built a site for buying ebooks that's better in every way than Amazon. I pay authors more, readers pay less, the ebooks are compatible with every device, and it's easier for both authors and readers to use my site than Amazon. I still probably couldn't survive against Amazon because they'd tell their authors that if they sell with me, they can't sell on Amazon.[0] They have such a market dominance that authors would lose money by using my platform, even if it's a demonstrably better product in every way with better pricing.
But it goes beyond that. Big businesses have all these other huge advantages so that they can succeed not because they're offering the most value but because they have a pre-existing advantageous market position:
- It's a small percentage of their costs to hire attorneys to look for tax loopholes
- They can manage the overhead of abusing the H1B visa system to hire workers at below-market rates
- They can sue people and get sued and still have 98% of their employees not paying attention to any lawsuits
- They can afford to sell things at a loss just to choke out smaller competitors
Look at trillion dollar industries where 95% of money goes to just 2-3 companies. The iOS/Android duopoly, the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. Do they control the market because they're just so great at offering value? Or does their market position and terrible government policy prevent anyone from competing with them effectively and offering consumers better choices?
I skimmed the pdf; they show a model where having such an early "filter" is beneficial to the scammer, but doesn't provide any actual evidence that it applies in reality beyond restating the just-so story.
> Can anyone recommend a music discovery service that isn't garbage?
I enjoy using last.fm, although it's not their focus these days. Sign up, connect it to Spotify or whatever you use (incl. a long list of players of local music), after a day or so it'll learn what you like and you can create playlists with suggestions and export them, or browser around recommended artists etc.
I was a bit shocked when I talked to an Austrian colleague once and they told me they wanted to get into investing, but losing any money at any time was completely unacceptable. They had looked at investing in S&P 500 ETFs etc., but felt they must have misunderstood something, as they didn't understand why anyone would invest in anything that might go down, even temporarily.
So the thesis of the article definitely feels plausible to me.