• 2 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • In the sense that TLP isn’t Blackbeard, no, we don’t. But I would suggest that, unlike Scott, TLP genuinely understands the pathology of narcissism. Their writing does something Scott couldn’t ever do: it grabs the narcissist by the face and forces them to notice how their thoughts never not involve them. As far as I can tell, Scott’s too much of a pill-pusher to do any genuine psychoanalysis.

    Also, like, consider this TLP classic. Two things stand out if we’re going to consider whether they’re Scott in disguise. The first is that the dates are not recent enough, and indeed TLP’s been retired for about a decade. The second is that the mythology and art history are fairly detailed and accurate, something typically beyond Scott.

    (In true Internet style, I hope that there is a sibling comment soon which shows that I am not just wrong, but laughably and ironically wrong.)


  • Show me a long-time English Wikipedia editor who hasn’t broken the rules. Since WP is editable text and most of us have permission to alter most pages, rule violations aren’t set in stone and don’t have to be punished harshly; often, it’s good enough to be told that what you did was wrong and that your edits will be reverted.

    NSFW: When you bring this sort of argument to the table, you’re making it obvious that you’ve never been a Wikipedian. That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that you’re going to get talked down to; even if your question was in good faith, you could have answered it yourself by lurking amongst the culture being critiqued.



  • In enterprise computing, “smart contracts” are called “database triggers” or “stored procedures.” They’re a nightmare, because they’re very hard to reason about or maintain, and they’re prone to unexpected and spooky effects.

    It occurs to me that the situation’s even more dire than this single-node description. If everything’s in one database, then yes, a smart contract is effectively a stored procedure. But it can be worse! Imagine e.g. an MMORPG where city centers or dungeons are disconnected from the regional map to prevent overload. A smart contract might need to synchronize data between two databases, e.g. a dungeon and a surrounding region, to maintain correctness.



  • corbin@awful.systemstoLinux@lemmy.mlopen letter to the NixOS foundation
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    5 months ago

    The original signers include members of the infrastructure and moderation teams. You can find about half of them on Mastodon. They’re all well-established community members who hold real responsibility and roles within the NixOS Foundation ecosystem.

    Also note that Eelco isn’t “a maintainer” but the original author and designer, as well as a de facto founder of Determinate Systems. He’s a BDFL. Look at this like the other dethronings of former BDFLs in the D, Python, Perl, Rails, or Scala communities; there’s going to be lots of drama and possibly a fork.





  • I scrolled too far up and motherfucking Lemmy ate my fucking comment. Fuck this Web 2.0 garbage. You get a shorter reply, yay. Also I’m not re-linking everything; search Wikipedia for anything confusing, like “futures market” or “spot market” or “basket of goods.”

    A commodity futures ETF is a way to improve the arbitrage that an individual investor experiences, while also reducing their exposure to spot markets. In particular, an investor only holds shares in a fund, and the fund does the actual trading; also, the fund only trades futures, although they do typically have a “basket” which holds physical commodities at a secure location.

    For example, I hold shares of precious-metals ETFs. This means that, unlike e.g. somebody who has gold coins in their safe at home, I have to trust that the ETF managers will still exist tomorrow and that the financial system will still honor their contracts; this is technically increased risk. But in exchange, I don’t have to physically receive and store any precious metals, and also I get theoretically better returns due to the implicit arbitrage in futures markets.

    Fun fact: BTC is overpriced, mostly from grifters and miners pumping and hyping the market. However, arbitrage sees overpriced commodities as an opportunity, and a futures ETF can produce value for its investors merely by insisting that the commodity should be valued less. This is also why the spot ETFs were not approved by SEC; the spot market for BTC is quite volatile and it’s not clear that a BTC spot trader would produce value for investors.


  • I’ll be one of the resident communists.

    I think it’s important to not forget the positive facts (pardon the pun!) in the GameStop situation. The event really did contain a short squeeze, and one Manhattan hedge fund really did take it in the shorts (pardon me again!), nearly becoming insolvent in front of their friends and eventually closing up shop. (One London hedge fund also was taken to the cleaners. Robinhood was embarrassed in front of Congress, and worse, in front of their clearinghouse.) Additionally, GameStop has continued to restructure its management and operations, and the local GameStop (in the local dying mall) is doing about as well as the Claire’s next door in terms of customers.

    This was a victory, but only in a specific sense: Wall Street was wrong about GameStop’s failure, and collective action forced specific firms to admit their wrongness and even fail as ongoing concerns. The meme-stock cult can’t understand this, because they imagine that there must be more. More wrongness, more collective action, more FAFO. They can’t be proud enough to have destroyed two hedge funds and caused a Congressional inquiry; it’s gotta involve literally melting the bull and throwing traders out of skyscrapers. (Not that I’ll stop anybody from melting the bull!)