yayachiken

Also the rest of the remainder-case definition looks like a typical mathematical "Fallunterscheidung" in German.

Fall a1): Es gilt ... falls x < 0,

Fall a2): Es gilt ... falls x = 0,

Fall a3): Es gilt ... sonst.

Definitely have seen it written like that in mathematical proofs, you can even leave "Es gilt" and just write your proposition. On paper I would probably have placed a Halmos after sonst due to muscle memory lol.

Also if you threaten somebody with an "or else..." it works the same in German "sonst..."

Amazing post, I loved this game as a kid.

Interesting that the Pizza scoring rules are that simple. I remember that the in-game encyclopedia said something that kids and teens prefer big portion sizes. This led me to always create a Pizza that just had an entire fried chicken on it, as it was easy to reproduce, made a lot of money (big ingredient costs = big margins), and gave good ratings.

And I definitely noticed that Pizzas covered with an even tomato sauce did better than blank ones, probably from the symmetry rules. I just assumed it was hardcoded that people do not like naked pizza.

Interesting note for the translation: The game is German and they went deeply into the whimsy, e.g. most of the demographic groups had funny and very colloquial names. It seems they translated "Grufties" with "Goths". Which makes sense considering the real meaning of Grufti in German (members of the Goth subculture), but in the game the term was actually used as funny way to refer to old senior people (people almost in a "Gruft" = "crypt"). So it's obviously a mistranslation, pulling the word straight from the dictionary. Maybe "Cryptid" would have been more fitting. :D

OK, then we seem to agree.

I was only talking about the case that your funds can get lots if you lose your device. Because the tokens work like cash and cannot be revoked and reimbursed. Not about redemption from token back to euros.

I would strongly assume that the EMI license is about something different and does not enforce that your digital cash needs to be re-imbursable if you lost it.

There is already precedent of cash cards like GeldKarte which also were non-reimbursable if you lost the physical card, so at least BaFin would allow something like that, but I don't know if that predated the EMI rules.

Are you sure they didn't just mean the requirement that they have to keep the capital around (at least in significant parts) to cash out any tokens they emit?

I am just offering personal opinion and looking into my crystal ball.

You are correct on the facts. The idea is precisely to have a digital cash equivalent, in fact it will even be tracked as part of M1.

I just don't think that people will treat it like tangible cash, and instead assume it to have the same standards of loss prevention that they have with other digital payment methods. You don't lose your bank account if you lose your phone or your debit card, and people will act surprised when they find out that for the D€ this does not apply.

I predict there will be some sentimental news stories about those "victims" of the D€ quickly after the introduction, and it will take quite some time until there is some trust in the public, if ever. And then you get the chicken-egg problem, if nobody wants to use it, nobody will establish the infrastructure, so nobody will even be able to use it.

You don't have to trust anyone with GNU Taler as it is only a free software technology and your country of choice can choose to deploy it.

I guess it doesn't make a lot of sense to become a customer of the German GNU Taler association if you don't live in Germany or at least the EU. And if you already live in Germany you implicitly have to trust German governance somewhat because that is how being part of a society works.

That's the point of the new payment technologies, if you pay with a Visa card you have to trust an American company to provide the service continuously and as the US sanctions against the ICJ justices showed, this is not a theoretical threat scenario anymore.

These are two different use cases.

The Digital Euro is intentionally designed to be as close to cash as possible. This is also why GNU Taler was not a viable candidate from the start (lacks offline transactions). You can also acquire and have Digital Euros without having a bank account.

Wero is explicitly a system backed by the private banking system, if you do not have a bank account, you cannot participate.

I suspect that it will lose out against the Digital Euro.

I do think that GNU Taler is the better technical solution as the blind signatures and online model require less trust in the platform, while the Digital Euro requires untamperable hardware enclaves. So in an ideal world we would all standardize on GNU Taler and be happy.

Unfortunately, anything related to money is probably the place where trust paranoia is the least useful. In fact, widespread use of the Digital Euro will probably be the best proof for the security of the available hardware enclaves, similar to how Bitcoin is proof that SHA-2 is currently secure. Otherwise, somebody would make bank from counterfeiting in the few moments before the system crashes down.

The digital Euro has the real benefit to allow offline transactions. Both Digital Euro and GNU Taler have the psychological burden that you have to exchange "real money" for some kind of digital "monopoly money" which can get lost with no way to re-imburse you. (Which is the same as would happen with literal cash, but nobody will care about that.)

(Which is why I actually think both "digital cash" solutions will die out, with GNU Taler fading into obscurity, and Digital Euro being kept on life support as it is literally legal tender. And we will eventually all just be using Wero, which is just SEPA wire transfers in a trench coat)

> Math that isn't communicated is valueless - by definition.

That is quite a bold claim.

Math can always be used as a tool just to achieve results. This can include even novel math. Due to the maturity of the field it is just becoming more and more unlikely that somebody will come up with something novel without realizing the significance.

One example: Quicksort was almost not published because Tony Hoare initially considered the idea behind the algorithm trivial. In the end, all he wanted to do was to sort some numbers.

Maybe there is a polynomial time SAT solver running somewhere just because some overworked engineer implemented it for a completely different problem. And he was just annoyed that all existing libraries were so slow and he doesn't realize that he is sitting on a proof that P=NP. Who knows.

Probably you both really mean the same thing.

Every gram of body weight needs energy to stay alive. If you are in a caloric deficit, you will lose weight until your energy expenditure matches the caloric intake. If you stay in "caloric deficit" forever you will actually starve by definition.

Properly defining what you mean (comparatively low caloric intake without defining it via the current weight) is actually quite tricky, as your height, body composition and physical activities are all inputs to what counts as a "normal" caloric intake.

IPv6 mostly (RFC 8925) is a rather nice migration option.

Modern operating systems will gladly do CLAT, and old operating systems (or fussy users) can still get their IPv4 by just ignoring the new DHCPv4 option. But admins can finally stop keeping an IPv4 around for every potential client as most applications and users really don't care.

One of the main arguments for tabs over spaces was always that people wanted to configure how much space a level of indentation makes up on screen.

With tabs pretty much every editor except something like notepad.exe could do it since ancient times, with spaces the editor needs to do a bit more processing, so you were a bit more restricted in editor choice, if you really were bothered so much by the indents chosen in the project.

So it is actually quite similar to the ligature discussion. It would be good if the code looked the same for everybody but now instead of saying "But 8-space indents waste so much space on the screen :(" some people now go "But I don't like seeing things like != or -> instead of modern Unicode symbols :("

We have studies since ages ago that consistency in code style is one of the most important requirements for code quality.

This goes down to the details like that you should either use spaces over tabs OR prescribe editor config such that the code looks similar on each machine.

Of course this doesn't automatically mean that code ligatures are harmful, but I would be quite wary of using them. At the very least it introduces some friction, not sure if the arguably lower mental load of using real mathematical symbols instead of the ASCII symbols makes up for it.

My favorite anecdote for an astroturfing suspicion I had was in German subreddits.

Whenever somebody was talking about rolled oats, without fail, somebody would chime in that Kölln brand rolled outs were strictly superior and they would gladly pay the 4x markup for them.

It is hilarious because rolled outs are probably one of the most fungible goods out there. Also the comments eventually just... stopped.

Human perception is weird like that so even identical oats may taste better if the packaging is different, and also it might have been a memetic thing, but I am still somewhat convinced that it was a marketing campaign.