valenciarose

The quietly is less about communication with the public than it is communication with the non-profits about the gifts. No weeks/months-long crafting of the gift announcement message. No extended negotiation about how the gift is going to be used. Hint, right now every non-profit is hurting for unrestricted genop money.

It's incredibly refreshing.

Securities lending, OTC Swaps, and highly favorable margin rates (although the underlying economics of this are actually driven by the securites lending business)

It is safe for all but the shortest-term investors to ignore the ramblings of chartists. Intel has serious challenges in several markets, all of which are understandable without squinting at day-to-day price fluctuations.

It’s a necessary complexity, particularly given that Mozilla predates the existence of Benefit Corporations by a dozen years. As a purely non-profit corporation, having most of your revenue come from business income is a big problem. As a for-profit, director’s fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders can get in the way of pursuing a public good mission. And, collaboration with for profit orgs gets a little less regulatory scrutiny if a non-profit is in control.

This is a much more perceptive set of comments than I originally understood them to be. Thank you.

You assume all bytes are eight bits, but that hasn’t always been the case. Machines with variable byte sizes were relatively common in the 70s and early 80s. This is why so many RFCs use the word octet instead of byte.

The artificial resource constraints created by IPv4 are a substantial barrier to entry. Prediction: we’re going to see a court case that forces a mandatory retirement of IPv4 sometime in the next 15 years.

Aesthetic evolution is a fact in user interfaces as much as it is in other functional objects like automobiles, furniture, and architecture. Priorities in trade-offs between things like information density and rapid visual navigation are also subject to this kind of change. Part of that evolution is influenced by technical context, such as what has become possible or practical that wasn’t before. Part of that evolution is influenced by cultural context, including both art and the aesthetics of physical objects (or software). Successful UI in Japan is strikingly different than it is elsewhere, even allowing for differences in language.

One of the things that all user interfaces do is marshal user attention, and newness or freshness is one tool for that. That can be used to advantage or disadvantage users, but it is a constant pressure for change in user interfaces.

The term Modern in user interfaces tends to translate as “inspired by the Functionalist school of Industrial Design, particularly as exemplified by Dieter Rams at Braun and Apple’s Industrial Design team under Jonny Ive”. There’s functional value to freshness, so the definition isn’t static, but the term Modern means something other than new or contemporary.

It isn’t a waste of time for producers and critics (in the neutral sense) of user interfaces to learn some art history, architectural history, and history of Industrial Design.

All of my friends who work in crypto loathe PGP. None of them mention the implementation as their primary area of concern. Some of them mention the implementation as an unsurprising sequela to the kitchen sink of “capabilities” PGP attempts to cover. It has, by design, a nearly fractal surface area for users to compromise their security and for developers to make subtle implementation errors.

This isn’t an attempt to estimate a typical bill for an asymptomatic individual. It’s an attempt to set an expected value for the costs that will eventually be incurred across the population of asymptomatic patients. They are using a mean to describe how costs will scale with the size of that population (asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 positive) and NOT as a way to describe the typical costs of individuals in that population. The cost distribution is almost certainly a power law. I’d guess the median is zero and the mean is many thousand dollars.

Every jurisdiction regulates financial institutions for good reasons (yes, also some bad reasons). While a great deal of misbehavior does persist under regulation (Wells Fargo, etc), it’s a fraction of what we would see if they were not or could not be regulated.

Inspectable and freezable payments systems are one core part of the infrastructure that enables regulation. The point at which it looks like Blockchain technologies are successfully enabling an alternative financial system that’s not subject to these controls is the point at which blockchain technology gets severely constrained by law.

Intermediaries aren’t always a bad thing. Stock settlement intermediation was transformative for the securities industry, greatly increasing the liquidity of the market.

Oh, I have fond memories of 36-bit byte pointers.

My first two programming jobs were in PDP-10/20 Assembly. Occasionally someone will complain about network specs that say octet instead of byte. And I‘ll just casually say, well some machines had variable byte sizes and go back to what I was doing, waiting for them to start sputtering.

Bliss is Ignorance

Actually it was a very nice language and certainly an improvement over writing system software in assembly language.