The problem is banks and financial institutions have been blocking legitimate transfers for ages for anything above $10k. I lost count how many times it happened to me. One time a large sum of money was in limbo for almost 5 days and I needed it for an urgent government deposit in another country, ironically.
I wish Crypto or something like that takes off and wipes them all out one day.
The public lost trust in financial institutions. So when they say they are blocking something for our own good we will take it the wrong way by default.
I think they are already hedging for Taiwan. 1. They just pseudo-acquired Groq, fully made in USA (GlobalFoundries) and with a diversified supply chain. 2. And they just announced they will be re-introducing RTX 3090 made in Korea (Samsung). 3. And they plan to produce chips in Intel's new US fabs soon.
I think the bigger problems of the AI bubble are energy and that it's gaining a terrible reputation for being the excuse for mass layoffs while suffocating the Internet with slop/brainrot content. All while depending on government funding to grow.
European banks need the swap lines by the Fed to stay afloat. ECB, BoE, SNB, Denmark, Sweden, all are on USD life support.
The only viable way to do this would be for the EU to fully switch out of USA/USD into China/BRICS but Russia won't allow it and who is going to buy EU's exports? Not China.
But that analysis of viable options is for rational and competent leadership, so who knows.
EU banks: 1. Lend and trade in USD; 2. Have a shitload of deposits (liabilities) in USD-denominated accounts [1] [2] (1 trillion?)
A huge amount of EU imports (from outside Europe) have to be paid in USD. Like oil/natgas/commodities and manufactured stuff.
The Euro is not really used as reserve currency outside of EU.
So if EU goes into economic war with USA by dumping US treasuries: 1. they would be trading those treasuries for something else (EUR denominated bonds? yuan? something else?); 2. no more swap lines and goodbye exports to USA so USD debt trap with depositors (forced conversion to EUR?); 3. How are they going to pay imports without USD lines?
The only other big player who can give them equivalent liquidity in swap lines is China. But as I stated, that would be even worse than USD dependency and less likely.
All this while the EU industrial base is on the brink and with a huge dependency on American natgas and Chinese supply chain. They cornered themselves and they can't do much without huge sacrifices. The only way out needs a complete shakeup of the leadership in Brussels and a new economic plan. I wouldn't bet on that happening.
In Yuan? Which is certainly a more of a global reserve currency than the Euro and is certainly widely used for international trade? The same Yuan with the massive amount of liquidity outside of China?
The Canadian Dollar and Pound Sterling each are a have a significantly bigger share as reserve currencies than the Yuan....
USD/CNY havs only slightly higher volume than USD/CHF. Hardly anyone uses it anywhere outside China.
RMB settled ~60% of PRC cross border payments last year (up from 30% a few years ago), ~6T USD equivalent in settlement, which already makes rmb more real/useful currency than euro/yen reserves. And functionally shadow reserve - RMB can buy Chinese inputs, intermediate goods and global commodities, i.e. even oil delinked from USD, which covers like everything a country typically needs. That's what reserve is ultimately for, to buy shit/liquidity, not mere storage. RMB already guarantees access to most global goods for the simple reason PRC is producer of said goods. PRC also has massive USD war chest reserves, they already do USD lending AND USD swaplines to global south. In terms of liquidity/scale of swapline to EU, peak US swapline to EU was like 600B during covid and 2008 financial crisis, i.e. 20% of PRC USD reserves, which PRC increasingly need to find uses for as she displaces more USD from trade settlement. So it's doable for PRC, but question of trust, but not whether EU trust PRC, but whether PRC trust EU since these swap lines tend to be commodity-backed, where frankly EU has limited offerings to PRC.
Yegge named it Gas Town as in "refinery" because the main job for the human at this stage is reviewing the generated code and merging. "
The whole point of the project is to be in control. Yegge even says the programmers who can read/review a lot of code fast are the new 10x (paraphrasing).
Yeah and its not a big focus of the posts which is interesting. I'd have thought he'd spend a lot more time talking about the workflow he's using, the specs/feature definitions he's writing, and so on.
> CUDA architects [...] happily exposed every ugly details of underlying hardware to the programmer if that allows a bit more performance.
After spending more than a decade dancing around all the underlying x86 hidden stuff for low-level optimization, I appreciate CUDA a lot. Everything is there under your total control. No more one size fits all. Higher barrier of entry but no surprises and less time spent debugging to figure out what landmine your code stepped into.
Meshtastic + budget kit ($10-$35) is way better. BlueTooth alone is kind of useless. It's max ~100 meters/yards vs 2-20 km (12 miles). And the community is great.
Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations).
Cross test with Meshcore doesn't show any issues. Chats over 5 hops have almost a 100% success rate.
Long time I avoided MC because of its closed source client - but a Opensource Flutter app for Apple/iPhone is slowly getting usable and stable. (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)
Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4
The nearest Meshtastic and Meshcore nodes to me are 20 km away over hilly granite terrain.
Anyway how would either network fare in the Iranian situation where the authorities are actively trying to shutdown communications? Sure the authorities could simply flood the network with traffic.
The "aliens" are just spiders. With a lot of magical thinking. It's more like fantasy than science fiction. And character development is terrible. Only one or two are interesting and they get killed too early.
I can take SciFi that's at least either good story or good science. To this day I don't know why people recommend this author so much, even more than Watt's Rifters trilogy or Firefall. He is a "legal executive" who dropped out of zoology/biology. Explanations are just "nanovirus!" or "bioengineering!" and left at that.
Spoiler: the spiders make a space elevator and an asteroid catcher out of spiderweb; really. Stuff like this doesn't pass the suspension of disbelief for me. Reading it was quite annoying.
Feel free to downvote me, but if you do, I ask you the minor kindness to refute my points.
Edit: also "nanovirus!", what? All viruses are nano. And this virus being so complex it can't be too short, either.
LinkedIn slop leaking to HN. But he gets upvotes somehow...
The guy literally works (or used to work) for a garbage Indian consulting company who was sued for discriminating against non-Indians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipro#Criticism
I think he means also US stocks. So most of the wealth fund.
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