I think all three of those groups are in for a pretty bad wake up call regarding what their protest vote bought them…

I know A LOT of people that still use cash and use it frequently for legitimate purchases.

There are also several places around here that are cash only shops, and several more that will charge you extra for using a credit card.

Cash is an official, government sanctioned, form of currency. Part of the appeal of cryptocurrencies is they’re a currency that’s outside of government management.

The problem with bitcoin in particular is volatility vs any other reference currency is insane. You might have enough to buy an expensive house one day, then a few months later you only have enough for a cheap car, then a few months later you can buy an even nicer house (or maybe not!). That’s just not practical for most people … I don’t think it ever will be practical for most people.

If we get a “stable coin” that requires low power draw … maybe? But is that really better than just using a credit card? Are online purchases really more secure? People get their wallet stolen in real life, getting your digital wallet stolen is something that can totally happen too. There’s no FDIC on your bitcoin, a bitcoin wallet isn’t a bank.

Crypto fans love to talk up crypto coins but … I just do not see them as a practical solution to much of anything. We would be far better off improving security of credit cards so you can manage your purchases in a system that’s more like PayPal’s where there’s a way to see “these are the things that are authorized to take money from you automatically” and “these are the things where we generated a one time token and this is how much you paid.”

The things I’ve seen about bitcoin at scale have also suggested it could never even come close to the transaction speed of VISA.

I just … I am so far from sold. I found Bitcoin when it was ~1 USD per bitcoin. I wish I’d bought just $50 of bitcoin back then and sat on it, but I don’t think bitcoin ever has soared because of its merits. It’s kind of like this AI hype right now, block chains have very limited practical usability.

OH, I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you were saying search itself is a duopoly between Google and Brave Search.

You’re saying searching Reddit is a duopoly between Google and Brave Search.

That’s my bad… but yeah, the article is just wrong anyways, Kagi also has access still (presumably through their deal with Google to use Google’s search results as part of their result set). I wonder if Brave has a similar deal … or their crawlers just haven’t been blocked yet … or they paid off Reddit.

EDIT: Also, I will say because Brave search has such a small market share that’s probably not going to help Google’s case much.

I will say, I disagree with this perspective as a developer.

Adding more people doesn’t inherently make the product better. You can have too many cooks in the kitchen and too many people stepping on each other’s toes.

It’s like the saying 9 women can’t make a baby in a month.

I think the other apps are moving at a reasonable pace. Though I do wish they’d put some more people on Linux desktop apps… Maybe even a Linux distribution “Proton OS” could be very interesting.

But it’s no where near the #2 spot. Brave search is incredibly niche.

You’re probably meeting our weirdos in those cases… Trust me we get other countries weirdos (mostly in our touristy spots) too.

We can be chatty with strangers but it’s typically very surface level stuff “what’s a nice place to eat around here”, “that’s a really cute dog”, “any recommendations for things to do while we’re here”, etc

Brave search…? You’re joking right…?

… they do email, but they also do other things. They still do email better than the alternatives.

It’s kind of like if Chipotle came out with hamburgers and you were like “well I want a burrito but I’ll never get one of their burritos now, they’re just like all the other fast food now.”

LLMs are expensive power hungry beasts of limited use.

Crypto is similarly a power hungry beast. It’s also primarily a niche pseudo currency that’s arguably more regularly used for crime than legitimate purchases.

“Feed what you wish to grow” applies here … and TBH I’m okay with what they’ve done with the LLM. The crypto wallet … I just wish we’d let crypto die. Bitcoin in particular is too unstable for the average person to use as some kind of normal currency. People also see it as an investment, but it’s a super questionable investment that is backed only by the arbitrary value we give it.

You should definitely benchmark it using a simulation of what your data might look like. It should not be that hard. Just make script, that creates bunch of files similar to your data.

Right, it’s just kind of a thing to think about. If your program is something that might conceivably be used of sshfs (as an example) … this is probably not a great option for your program’s configuration.

The data structure and parser is not formed the same way as the json, where you have to parse the whole thing. So you don’t have to. You just open the files you need read their content. It is a bit more difficult at first since you can’t just translate a whole struct directly, but it pays for itself when you want to migrate the data to a new format. So if your structure never changes, probably those formats are easier.

Well a very common thing is to create a “config” object that lives in the long running process (and in some cases can be reloaded without restarting the program).

That model also saves you from unnecessary repeated IO operations (without one off caching and reloading mechanisms) and allows you to centralize any validation (which also means you can give configuration errors on start up).

I do wish various formats were more “streaming” friendly, but configuration isn’t really one of them.

In a lot of languages moving between formats is also fairly trivial because the XYZ markup parser parses things into an object map and the ZYK markup writer can write an object map into ZYK format.

Maybe I’m not understanding what you mean by migrating the data to a new format though.

Which I’m totally okay with. In some of my clothes my pockets are doing gymnastics to try and fit the giant brick (because the phone is a long as the full length of my pocket). If you don’t have/like baggy pockets, these huge screen, long phones are a huge pain.

Having it be “twice as thick” means it’s about as thick as my wallet (and I have no complaints with that).

I’m a bit skeptical about the performance penalty. I know there’s a benchmark but I didn’t see any details of what was actually benchmarked and where. Windows (AFAIK) still has notoriously slow directory traversal operations. God forbid you’re using SSHFS or even NFS. I’ve seen things with hundreds of YAML nodes before.

Benchmarking this is also tricky because the OS file cache will almost certainly make the second time faster than the first (and probably by a lot).

Also just the usability… I think opening a file to change one value is extreme. You also still have the problem of documentation… Which sure you can solve by putting that in another file, but… You can also do that with just plain old JSON.

I think in the majority of languages, writing a library to process these files would also be more complicated than writing a JSON parser or using an existing library.

Also how do you handle trailing whitespace inserted by a text editor? Do you drop it? Keep it? It probably doesn’t matter as long as the configuration is just for a particular program. The program just needs to document it… But then you’ve got ambiguities between programs that you just don’t have to worry about with TOML or JSON.

“a few” … it literally cuts the length in half. For me personally, something like this is much desired. Having a 3x3x.5" block vs a 6x3x.25" block would be a major improvement.

Speak for yourself… I’m hoping google comes out with a flip phone Pixel. If I was an iPhone person this is exactly what I’d be hoping for.

I want a phone that folds up to be smaller than a normal phone so I don’t have to have giant bricks in my pocket.

They just think “look at all this inflation we’ve had under Biden! It wasn’t like this when Trump was in control.” Of course they can’t think far enough to realize that perhaps a global pandemic caused this inflation and there was little that Biden could have done to stop it.

Which is particularly painful because Trump overheated the economy before the global pandemic even got off the ground. It’s a sort of miracle things aren’t worse than they are in that regard.

Dear AWS, hire a UX team to make your (clearly) programmer UI actually make sense.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

For real security, you basically have to. Even without this, jammers can be used by thieves to disable wireless cameras and security systems.

You can be upset, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to outlaw running for president as a criminal. Russia exists as a case study/prime example why even in modern times that founding wisdom holds.

It’s not just a circle jerk in this case. Windows is dominant for desktop usage but Linux has like 90% of the server market and is used for basically all new server projects.

Paying for Windows licensing when it doesn’t benefit you, it’s silly, and that’s been realized for years.

This is a pretty hot take. A single bad file can topple pretty much any operating system depending on what the file is. That’s part of why it’s important to be able to detect file corruption in a mission critical system.