6
points
leifg
Joined 1,002 karma
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/leifg; my proof: https://keybase.io/leifg/sigs/2oSnL-U5YbaZPjyig4HsLw_eQgbSeuqc2y7auIghWJY ]
[ Kismet Code: 0b8f2d ]
meet.hn/city/us-San Diego
Socials: - github.com/leifg
Interests: Remote Work
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- 6 points
- It doesn't matter for English website because you usually send out emails with "Hi Joe".
Once you internationalize you will need this because in German it's an absolute no go to address a stranger by their first name (at least for B2B services).
And internationalization is on the road map for a lot of companies.
- I have weekly 1-on-1s and I do enjoy them. I work for a big-ish company and half of the team works remote full time.
Similar to other comments, we chat a lot about personal stuff and crack some jokes. But I also make an effort to note down things that I want to ask about. Sometimes it's about what the vibe is on the business side, sometimes it's about my career or feedback on what I did recently and sometimes I ask mundane things such as "do we have a stock image account for my presentations".
- I should have said "Blockchain applications outside of cryptocurrency" but as you seem to equate the two let's talk about that.
A good metric is: "people are using it".
That is not the case for any cryptocurrency (yes and that includes El Salvador). I frequently wire money across borders and cryptocurrencies are still completely useless for it despite it being the number one use case that is shouted from the crypto rooftops.
So you're left with: "It made a ton of money for rich and a few lucky middle class people" and "some quasi dictator implemented it as an additional currency without a mandate".
- I always wonder with these things: what is the deadline after which you are allowed to say "There is no value".
It has been almost 14 years since the inception of Bitcoin. There is nuance to this timeline that's why I usually use the launch of Ethereum as a starting point (~7 years If I recall correctly). Nevertheless so far nothing substantial running in production has come out of it Blockchain technology.
The typical response then is "well it takes time there is a lot of potential". I mean yeah but if you compare it to something like contactless payments or ride sharing apps these products have moved a lot faster and now have high user adoption.
So again: At what point can we just ignore all these Blockchain prophets that say "just wait the innovation is around the corner". 10 years, 20 years?
- Knowing German I read through the sources. This article is pretty misleading.
The [primary source](https://www.watson.de/leben/urlaub%20&%20freizeit/879935671-...) is a slightly clickbait article asking the questions: "Are AirTags allowed in checked luggage?".
They reached out to Lufthanse asking them. They responded: "Luggage trackers are electronic devices so they have to be turned off when the luggage is checked".
It is unclear wether they really understood how AirTags work and that they are not active trackers.
There are a bunch of other magazine echoing this response but I have yet to find an official statement by Lufthansa explicitly banning AirTags.
- I recently quit being an independent contractor after 5 years and returned to being an employee. Let me outline my experience going from employee to contractor and back.
In general: I have been a software developer for 14 years. I love writing code but I also like to figure out the root of the problem and come up with the best solution. I started freelancing in Germany and continued to do so in the UK and the US.
The initial reason to go solo was mostly feeling based. I imagined being super flexible about what I could work on and wanted to have more time off even though it was unpaid. Additionally I thought I could spend some time to specialize in a field in order to get higher rates and maybe come up with a product idea. I also justified this move to myself with "I at least gotta try it". I was lucky to find a client pretty quickly and enjoyed the networking and finding follow up opportunities.
However a couple of things became pretty clear to me very quickly: the easiest way to work as a freelancer for me was to basically continue to work as a generic software engineer that knows $language for a client 5 days a week and then invoice them. I didn't really spin up additional income streams and I didn't even take more time off.
However there were a few things that kept me from returning into a regular job: The increased income (in my first year my income effectively increased by 50% even though I was doing the same work), the opportunity to switch "jobs" more often without it being perceived as being a flaky employee (this one is kind of a hack but nobody ever questioned why I was only working for 3 months for a particular client).
Things ultimately changed after I moved to the US because the calculation now wasn't only about pure money. I also would have to factor in health insurance cost (in Europe this is essentially the same wether you are freelance or not), there are other benefits like 401k contribution and employee stock buying programs that I needed to consider. But ultimately I was missing working on projects long term rather than just coming into a company churning out code. I also enjoy not having to write invoices anymore or doing a more complicated tax return or figuring out what kind of insurance I need. I am also glad that there is now basically no need for me to do any kind of marketing or sales related work.
In total I had 9 full time clients and a few short term projects (1-2 days). The short term projects were some of the worst days as a freelancer because the project was timeboxed and every time I scrambled to deliver on time.
In general I would say if you are an hourly/daily rate based contractor the only two reasons that I saw as an advantage was: more money and seeing more different projects. If you are willing to put up with the admin overhead of going solo I definitely recommend it, especially if you have a talent or are willing to do marketing and sales related tasks. I suggest however to be honest with the income calculation. If you compare your current job to something like 220 billable days as a freelancer (not unrealistic) you are going to see a big increase. But if you take into account the benefits and compare this to a competing employment offer, the income difference might not be as big.
- > I think you misunderstood the tone of my original comment, which was that NFTs introduce an extremely marginal benefit for the ticketing use case while bringing in all the negative aspects of something based on a permissionless blockchain AND still requiring a trust relationship with the issuer to be established out of band.
Fair point, I didn't see that.
I would however make the argument that in reality NFTs wouldn't introduce any benefit.
Digital tickets and a centralized software that takes care of reselling completely solves the issue of fake tickets (at least on the technical side). None of this requires NFTs.
- So?
It’s so frustrating having these discussions about energy consumption.
If you make a statement about the absolute energy consumption of a PoW blockchain, the first response usually is “But this other thing consumes way more energy!!!!”
In order to compare the consumption of the network to anything you will need to calculate it by some unit of utility. Transactions is the only metric that makes sense.
- 1 point
- I have to concede that actually is one of the use cases for cryptocurrencies or more concretely: stable coins.
I guess using cryptocurrencies make sense if you are completely left to your own devices and can't rely on the government for help.
I'm just worried how this will turn out long term:
- Is using a cryptocurrency run by a company registered in Hong Kong, backed by a bank on the Bahamas really that great of an idea? - Are large parts of the population able to store their assets correctly. Are they storing their coins on their own wallets or are they using exchanges. If they use exchanges, does the government have an interest in letting them do whatever or are they imposing sanctions? If they store their coins in their own wallets, is the majority of the population able to properly secure their assets? - Will mining operations have an impact on the existing infrastructure if it becomes to profitable. I can totally see mining operations by powerful individuals prioritizing their profit over a nearby town's electricity needs.
But most importantly: what will happen if the value of cryptocurrencies decreases or even crashes? I don't see regular people highly invested in crypto just walking away from a crash.
- My apologies, I used “reverse” and “invalidate” synonymously.
Nevertheless on a public blockchain all transactions would be invalidated and that indeed is a problem.
Because everyone who received coins would have to wait again for n confirmations in order to be sure they got their money. In theory nobody should be able to add a double spend transaction to the pool but I wouldn’t bet on it.
That’s what I mean with technical nightmare.
You would have to make sure to properly identify all transactions. Possibly take down the system, exclude a single transaction. Make sure that the miner who will find the next block will include the right transactions. Make sure of that for the following block. I don’t see that happening with a large coordination effort, meaning: centralization.
And when you come to that conclusion you should probably take a step back and rethink “why are we doing all of thatch blockchain stuff when we need to rely on a central authority?”
- Sure maybe. But that only really works if few (if not all) entities have control over the consensus mechanism.
On a regular PoW blockchain you will have to recalculate all the hashes according to the difficulty which will up to the miners.
But even if you could, it's an absolute technical nightmare.
To build an analogy that somehow fits. If you have git repo and you find out that a particular commit that you want to undo, what do you do?
- Rebase all changes to an earlier commit, remove the faulty commit and recalculate all commit hashes that follow it.
or?
- Create a new commit that reverts the old commit.
In reality you opt for option 2 99.99% of the time. The only reason you would ever want to remove a commit from history is if you accidentally exposed information to an audience that is not supposed to see it.
- Even if that is desired and wouldn't spark a philosophical debate about wether centralized entities should get involved at all, there is a much deeper problem.
Every transaction that is occurring now on the chain will be invalidated.
That means you can't even reverse a single transaction you will have to reverse one transaction and ALL other transactions that happened after the one you want to reverse.
If that happens too often why would I want to to transact on a chain that is under constant threat to be forked off?
- I had multiple arguments around situations like this.
There are essentially two camps. The one side says:
- You can sell for cash, use mixers, NFT sales, $other_sophisitacted_technology and get away with it
The other side argues:
- You won't be able to ever cash out this sum and law enforcement will use sophisticated data mining on the blockchain and will eventually bust you
I think in reality it is like any illicit asset worth $650 Mio. It's gonna be extremely hard to launder but not impossible.
- I don't understand this argument.
All three Molly White, Stephen Diel and Nicolas Weaver have made arguments beyond "cryptocurrencies use a lot of energy".
You cite a couple of sources in your statements but I would like to see these twitter threads where they "have all deliberately been ignoring the eco-friendly cryptocurrencies and technologies for years". I'm not saying it didn't happen but in these cases it depends on the details because I wouldn't engage in a debate with a laser eyes account whose only talking point it "you forgot about 'eco-friendly" cryptocurrency X".
- OK fair point.
If you want a concise definition of web3 the website provides this as well: https://web3.lifeitself.us/concepts/web3
- > Concretely, our approach starts with collecting and steel-manning the key claims made for web3 through conscious, critical and open dialog with a diverse set of experts.
This is something that is desperately needed. More often than not I try to assess bold claims like "Blockchains will solve X". I try to follow the thought process of these claims and arrive at the solution: "Blockchains will most likely NOT solve X". The first comment to that is usually: "It was never supposed to solve X it is rather about Y which is loosely related to X".
There is no way to have a proper debate if one side if flip flopping about claims.
- In theory yes. If you have a list of addresses you want to “block” and you convince the biggest mining pools to play along you can “block” transactions to and from all these addresses. Whoever mines a new block gets to choose which transactions are going to be in it. If you just never include flagged transactions, no one is able to transfer terrorist money in and out.
There is still a possibility that one of the smaller miners gets a block once in a while but you’d already be able to significantly disrupt the terrorist organization. In addition to that you could also decide to fork off the chain before a block with any transaction and long term convince 100% of the miners to not touch any of the addresses.
Here is where reality kicks in: how do you get an agreement which addresses to block. There is more than one terrorist organization and certain miners might find the “censorship free money” argument more important than the existence of some of them. And judging by how often I hear the argument that BTC is “non-political” I don’t see that happening at all.
And even if you had consensus of what is good and what is evil, the counter attack of terrorists is fairly simple. Generate a new public key for every donation. This makes is a lot harder to track and would start an arms race between miners and terrorists.
I was working for a UK steel supplier and they would address all their email recipients with their first name. We had to change this when internationalizing into German. If you want to sell to Germans you are much safer to use a more formal tone.
Slightly related to that is the formal and informal you that exists in a lot of languages.
I was also working for a German fashion startup mostly targeted at young women. In German it was fine to address everyone by first name and the informal you, but when translated the page to French, we could keep the first name but had to change the informal you to the formal one.