I had an Apple 2+ back in 1992. It was an old computer, even then.
The Apple 2+ only supported displaying capital letters.
I remember calling a few local BBSes using terminal software that let me press the right arrow (I think) and the character key, and it would display the character inverted (white background, black letter).
Hayes 1200 baud serial modem (I think) hooked up to a serial card.
I don't think a cleaning robot and a vehicle are in the same category, as vehicles are more a necessity (at the very least to get to and from your jobs, to buy groceries, etc) and a cleaning robot is squarely a luxury.
A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time. Depending on depreciation, it's feasible that you could go do minimum-wage level work on Doordash using the chore time you save from the robot and still come out ahead. E.g. 5 hours/week at $20/hour = $5200/yr
> A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time
Mileage varies. My impression is that on net, many people borrow money for the vehicle and end up adjusting their lives to depend on it, so much so that in their head they think they're saving time, but if they'd put that money into their home budget and moved closer to where things are, they'd get more exercise, be more socially healthy, and also waste less time and money driving. In aggregate, this makes everything worse and perpetuates the cycle. I sure as hell wouldn't move somewhere I had to drive to and from if I didn't already have the car, and I sure as hell wouldn't buy a car to get to a job unless the nature of my work required it. Not again.
Only way I can see that happening is if you somehow get fired for not folding your laundry, in the same way people are fired when their car breaks and they can't make it to work.
At some point, household robots — once they become mainstream — can do things around the home that you depend on, and if/when they break down, prevent you from being able to work/get to work.
Or, if the stress of doing everything they do is too much, and interferes with your ability to work and do other things you once had the time to do.
> I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component.
I've used on in the past, but I found that I was routinely dissatisfied with how they were doing things and I felt I needed to maintain a certain level of tidiness to allow them to clean properly. I think there is an intrinsic cost to having hired staff in one's home that most consumers would be factoring in, consciously or not.
Anecdotally, whenever I go swimming with my kids in the summer, and I don't put sunscreen on right away, but let myself get some intense direct sun, I feel good and sleep really well that night.
As long as I don't let myself get in a red, sunburn situation.
Interestingly the best time to go out is at solar noon, when the UVB/UVA ratio is higher. Just go for a shorter amount of time to compensate for the higher overall intensity.
My country, Spain, is famous for its beaches. Everyone native leaves the beach in the middle of the day and returns after lunch/siesta, when the rays are less intense.
Cool anecdote but as I said, in the middle of the day you should go for a shorter amount of time (starting with just a few minutes) to get ideal UVB exposure.
Tourists are an especially bad example since they often work indoors all year or come from less sunny countries, so the sudden sun exposure is doubly bad for them.
Spain is sunnier yet has lower melanoma incidence than Northern Europe..almost like moderate sun exposure is protective, or that going from a cloudy country to a sunny area for a few weeks is especially bad - you can analyze it how you wish.
For sure that contributes to their higher ceiling for exposure, and also makes it harder for them to get vitamin D, which is why they shouldn't avoid going to the beach until the sun is down, since as a population they are quite deficient in Vitamin D.
I agree, but you can titrate your exposure. So at the beginning of the season, in the 12-3 window you can start by going 5 mins without sunscreen for a few days, then 10 mins, then 20 etc. depending on your skin type.
The worst thing to do is to go from low exposure (i.e. winter months, or just constant indoor time) to long periods of exposure, even with sunscreen.
No, UVA is stronger and more harmful. UVA penetrates deeper in the skin, since it's stronger. UVB stimulates Vitamin D production, while UVA doesn't.
So almost anything that is "UV-blocking" (sunscreen, UV-treated glass) gets rid of all of the beneficial UVB before UVA starts getting reduced. So you are actually enriching your exposure to the most harmful UV type, and not making Vitamin D.
This might explain the paradoxical finding that people who use sunscreen more can have higher rates of skin cancer
People who spend more time outdoors are more likely to try to wear sunscreen, as are people who already got a lot of pre-existing risk to excessive sun exposure.
Key word on try as its greatly assuming there isnt a wide audience who do use sunscreen, then just apply it in poor amount, or never re-apply but enjoy staying out far longer than most do in the sun feeling they're oh so very protected.
Spray sunscreens for example are just about useless, as are those solid stick applicators. They only get a fraction the amount you need for the rated protection. The biggest issue with sunscreen relates to companies selling sub par "convenience" slop, often right beside their other products some of which might actually be half decent.
Sure that’s a theory, but hasn’t been proven. If I recall, the study showed that heavy sunscreen use amongst sunscreen users was associated with higher cancer rates.
Secondly, if sun exposure is really that bad then how do you explain why most skin cancers are on the trunk and thighs rather than more exposed areas like hands and arms?
The simplest answer is it’s not sun exposure that’s bad but sudden high exposure after non-exposure (repair mechanisms can’t keep up with damage).
Not sure why I’m being downvoted. I guess there’s a lot of sheep among us. If anything I said is incorrect, please show me the evidence.
A critical factor for doing a screening is how many bad burns you've had on the chest and back which would probably be similar to many times the burns on the arms in terms of surface area x added probability.
Unfortunately, that I know of there are not many studies that compare 'frequent low/moderate exposure followed by high exposure' vs 'very low exposure (high sunscreen use) followed by high exposure'
These results show the specificity of the positive association between melanoma risk and intermittent sun exposure, in contrast to a reduced risk with high levels of occupational exposure.
Both the low-intermittent (HR = 1.26; 95%CI = 1.17–1.38) and high exposure groups (HR = 1.13; 95%CI = 1.01–1.26) had higher rates of melanoma than indoor workers.
The low-intermittent exposure group had elevated melanoma rates on the arms and trunk (body), while the high exposure group had an elevated rate on the head and trunk.
Digging into the data, the moderate exposure group had no detectable increase at any body site and a weak suggestion of lower risk (not statistically significant):
Why would the low-exposure group have a higher rate on the arms and trunk? Could it be because when they do go to the pool/beach, their arms are not protected? Whereas in the high exposure group, their arms are protected due to everyday exposure, but their trunk is only exposed when they go to the pool? Then again, you would think the low-exposure group would also have high trunk incidence, so there might be some confounding factors like ethnicity/behavior/dress.
Anyway, hopefully I convinced you that it's not as simple as more sun = always bad.
My point is more that you are fishing for confirmation of your theory instead of answers that fit the data.
High sunscreen use (assuming rational choices for when to use it) and left arm truck driver risk is very consistent with a microeconomics model of UVR x filter factor on each cell determining probability for any given cell.
Some other problems with a study of Ontario work exposure are covered in the study itself. In essence this is low exposure compared to leisure time sun bathing that may be more desirable depending on work environment.
> you are fishing for confirmation of your theory instead of answers that fit the data
If you say so.
> left arm truck driver risk
Truck driver sunlight exposure is spectrally different from ordinary sunlight. It is all UVA, over many hours a day. To repeat myself, moderate exposure to preferentially UVB likely yields the highest reward/risk.
> a microeconomics model of UVR x filter factor on each cell
I'm not quite sure what you mean by the economics stuff but in addition to not mentioning the UVA/UVB difference, your model doesn't seem to take into account host repair pathways, which actually require some moderate damage to be activated, but are overloaded by too much damage (similar to the effect of exercise on the body).
Enhancement of UVB-induced DNA damage repair after a chronic low-dose UVB pre-stimulation
> Some other problems with a study of Ontario work exposure are covered in the study itself.
Some other potential problems, sure, along with a mention of potential benefits of vitamin D from optimal sunlight levels.
Since sunlight is associated with a lower risk of almost all cancers (including recovery from melanoma), not to mention autoimmune diseases, and skin cancers are amongst the easiest to catch early and to treat when caught early, it is very irresponsible to argue against the benefits of sun exposure. The idea that every additional unit of "UVR" carries an identical marginal risk is especially harmful.
If we live long enough to reproduce and usually impart some guidance to offspring evolution has done the optimization it will do. You seem to want to believe in a lot of systems that may sort of work but really we are not right to expect that every dose of UVR isn't a roll of the dice for a game plan that works out to less than 30 years in the sun while having hair or taking reasonable precautions for having no hair.
Trying to hide low but perpetual UVR risk for people who think they are going to be immortal is counterproductive compared to fixing the delusion that would make someone avoid life expecting to get more of it.
Vitamin D levels are directly tied to melatonin production, that's why the less sun you get the worse your sleep gets. Vitamin D also lowers inflamation throughout the body.
I can spend a solid hour in the sun before I start to burn, assuming I have a hat on my head.
I've also noticed some correlation between my diet and how fast I burn. Whenever my metabolism is running at/near ketogenesis, it seems like it takes a lot longer for the sun to affect me.
Just so you know, burning & cancer isn't the only reason to avoid strong sunlight - it also causes skin aging (i.e. wrinkles). If you don't want to be super wrinkly when you're old, wear suncream!
When we were dating, the first thing my now wife did was get me on a regimin of sunscreen and tretinoin. I now have significantly fewer wrinkles than my younger siblings (2-3 years).
This is a common misconception. Topical tretinoin has been shown to have no effect on the fetus. Oral tretinoins (like isotretinoin) have been linked to congenital defects. This is due to the differing rates of absorption and the resulting ability for the retinoid to cross the placenta at higher concentrations.
With that said, folks who are pregnant are discouraged from using any retinoids out of an abundance of caution.
Yes, some stuff make your skin more sensitive to light than others. For example, you should avoid vitamin A creams and some herbs during summer because they increase risk of permanent skin discoloration.
Most likely that’s the nitric oxide (not to be confused with nitrous oxide) that is a biproduct of vitamin d synthesis which requires UV light. It is a natural muscle relaxer and is generally considered good for blood pressure and heart health in general.
It's just that getting sun is healthy (in moderation) and our body reward us, we have this new anti-sun obsession which is likely to cause many health (and mental health) issues
I don't think it's that simple, and making it seem that way is counter-productive towards understanding what we should/shouldn't be doing.
There's no anti-sun obsession, either. Sunscreen isn't anti-sun, and people are well aware that Vitamin D synthesis is an issue in farther northern/southern latitudes. There's definitely an increased recognition scientifically that excessive sun is extremely bad, though.
I would assume that many are taking Vitamin D, but there is still a major difference, if I spend few days no-lifing and I suddenly go out in the hot sun and comeback home 30min later, I feel much better, something happens internally, could be from the light itself, unsure, but I'd say for example to fight off depression, getting under the sun is quite powerful and will definitely improve your chances of getting out of it.
I let my 2-year old child (she is also taking Vit D - 300iu a day) under the sun in the garden quite a lot on/off (I'd say probably 1h a day in total) and I find that she sleeps much better and is more calm in the evening as well, I can't say the same if we do an outing to the mall, something is clearly different/rewarding.
I typically do the same thing. I only wear sunscreen if I am planning on being in direct sun for an extended period of time where I can't easily get back in the shade.
The more you're able to build up a base tan the less you need it to avoid a burn at least.
I'm pretty light skinned and the burn pretty easily. I just put on sunscreen by default when going hiking/mountain biking. I'm really excited for the new sunscreens coming out here in the US that have those new to us ingredients that the Euro's have had forever.
I discovered sun shirts very recently, with a hood. It's so much nicer to slip it on than apply sun block, which I'm trying to reduce since I don't really want it in my blood stream [1]. Mine is white, so I usually end up a bit cooler than without!
30 years ago I was a lifeguard and got to experiment with this some. I can't tell you the biology specifically, but I have always tanned quickly. The less tan I am, the more easily I burn.
I was talking to someone running an ecommerce site, they also run their own lighning nodes and there's many reasons:
- High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops
- Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard
- People from countries with active sanctions against.
People in other countries trying to buy stuff from US ecommerce sites. A number of payment processors really don't care about them, and simply will not let customers from there buy using a credit card.
Just this week I couldn't purchase from Walmart.ca with a CAD denominated card for delivery to Canada, because my billing address was not in Canada or the US.
This has tradfi banking ramps. You don't need to hold it. You can treat BTC as basically a payment network instead of something like the visa/mastercard cartel.
afaict, the main advantages of buying things with crypto are (potentially) lower transaction fees and latencies, and less red tape restricting who can buy what from whom. If you use a "tradfi onramp", doesn't it negate all of that? Why not just use tradfi all the way, for that transaction?
There is no requirement to use the tradfi ramps. It is merely offered as an option. But as it pertains to banking in the USA, a couple differentiating qualities I will offer before the goalposts will inevitably be shifted yet again to damn my response
1) Settlement time (wires only sporadically free in US, plus usually settle slower)
2) Irreversibility.
3) The tradfi ramps, if used, only have to be OK with crypto ramp, rather than the whole host of underlying transactions. It is conceivable some banks will tolerate crypto while not tolerating, say, directly handling a particular transaction.
This was thr original intent of thr Satoshi paper, except BTC is probably the worst payment network you can think about, which is why it failed to gain any use as such over the past 18 years…
I sent a transfer from the UAE to Spain and another one to the Netherlands. They took 5 days and 7 days respectively.
The same transfer takes 10 minutes in Bitcoin.
You don't do transfers to pay for stuff at the grocery store, the same way you would not pay using the Bitcoin network. You would use lightning network, which takes less than 2 seconds finality.
That usage is not a generic payment usage. This is a use case it is good for. But if 8 billion people should use Bitcoin for their everyday shopping, that is a totally different case...
Well you wouldn't use Bitcoin itself to exchange on, you'd use side layers like Lightning payments for the near instantaneous exchange which then gets aggregated into one of the upcoming blocks.
MasterCard was around in the 1950's, in 2026 they do not still use the same method of exchanging money as they did back then and have had to make big changes to their systems as time has gone on, Bitcoin does the same thing except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
> except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
Bitcoin is absolutely not controlled by its user base, but by another cartel (made of mining pools and exchanges). You, as a user have literally no say in any decisions taken by bitcoin except voting with your feet, which is exactly what you're suggesting against Visa & MasterCard's (which aren't banks by the way…)
The exchanges and miners do have a large influence, but the node runners (the users) have a voice as well. The node runners can get together, and refuse to peopogate the blocks of of the miners/exchanges that are being bad actors (BIP 148 for example) and also (BIP 110) that's currently making the rounds.
If a large enough percentage of the node runners need refuses to propogate a block from a bad actor, then another miner can mine the same block and get the reward.
The miners don't need “node runners” to get access to other miners mined block. That's not how the bitcoin protocol works at all.
In an ideal world the best non-miners can do is prevent some transactions by preventing them to reach the mempool, but you're not going to block an exchange this way either.
The bitcoin protocol is actually very friendly to centralization, the only mechanism that was supposed to prevent it was the PoW, which failed because ASICs exist. And as a result, in practice it's been very centralized for more than a decade now.
It's nice to have the option either way, but if merchants offer irreversible methods I usually pick them rather than pay a 1+% premium to cover chargebacks from scammer customers. For some customers irreversible is a big plus, if they trust the merchant.
A former tech giant that has seen its dominance being swallowed by competitors and now cornered into numismatist and other collectible.
Sure it's a very profitable company for its inveators, but a friend of mine used to work there until recently and he used to describe it as a dead shell that merely lives out of rent-seeking on its legacy.
Good luck attracting investors if you have the same business plan today.
Only if they're on the receiving end. You need to remember that businesses also buy things, and often by credit card.
Chargebacks exist in the real world because long, long ago people recognized that electronic payment systems are fertile soil for scammers. The "lack of chargeback risk" that cryptobros keep chirping about is nowhere near the flex they think it is.
It's a flex when you compare it to a government based currency where the bank or government can freeze your bank accounts or just empty it.
Plenty of stories from The USA and Canada from the last decade of that very thing being done.
Sure. The vast majority of those stories being the freezing of proceeds from criminal activity or funds that are part of a legal dispute and for which there is a high probability that the holder of those funds will attempt to illegally hide or move those funds.
Again, this is by design. Such safeguards exist for a good reason. They are tools that are as necessary as a policeman's gun. Yes, they are tools that can be (and have been) abused and for which there should also be guardrails and oversight in place. But saying that crypto is better than "government based currency" because crypto has no such safeguards in place is the same thing as saying Wal Mart security officers are better than police officers because they don't carry guns. It is a naive thought at best.
As much as some amount of defiance towards contemporary governments is warranted, believing that the crypto world is more trustworthy is an insane take. Especially post MtGox and all what followed…
The Epstein class and the Bankman-Fried class are the same people (and don't get fooled by their patronyms, it has nothing to do with Jews, and all to do with the American elite). And Trump is both an friend of Epstein and a proponent of cryptocurrencies.
Meanwhile with cryptocurrencies you have the choice between getting blocked by your exchange or losing your wallet (from your own negligence or a hack)
You lose your wallet, you make a few phone calls or walk into a bank and get a new card. You lose very little more than some time. Losing your crypto key means you lose your crypto.
The same institutions that caused the 2008 crash, the same institutions that in the last 5 years have printed 50% more of the total US dollar supply, the institutions that keep the poorest and lowest classes perpetually poor and stuck by constantly inflating their savings away?
Yes, I think I will trust Bitcoin and my hardware wallet more.
> The same institutions that caused the 2008 crash
You rightly call that a “crash” that is nowhere near the scale of the regular bitcoin price fluctuations!
> that in the last 5 years have printed 50% more of the total US dollar supply,
Better trust an ecosystem that has created an endless amount of virtual money over the past 15 years instead then…
> the institutions that keep the poorest and lowest classes perpetually poor
Did you miss the fact that you now need an entire data center worth of specialized hardware to mine bitcoin? It was supposed to be a democratic hacker currency that anyone can mine, yet it is entirely controlled by a handful of hyperscalers… Pretty much no individual can even hold a full bitcoin now, talk about keeping people poor.
> I think I will trust Bitcoin and my hardware wallet more.
Small teams building continuously get to write features that are 90% correct in a tenth of the time.
Big enterprises get to write features that are 90% correct barely twice as fast, because all of the bottleneck lies elsewhere. They also spend more on AI per user because of the internal dynamics pushing people to adopt AI irresponsibly. They can correct the 10% of errors slower than small teams because of bureaucracy, increasing the cost of errors that show up in the product. Furthermore, they have less to gain from a given amount of speedup because they had plenty of engineering velocity anyway compared to small teams.
I don't think big enterprises will start winning from AI technology until AI truly can automate almost everything in a company and let said company outproduce competitors by burning tokens alone. That's nowhere near possible right now.
I don't think "90% correct in a tenth the time" is really the tradeoff. For a well-specified task, it's closer to 100% correct in 1/100th the time. But that undersells the time required to generate a good spec.
For under-specified tasks, it's not really accurate to talk about "correctness," because the machine isn't psychic. I would suggest that given a high-level feature request like "add streaming support" it's more about acceptance probability. In a well-structured and well-documented codebase, and a reasonably sized feature request, there might be an 80% chance it will generate something which is 100% acceptable. But there's about a 99% chance it will generate something which is acceptable after 1-2 revisions.
Social connections. Trust. Facetime. All matter more than ever.
Want a moatable software business? Know your customers on a personal level. Have a personal relationship. Know the people that sign the contracts, know their kids names, where they vacationed last winter, their favorite local restaurant.
