That's not a problem with feature flags per se, it's a problem with lazy implementations of feature flags. Flags should be associated with an expiry date, and company comms tooling should be consistently yelling in some public channel when expired flags still exist in the codebase.
> That's not a problem with feature flags per se, it's a problem with lazy implementations of feature flags.
Oh absolutely. Feature flags are great, but you definitely need discipline to make sure you clean things up. The longer the unused code rots, the harder it is to remove it.
> Talk to anyone who works in the industry and they're trying to solve a problem.
Sure. But are those problems worth solving? How many VCs does the world need to pump cash into NFT-enabled video games before we ask the question, "why?"
> But I don't understand why people get so invested in it being a scam or failure.
Can't speak for everyone. But from my perspective, it's because certain "applications" are being marketed very heavily to non-technical people who aren't able to reasonably assess the viability of the technology. I'm thinking of NFTs in particular. The only other popularized non-NFT applications are cryptocurrencies, which are pure speculation (i.e., gambling).
In short, that's a moral issue. People were outraged by the Madoff scandal (and others), and this doesn't look a lot different to people who understand the underlying technology. Nobody wants their mom going broke because they bought some hyped-up blockchain thing on the advice of some super-hustler internet marketing influencer out looking to make a buck.
“Low slippage stable coin swap” is one of the most jargony things I’ve read on here in a while. Can you please ELI5 because I have no clue what this is or how it could be useful.
Have you heard of leverages, margin calls, derivatives, put options, etc.? DeFi is pretty much the same level of complexity but implemented on top of cryptocurrencies.
This https://youtu.be/8CAafjodkyE?t=104 is a recent thing I found mind blowing; 2020 iPhone can do on-device image processing and object recognition and speak a description of what the camera sees. Just quietly a builtin feature.
2010 iPhone, I was mind-blown by the Word Lens app which could do OCR on text in the camera feed, translate the words into another language, and overlay the results on the image in near-realtime. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/12/20/word.lens.ipho...
These are tasks I had never seen any computer do in any circumstances, things which would be unthinkable on a Java MIDP Blackberry from 2005, or a Pentium II desktop from 1997. Compare this to the wearable augmented reality devices Professor Steve Mann was building through the 80s and 90s[1] and this "describing the image" is so so far ahead in so many ways - processing power, imaging quality, battery life, storage space, size, weight, convenience, reliability, it's just mindblowingly better, neural networks and fast chips and solid state storage is a step change in a way that "faster" isn't enough to really convey.
Google tells me "Derivatives have a long history in the United States, dating back to the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade in 1848.", you're telling me people are doing that but with blockchain, why is that interesting at all, why mind blowing?
Personally the reason it blows my mind is because it’s now permissionless to craft a unique structured product or derivatives protocol, deploy it globally, and anyone on the planet can participate in that market.
It’s fully customizable and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
Call me old fashioned my I prefer regulations in the markets I participate in. I still fail to see how “permissionless market creation”, while impressive, actually solves a problem. Where is the demand coming from, besides people in tech??
In what way "permissionless"? In the way "the government has agreed that they can be unregulated financial products" or in the way "hopefully it can evade government financial regulation"? or in some other way?
Sure there’s definitely US-centric issues given the current regulations in place.
But it’s permissionless in that if the financial markets don’t support a structured product you or your community needs, you can create and deploy it yourselves with instant global accessibility.
You could (Matt Levine talks about his ExcelCoin he tracks in a spreadsheet), but with the rise of AMMs [1] (and SSOV’s) it’s easier to make the market in the DeFi space.
That feels like saying stealing food is a permissionless new way to get food. And I'm not at all convinced that the governments of the world could not regulate blockchains, or their use, if they wanted - either in ways like outlawing it, or auditing / regulating / taxing companies which use it, or pressuring insurance companies to put limits against insurance cover, or numerous other ways.
That’s not a great argument. It’s like comparing the invention of tcp with the iphone. They’re just two different technologies. If you’re interested in learning there are many resources, but it’s too easy to criticize something by looking at its cover.
And if you told me there was a new "TDP/JP" which is like packet switching but much slower and more energy hungry, and it was blowing your mind, and I asked why, and all you could say was "do your own research", I don't think I would do any research about that either.
Money obsessed people moving money around in ways that seem manipulative and gambling feels like a negative influence on the world.
Ok cool, so basically just fancy ways for traders/investors to gamble and “create value” that doesn’t really benefit anyone besides themselves and others tied to the platforms. Got it.
The idea is you can lock capital in a pool, and as people trade between two usd stablecoins, USDC and DAI, you earn a fraction of the trade fees. The low slippage is due to the pool being large enough that you will get $1->$1.
So this is Yet Another Liquidity Pool? $14B is not the kind of scale I mean. That is frankly trivial especially when transactions are large (or initial funding is high).
What I mean is, if blockchain is going to be a revolutionary technology backing all finance, where is the evidence it can handle the kind of transaction volume that, say, major credit card networks generate?
This is a protocol that rolls up ETH transactions and executes them in batch, in an attempt to alleviate scalability concerns. I can't really speak to the side/unintended effects of transaction rollups on a blockchain, but I'm interested in learning.
This excerpt from the FAQ
> It is worth noting that anyone can become a relayer so long as they have staked the required bond in the smart contract. This incentivises the relayer not to tamper with or withhold a rollup.
kind of bothers me. It does not seem like such a small step to go from 'decentralized' to 'cartel of relayers' to 'central bank and subordinate branches'. And the fact that this protocol is unavailable to US persons is interesting, though perhaps standard for the space right now.
The censorability of rollup relayers bothers me too. As you mentioned, the fact that US persons are blocked from the protocol shows this is a real problem.
I think this is a problem with technological solutions (perhaps anonymous and redundant relayers, or private rollup transactions so that the relayer does not know the content of transactions in a block but can produce a valid output state) that will be worked on in the next couple years now that the base technology (rollups) exists.
Sorry, thought my last paragraph covered that. Can any blockchain-backed tech handle the number of transactions per second that current major credit card/payment networks do?
1,700 tps for VISA is a good benchmark. I recall VISA's technical capability is 10x or 100x that number,
Ethereum 1.0 can handle 30 transactions per second.
Part of the development dubbed "Ethereum 2.0" is focused on scaling the number of transactions via sharding. Each shard will be able to handle 2,400 tps. As more shards are deployed up to 64, Ethereum 2.0 will reach 160,000 tps.
I am interested in learning about how "shard chains" work.
I'm concerned after reading https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/shard-chains/ that sharding is aimed at letting individual dApps roll up transactions -- i.e. the individual app would be the effective shard key -- and thus that would introduce some notion of centralization into the system.
The parent article doesn't say anything about performance. Therefore this comment seems like a red herring. A case of not reading the article?
The parent article's point is that most currently popular technologies found an application rather quickly, whereas blockchain technologies have been around for a long time (in tech terms) and still have not made ground.
> How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word?
OK perfect. "Inefficient" in every sense of the word. Let's say I'm wrong and skipped over that line. What else could the various senses of "inefficient" mean in the context of this article?
Probably the fact that, despite having been under development for > 10 years, we haven't seen any ground broken by any blockchain technologies for any reasons other than speculation or triviality. Which is what the other 95% of the article focuses on. The inefficiency of the development process, not necessarily the technology, although yes, the latter is a factor.
Maybe you mean that they haven’t made useful ground, where useful is specific to you.
Remember that blockchain technologies have become legal tender, have over a trillion in market cap, have become financial instruments traded by people around the globe, is taught at Universities and part of the CFA accounting exam, is in the news daily, has resulted in large investments in research, etc…
It’s impact has hardly been non-trivial. Just the impact on finance is substantial even if people seem to gloss over a new financial asset as “just finance stuff”.
When has "market cap" been a measure of a currency? This is indicative of the logical fallacy so common in these debates, conflating "store of value" with "useful mechanism for transactions."
It's a Ponzi scheme. There's no inherent underlying value, its "market cap" is strictly a function of more dumb money flowing into the system. Occam's razor, this is the most likely explanation for everything in the crypto space; the model makes sense and explains a lot more than "a new financial asset" hokum.
Depends if you view them as stocks or currencies, no? If it’s stocks then market cap is normal. Anyhow, if it was a giant Ponzi scheme then what about the projects ran by JP Morgan/Visa/Deloitte/etc? I have no doubt some projects are scams, but there are also non-ponzi projects and I don’t agree with painting them all with the same brush.
> You act like people that struggle with reading aren't capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates
A functioning political system shouldn't only have ever have 2 viable candidates. Much less have the only viable candidates belong to one of two viable political parties, both of which have cartoonishly stable views over time.
Maybe the broken, overly simplistic US political system is a _symptom_ of shockingly terrible education outcomes. Not vice-versa. Like many of the other social ills currently ravaging American society.
> Much less have the only viable candidates belong to one of two viable political parties, both of which have cartoonishly stable views over time.
There are lots of things you can say about the major American political parties, but that they have stable political views over time is not even close to one of them. (This is, in fact, a direct consequence of duopoly, since coalition building occurs within big-tent parties rather than between parties as it does in multiparty democracies.)
Certainly changing at glacial speeds compared to other developed countries. Wherever else do you see people debating whether we still need statues of long lost fights, whether access to books should be strongly controlled, whether abortion is a woman’s right, etc.
Ideally you wouldn't waste everyone on the team's time every day just to suss out individuals who potentially can't ask for help. A competent lead or manager should be able to identify those kinds of team members without a standup, and address the issue 1:1. If the lead or manager can't do that, why have a lead or manager at all?
I'm actually struggling to think of how a good lead or manager should go about identifying these problems.
By asking people what they are working on all day?
"Hey can you tell me the status of xyz please" type things?
Wander by the cubicle and peek over the shoulder?
Feels like stuff that would get people accused of being micromanagers. Honestly far better imo to just have a pre-set, teamwide thing set up.
This also involves the whole team in identifying and solving blockers rather than everything going through a lead, who could then just become a bottleneck (or a human-shaped blocker)
> how a good lead or manager should go about identifying these problems.
Notice when things aren't getting done by the time they were estimated to be done, and notice if the person seems to be continually pushing back completion dates. After a day or two of "thought I could get it cone but couldn't", it's negligent to _not_ dig in to _why_ the person is struggling. Really not meaning to be snarky, but if a manager isn't doing this, I'm not sure what exactly they are doing.
IME most solid engineers prefer autonomy and trust over schedule and process, and would strongly resent having to spend their time in a meeting because their manager was unable to do people management.
Where is the incentive for a company to actually bother reaching into the ledger to determine who holds royalty rights? The underlying media pointed to by the NFT is not restricted, it's infinitely reproducible and thus valueless. Why not just right-click save-as and display the media, bypassing the metadata encoded in the NFT?
It seems like there'd have to be some person or collection of persons who are responsible for enforcing that the company treat the terms of the NFT as a binding agreement. Using force, if necessary, either legal or physical. Something almost like... a legal system associated with a state. Which would be centralized. Which would beg the question, what's the value of the decentralized ledger in that case?
> The underlying media pointed to by the NFT is not restricted, it's infinitely reproducible and thus valueless
It is protected by copyright or other IP law, and not valueless.
I would say that the incentive is that they can access a market of digital products without fear of being sued by the rights-owner. The value of the NFT approach is that it can all be codified and automated so that a) as a creator I can get paid for my content without having to negotiate contracts with every distribution channel b) distribution channels get access to every piece of content.
Not saying that NFT's will work in the end, but that's my understanding of it.
In simple terms, though, it's just codifying the license terms, so that at least has some value as digital media grows and content creation becomes decentralized.
So an NFT is a digital signature that is worthless unless it "makes a market for" itself. It is a pointer to an infinitely and freely reproducible resource, meaning the owner of the signature doesn't actually have control over the underlying resource, they just have "proof" that they "own" it. And the owner needs to convince other people that their "owning" the signature has value, so that other people will pay larger sums of money for transferring "ownership", or other people will be recruited into the market to buy more stuff.
Let's substitute "digital signature"/"NFT" for "tulip", or "star", or "moon crater", or "beanie baby", or "MLM beauty product". How is the market for NFTs any different from these essentially ponzi-scheme markets?
"NFTs allow digital artists to profit from their work!"
I mean, sure, but again, they are selling digital signatures with no inherent value that they need to "make a market for". The money they are making isn't because of their art, it is because their sales skills allow them to convince greater fools that inherently worthless digital signatures are actually worth something.
Would we say "selling stars enables amateur astronomers to profit from their work"? Or would we rather say selling stars enables scammers to scam people who don't know any better? Or charitably that selling stars enables charitable people to donate money to whoever is selling the "star", both parties to the transaction recognizing that there is nothing of value being exchanged.
The latter would be forgivable but it also seems highly unlikely there would be a large market of altruistic donators wanting to provide patronage specifically via NFTs. We have a large and robust financial system that is perfectly capable of facilitating low/no-cost donations. It seems more likely that illegitimate or shady capital needs ways to achieve liquidity and legitimacy. And the whole "supporting artists"/"allowing artists to prosper" narrative is a fantastic (and sufficiently complex) cloak that would achieve that while avoiding scrutiny.
tl;dr When a market for an inherently valueless, infinitely reproducible resource pops up out of nowhere and begins to rapidly inflate, it seems likely there's some sketchy stuff going on under the hood.
“The money they are making isn't because of their art...”
Yeah you lost me there we must have radically different exposures to NFT art because the stuff i see is magical. Not sure what you’re looking at but you should check out Hic Et Nunc, OBJKt and my fav - FXhash which is a generative art market on Tezos.
A lot of things you’ve said can be true and simultaneously we could also have a healthy global digital art market growing under our noses for the first time in human history.
but that market isnt selling art - it's selling the signature for a piece that is infinitely reproducible. if i was unscrupulous, i could just pirate the art, and forget about the signature, and the artist has no recourse but to sue me for piracy.
how the signature plays into this i dont know, but it seems that i can entirely ignore the signature if i want the art.
You can’t pirate the art since it’s not copy protected. NFTs are not meant and I think should not be meant to be used as copy protection. It’s DRM without enforcing scarcity , since it does not prevent copying and redistribution of the artwork.
If you mean that you can just re upload the art somewhere and mint NFTs under false pretenses, I expect this to (hopefully) be solved soon.
NFTs are an authentication mechanism for provenance/authenticity but it is not meant to prevent others from looking at the art.
