AndrewStephens

> Some nations are better at controlling their currency's rate of inflation than other nations.

Manifestly true, for lots of reasons.

The analogy only goes so far because currency is traded for goods, services, and debt all the time whereas shares are usually just traded for currency.

You can already buy shares in a nations economy - it is called owning currency. The big difference from stocks is that most countries issue new shares (dollars, etc) to keep the price stable (indirectly via careful control of interest rates).

I am simplifying terribly but just as shares represent a fraction of a company, cash represents a share of a nation’s economy.

> How long before championships are scripted?

Minus several decades in rare cases but it’s going to be increasingly common.

Gambling always brings corruption. With on-premise casino games this is limited to inside of a single building owned by people who have a vested interest in keeping things looking honest.

With sports betting, there are huge incentives to collude or even act alone which are very hard to distinguish from legitimate play.

Internationally, horse racing, cricket, rugby, and (oh boy) soccer continue to have huge problems.

Tech pundits should just talk to me. I bought AirPods the week before the new ones came out, and I bought a new iPad 48 hours ago!

Luckily I didn’t buy a iPad Mini, but I really like the form factor.

I knew this was going to happen when I purchased my AirPod3s a couple of weeks ago. The only feature I really miss is the touch volume control.

Very nice results, I really like the way it looks like a printed page. Image processing is addictive - once you start playing around it is hard to stop.

Alternative allocators could make a huge difference to the runtime performance. When multithreading on real multiprocessor systems started to become a thing it was common that all your carefully written threads ended up waiting on the allocator mutex. The win32 heap was particularly prone to this.

Third party allocators improved on this as well as usually avoiding the heap fragmentation problems that system heaps often suffered from back then.

These days the system heaps have improved to a point where you really only need to think about a third party heap for very specialized circumstances. They do usually come with nifty debugging tools though.

When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was.

There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that needs to know how to use the different smart pointers in C++ or how to properly care for a cast iron pan.

I think what you are looking for is something like Mastodon or related activity-pub service. You can run your own instance and nobody can take that away from you. No need to drag a blockchain into it - just host whatever services you need.

What is the incentive for an individual to participate in a non-financial blockchain?

Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.

> I'd probably skip WebP, and go straight to AVIF now.

That is my assessment as well. The compression ratios with AVIF are ridiculous compared to older formats.

This is pretty neat if all you need is to ping a local server but please use curl (or something equivalent) for contacting remote services. HTTP1.1 seems like such a simple protocol but in the real world you need to deal with proxies, different encodings, and redirects. Curl takes care of that (and a host of other annoying stuff) for you.

Exif is great but here is your obligatory reminder that if you are publishing images you should strip out some of the identifying information that cameras and image editing software likes to embed.

In particular, you probably don’t want the GPS coordinates of your house publicly available on your blog for everyone to see.

My static site generator strips out exif data from images and I would expect all sensible sites would do the same. There is a lot of personal information jammed in there - if you post a picture of your dog making a funny face to social media you don’t want the exact GPS coordinates of your house plastered over the internet.

You have to be selective though, some of the EXIF data specifies things like color spaces and orientation that is used by browsers for displaying the image properly.