Few people seem to know that there are almost no hard and fast rules with a currency: * There is no unacceptable debt to GDP ratio. Some countries have faltered at 60% others have sustained 200+%.

* Confidence is seemingly a factor, but this can be so fickle as to have little predictive value.

* It doesn't have to be backed by anything. Gold backed can increase confidence, but take somali currency. The government was never solid, and has been a basket-case since the 90s. Yet, people go to the market to buy/sell stuff using the "national" currency. For international trade it is entirely useless, so they use neighbouring or solid currencies.

* Once currency can be terrible, but people living under an even worse currency will find it attractive. I fully believe this is one of the things propping up the USD. Other people (in some countries) want it because they want their own even less.

* Too much of it isn't entirely a problem. It takes a confidence crisis to usually push too much over the edge. Going right to the edge of "too much" will stimulate an economy to produce things to mop up the ever growing amount of currency. I would argue this is where things like crypto currencies are becoming attractive. They are just a way to mop up the huge amounts of USD sloshing around. Some people argue these are a hedge, I would say at this point this is not the case.

* Most people are unaware of the velocity of money problem. Once various categories like M1 and its friends are actually crossing the line of "too much" people will dump their now inflating currency faster. This increases velocity, which effectively increases the money supply; which (everybody sing along) increase the incentive to increase the velocity. This is a positive feedback loop with very negative consequences.

* People forget that you have to pay your taxes in USD. This means that people will still do part or whole of all transactions in USD, so as to pay their taxes. This can place a support for a currency for a period. If the US federal government said that all taxes had to be paid in Leopard pelts, the leopard would go extinct in weeks.

* Most of the rich world is quietly dumping US debt, and only acquiring what is needed for basic trade.

* The USD debt is safe because the US can always print more. This is technically, and pedantically true, but the reality is that if you hold a 10 year bond with a 5% and a 10% one comes out, the first one is now only worth $69.30. That is a massive massive massive haircut. If you are thinking that 15% is on the table, then you are thinking your bond could go to $49.81. That is a halving in value if rates on a 5% bond go to 15%.

* Crises come along on a fairly regular basis. Not every presidential term, but pretty close. Right now the US deficit spending is at a crisis level (the level you would expect during a crisis like 2008, 2001, a major war, etc) This means a real crisis would require way more spending. Where is this money coming from?

* The world can't supply limitless money to the US. Think of it this way. If you have a trusted friend and they come to you looking to borrow $1,000. I think most people could manage this, some could manage $10,000, some could manage $100,000 or even a million if they mortgage against their house, etc. But a point would come for the vast majority of people where they could not round up the money to loan. If the US goes to the rest of the world looking for 5T, 8T 10T, a point will come where no matter how much they threaten, or the world even wants to desperately help, they can't cough up that much. Seeing that the US is not inspiring confidence, and is no longer a trusted friend; there will very soon be a point where bond auctions don't produce results. So, they will start cranking up interest rates

* Triggers. This is one many are actually worried about. If they screw with the fed's independence, this will trigger an instant bond auction failure. Minimally, this tags 2-5% onto the next successful auction. Other triggers include punishing some country by nullifying its debt in some way. This an instant confidence crisis and the world goes from quietly dumping US debt to quiet panic dumping of US debt. The US bond auctions have to compete with this debt.

* On this last, going back to the value of lower interest debt to higher interest debt, it gets weird. Many countries hold US debt from over the last 20 years. Much of it is at 1.5% or so. Thus, selling it into a market where the US is printing at 10% means you have to sell it at less than $47.77. Seeing you are in a buyers market, this could be far lower than that. Many countries would not be happy to have something which seemingly has a value of $100 and are dumping it at say $30. I say seemingly in that most people would see a bond with a face value of $100 as worth at least $100. The reality is far more complex. But this highlights that this whole event would not be simple.

* Revenge. Quite simply, there are a whole lot of countries in the world now who are still having to do business with the US but no longer want to. Beyond the financials, things like pension funds, etc are not inclined to be buying US anything. This is a little bit of a doom loop. If large pension funds are slowly exiting the USD, then it will drop, which makes the US stock market look less attractive; which makes all of them less inclined to invest in US anything.

* Quantitative Easing. This is a financial term we all learned in 2008. This was the pumping of massive amounts money followed by trying to slow down and mop it all up before the economy overheated. With the amount of money now being paid in interest payments on US debt; the amounts dwarf QE. With the new debt being issued at much higher rates, these interest payments are flooding the economy with massive amounts of money.

* Economic indicators. People are saying these are lies now. Who knows. But with organizations like ICE getting a budget triple that of the US Marine Core, and larger than the military budget of russia, that is a whole lot of hiring to produce a whole lot of nothing.

* Risk free interest rate. This is a foundational part of the math behind finance. Everyone was comfortable with this number in the US being the 3 month treasury. People are now realizing that while still low risk, it is no longer no risk. This has ripple effects on all kinds of things like options, derivatives, etc. I couldn't even guess as to how this could blow up; but these are massive markets, so if they do blow up or hiccup, it would be quite bad.

* Post WWII Britain is a very good analogy for what is going on now. They had too much debt, a crumbling empire, and a new world competitor. But, it really didn't come to a head until 1959. In the few years up to 59, it looked like things were on the mend. Did the UK come to a screeching halt and everyone died? Nope, but they were no longer an empire.

TLDR; various tropes about the US being sound, a world reserve, no alternatives etc, are all basically BS based on ignorance, misplaced confidence, and hope. As most financial reports say, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

There are lots of really crappy developers out there with the word "senior" in their title.

The only thing senior about them is that they have mastered their horrific legacy codebase, build system, and cancerous corporate culture. They know some obscure C or some other mostly ancient language.

When they do interviews, they lord it over the interviewees that they know extremely esoteric things about old C, old microprocessors, and weird esoteric jargon BS from their own domain. They make it seem like the interviewee should know all this, even though this "senior" person knew none of it on their first day. Their goal in interviews is twofold. To make themselves look very smart, and not to hire anyone more capable than themselves.

But, these are not people prone to growing, learning, and personal evolution. Thus, they won't learn rust, they certainly can't grok rust for what it is. This means that if a company starts the transition to rust they won't be able to be assh*les all the time using their title "senior" to make everyone around them miserable.

But, the executive hate them as well, and when they learn that rust can give them some fresh new blood, they will ignore their bleating about "fads" and "unproven" and shove them aside with a fury; a genuine angry fury; as they too have been putting up with their BS for decades. These old seniors have been saying "No, that can't be done" for decades, while their competition would regularly do it. Then the seniors would blather on about how much risk the competition was taking and that everyone was going to die.

Now the executives will realize, they can clean house, and they will.

So, if you are trying to get rust into your old sclerotic organization, don't go to the executive with explanations about borrow checkers, but explain, that the old fogies will be fish out of water with this new tech and can finally be entirely ignored, or even thrown out the airlock. If the fogies push back with the useless phrase "institutional knowledge" just tell the executives that an AI knows all their stuff, better, and more. This last might be lies, but those seniors have been lying for decades and doing untold damage.

I've been using AI like a first semester intern, and it works great and for what I use it for it is much faster than me doing it by hand

boss: "hey, we need to suck this csv file in and store in a DB for the report writers..."

me to ai - "for this csv header row, make a DB2 create table statement, add an auto generated index called row_id, and then create a pojo that uses the @BindByName, @Entity and @Column annotations to import and save it" and then give it the CSV header row. Copy/paste results to my IDE, a bit of clean up and it is pretty much done.

For this type of stuff it is great, but you do need to treat it like a first semester intern and be explicit with your directions and then double check and confirm everything ....

I was told by a tenured professor that he regularly saw his fellow academics use woke as a major weapon to take out competition. He stated the exact same thing as this article. His point was that you have a group of very smart, high achieving people in a very closed environment fighting for a very small number of jobs. He said the criteria for these jobs is fairly nebulous. It is unlikely that someone at the very beginning of their career is going to accomplish anything earthshattering, or even in their entire career. Even the number of citations, etc won't be a very good measure in the short time available. So, you have two choices. You can do what society is expecting of academics and squint into your microscope, or you can go full time Machiavellian.

Guess which strategy is more likely to get you an academic position?

So, now you have a group of people where the selected trait is backstabbing prick, who are now competing for grants, promotions, etc.

Guess how that turns out?

He said, once in a while an actual scientist gets through, but that it was very rare, and that most who are making it are part time scientists at best. The ones who argue that science can now only be done in large teams. This is because they need to hope that some (one) on that team is a real scientist of real capability and will drag the lot of them into the limelight.

Perhaps if it had adequate funding... ?

If anything like psilocybin mushrooms or peyote, you puke and the trip kicks in

white-space: pre-wrap;

How about this, then: It fills a niche, but it is full of bad decisions (and fragmentation), and survives mainly by its existing momentum. It's crap in the same sense that Unix is crap: the founder effect has made its flaws impossible to dislodge or rethink.

A popular solution to a problem is not necessarily a good solution to that problem.

There's nothing much to doubt. The evidence is always the same: "our web server logs show scrapers originating from IP addresses owned by someone who didn't pay us."

The Verge article is a little clearer. 100,000 threads pilfered over the past year with scraping! Oh no!

(See also: the actual legal filing. I have to admit the headings sound a little unstable.)

Just you wait—they're way more over-represented they are in subreddit moderators... and in the accelerationist movement.

"Actually" read them? Are there a lot of people running around purporting to have read TSR novels, or to have credentials that require doing so?

I'd rather people learn the skills that make a good coder - critical thinking, problem analysis, etc.

There are no real downsides to saying the 2026 version is 26 and the 2126 version is 126. It's just [year - 2000]; you can even imagine this is release 026 rather than 26. Personally I'd worry more about what happens in the year 3000 when they have to release version 1000.

Moreover—these are just version numbers, imitative of dates, rather than actual date fields. It's not like someone is going to be charged for unpaid bills because their iOS version number was accidentally parsed as being in the past. Take your damn pills, grandma!

The BSD license is more "do what you want with the code" whereas the GPL is protective of the next guy down the line

Better, take money out.

What percentage of seats available were sold?