mudrockbestgirl

Not my experience. I think you are either just parroting what you read online, live in the countryside, or have not been to Japan for 10+ years. I live in Tokyo and none of what you say is true here. I pay all my rent online, and have for 5 years in all places I've ever lived. I never printed out concert tickets. Seals have become less and less common and are almost never necessary anymore except in very traditional B2B settings. I have one and I have never used it despite have various Japanese bank accounts. They are officially being phased out. I don't know about the ATMs because I never have to use those since 99% of restaurants accept digital payments. Yes, there are still a few that need cash, but it's really just 1%.

Japan is definitely technologically behind. I am not arguing against that. But let's not exaggerate here.

I successfully quit Twitter. I used to be on it ~2 hours a day, now I haven't opened in for almost a year. Unfortunately that habit has been replaced by others and I still have FOMO from not being on Twitter when I see colleagues sharing Twitter links.

It's incredibly hard. The only thing that seems to work for me is to create a system to convince myself that I'm not missing out. For example, set aside a fixed 30 minutes a day, or 2 hours on a weekend, to go through the top links of your favorite social media state to satisfy the craving (I use RSS for that). That way at you can at least stop wasting time becoming distracted at random times during the day. Treat it like a cheat meal.

Another thing that has helped me cut some habits are reviews. After you spend a fixed hour on Twitter, ask yourself: What did I get out of this? Was it worth it? How did I feel before and after? Write it down in your journal. If you read your old entries week after week and they're all saying "I spent an hour on Twitter but I didn't feel like I got anything out of it" it makes it easier to quit.

Still, I can't help but feel that optimized social media feeds are the worst thing that has happened to our society in the last 10 years. Our brains haven't evolved to deal with this. And I don't think people have realized just how bad it is. Sure, we see news that social media is bad every day, but I don't think we as a society have truly understood the full implications. I think it's much worse than most think it is.

I don't understand where the bank analogies always come from. Crypto is not a bank. Holding crypto is like holding cash. If you put it under your bed and it's stolen, do you go to the government and complain about reverting the transaction?

If you want a third-party (bank) to secure your cash so you can do that with crypto, but then you're also exposed to the counterparty risk that comes with it. But that has nothing to do with crypto or fiat or whatever. If you don't trust yourself with managing the keys, put it on Coinbase or Kranken, centralized banks. If you want full control, put in your safe, i.e. manage your own key.

There are also decentralized alternatives that offer something in the middle, e.g. smart contract or social recovery wallets.

I guess most reasonable answer is that you should include anything that would transfer a significant amount of money to the IRS. Starbucks points and FFXIV gold may be theoretically included, but the liquidity for those is so small that the IRS just doesn't care and would never enforce it. They don't want that $100. What they're trying to do here is get a cut of the billions of dollars that come from crypto.

I know that's probably obvious to you, but I don't think there's much more to it. It's just another way to make money.

I think the op may be asking the more general question of why it is defined like this. What makes a "digital representations of value that are recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger" so fundamentally different from an MMO currency that it becomes taxable? The fact that it's distributed? Why should that matter? What even is the definition of distributed? And isn't an encrypted database cryptographically secured?

That argument doesn't make much sense. You don't control your bank balance, which are just IOUs, either. It's just an entry in some centralized company's database.

> How do I get back to who I was, in terms of feeling driven to solve problems and make impact? I feel like I’ve lost who I once was and don’t know how to get it back.

This is an interesting statement. I feel the same, but I wonder how much of the optimism and motivation I had in my 20s was unfounded and naive, stemming from a lack of experience. Having seen stuff play out multiple cycles has made me more pessimistic (realistic?) This makes it harder to become motivated, at least about technology. I guess that's a good thing to some extent, but it's also sad that I can't go back to that old naive self who blissfully worked on stuff without questioning. I think you need to deal with the fact that you can't go back to that old self because you have more knowledge that inhibits the naive optimism.

Maybe try something other than technology? How about working out? Playing an instrument? Art?

I agree with you that the Nix language is a problem, and most likely a mistake in hindsight. Even for someone with lots of functional programming experience it's ugly with bad usability. I'm not familiar with Guix, but I am with Nix and

> Guix is an advanced distribution of the GNU operating system

This sounds like it competes (?) with NixOS, but not with Nix. A reason for the popularity of Nix is that it's not only an operating system. Most Nix users probably haven't touched NixOS, but they use Nix as a package manager, build system, development environment, etc on their local machine. That target audience is a lot larger than those who want to adopt a whole new operating system.

This adoption of Nix outside of the operating system context naturally leads to more adoption of NixOS. If you already work with Nix anyway, it's not that huge of a jump towards adopting NixOS.

I generally agree with you, but it depends on how obvious the semantics of the code are.

In your example, noNameDateFiltered is most likely superfluous. If the filter function is short it's self-descriptive what it does. Adding long variables names makes the code harder to read and adds cognitive overhead. In this case, I would strongly prefer just re-using arr or a.

On the other hand, I have seen long complex function that use single-letter variable names and end up with 20 variables that mean different things. Keeping track of what's what in such a case becomes difficult, and you want something more descriptive.

Taking a step back, the goal of variable names is to make the code easily comprehensible by someone else or you at a later time. You have a few choices to do this, in order of preference:

- The code is self-explanatory, like a simpler filter function - use a short simple variable names. This is always the preferred method. Why make it harder than it needs to be? Reading over-the-top verbose code is just as bad as the opposite.

- The code expression may cause confusion - use a more descriptive variable name, but don't go overboard

- It's difficult to describe the result succinctly even with a variable name - use comments