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It doesn't make sense for Americans, or anyone with access to a dollar denominated bank account.

For the other 80% of the planet though, it's a game changer. Rough estimate, but feels fair, as outside the US most people can't have one without substantial access to capital.

At the end of the day, it's just another IOU, much like a bank deposit, except instead of getting the 0.1% yield and FDIC (IF you're in the US), you get the ability to transact 24/7 across borders in a much faster manner than even bank wires, let alone ACH payments.


Still one of my favorite comments along these lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410

Gonna need to find a way to circulate this FUD further -- I'm annoyed the price is already jumping back up while I'm awaiting the glacial speed of the bank transfer of my paycheck this week to buy more.

The fact this is happening amid one of the smallest dumps from an ATH in Bitcoin's history is particularly amusing. 45%, compared to 80+ in prior cycles. And this time, while all major markets are melting down amid global liquidity hitting a wall.


Debian without systemd is a good start. Now, do Debian without dpkg, and you may finally be getting somewhere.

The reason Debian fell to the systemd behemoth is because its sysvinit scripts were already a complete disaster. Slackware and Gentoo, on the other hand, were able to stay clear of the mess because they had a decent implementation to begin with.

And Sysvinit was never the only place Debian kept its mess.


Yeah, that's why Slackware and Gentoo have a much larger userbase than Debian :-D

Last time I checked, ChromeOS is a gentoo derivative that doesn't use systemd, so yes this but unironically.

Huh, TIL.

> ChromeOS (sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS) is a proprietary operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS operating system (which itself is derived from Gentoo Linux)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS


It sort of makes sense. Gentoo is basically automated Linux From Scratch — you can make anything. It's like Yocto/OpenEmbedded but for PCs. It even uses the same language.

Bitchat does work with Meshtastic as of the most recent release. It also lets you self host a relay, because it uses Nostr relays. I'm not so sure about white/black listing so yours DOES get used, but you can absolutely host one. Routing through the Internet is something both Bitchat and Briar support, Briar through tor, Bitchat through Nostr (optionally also through tor). Disabling Internet routing at this time may require turning off Internet for Bitchat -- haven't dug on that one.

I do like the store and forward idea, though a thought on that is that while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short. It makes good sense for forum like content though. I think so far Bitchat has treated this as a bit out of scope, at least at this stage of development, and it is a reason that indeed, Briar is still quite relevant.

Bitchat only just recently even added ad hoc wifi support, so it's still very early days.


> while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short.

Neither are real time once you introduce delayed communication. Not sure I see the distinction.

Actually, I'd argue that unreliable transport breaks the real-time assumption even without introducing delayed communication. Is there immediate feedback if your message can't reach it's destination?


I still see the occasional netsplit.

But with modern nickname and channel services (Nickserv and Chanserv, mostly), and the very small IRC userbase, they certainly aren't as impactful as they once were.


There are people on IRC who I've maintained contact with for longer than anyone I can think of off the top of my head aside from family members. Many now through other channels (thanks to the Discord wrecking ball), though some still on IRC.

Hard to say how many intellectual rabbit holes I've gone down as a result.

I can say for sure life would have looked very, very different without it.


I think around that time was when Ubuntu switched from Gnome to Unity as well. What a mess that was. Seemed like all the UI teams had lost their minds at once.


Gnome 3 was also doing a major restructure, which forced MATE to be built. I liked some things about Gnome 3's original release, but I was insanely annoyed because a lot of it went away, I'm not sure if it was just distro specific or packages changed drastically, I don't even know how to describe the feature, but for example Gnome 3 had apps that could show / hide on the edges of your screen, so if you were logged in to MSN (or even XMPP) you could chat with someone, then it would 'hide' it was really cool how that was implemented, I was upset to never see it again on any other OS, it felt like a nice way to keep a chat window available but still out of the way.


It has felt quite good to be a KDE long-timer watching all this unfold.


I love KDE since KDE 3.5 but after KDE 4 its been weirdly unstable. Even now, I use KDE daily on Endeavour (Arch) and it will randomly kill the taskbar etc and restart itself, which is cool that it can self-clean but why does it fail like that randomly? I hate it because other DEs feel unstable or like the UX is worse. KDE has the exact UX I like, but I do hate the one thing browsers / KDE does where my clipboard is hijacked if I highlight text, not sure if I mistakenly made it like that or what but it drives me up a wall, sometimes I want to highlight text to paste over.


Bad compilation options, and/or bad driver/firmware interactions.

I'm using it on CachyOS with on old intels(Kaby Lake Core i5-7500t/Core i7-7700t) with old intel integrated graphics(HD630), and it never did that. Since early Plasma6/late Plasma5 times. Cant recall exactly anymore, for about 2 years now. In fact, since Plasma6 it reminded me of the good old KDE3 days, again. Except for the memory usage maybe. OTOH the systems have much more memory since the times of KDE3, so shrug?

If everything else fails, there is still https://www.trinitydesktop.org btw.


KDE lost some corporate support when SUSE changed their default to GNOME in about 2005(?). I think it sees some use in the automotive world but aside from that it's all volunteer work.


I missed KDE 3.5 for many many years, as KDE 4 was terrible by comparison, and went to MATE due to the awful GNOME 3. KDE 3.5 was so so usable and Konqueror handled everything well.


I’m sorry, but the release of Plasma, around the same time IIRC, was not without controversy.


KDE 4.0 - which introduced plasma - was released in 2006, and it was awful and wasn't supposed to be generally available (blame the distros and/or poor version naming). By version 4.5 (2010), KDE had stabilized. By the time Gnome 3 and Windows 8 were released in 2011/2012 respectively, KDE plasma was pleasant to use and rock-solid

It felt great to watch Gnome stumble after all the shit-talking, some schadenfreude was in order. I didn't care much for Windows 8; Vista was a the bigger mess of a release.


But, come on, a WHOLE OTHER LEVEL of "controversy."

Plasma criticism was pointed and deliberate and grownup. Windows 8, less so.


Indeed, this is the dirty secret and shame of our industry that doesn't get acknowledged enough. We are so prone to group-think and follow-the-thought-leaders that as my parents would have said, "would you follow them off a cliff?" the answer as an industry is a clear "yes." We rarely seem to learn from the lessons of the past either.


IIRC the true story behind that dark period is that Microsoft was making vague murmurings about suing everyone for cloning Windows XP, so everyone felt they had to run away from that.

The problem was that it was a bunch of people who had no good ideas and no insight trying to come up with new paradigms for interaction, and they were all bad. What the Linuxen desktops were doing was even worse than Win8, and the ones on that journey were all determined for some reason to deprecate the old WinXP clone UIs at the same time. Gnome really moved into a position of harassing and mocking its old users (basically regulation redhat behavior.)


I have to admit, I really, really liked Unity. The HUD feature (which let you 'search' in menus for any command) was really useful to me.


Still around, still works, and still in active development on mobile -- that version is in Debian now.


People don't like when I say this, but it's just another piece of evidence that mobile phones ruined everything.


It IS labeled "Opinion" in their defense...

But yea, El Reg is never where you go for objectivity.


Made it that much less likely that anyone would withdraw their gold from banks due to the disparity in utility between deposits and cash.

Paved the way for the downfall of physical money, and over a century of warfare in the absence of any sort of monetary discipline.

Thankfully we now have the necessary tool to fill that vaccuum.


Paper money was well established at this point.

When the pound replaced the Spanish silver dollar as the default global currency, it did so with a nascent international banking system where banknotes issued by a certain bank in a certain location could be exchanged by other banks in other locations.

Payments were thus often settled in metal rather than being transacted with it.


Terry Pratchett’s Making Money portrays it quite well, imho. It doesn’t hurt that it’s an entertaining read.

I was surprised to realise bank notes used to be tied to a bank, not a state.


"and over a century of warfare in the absence of any sort of monetary discipline".

There were major wars for millenia before the invention of the telegraph. They even names like "The Hundred Years War".


The issue is that broad money isn't money. It's credit. And measuring credit is like measuring both velocity and position at the same time.

The Fed tried to measure dollar supply globally for decades before giving up as they finally got their heads around how the Eurodollar network works, and they've kept somewhat quiet about the fact that they're just not actually at the center of it.


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