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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • When governments print banknotes, they can sell them and get money to do things at face value, instead of having to get loans and issue bonds where they’d have to pay interest or charging taxes where their citizens would object. In fact, in countries like the EU, UK and USA, despite normal people and normal companies using cash less and less, for the past couple of decades, the amount of cash printed has increased rapidly because as long as people buy it, there’s a big incentive for governments to print it. Bigger face value notes mean more money for less printing, so are the best thing to issue, as long as people are buying them.

    That leaves a big question of who on earth is buying more banknotes each year than the last. The obvious thing that can be best done by banknotes is storing a large value in a small space with the ability to be moved around without traceability or counterfeiting, which really only matters to money launderers. Things like bank transfers and cryptocurrencies can be traced as long as someone knows who owned the money at some point, but if you buy your bitcoin with cash from someone who doesn’t keep records of who gave them the cash, then your crypto wallet is totally opaque to the authorities.

    The people involved range from minor things like spouses hiding money in a divorce to tax dodgers to drug dealers to people traffickers to sanctioned governments, and when that’s all added up and funneled through opaquely-owned shell companies so it doesn’t look like it’s Russia or Iran’s money buying the cash, there’s enough demand for governments to justify building new money printing facilities and issuing higher denomination banknotes.

    If you want to learn more, there’s quite a lot more detail in Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough.




  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlalways has been the empire
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    1 month ago

    Depending on the context, it could just be who’s doing it. Star Wars was originally specifically an allegory for the Vietnam War, which was a war of Western imperialism because the two countries making it a war rather than a country gaining its independence were France (who’d conquered Vietnam as part of their empire and weren’t happy that the Vietnamese didn’t want to be in their empire) and the US (who wanted to stop communists gaining power anywhere), both of which are Western countries. It was about that war in particular rather than imperialism in general because that war in particular was the one that was a big deal for the target audience at the time - if Lucas had been Japanese and making the film decades earlier, maybe he’d have made it an allegory for something else, but he wasn’t, so he made the film he made.


  • You’ve probably created something that would be considered a DRM circumvention device under the DMCA, so possessing it would be illegal unless it’s covered by one of the exceptions. If you think it might be, then you’re probably in a legal grey area as there isn’t case law settling whether the exceptions override the parts about DRM circumvention, but it’s fairly widely accepted that they probably do - DRM-era console emulators like Dolphin rely on it being legal to bypass the games’ DRM in order to interoperate with other computer systems, and no one’s been brave enough to sue them for that interpretation yet.

    If it is illegal, the most likely outcome is just that someone does a DMCA takedown request and GitHub would take it down and that would be the end of that, which is pretty much the same thing as would likely happen if anyone didn’t like it but it was legal, as it’s easy to submit takedown requests, but hard to appeal them if they’re unjustified.






  • Premature optimisation often makes things slower rather than faster. E.g. if something’s written to have the theoretical optimal Big O complexity class, that might only break even around a million elements, and be significantly slower for a hundred elements where everything fits in L1 and the simplest implemention possible is fine. If you don’t know the kind of situations the implementation will be used in yet, you can’t know whether the optimisation is really an optimisation. If it’s only used a few times on a few elements, then it doesn’t matter either way, but if it’s used loads but only ever on a small dataset, it can make things much worse.

    Also, it’s common that the things that end up being slow in software are things the developer didn’t expect to be slow (otherwise they’d have been careful to avoid them). Premature optimisation will only ever affect the things a developer expects to be slow.



  • There’s no point retaliating once you’re dead unless the enemy knows it’s something you might do. You also can’t make a plain A-bomb arbitrarily big as you need the fuel to be small enough to be subcritical until it’s assembled, and simple enough to assemble that it spends so little time critical but not supercritical that a random decay doesn’t cause a chain reaction to start before the mass is fully compressed. If it starts too early, there’s enough energy to blow the bomb apart, which stops the reaction continuing. The more material you add, the more often random decays happen, and the likelier it becomes that the reaction starts prematurely. The theoretical limit is somewhere between 500kT and 1MT, which isn’t very much for a city buster, especially if you’ve buried it. You’d have to use more than one, but a pure fission bomb is very senstive to nearby nuclear detonations, so only the first one would be likely to work.



  • This has the slight problems that:

    • The UK’s now trying to make VPNs illegal, and was obviously going to because of the obvious flaws in the Online Safety Act.
    • They consulted with MindGeek about the law before passing it, and they own most of the sites with a route to remain viable businesses under the current law, and several agree verification services, so they’re a much better company to blame for this.

  • Modern nukes contain a subcritical mass of fissile material and require an injection of tritium to arm them, and also require tritium for their second stage to get most of their rated yield. Tritium doesn’t last very long, so needs regularly topping up. If you’ve secretly buried a nuke, you’ll have to dig it up pretty often, undermining the advantages of secret burial. There’s also not much point in having a better nuclear deterrent than your enemy knows about, as the goal is to make them know you can destroy them so they’re too scared to attack you rather than to actually destroy them.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devTOML
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    6 months ago

    TOML’s design is based on the idea that INI was a good format. This was always going to cause problems, as INI was never good, and never a format. In reality, it was hundreds of different formats people decided to use the same file extension for, all with their own incompatible quirks and rarely any ability to identify which variant you were using and therefore which quirks would need to be worked around.

    The changes in the third panel were inevitable, as people have data with nested structure that they’re going to want to represent, and without significant whitespace, TOML was always going to need some kind of character to delimit nesting.