This is a pretty great introduction to group theory from the prospective of a distributed systems programmer. Really useful stuff. It starts by mentioning abelian groups offhandedly in order to poke fun at the impenetrability of the jargon of group theory compared to how easy it is to understand the concepts involved. If you understand idempotency, you already have an intuitive understanding of things like commutativity (which is what items in an abelian group share). If you don't, this talk makes it really easy to understand what properties resilient distributed systems tend to try and design upon and why.
Yeah, I think that elegantly sums it up. We're in so deep on economy as speculation at this point that basically nothing about a company matters beyond attracting investment. It's companies looking to get in on yield farming. It means the economy is mostly a measure of how compelling the collection of FOMO stories seem. This is why you've got runaway. If your FOMO story aligns with a lot of other companies stories, this only further boosts the FOMO.
Cryptocurrencies showed that the economy as an exchange of goods and services was only incidental, not explicit to generating the needed speculation. Making and selling (or more likely renting out) things is now only there as props in telling these stories to earn the real money. That is, people giving you heaps of cash in exchange for stock. Basically anything you can invent by typing numbers into a spreadsheet that buyers can trade amongst themselves will work. Stock these days fits the bill because you don't have to pay dividends. Why not? The story goes that if you did that, you wouldn't be growing as fast. Conveniently this reinforces the FOMO narrative.
Whenever someone whinges that the stock market is up or down and somebody inevitably retorts back that the stock market isn't the economy, I'm actually starting to think they're wrong. The stock market really has become the economy. Anyone with power has so much money tied up in the stock market, that to them, their ideas, what they think is important, the stock market weighs heavily in every decision. Everyday people aren't like this, they need bread and circuses which are becoming ever increasingly more expensive (because doing that makes the stock go up). But to those setting policy direction in government and companies, the stock market really does drive their entire outlook.
Look, if 99.9999% or more of your wealth was in this one vehicle, most people really would do everything they could to prevent their wealth decreasing even if it meant destroying people and the planet to do it. You're only going to live 30-50 more years tops. Problems for later generations or suckers less fortunate are superficial compared to your retirement portfolio.
If you've never edited Wikipedia, give it a go. It's way simpler than you probably think it is, especially for the often undervalued work of citing sources or fixing grammar and/or punctuation. You're likely going to read a bunch of Wikipedia anyway. Take the extra few minutes to help fix problems when you see them.
A great run through many of the noodly little details of Unix processes, signals, alarms, select, poll, and more. Includes a go through the self-pipe trick which I hadn't thought about until now, but is a neat way to simplify. I'm really happy when someone explains something by working a solution to a problem with all the trade-offs left in. Doubly so when the explanation also includes all the hairy bits of the implementations instead of leaving them as a stumbling exercise to the reader.
