Probably because fiat, unlike crypto, is not decentralized and fraudulent transactions can be reversed. A North Korean hacker zeroing out an account balance and incrementing another, can be reversed.
Exactly. It turns out a lot of the things in the banking system that cryptocurrency people complain about are actually features, not bugs.
IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency. It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources. Current form, however, has devolved into casino gambling and criminal laundering.
I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.
That is a category error, though. You can't entirely separate money from state power because ultimately all money represents a claim on resources within some political structure. And the place where you exchange money for those resources is always going to be within reach of the state, kind of by definition.
A monetary system also shouldn’t disproportionately reward the first users of that currency just for them accidentally being first in the pyramid (scheme).
> Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency.
There’s already a solution, use the currency to buy assets denominated in that currency. Crypto was not needed when bonds, stocks, real estate, etc exist.
There are hundreds of trillions of dollars in assets to buy whose value increase over time may beat inflation, I’m surprised you’re not aware of this solution.
0.5% of my net worth is in cash, the other 99.5% is in dollar denominated assets. Cash is a unit of exchange and a unit of account, not an asset.
> It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources.
Indeed, but also complete responsibility for safeguarding these. It's hard to imagine a good situation where an individual has complete control but not complete responsibility, that way lies moral hazard.
> giving the individual complete control of their financial resources
This seems like a definitionally unachievable goal. How can you have finance without others that you ultimately need to trust, if only to be stable enough in their wants and needs to want to trade with you?
The cost of that reversible fiat system is ongoing inflation that is put as a hidden tax on everyone. I’d rather have those 6bn from speculators going to NK if that means we go back to sub-2% inflation for a while
That is bs. Before 1971 we had a gold-backed monetary system and no record of deflation in the history of mankind (individual outliers notwithstanding when looking at the last 6000 years as a whole).
So you claim that in the last 6000 years of history we had stagnation? I would claim the world economy did nothing but grow on asset-backend currencies - sure, there is some localized, small (as in relative to the timeframe) outliers that don't matter.
> So you claim that in the last 6000 years of history we had stagnation?
Yes. That's exactly my claim. Without instruments to support growth, the pre-industrial economy did not grow.
The European Industrial Revolution was kick-started by looted gold and other precious materials (like spices) that were looted from the colonies. It provided unexpected inflation by physically increasing the amount of available currency.
> I would claim the world economy did nothing but grow on asset-backend currencies - sure, there is some localized, small (as in relative to the timeframe) outliers that don't matter.
If you are bringing up 6000 years of stagnation, then our current economic growth is nothing but an outlier.
Yes you can pick individual outliers, but clearly the world economy has been growing on a gold-based (or other shiny object backed) currency for literally thousands of years all over the world. Picking out individual cases is literally like looking at the 0.1%. Or do you seriously claim we had stagnation in the thousands of years of civilization, and only started to have groth since 1971? Then I know who is the ignorant one.
So episodes of deflation that inevitably resulted in stagnation are "outliers" and thus don't matter.
> Or do you seriously claim we had stagnation in the thousands of years of civilization, and only started to have groth since 1971?
The economic systems have not been based on precious metals for quite a while. There simply has not been enough gold (or silver) to back up the economy for at least 200-300 years. Instead, the global economy was based on the _promise_ of getting gold.
No, I think that's approaching a strawman. Speaking as somebody that doesn't give a shit about cryptocurrency.
It's all tradeoffs. The same power that grants the ability to reverse transactions also grants the ability to reverse a transaction in bad faith and commit fraud. Will the system correct that? Would it surprise you to know that it doesn't have to? That same power also grants the ability to lock an entity out of any kind of monetary transaction, and things like debanking. Usable for good? Sure. I don't think it's controversial to say that it being leveraged against Hunter Biden was at all justified, however. Would you like to be on the receiving end of that? Would you like to see a world where an LLM gets to decide that kind of thing based on your presence in the surveillance panopticon?
To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode. To be clear, I don't necessarily agree with it myself, but you shouldn't be so uncharitable to people to assume disagreement is always a matter of delusional ignorance.
> To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode.
Another way to restate my comment is: cryptocurrency is technically interesting but the tradeoffs it made to focus on certain edge cases mean that for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
It might not be a magic security wand, but so many critical vulnerabilities in software trace their origins to memory unsafe code and things like "use after free".
"~70% of the vulnerabilities Microsoft assigns a CVE each year continue to be memory safety issues" - Microsoft [1]
"We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android’s C and C++ code." - Google on Android [2]
If I were Google I'd try to rewrite Chromium in Rust. The FFMPEG folks should try porting the whole codebase to Rust too. They can always keep the legacy versions for legacy computers (my old n270 netbook can barely play 720p@30FPS anyway, and it's too slow to downsize 4k video to 720 or 480p...), so a bigger amd64 machine will always be -reallistically- needed for anything else than <=720p consumption.
And 6 months ago someone did a little experiment using Claude to rewrite FFmpeg in Rust. It was by the own description by the person that had the AI do it, significantly slower than FFmpeg even when incorporating assembly code from FFmpeg.
Maybe with further advancements it is now possible to get a better result, or soon.
But if you are going to copy their assembly code into the Rust protect how do you definitively prove that no memory unsafe operations are happening in those parts? Seems to me that either the whole thing should be safe Rust, if the point of the rewrite is memory safety.
In case of ms it's often concurrent userland-kernel transitions, and kernel doesn't control how and when they happen. Copilot is busy optimizing windows 11 and can't riir the kernel.
it's a linux container but through WSL and natively integrated into windows. that's basically it.
It replaces the need to install docker and mess with a lot of hackery instead with an officially first party supported linux container subsystem.
Edit: and since I forgot to mention a key value-add of this is that it's integrated with group policy, defender etc so you can limit specific users or groups or OUs, etc to running specific containers or to exposing specific resources/network devices/hardware/etc to WSL at all. It makes managing all of it no different than managing any other part of an enterprise windows setup.
And likewise WSL has native antivirus/anti-intrusion instrumentation hooks via a Microsoft Defender for Endpoint/MDE plugin to WSL so that unlike with docker, etc you don't get a sudden blindspot that's non-trivial to monitor (or that comes with a heavy perf penalty).
So it's not something for me, but like everything Microsoft makes, it's for our BOFH's who will torment us with yet another corporate compliance machine.
As a Linux developer on Windows, I find this feature really compelling. I had been doing this by importing debian and alpine images manually, to reduce the scope of agents to a limited vm instance with limited credentials.
With WSL, you can control which Windows dirs are accessible (read or read-write). you can easily clone new VMs (distros ) as a new instance.
WSL containers adds convenience and consistency to the manual steps I was doing before.
for example: a primary debian developer env, a second Debian maintainer/developer instance, multiple alpine containers (for each agent stack, one with cloud keys, one with messaging keys).
This adds a very feature rich vm and container experience on top of WSL2 , which was great to begin with.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a feature of Windows that allows you to run a Linux environment on your Windows machine, without the need for a separate virtual machine or dual booting -- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about
Actually like containers, however different WSL distributions (already in WSL2) share the same virtualized kernel, which is particularly prepared to interactact with the host Windows.
Those who can’t or won’t move off of Windows have some other way to run Linux stuff in a virtual machine that integrates into a native terminal. I’ve found it quite awkward in general, and honestly haven’t thought much of it since I just decided to move to Linux.
The author literally spells out why this isn't always the case:
> Yes to start out it’s 95% booleans. But then you want a rollout. And then you want some targeting rules. And then you want non booleans… maybe some json. Oo wouldn’t it be nice if the json could conform to a schema… and then eventually you are like damn I really want to change these without deploying. Or you want to read the same flag from multiple services.
I really like that this exists, but I found the menus and UI to be rather non-intuitive. My main use case was to sync reading progress between my Kobo and my iPhone. I was able to do this using KOReader on the Kobo & the Readest app[1] on iPhone (also open source).
Ultimately I decided to get rid of KOReader because it felt a bit laggy. The gestures (eg: swiping up on the left side to increase frontlight brightness) didn't work well either.
I eneded up writing my own software to sync progress from Kobo to a KOReader Sync server[2] which my Readest app also connects to (love that unlike the Kindle, the Kobo is quite an open system). You can even set it up so you can SSH into it[3].
I really appreciate that KOReader is an option. On my older Kindle (first-gen Paperwhite), the default reading experience had declined until page turns take several seconds. Firmware update and factory reset wouldn't fix it. Using the default reader just wasn't a viable scenario.
I jailbroke it, launched KOReader, and it's like I have a new e-reader. The amount of customizability gets kind of in the way, but once it's set up I don't really think about it from one month to the next. I also didn't feel the need to upgrade my original install either.
Amazon bricked the first gen paperwhite, so I went on a similar journey. I started out making a single rust app on it, then went down the rabbit hole of trying to replace the shell/launcher. https://github.com/justinledwards/ferrink-home-assistant and "ferrink" is the launcher. It is pretty snappy on the paperwhite for what it is.
I tried to set up KOReader multiple times and always got stuck figuring out where all the settings are and how exactly they work. It seems very complete, but I'm just too dumb to actually use it.
I went through the same on my 10-inch Android tablet. The key is just sticking with it long enough to get it set up for your needs and prefs. I'm glad I did because it's really great. While the docs are quite good, if you get stuck just use an LLM. Once you get it configged, you won't be using the UI much.
KOR is both complete and very capable. It can very probably do everything you'll ever want but, as many people observe, the UI is just a bit weird. That's not to say the UI is broken or inconsistent, its simply that its approach is a little different than you'd expect. Once I got familiar with the main flow of the UI, it hasn't been an issue for my daily-use needs. If you care about flexibility, control, features and having it "your way", I think it's well worth the one-time effort to set up. It's also extensible with plug-ins and the UI is entirely user-moddable with Lua scripts. I use several found here: https://github.com/sebdelsol/KOReader.patches.
There's a search function hidden near the help menu. That was handy whenever I lost a menu item, which was frequently. I do like it now it's set up and it accurately reports the battery level, unlike the Kobo reader which says 40% then 0%.
I use the Project:Title[1] addon, I think someone else here on HN suggested it a few months ago. The only catch is that you need to update it manually each time after updating KOReader
I was a bit dumbfounded by the original KoReader browsing UI, I would have expected something more organized, but I thought "maybe it's just a setting I haven't discovered yet".
It looks like I need one of those instead. Will do when I have some time.
Does this support collating books of the same series together?
I also found all existing e-reader software to be lacking, and all I really wanted was a basic reader. I ended up writing my own with Rust and MyPDF (the latter doing all the heavy loading).
The hardware is great, but the software is pretty lacking. Apparently a lot of the tools out there are from folks in similar situation: had the hardware, but the software to drive it was lacking.
Surely you understand why they wouldn't want to publicize a PoC, right?
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