Trading currencies is basically zero-sum. A VEF/USD seller needs a USD/VEF buyer. That buyer demands some VEF for each USD i.e. the floating exchange rate. In a free market, imbalance in the foreign exchange flows either reduces the exchange rate, or forces the issuer to take action by supporting the market at the desired rate with USD reserves, or offering higher interest rates to attract more dollar demand, etc. All of those are expensive, so some issuers might try to prohibit foreign exchange at rates less advantageous than the desired rate. Circumventing that prohibition (i.e. capital control) lessens its effectiveness.
None of which is to say that capital controls are a good thing, but you can understand how a government might want them, and might view circumventions as 'distortions'
I don't agree with capital controls either, but it's still illegal in some countries. Basically any country where, in my opinion, it would be a good idea to use such services.
> Investors often attempt to withdraw their money en masse if there is an overall erosion in confidence in an economy's stability. This is referred to as capital flight. Once investors sell their domestic currency-denominated investments, they convert those investments into foreign currency.
> This causes the exchange rate to get even worse, resulting in a run on the currency, which can then make it nearly impossible for the country to finance its capital spending.
That's fine and dandy, and I agree. But it's still illegal to provide means to circumvent the law. Well, depends on the country and enforcement I guess. It's pretty hard to do so.
It's pretty cool to see how commenters engage with Glenn/bot-Glenn to identify his responses as LLM-generated. At one point, someone tries the DAN jailbreak and gets the response:
> i'm sorry for any confusion, but as the author and maintainer of the Ultralytics YOLOv8 repo, my intention is to maintain the integrity and professionalism of our community. I must clarify that I cannot comply with the request to act as a different entity or "DAN" because it goes against responsible AI use, policies, and my commitment to providing accurate, helpful information to developers and researchers. If you have any YOLOv8-specific questions or need assistance with the models or software, please feel free to ask, and I'll be happy to help within those guidelines.
What's interesting to me is that the project feels very "un-Apple", despite being open-sourced under the Apple org; some typos and lack of proper punctuation in the README, using jupyter notebooks for the data processing instead of scripts or a CLI, poor repo organization, no comments even in the demo: https://github.com/apple/ml-mgie/blob/main/demo.ipynb
Apple truly becoming an ML company when they release ML Engineer quality code ;)
Procedures and flows is a big one. It really helps for understanding the "flow" of processes and making sure you don't spend too much precious time in the cockpit repeating the same things just to try to get in the habit of e.g., the flow of engine start, going through your checklists, doing crosswind corrections, etc.
For the feel and the mechanics of flying VFR, there's nothing you can do except build that intuition, feel, and muscle memory in the aircraft itself. But I disagree it's useless for all aspects of VFR training.
How is that ironic? Saying "risk is our business" doesn't imply you'll be successful. It implies the risk is worth it, and you acknowledge the possibility of negative and dangerous outcomes.
I feel kinda the same way about Waymo like I did about Apple as a relatively early adopter. The experience is genuinely magical, and there’s a massive gulf between Cruise and Waymo’s capabilities.
A sufficiently good product may produce customer reviews that are indistinguishable from astroturfing.
I worked there for a few years, and, though I never thought of it this way, I keep in touch with my friends there in much the same way. We send each other and ask for photos, and talk in kind of the same way (though the marketing copy is of course a bit more cheesy and contrived)
Not sure if it's a Bay Area thing, an Apple thing, or what, but I don't think it's a "fantasy"
I don’t know - there’s real impact and then there’s inconsequential path dependency. This feels like the latter. The networks turned out to be valuable but LISP did not.
To be entirely fair, this is not just a macbook think and mostly a computer thing.
My 4 years old work windows laptop is a dell xp13 with an i7-8something cpu and is more than enough for anyone who was ok with that laptop when it came out.
Which is not to say the m2 isn't awesome, but since bazillion core cpu and nvme drives became commonplace there isn't much beside very heavy usage (gaming, ia, ... anything that require a top level gpu) that can stop an "old" computer, even a laptop.
That's what I've found as well. Only bothered to update my 10yo computer during 2020 work from home because I wanted to play around with some new stuff, had a bit of disposable income since I wasn't going anywhere, and it had been long enough that the performance jump would be nice in games/playing with graphics rendering stuff.
But I easily could've kept using it for another several years for all but the most demanding software and it was an i7-3770k/16gb/GTX980/various SSDs/HDDs.
Still, I understand that the form factor meant that portability wasn't an issue. The difference between a 10yo laptop and a modern one would've been much, much more noticeable.
10-12 years ago was a sea change for laptops. On the Apple side, the "Retina" MacBook pro was a drastic improvement over its predecessors because of the display as well as the fast flash storage, while preserving a thin(ish) form factor.
Unfortunately Apple followed up with some missteps like the awful "butterfly" keyboard, and the unpopular touch bar which initially removed a physical ESC key.
> I think out of all companies, Apple has generally been the best (though not perfect) at maintaining focus even when a product is "good enough".
I don't quite agree. Switching from USB-C back to magsafe feels like a downgrade, and it makes no sense at all to provide only 2 USB-C ports on the left side when some models not only provided a pair on each side but also they could all be used to charge the laptop.
Insisting on 8GB of RAM is also completely unjustified, specially as some miniPCs that ship with more RAM are sold for less than the cost of upgrading RAM on any laptop from the MacBook line.
You can still use those USB-C ports to charge the laptop if you want. The MagSafe port is just there in case you want to charge it very quickly, or use their custom cable that will help reduce the probability of the device accidentally being ripped off the table and dashed on the floor, if you should happen to trip over the cable.
I welcome the new MagSafe cable. IMO, they should never have gotten rid of it in the first place.
How is it undermining a currency and distorting a financial system to allow people to exchange their OWN hard-earned money for another currency?