zarzavat

Governments may want as much economic activity as possible but we've learned the hard way that this is detrimental to the financial system, because it creates damaging boom and bust cycles.

So we empower central banks to intervene in various ways in the monetary system in order to achieve low inflation and system stability.

Activity is only the secondary objective. System stability is the first. Stability doesn't mean that markets cannot go up and down even violently. It means that when they go violently up and down, there remains faith in the currency and people are not suffering from mass unemployment, etc.

When a currency is healthy and has low inflation, hard assets are not a threat. Gold doesn't pay any interest, it doesn't have any earnings. You don't need to convince people to buy stocks and bonds instead of gold, they do that by themselves.

When a currency is unhealthy, hard assets can become a threat to it, but notably it's usually other fiat currencies that are the biggest threat.

Hard assets are useful tools for the financial system because they are less correlated with the market. You can criticise Bitcoin in various ways but the criticism that it is a hard asset with a fixed supply that by not inflating somehow damages the financial or monetary system doesn't land. Fiat money is intended to facilitate the existence of markets in other things, including hard assets.

That's why it's not safe to hold fiat money, it's by design. Governments don't want people to hold it, they want them to cycle it, spending it, investing it, and lending it out.

The existence of harder forms of money (gold, bitcoin, etc) is an expected consequence of how the system is designed, and not in any way a subversion of it. Somehow, both sides seem to miss this point.

I don’t care and in my opinion AA does a disservice to their users by allowing such blatant manipulation. What would happen if every AI company were to include their unreleased models like this? Put the unreleased models on a separate page and leave the headline benchmark rankings for models that you can actually use.

Else doesn't sound archaic to my ears.

"When you go shopping make sure to buy flour or else we won't be able to bake the cake"

"otherwise" is a more common word choice but "else" is definitely in the active vocabulary of modern English speakers.

The issue is that they have fully abandoned the Plus plan while continuing to take people's money.

Back in March, the Plus plan was marketed as the way to access Gemini 3.1 Pro, their top model. The free plan gave you a tiny quota of their Pro model, and the Plus plan gave you a generous quota, enough for chatting.

It was expected that 3.1 Pro would be upgraded to 3.5 Pro whenever that came out, but that model never materialized.

When Google finally had a new Pro model, not only did they not apologise for the delay, but they didn't upgrade the Plus plan, which is to this day stuck on this ancient model.

Fine, you might say. hey made the Pro model only for the Pro plan. What's the big deal?

But why, why, did they stop upgrading the Flash model as well?

So we've gone from "The Plus plan lets you access our top model with generous limits" to "The Plus plan only supports a months old second-tier model".

I'm sure that Google never explicitly promised that the Plus plan would receive upgraded models, but nevertheless it feels like being scammed.

ChatGPT Go gives you access to Sol which is much better than the ancient 3.1 Pro.

No, not free. I'm on a paid plan.

The borg cube does not understand customer satisfaction.

Perhaps someone should tell the Gemini team about these models. When I open gemini.google.com I see 3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro.

PKI works on trust. When a CA does things that violate that trust, their root gets removed. That's how it's supposed to work.

All of Apple’s operating systems are designed for high PPI displays. There’s no font hinting, no subpixel AA. Apple decided long ago that a high pixel density is a baseline requirement for any device they sell, including computers, since the 2010s. You can use a low PPI external but it will not look good.

Given that the smartphone industry also adopted high PPI displays as a minimum standard, it’s actually the external display industry that is the odd one out here. Low PPI displays should have gone the way of CRTs, but they cling on.

If you do creative work, including frontend development, you need to have a hidpi glass display because a fuzzy plastic display will not faithfully represent what your viewers/users will see on their devices.

Apple's solution to reflections is to overpower them. I use my MacBook in some bright public spaces and reflections have never been an issue. For an iMac which is more likely than a laptop to be used in an environment with controlled lighting, it's just a non-issue.

That 32" monitor will have a crappy pixel density. It's incredibly hard to find good external monitors that are not made by Apple, definitely not for $800. Apple will give you a display with a high pixel density and glass front.

Every day people go to work and turn off their electrical devices. Switching your home to off-grid solar + batteries is just like going to work and not coming back. The grid can handle it.

If many houses install off-grid solar, it's still not going to have a negative effect on the grid because the change is spread out over time.

It does mean that less generating capacity is needed over the long term, but decision makers can just get that data directly from the grid. I don't see what extra information the permit is adding.

This doesn’t make any sense. You also use less electricity if you switch off your devices. I think Germans just have a fetish for permits.