sylver_dragon

Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme with a really long time horizon. In a way, any fiat currency kinda is as well. The difference is that a government backed fiat currency like the US Dollar is backed by the US Government saying “you will accept the USD, or else”. That backing keeps the game running. Bitcoin has nothing like that. The only reason it keeps going is because of speculation, money laundering and the purchase of black market goods.

So, as long as you can go buy drugs or move money across borders with Bitcoin, it will have value. As long as it has value, some folks will speculate on it. That can keep prices up, right up until it doesn’t. So, as is always the case for speculative assets, caveat emptor.

I happen to be a prime example of how bad US Rail is this week. I’m taking my son from near Fredericksburg (the real one), up to Ballston for a summer camp. We have a couple options:

1. Drive

• Distance: ~70 miles one way, ~140 round trip
• Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes one way, with traffic. ~3.5 hours round trip.
• Cost:
  • 4 gallons (US) of gas @ $3.50/gal: $14
  • Wear and tear: estimate at 0.5 gas cost: $7
  • Parking: $11
  • Total: $32/day

2. Virginia Railway Express (VRE) and Washington Area Metro (WMATA)

• Distance: N/A
• Time:
  • Drive to Fredericksburg station: 20 minutes
  • VRE (Fredericksburg to L’Enfant station) - 1 hour 20 minutes
  • WMATA (L’Enfant to Ballston) - 20 minutes
  • Total: 2 hours one way, 4 hours round trip
• Cost:
  • Drive: we’ll just ignore this, it’s close enough to zero.
  • VRE: $23.56/person * 2 people: $47.12
  • WMATA: $3.45/person * 2 people: $6.90
  • Total: $54.02/day

So, for the low, low cost of about 1.68 times the cost of driving, we can take slightly longer to get to our destination and have zero control over our schedule, which makes the actual time devoted to travel considerably longer. We tried the public transit route last year, and it meant leaving earlier in the morning (about 30 minutes) to catch a train to get us there on time, and getting us home around 45 minutes later. And this is right around the US Capitol, which has some of the better transit options. Needless to say, we’re driving this year.

I really want to be able to take transit, but it’s basically dead in the US. Earlier this year, I needed to go to Boston for work. Catching a train from Washington, DC to Boston meant an 7 hour train ride (using the “high speed” Acela line) at ~$500 round trip. Flying was 1.5 hours and cost ~$300 round trip. Wanna guess which option I used?

Basically, all of the incentives are stacked against transit options in the US. Except within certain metro areas, driving or flying is always cheaper and faster. Yes, inside those metro areas, public transit can be great. I used to work in Washington, DC and used the VRE I mentioned earlier to get there and then WMATA or the Capital BikeShare to get to my office. That was great, since I didn’t have to drive into DC every day, which sucks big donkey balls. But it probably wasn’t cost effective and wasn’t really time efficient either.

War is Peace. Freedom is slavery.
And now for your Five Minute Hate.

Not a specific word or phrase, but Google Dorking is useful for limiting down search results. Just the basics of putting things in double quotes (e.g. “Find this exact text”) and negating words/phrases (e.g. -NotThis) can go a long way in refining search results. The “filetype:” modifier is much less useful than it was a decade or two ago, as SEO assholes have gotten wise to it and so include tags to show up on results using it. The “site:” keyword can be really handy, when you are pretty sure what you want is on a specific site/domain. Or, if you are trawling a website for specific information. You can also negate the “site:” keyword. So, you can add something like “-site:expertsexchange.com” to a search and get rid of useless advertising sites.

No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it.

I’m willing to withhold judgement. But, Chosen’s website reads like bog standard vulture capital trying to pretend they are not going to ride in and enshitify anything they touch. With lots of broad claims about being “community driven” and AI art. Maybe this will work out; but, I wouldn’t be putting money on it.

That said, I don’t blame Dark0ne for wanting to step back. He’s be running this wonderful site for the community for a long time and deserves the opportunity to go do other things. I wish him the best of luck and I hope that NexusMods survives this transition.

It seems that internal polling put the “weird” message as not really helping (or hurting) the Harris campaign. Arguably, keeping up the “weird” message may have been useful, but they were likely trying to find something that seemed to have a larger impact.

The short answer is, it’s what we were taught in school. Like many preferences, it’s shaped by the culture we grow up and live in.

I’m sorry but it doesn’t make sense to me.

Of course not, you were raised and live in a different culture; so, your preferences are different.

Ultimately, the right answer is ISO8601. It’s unambiguous and sorts well on computers. But, I don’t think any culture is teaching that as the primary way to write dates, so we’re stuck with the crappy ways.

Crypto is a ponzi scheme playacting at being a currency or investment vehicle. Meme coins just dispense with playacting and aim for shorter time horizons on cashing out from the ponzi scheme.

The person who authored the cheat(s) the other person is using. Because clearly, if I lost they must be cheating. /s

For many games, I’d argue that you are to blame for your loss. Assuming the game is based purely on skill, then your ability to execute said skills is the only factor which matters. Consider something like Chess, where the game is solved and one’s ability to win is really down to your ability to memorize board positions and recognize the optimal move. If you lose, it’s likely because you failed to pick the optimal path.

This is mitigated, to a greater or lesser extent in games where chance plays some role. It’s entirely possible to chose an optimal path, but have RNGesus decide that you get to lose today. Some games provide some ability to manage the risks created by randomness, but you often have some reliance on “luck”. Obviously, the more luck dependent a game is, the less control you have over winning/losing.

And then there is the issue of other players who can affect the outcome. If you play a game where there are more than two players, the other players may be able to change the course of the game enough that, no matter how well optimized your choices, you cannot win. This leads to the classic “kingmaker” problem in board games. It may be that someone who is themselves unable to win is in a position to directly effect the outcome of the game in such a way as to make another player win or lose. So, maybe you played a very good game, but the kingmaker decides that you lose.

Ultimately, the answer to the original question is, “it depends”. And there are a lot of factors one must look at to come to an answer. And that answer is unlikely to be whole one thing or the other.

It’s a matter of circumstance. Authoritarianism is only useful in situations where time pressures make the slow, deliberate decisions of democracy unworkable. Combat is a good example of this. When the shells are raining down around you, there isn’t really time to hold a vote on how to proceed. So, in such situations there is usually a chain of command which is given authoritarian control. Other emergent situations will also often require similar levels of top-down control. The person in charge may not make the best or fairest decisions in the heat of the moment. But, inaction will almost certainly be a worse choice.

The other side of this is, when the situation isn’t emergent, a democratic (well, really semi-democratic, but I’m going to use “democratic”) system is likely the best choice. And those democratic systems would be wise to prepare for the emergent situations by identifying and designating the people who will be handed dictatorial control when the fecal matter hits the air circulator. And the system for identifying when the emergency has ended, how dictatorial power is unwound and how the performance of the person handed that power is to be judged.

The reason I hedged with “semi-democratic” is that a truly democratic system can have issues too. The classic “tyranny of the majority” problem. As any majority could override the rights of a minority in a truly horrible fashion. The solution being things like constitutional democracies, where the power of the majority is limited in specific ways (e.g. unrevokable rights).

That is really rich coming from the person who wrote the decision making the President unaccountable to the Rule of Law.

The entertaining question would be: what do the salaries of the new employees look like, compared to the old ones? I’d suspect that the administration is thinking they can fire a well experienced, but expensive employee and hire on a cheap replacement. However, I also suspect many of those positions are fairly specialized and they are going to end up paying to get rid of all that experience and then end up paying a premiums to hire someone with the needed experience for the position.

I’ve not returned an item over it, but I’ve often wondered if there was a market for a company which de-LEDs items.

Secret?
If you have to be online for a single player game to keep working, they are collecting data.

As in most social media apps, downvote and move on. Personally, I have a list of channels I subscribe to and mostly just stick to watching the content they produce. None of that is reaction videos, which I agree are lazy and stupid, but I guess some people like them or they wouldn’t keep making the rounds.

I just want to stop feeling imposter syndrome. I’m nearing 50, at work everyone seems to think I am one of the most competent people they have met in my field. I get the hard problems, get dragged into lots of projects as a technical consultant. And yet internally, I forever feel like I’m “faking it until I make it”. Like I’m one question away from being unmasked as a kid playing at knowing what I am doing. Consciously, I know I am not and that I’m actually pretty good at this. But, every time I get a meeting request from my boss, I still get a moment of panic thinking, “this is it, I’m about to be fired”. That’s what I want from “growing up”, to just not feel that feeling constantly.

Also, I want to be independently wealthy when I grow up. Fuck this whole work thing.

So much this. I was having a discussion with one religious zealot and he kept insisting, “he’s your god too” when I referred to yahweh as “his god”. No asshole, I don’t subscribe to your fairy tales. Though, in a nod to keeping the discussion civil, I limited my responses, to “no, I don’t subscribe to your beliefs.” Getting upset, yelling or insulting only plays to their ability to project victim-hood. So, it’s important to stay calm and keep the conversation rational and focused on the failures of their explanations. You will never convince the delusional to give up their delusions, but you can convince the other people around, who aren’t fully delusional, to question the delusions.

You can delete them?

Step one: Document, Document, Document.
Step Two: Did we cover documentation yet?
Step Three: Complain, with documentation, to the apartment management.
Step Four: Document.

Recordings such as video and audio are useful. Just keeping a log of all such interactions can help as well. But, you want to have the documentation to prove your side of things. If things go really sideways and you end up in court, the judge won’t give a fuck about what you say, only what you can prove. Be ready to prove your claims. As we say in the DFIR world, “logs or it didn’t happen”. Then, start complaining to management. And document (keep a written log, you probably won’t be able to record) your interactions with management. All logs should include date, time, who you spoke with, what you spoke about and any actions which management said they would take or actions you said you would take. If it’s an option, keep your communications with management in email. Both the sending and received emails will be timestamped and the headers will provide a reasonable record showing that the emails were to or from management controlled email servers and addresses. And they log what was talked about quite nicely.

Ultimately, the goal is to move this from being your problem to management’s problem. And it’s possible that your problem neighbor is also someone else’s problem. If management has three tenants all complaining about the same neighbor, they have more impetus to take action against the problem. Of course, this assumes a neutral management, which can be an open question. But, this is likely the least costly way to resolve the issue.