_jackdk_
Joined 3 years ago
Karma
491
Submissions
115
Member since
May 17
Recent submissions
Comment · 9 days ago
Right, because you can issue coins as a "purchase" of the coins being transferred. That makes sense, but still doesn't address the concerns around the system being designed to support negative interest rates and withdrawal rate limits.
Comment · 9 days ago
One point of Taler's architecture is that blind signatures are used to create tokens, so the issuer doesn't know which coin was issued to which person. Then the merchant doesn't know who the coin was issued to but can redeem it with the issuer if it's valid. So if there's enough transaction volume it'll be hard for issue of coins and redemption at merchants to be correlated.
What worries me is the SNB whitepaper on "how to issue a digital currency" they worked on with Taler: https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r...
> > In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.
And also I don't think they have a privacy-preserving solution for money transfers between consumers. So if I wanted to give you 20€ I think that has to be represented as a burning of tokens and a reissue, so the central issuer learns all those transactions even though purchases at merchants are private.
Comment · 17 days ago
Thanks. I didn't know about the UK specifically but replacing gas boilers with heat pumps makes a lot of sense.
Comment · 17 days ago
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...
> To be very honest here, you risk having KeePassXC blocked by relying parties
This threat, because someone dared to give users control, is completely unacceptable to me.
Comment · 18 days ago
> decarbonizing heating
I believe this refers to switching to high-efficiency electric heaters like reverse-cycle AC units (also known as "heat pumps"), rather than oil heaters or ducted gas heating.
Comment · 25 days ago
I haven't seen anyone write about wiring FRP systems to traditional GUI toolkits. Do you have a blog?
Comment · 25 days ago
It really is funny how you go through learning all these fantastic abstractions, and then at the end your line-of-business code ends up looking a lot like it always did. But expecting your data structures and control-flow functions to behave according to laws makes things so much more predictable and easier to wrangle.
Comment · 26 days ago
That's fair. They teach it as "Dr's ABCD", which is a reasonable mnemonic.
Comment · 26 days ago
> The "ABC" of airway, breathing, circulation they taught us may not be current advice.
The version taught in Australian first aid classes is DRSABCD: check for (D)anger, check for patient (R)esponse, (S)end for help, (A)irway, (B)reathing, (C)irculation.
Comment · 29 days ago
This argument applies to learning to code in general. What is your estimate of the ratio between "just shipped whatever the clanker spat out" vs "interrogated the LLM about its own output†" vs "deliberately interrogates LLMs to learn"?
†Untrustworthy, because it will either double down on its own output in its context, or will flip-flop to whatever the user said .
Comment · 1 month ago
As in the Steve Jackson one where you have conspiracies and front groups and fronts for those fronts? I wanted to like it but never could get into it; too many fiddly bits placing megabucks all over the power structure and adding up modifiers. Did you play house rules with friends, or does it get better with more plays, or was I just doing something wrong?
Comment · 1 month ago
Unfortunately that's accurate. From the SNB whitepaper linked at https://www.taler-systems.com/en/digital-currency.html you get to https://www.snb.ch/de/publications/research/working-papers/2... and then to https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r... :
> In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.
Well goody.
The idea of blind signatures is cool, as is the fact that the merchant doesn't need to identify the customer, as is the fact that you could deploy neat local currencies with something like this, but AFAIK you still can't give 20€ to your friend without the exchange knowing and approving, or it becoming a race to see who spends the tokens corresponding to the 20€. And that's not very privacy-preserving.
Comment · 1 month ago
Speaking of page 3, Google's been asking me to sign in if I try to go beyond page 2 of search results. What a wonderful modern WWW we live in.
Comment · 1 month ago
I agree with your concerns but also think that a new viable browser engine will be such a benefit to the health of the open web that I'm willing to overlook such irregularities, at least for now. sqlite doesn't accept contributions either and it's done well for itself, and if Ladybird ends up going sour there's always the possibility of a fork. This is similar to my stance towards Firefox: despite the actions of Mozilla Corp, having at least one non-Blink engine is too important, and for friends and family that I care about, working ad-blockers are essential so there's no practical alternative.
Comment · 2 months ago
Firefox is great, and I use and recommend it as daily driver, but the actions of Mozilla leadership are really hard to differentiate from deliberately managed decline. It will be interesting to see what happens as Ladybird matures.