The Vision Pro seems very Tesla-like in the online chatter, in that people who’ve actually experienced it tend to be very positive about its prospects, but there are also a bunch of critics and outright haters who appear to be very keen to see it fail.

We also saw this to some extent with the Apple Watch but this is a much more niche/expensive device, so it’ll be easier to argue that it’s not a success regardless of how well it meets Apple’s expectations.

I’m looking forward to trying it out at the local Apple Store in Feb to make my own mind up.

Just like in virology where a vaccine that doesn't completely block infection causes potentially dangerous evolutionary pressure, a fix would neeed to be (near) absolute.

Get a dual motor standing desk frame from Amazon for $200ish and a table top from IKEA for ~$100. Screw in a power strip to the underside and a cable management tray and you have an amazing desk for under $400

Make standing mode the default on your desk. One way that works for me is to start the day and end the day with it standing and only put it into a seated position when I’m tired.

eCash seems like a natural fit here. Imagine a federation of homeless charity services that all accepted the same tokens, and were the only place the tokens could be accepted.

That’s a good point, and it also highlights one of things that irks me about terming behavior as greedy or as avaricious - which is that we’re quick to frame others as suffering from it but never ourselves.

The truth is that we all act in self-interest, and in the vast majority of cases greed is not an objective or useful aspect of a given behavior. In addition, the negative effects are hard to identify, and the positive effects are usually completely ignored.

The takeaway? Act in your self interest, take care of those around you, and be careful about assessing greed in others.

What stops clients from ganging up and punishing the server?

Also, why would it be desirable for this to exist as a layer-1 based system?

Remember, you’re in a better position than 99.9999% of people on this planet simply due to the fact that:

You’re going to have an amazing life if you focus on the above.

Your dad’s position is totally understandable. Your lesson is not to blow out your BTC holdings in future out of blind faith in others.

Very damaging to EU-based technology businesses and their prospective customers in those countries, and it will just accelerate the flight to open source applications.

These EU bureaucrats are delusional. Who advises them!?

You could not be more wrong. Bitcoin will have fulfilled its purpose when it is usable by the weak and powerless and it’s up to the strong and powerful to make that a reality.

Some people have families whom they care about very much. This is a valuable conversation.

It was supposedly to allow farmers to take advantage of the brightness available in the early morning summer hours.

I think it’s getting slightly worse but I’m not certain.

My theory is that two related things might be happening:

The reason that it causes standards to go down is that In the past, none of this could be measured well, but it was obviously important, so good businesses placed a priority on getting good, empowered employees to fill those positions. Now all that matters is keeping average response times and ratings above a certain level, which results in a lower bar being met, mostly sustained by those simple common issues that arise.

Ah, ok.

It just seems to me that the US holding some amount of real BTC, while supporting Bitcoin investment vehicles (even if ‘paper’) further legitimizes bitcoin as a commodity and increases the market cap , and in turn helps stabilize its value in time.

I suppose it might bolster the dollar at least for some time, but I wouldn’t be too concerned about that personally. Is that a nightmare to you or do you foresee the dollar somehow remaining perennially due to this new scheme of the government and Blackrock? If so, I’m still unclear as to precisely how that will be achieved.

It doesn’t stop us holding it and transacting with it, ultimately, and anything that fails to do that is really supporting it.

Confiscation is about the only valid method I see. But that’s difficult to imagine in todays world - it’s very different from the one in which it was achieved in the USA with gold.

I think the main question I’d have is what maintains this petrodollar style ‘commodity link’? Oil is a physical asset that runs out as it’s used with relatively few major providers, that can be bought off (with military support in the case of the petrodollar).

In what way is bitcoin similar? In my view, it’s materially different:

.. and therefore cannot be weaponized in the same way.

I don’t think there’s any strong evidence that the existing system can coopt and control bitcoin.

What they can do is build a bitcoin investment vehicle that is attractive enough to the average investor and is connected well to the existing system such that the fed gets their taxes and can go after money launderers — which I realize is ineffective, but it keeps these people in their jobs and their agency funded, which is where the incentive comes from.

All this does is push up the BTC price and incentivize the Fed to ensure those funds keep bringing in the tax dollars.

It doesn’t stop us continuing to promote holding one’s own keys, and building better tools to help everyone transact safely and easily.

I don’t think any big publishers have tried it yet because it’s too hard to get normies on board without better in-built Lightning support on browsers or mobile OSes. Plugins just won’t cut it when it comes to user uptake.

Yeah, Google probably suffer quite badly from it.

Apple, on the other hand, generally don’t have product managers so suffer little from this particular problem.

It’s due to straightforward human incentives.

These companies have employees. They want to keep their jobs, and some will also want to gain more money or status through recognition of their efforts. So what do they do? They come up with new features.

This can work just fine in small teams without competition between those tasked with coming up with those new feature. The worst examples are due to an org having too many people tasked with coming up with product changes, which creates incentives that result in a worse user experience, like you’re describing.

I think we’re going to need bank tellers to help us do multisig.