They've been reprimanded by a federal judge for blatant extrajudicial power grabs like this one. None of their huge cases claiming various cryptocurrencies are securities have succeeded, except in the super cut-and-dry cases like ICOs and centralized schemes that clearly pass the Howey test.
> in the specific context of staking and promising returns, not crypto in general
Every ruling in the lower courts on these issues will be narrow. The SEC has been on a winning streak recently. The only major kerfuffle was the judge not ruling that XRP is a security, though Torres still ruled in the SEC's favour broadly, and the ruling has been widely criticised (not by industry people, but senior lawyers) for being likely to be overturned on appeal.
> I don't need an LLM for that, just the right google queries do the trick.
LLMs are clearly superior at presenting the information and have tangible room for improvement, whereas Google has regressed over the last decade and is getting more brittle by the day.
Open technology (LLMs) are going to offer much more robust and reproducible solutions to such questions as "here are my symptoms, what's wrong with me?" than Google.
You can nitpick my statements all you want and I will probably agree with you, but the overarching takeaway should be that LLMs are a much better solution, especially for laypeople who cannot use Google effectively.
LLMs are excellent at presenting more common diagnoses first. With Google you can easily find some rare and scary disease that fits your symptoms, that trips up a lot of casual Googlers.
Sometimes when you look at studies, those rare diagnosis turn out to be really common, just not part of the standard curriculum. In those cases LLMs perform more like a normal doctor giving you all the normal junk a doctor would say.
What google needs is a "search journals" toggle on its normal search, not related to scholar.google.com since those results are also different.
You’re unlikely to find anything useful because everything has been SEOed up af. Useful results, if not already in the SEOed sites, are buried pages deep into the search. Content explosion did not start with generative AI, so search quality has been deteriorating for quite a while.
> ebpf isn’t really novel beyond the interfaces it provides. They are just kernel modules that have been vetted and are sandboxed. Inserting executable code has been part of the kernel since forever in module form and kprobes.
This should be sung from the mountaintops. This concisely summarizes nearly everything that uninformed reader should take away from the comment section.
I mean, I love eBPF more than most, but this is a practical engineering solution to a logistical problem that didn't really need to exist in the first place.
This is not genius and not an order-of-magnitude improvement to an important computer science problem; it's an improvement to a costly artifact of the Linux kernel.
As someone who works with BPF every day, I don’t think comparing orders of magnitude is right. It just enables things that can be done now that you wouldn’t dream of doing before. I think a good analogy is going from horse drawn carriages to the automobile. In a carriage going from Boston to New York would be a multi day journey that you would have to plan for weeks in advance. With a car you just get in and go. BPF is like that, suddenly you have all these options for things that you can do instantly, that you’d only do before if you were ready to dedicate years to getting support into the kernel. It’s a superpower for kernel development.
That's a cool conjecture but it kind of misses the point of eBPF.
The point of it is that you can run user-defined programs while avoiding the costly context switch between user space and kernel space.
The kernel already is the kernel. Compiling kernel code to eBPF programs would offer seemingly no performance gains, since you're already in kernel space; there is no costly context switch to avoid.
eBPF allows user-defined programs to run in the kernel.
This is huge for performance-sensitive code that executes against network packets: you don't have to context switch between kernel space and user space.
It's worth pointing out Solana's extreme competitive advantage over other chains is almost entirely due to it running on a variant of eBPF. †
This is an order-of-magnitude leap over other implementations and essentially the way you should do it, if you were to write it from scratch, aside from special purpose hardware fabrication.
† The second reason Solana is so fast is extreme parallelism: all accounts that are used in a transaction must be marked as either "read-only" or "writeable" before sending the transaction, allowing the runtime to parallelize all reads and only solve write contention when necessary.
I used a very sterile, transactional description of it but there’s no denying that this is the case. Of course it’s not the only benefit, and it’s not what motivates the purchase in the first place.
It is unfortunately true. You cannot invite your social peers and pay for their lodging. It is only socially acceptable if you literally spend 3x as much for a rarely used guest room.
Traditional recruiters have really good leads. Just say you're looking to structure the "job" through an LLC instead of W-2. Pick a niche and demand easily outstrips supply. You can set your own hours and command very high rates.
Red flags which crypotocurrency may raise for a client aside, isn't it higher friction for the vast majority of companies?
It's hard enough to get clients, but then to have to say.. oh, also please use this other payment system which I will likely have to walk you through setting up once you clear it with accounting?
In my experience, clients have asked me if it's alright to pay me in USDC, not the other way around.
The genie's out of the bottle. Once your funds are on chain, you have instant settlement, zero fees, and zero risk of an intermediary arbitrarily freezing your funds. No point in going back, unless your counterparty demands it.
Trading and finance. It makes sense that they are crypto friendly, given their close proximity to it.
I suspect the rest of the commercial world will become much friendlier to it as more and more businesses are onboarded.
The pros vastly outweigh the cons and if you need something like escrow (or another trusted intermediary) then you can always revert to the legacy financial system for that. Both have their use cases.
For the most part big companies won't be paying via stripe anyway, but even if they did want to pay on credit card they certainly won't want to pay with cryptocurrency, even if it is a stable coin.
I've accepted hundreds of thousands of USDC in revenue in other ventures.
I've also wired and accepted wires for similar amounts. Each time I get a call from the bank and it takes a half a day at the very least. Sometimes it takes weeks to unfreeze my money in various payment processors.
Would love to see some stats on the number of companies that are prepared to use USDC vs bank transfers. I'm going to suspect it's low until proven otherwise.
And the number of companies that made use of computers was low when they first came out, despite the fact that the fledgling technology was genuinely valuable to them.
Hint: It is not about the fees. The 3% fee is a much smaller problem to have than what the world of crypto brings. Oh and while we are at it, remind me how to get majority of customers to pay in crypto who are used to just credit cards or wires ?
Because 2.9% is just a cost of doing business. If it's that critical to your margins, raise your price to compensate for it. Adding friction by using crypto is likely to cost you far more than 2.9% by losing the contract altogether.
Two years ago I had to fend off contracts that paid in USDC.
It's easier to find someone to pay in USDC today than it was then.
Market share and volume will continue to grow.
What do you have against a genuinely useful technology with tangible benefits?
- Cheaper
- Faster
- No arbiter risk
- Built-in escape hatch for political dissidents and enemies of the state
If you want a trusted arbiter for all your financial transactions, you can continue to use the legacy financial system and pay the costs for doing so. I'm not arguing crypto will replace it. Both have their use case.
