obstacle1

That's not a problem with feature flags per se, it's a problem with lazy implementations of feature flags. Flags should be associated with an expiry date, and company comms tooling should be consistently yelling in some public channel when expired flags still exist in the codebase.

Great pointer, thanks.

This is a protocol that rolls up ETH transactions and executes them in batch, in an attempt to alleviate scalability concerns. I can't really speak to the side/unintended effects of transaction rollups on a blockchain, but I'm interested in learning.

This excerpt from the FAQ

> It is worth noting that anyone can become a relayer so long as they have staked the required bond in the smart contract. This incentivises the relayer not to tamper with or withhold a rollup.

kind of bothers me. It does not seem like such a small step to go from 'decentralized' to 'cartel of relayers' to 'central bank and subordinate branches'. And the fact that this protocol is unavailable to US persons is interesting, though perhaps standard for the space right now.

OK perfect. "Inefficient" in every sense of the word. Let's say I'm wrong and skipped over that line. What else could the various senses of "inefficient" mean in the context of this article?

Probably the fact that, despite having been under development for > 10 years, we haven't seen any ground broken by any blockchain technologies for any reasons other than speculation or triviality. Which is what the other 95% of the article focuses on. The inefficiency of the development process, not necessarily the technology, although yes, the latter is a factor.

So this is Yet Another Liquidity Pool? $14B is not the kind of scale I mean. That is frankly trivial especially when transactions are large (or initial funding is high).

What I mean is, if blockchain is going to be a revolutionary technology backing all finance, where is the evidence it can handle the kind of transaction volume that, say, major credit card networks generate?

> But I don't understand why people get so invested in it being a scam or failure.

Can't speak for everyone. But from my perspective, it's because certain "applications" are being marketed very heavily to non-technical people who aren't able to reasonably assess the viability of the technology. I'm thinking of NFTs in particular. The only other popularized non-NFT applications are cryptocurrencies, which are pure speculation (i.e., gambling).

In short, that's a moral issue. People were outraged by the Madoff scandal (and others), and this doesn't look a lot different to people who understand the underlying technology. Nobody wants their mom going broke because they bought some hyped-up blockchain thing on the advice of some super-hustler internet marketing influencer out looking to make a buck.

I'm not aware of any serious financial application running at scale and relying on blockchain under the hood.

Are you? What is it? Specifically.

The parent article doesn't say anything about performance. Therefore this comment seems like a red herring. A case of not reading the article?

The parent article's point is that most currently popular technologies found an application rather quickly, whereas blockchain technologies have been around for a long time (in tech terms) and still have not made ground.

> You act like people that struggle with reading aren't capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates

A functioning political system shouldn't only have ever have 2 viable candidates. Much less have the only viable candidates belong to one of two viable political parties, both of which have cartoonishly stable views over time.

Maybe the broken, overly simplistic US political system is a _symptom_ of shockingly terrible education outcomes. Not vice-versa. Like many of the other social ills currently ravaging American society.

> how a good lead or manager should go about identifying these problems.

Notice when things aren't getting done by the time they were estimated to be done, and notice if the person seems to be continually pushing back completion dates. After a day or two of "thought I could get it cone but couldn't", it's negligent to _not_ dig in to _why_ the person is struggling. Really not meaning to be snarky, but if a manager isn't doing this, I'm not sure what exactly they are doing.

IME most solid engineers prefer autonomy and trust over schedule and process, and would strongly resent having to spend their time in a meeting because their manager was unable to do people management.

Ideally you wouldn't waste everyone on the team's time every day just to suss out individuals who potentially can't ask for help. A competent lead or manager should be able to identify those kinds of team members without a standup, and address the issue 1:1. If the lead or manager can't do that, why have a lead or manager at all?

Re: your last example.

Where is the incentive for a company to actually bother reaching into the ledger to determine who holds royalty rights? The underlying media pointed to by the NFT is not restricted, it's infinitely reproducible and thus valueless. Why not just right-click save-as and display the media, bypassing the metadata encoded in the NFT?

It seems like there'd have to be some person or collection of persons who are responsible for enforcing that the company treat the terms of the NFT as a binding agreement. Using force, if necessary, either legal or physical. Something almost like... a legal system associated with a state. Which would be centralized. Which would beg the question, what's the value of the decentralized ledger in that case?