TBF the worst outcome is famine and mass death of humans which... was somewhat the standard historically (low populations / intermittent famine). I have as much existential dread as you but that's also because I overvalue human life relative to what nature has historically thought about us.
Isn't the jury still out on that statement? Pretty sure we've been experiencing the long-tail cultural decomposition caused by the effects the industrial revolution brought with it with the exception of a 20 year opportunity to change our trajectory as a species. I think getting out of this conundrum alive will require de-segmenting our cultural narrative around how we got here.
> Meanwhile this site disappears a 1500 comment thread about the Marines being used to crush incredibly peaceful resistance to the unconstitutional regime's White Supremacy. US citizens are being violently kidnapped, and for what?
That topic is not intellectually interesting. I don’t really come here for politics, and I’d like to believe that neither do most HN readers.
> a software update could easily cripple its ability to run on your local machine
A software update collaborated on by Microsoft, Apple + countless of volunteer groups managing various other distributions?
The cat really is out of the bag. You could probably make it a death penalty in the whole world and some people would still use it secretly.
Once things like this run on consumer hardware, I think it's already too late to pull it down fully. You could regulate it though and probably have a better chance of limiting the damages, not sure an outright ban could even have the effect you want with a ban.
Models released today are already useful for a bunch of stuff, maybe over the course of 100 year they could be considered "out of date", but they don't exactly bitrot by themselves because they sit on a disk, not sure why'd they suddenly "expire" or whatever you try to hint at.
And even over the course of 100 year, people will continue the machine learning science, regardless if it's legal or not, the potential benefits (for a select few) seems to be too good for people to ignore, which is why the current bubble is happening in the first place.
I think you over-estimate how difficult it is to get "most of the world" to agree to anything, and under-estimate how far people are willing to go to make anything survive even when lots of people want that thing to die.
> I think you over-estimate how difficult it is to get "most of the world" to agree to anything
agreement isn't needed
its success sows the seeds of its own destruction, if it starts eating the middle class: politicians in each and every country that want to remain electable will move towards this position independently of each other
> and under-estimate how far people are willing to go to make anything survive even when lots of people want that thing to die.
the structural funding is such that all you need to do is chop off the funding from big tech
the nerd in their basement with their 2023 macbook is irrelevant
Plenty of past civilizations have thought they were invulnerable. In fact, most entities with power think that they can never be taken down. But countless empires in the past have fallen, and countless powerful people have lost their wealth and power overnight.
It's up to the merchant to decide if they want to support offline payments and to what limit. The terminals certainly allow it. Your transaction will be stored in a secure way (either encrypted or in a secure element) until the terminal reconnects.
The way the rules are set up though, the risk of a failed offline transaction is almost entirely borne by the merchant. In most cases the merchant is unwilling to accept this risk and disables the feature.
I guess for a restaurant it basically always makes sense to accept offline payments. I wasn’t aware that they might not be able to process card payments when I ordered.
I don’t typically carry any cash on me, and, well, if their terminals go down before I’ve closed my tab, they assume all of the risk anyway.
I think it’s still pretty frequent even nowadays. I have payment cards with systematic authorization and and others without and I can totally see the difference.
Transactions with the cards requiring authorization will take several seconds while with my other cards it will be instant most of the time.
It depends on the configuration of the terminal : most merchant will allow offline (or asynchronous) transactions up to a certain amount when there is an important flux of customers waiting to pay.
I’m also pretty sure (that’s speculation at that point but I felt it in my experience) that some cards have more chances to have instant (offline) transactions than others. The more « premium » the cards the less I saw the "waiting for authorization" screen. Especially for small amounts.
About 15 years ago I remember paying for fast food delivery where the delivery guy put your card under the carbon paper bill and just rubbed a pen sideways back and forth over it a few times
It also depends on the card. The card can decide and even stores a running counter of how much has been processed offline, after which it will want to go online to check and reset its counter.
> Also, most airlines that take payments on board also run the terminals in offline mode.
Anecdotal, but most airliners I have recently flown with seem to have switched to online POS terminals, though they do still seem retain offline payment functionality as a fallback. I've seen payments being made, only for the flight attendant to return back to the passenger a few minutes later to inform that the payment was declined. This was over the ocean, so definitely no ground communication.
Airplanes for commercial flight all have VHF/HF or satellite connectivity, the've had that for a long time already. It's used for functionality like ACARS, voice connectivity, remote monitoring / diagnosis, etc. I can imagine this can also be used for payments and other low-bandwidth functionality.
Most airplanes also have WiFi access points on board, even when not offered to passengers. Typically these use hidden SSIDs. Speaking to an airplane tech once I know these are used for flight-crew handheld devices such as the POS terminals and iPads.
I happen to have a few friends that are pilots (all working for the same company) and they told me that their entire fleet already has Starlink terminals retrofitted, though they aren't offering that to passengers yet.
I guess what I'm trying to convey here is: the era of airplanes being 'offline' is already behind us.
It's absolutelty an irreversible hysteresis. That's more about not wanting to have fear for dying. After the actual dying, you (probably) don't have a desire to be alive, so the only real problem is the fear leading up to it.
I would prefer not to die soon, not only because it would be unpleasant but also because my death would be inconvenient for my employer, distressing for my friends and family, bad for charities I donate to, etc. And also because there are various things I would like to do that, if I get hit by a car tomorrow, I will never get to do.
(The last sentence is debatable. You might say that my preferences just evaporate and stop mattering at all when I die. I wouldn't agree, but I don't have a knock-down counterargument.)
> (The last sentence is debatable. You might say that my preferences just evaporate and stop mattering at all when I die. I wouldn't agree, but I don't have a knock-down counterargument.)
Your current preferences matter now. You currently don't want to die tomorrow in your sleep, therefore dying tomorrow in your sleep is already bad now. Independently of other things you want to do tomorrow or next week.
That is also my opinion. I would also say that because I have a persistent preference for not dying if I needn't, dying tomorrow in my sleep is bad then too even though I will be asleep/dead at the time and therefore any preferences I have won't be actively motivating me at that point. And -- this is I think clearly more debatable -- that if I prefer now that I eat a slice of chocolate cake tomorrow, then to that extent it's a bad thing if tomorrow I don't eat any chocolate cake, even if tomorrow I prefer not to have any. Not a bad thing on balance; if I make a choice tomorrow, then tomorrow's preferences are rightly more important than today's in most circumstances. But, still, the fact that today I preferred chocolate-cake-tomorrow makes no-chocolate-cake-tomorrow a worse thing than if I hadn't had that preference yesterday. And, similarly, if today I prefer that tomorrow I eat chocolate cake, or kiss my wife, or conquer Spain, and I die tonight, then one reason why that's bad is that those preferences don't get satisfied, even though by the time they fail to get satisfied the person who had those preferences is gone.
But, again, a reasonable person could disagree with most of that.
Everyone will die at some point anyways and instant nuclear obliteration seems like the better way to go compared to slowly vegetating away in a hospital bed or the infinite number of painful ways to die.
Getting blown up by enough high explosives to detonate a nuclear device is not painful at all. You’ll be about as dead as the Deepwater Horizon people.
Part of the problem with a currency basket is figuring out which currency basket weighting you actually want to use, and maintaining it. USD just exists.
> What is in the SDR is public information, so if you wanted to track them, it's not that hard.
The problem is the contents of the basket changes every 5 years. It is trivial to build your own “emulated SDR” just by holding appropriate amounts of the underlying currencies; but the problem is that in 2027 the IMF is scheduled to change the weights of the basket again; that means you may have to execute some (potentially very big) currency transactions to rebalance your “emulated SDR” to match the real one, and there’s a risk you won’t be able to do so at the rates the IMF assumed when it decreed the reweighting, especially since it doesn’t use spot rates, it uses 3 month average rates.
One option is to treat each edition of the SDR as a separate currency, so you might offer 2022 SDR and 2016 SDR in parallel. Another would be to have your “eSDR” aim to converge to parity with the SDR in the long-run, but allow it to temporarily deviate from parity whenever the basket updates.
SDR issued by the IMF don’t have this problem-whenever the definition changes, they all update accordingly-they are to a certain degree a “fiat” currency. There are two problems though-the first is that only sovereign states and certain international organisations established by treaty are legally allowed to possess them, private individuals and companies cannot. Some would like the IMF to change the rules to allow private ownership, but the US always blocks that because they are afraid of the SDR competing with the USD as the de facto global currency-and the IMF’s rules were architected to give the US a veto over all major decisions. The second issue: if you legally own SDR, you can take them to the IMF and ask to swap them (e.g.) for USD, and the IMF will work with the US Fed to ensure the transaction happens at the current official USD-SDR exchange rate. The problem is, the IMF rules only let holders carry out these transactions under quite restrictive conditions, meaning the SDR isn’t in practice freely convertible with its basket currencies-again, the IMF could loosen those rules, but the US would likely veto it.
Ultimately, some kind of private edition-based SDR emulation, or even a continuous emulation which closely tracks the SDR but temporarily diverges from it around reweighting time, is entirely feasible for a private actor (such as a bank or ETF issuer) to issue. I think the main reason why they don’t, is there just isn’t market demand for it - and an emulated SDR issued by a private actor is potentially at the regulatory mercy of the country to which that private issuer belongs, to a much greater extent than real SDRs would be.
Not necessarily. A correspondent bank is simply a bank where the recipient bank has an account in the specified currency. For domestic currencies used only in certain countries, that bank will almost always be in that country. For currencies used globally - not necessarily.
