fun fact, last year I had a contractor come to my house. He was a very nice guy. After he was done we were talking and it turned out he was terry’s brother… He told me a lot of stories about him and his life, mental health and death. Pretty sad and interesting..
Like also for floppy disks, the older CDs had typically a higher manufacturing quality than the more recent.
This is shown in the table from the parent article, where there are 3 rows for CD-R, the best, which were specified as suitable for archival purposes, but Kodak and the few other manufacturers of such CD-R have stopped soon their production, the second best, which were the original CD-R with phthalocyanine dye and then the other CD-R, whose expected lifetime is only half, with cheaper dyes, which were introduced on the market later.
Also, as expected, the table shows that the higher the information density is, the lower the expected lifetime is, when similar materials are used.
I think that optical disks is a lot like a Lemons market[1]. Buyers can't evaluate the quality (durability) of disks, so are not willing to pay high prices, which drives high quality suppliers out of the market, which causes buyers to offer even less, which drives even more quality suppliers out of the market, resulting in a death spiral.
Do you test the data is identical? I've got a stack of old CD-R's containing mp3 files from 20 years ago and lots have unreadable files or worse: data that reads correctly but won't play without glitches. (corrupt mp3's can produce loud spikes that are very bad for your ears and/or audio equipment)
The article strictly points out the need for a shared concurrency models required in the functioning of a online game thats massively parrelled across both clients and various individual 'servers'.
Unique, hash based, 'stacked' items that are non-fungible with a decentralized shared state across clients.... yes, technically that's 'Just a database' but a highly complex one.
I get people hate the hype and 'uselessness' of crypto and even the term 'Blockchain' is loaded, but dismissing the technology out of hand is uncalled for. Especially when the author gave a very clear use case for a very real problem in shared state computing.
All of the server nodes are run by the same entity (the game developer). Blockchain is a good solution when the nodes are not necessarily trusted (thus the need to prove that you did the work). If all the nodes are trusted you can accomplish the whole decentralized thing much more easily.
As a super simplified example, if you want your distributed database to generate unique identifiers, partition the id space so each node is guaranteed not to overlap. You trust to nodes so you don’t need blockchain.
Yeah, my point was that an internal PoW ledger (not decentralized but still technically a blockchain) would’ve been useful because: A) stack tracking per stackable type is trivial with UXTO, and B) adding a few seconds of PoW makes the resulting chain so hard to forge for crime-of-opportunity style attacks (preventing internal employees from making untraceable gold) that it could’ve prevented a few firings/calls to the authorities during my time. Oh, and C) it might’ve resolved the duping issues with cross-server character transfer exploits (a different beast than areaservs), and D) heh, maybe conned an engineer into making a block explorer dashboard so we could see the global state of currency/stackable amounts
Like you said: most of these except B) could’ve been done with traditional techniques and relational databases, but I maintain A) might’ve been easier than the message passing code required to synchronize and emulate it.
You still don't need PoW here, though. All the servers are presumably trusted. You perhaps have a trust issue with your employees, but that is what access controls (limit the number of people who can create items) and audit logs (after an item is created, you know exactly who did it and when) are for.
And yes sometimes an employee that you've trusted with item creation access will turn out to be a bad actor, but you have the audit log to prove that, and you fire them. That's... just life. Hopefully the fact that there are audit trails dissuades most of the borderline-sketchy employees that it's not worth the risk.
> adding a few seconds of PoW makes the resulting chain so hard to forge for crime-of-opportunity style attacks (preventing internal employees from making untraceable gold
I just don't get why this needs a blockchain. Internal access controls! Don't just let random employees make arbitrary, untraceable changes to game state! Of course you're going to have problems if you allow this, blockchain or no.
Obviously you are much more knowledgeable about the issues around transferring state across server boundaries. But I still have not seen anything (in general) that suggests that inherently centralized systems (like an MMO run by a single corporation) meaningfully benefit from PoW systems. PoW is just there to ensure that people can't forge things. But when your ledger is centralized, if you implement the proper access controls and audit trails -- which you should be doing no matter what -- then PoW/blockchain is just not necessary or useful.
You don’t need the proof part if all the server nodes are trusted. Just the hashes is enough. I think that’s the part the author was pointing out in the article and we’re reading a bit too far into it.
The question then is the additional cost worth it. Employee tampering is rare and already dealt with in other ways. Also putting things on chain doesn’t prevent it because there are still employees making the game and thus can still add back doors that will be legit transactions.
I still don’t think the proof part is necessary even with the potential for internal employee tampering. With sufficient system authorization and security auditing catching someone tampering would be enough than wasting all that compute resource to prevent it for such a rare case.
Cool story though. I really like UO back in the day.
I 100% agree - I don't think that I would ever reach for a PoW blockchain to solve this problem, but it has certainly generated some interesting discussion
I think employee trust is not something you solve with a blockchain. This is like that section of the "why your idea won't work" checklists, where you have "you are attempting to solve a social problem with technology, which does not work". Access controls and audit logs are the way to go. Employees who know that they can't behave badly without the system recording all their bad actions are much less likely to do bad things. And when they inevitably do bad things (which would still be the case in a blockchain system), you have the audit trail to prove it, and you fire them and/or involve law enforcement.
Okay? What makes you think this would stop them from just running some GPU in the corner and generating a bunch of expensive items to peddle ? They'd have all the access to make it look legit ?
Are there ready-to-use blockchain libraries to simply create such a blockchain or does everything have to be custom-written and tested manually -> requiring the developer be an expert?
Oh, and a good aside: thanks to player exploits the nodes themselves weren’t necessarily trustworthy (such as duping exploits across shards, not just areaservs).
Like I said, not saying we “needed blockchain”, but when AWS released QLDB I was like “ohhhh, that would’ve been useful” since, you know, forging log files is a thing.
> if you want your distributed database to generate unique identifiers, partition the id space so each node is guaranteed not to overlap. You trust to nodes so you don’t need blockchain.
You can also generate unique IDs by giving each server/node a unique hash and then use (node_id,1), (node_id,2), ... etc. Its more complex this way but this approach compresses way better if you have a lot of IDs. (Thanks Martin Kleppmann for this trick)
>The article strictly points out the need for a shared concurrency models required in the functioning of a online game thats massively parrelled across both clients and various individual 'servers'.
Uh, no. The servers are essentially independent. Each server have maybe few thousand clients at once.
The data most clients change is independent of eachother. Hell *you don't need to store most of them*.
All you need to store is basically some world state data (nobody GAF that non-boss monster just respawns after server restart ,no need to store that data in the database) and player possesion
>Unique, hash based, 'stacked' items that are non-fungible with a decentralized shared state across clients.... yes, technically that's 'Just a database' but a highly complex one.
Uh, no.
<server-id>:<item-id>:<account-id> + a server signature to signify it was actually generated by that server.
Any change of ownership within a server is server changing account ID item belongs to + signing the transaction and resulting record. Alert on fraud if someone has same <server-id>:<item-id> pair.
You reduce the problem space to "do I trust the other server" which is much easier to solve. And even if you say allow malicious server with tons of accounts having cheated in items transfer to yours.... each item has that server's ID so you can trivially fix it by removing them from yours.
All that would need to be tracked above that are account transfers.
If I understand correctly this can be solved with much less complexity via something like snowflake to guarantee ordering consistency. There are of course dozens of ways to achieve consistency across nodes, and a blockchain is one such solution. The reality is if blockchain were an optimal distributed store it would be used for that purpose in more places. Instead what we have is a bunch of buzzword shoehorning (which frankly today sounds a bit overplayed/stale).
Can you describe how a snowflake ID would help? Imagine the data contains two Rare Items, when it should only contain one instance. They both have different snowflake IDs. How do you determine which is authentic? The timestamp on the duplicated item could have been spoofed.
I think the real solution to this problem is just to trust a centralized actor and single large database that is shared across all servers. Not what the author wants to hear, but most games don't need the level of decentralization of PoW or PoS for all of their game assets. But a fully decentralized MMO would be cool in theory.
> Especially when the author gave a very clear use case for a very real problem in shared state computing.
He did not. One server can just keep track of a player's items then pass that state on when he moves to the next adjacent server. I don't even see the issue here except the codebase is described as something very messy with weird OO/hooking style non-abstractions that just cause bugs.
No, a ledger and a database are different. The ledger is a transaction log. The database holds the current state.
Basic bookkeeping concept: every once in a while (usually daily) you take a snapshot of the current state and mark that point in the ledger. Then you take the previous snapshot, re-run the day's transactions, and you should get the current snapshot. If you don't, something has gone wrong. This is called "reconciliation".
A database can hold state but it can also easily hold a ledger/transaction log. Or both. Most of the databases I have built or worked on end up organically evolving to have both "state tables" and "event tables" where event tables record state transitions broadly speaking. That's just a very natural way to model systems where you need to capture information about the state changes (eg when they happen etc).
they seize random voting machines from polling sessions and input a known amount of votes for each candidate and match them with the ending totals. (just one kind of audit they do)
VW was able to detect when an emissions test was being done, so there may be ways to detect this as well. E.g. by the unusually fast rate at which votes are being cast, or if this "seizure" involves moving the machine, reconnecting power to it, or any other kind of abnormal interaction.
Why make things so complicated when manual counting works perfectly well??
With auditing being so difficult, you're not even saving any labor.
Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about.
Manual counting does not work well. I cannot stress this enough.
Manual counting in the past has meant much work, rework, terror, confusion and rampant fraud and miscounting. Brazil is a gigantic country with over 150 million electors spread across an area larger than western Europe and with a population much more diverse than that.
The labour and the complexity involved in producing the machines and auditing is nothing compared to what manual counting was.
Can you be more specific? I know that population or geographic size alone has no effect on counting complexity - the number of people counting is proportional to the number of votes to be counted. Communicating the vote totals from electoral districts can be done through the same medium as the voting machines would use, and producing final sums takes only O(log n) parallel steps.
So where does the terror, confusion, and rampant fraud come from, and what is it about Brazil that causes them, when so many other countries manage to avoid them?
> the number of people counting is proportional to the number of votes to be counted
Each new person is a new liability. Complexity and likelihood of mistakes do grow with number of votes.
People tick ambiguous boxes for executive functions (somehwere between 2 candidates). How do you count that?
People write numbers or names of legislative candidates. Sometimes it's illegible. Sometimes more than one candidate share the same first name or surname and the voter only wrote one. How do you count that?
The people counting the votes are members of the civil society. They're working for free in horrible conditions (hot and humid, hard chairs, pressure to finish and go back home). They're tired. They're hungry. They're thirsty. They've been many hours speaking only with a bunch of other people whom they've only met in the day and some of them are fervorously against their ideology. They make mistakes. A lot of times they miscount on purpose.
In certain regions, the "colonel" (like a local caudillo, usually a big farmer with a lot of properties and the entire town dependent on him) will not let people leave the counting place until his candidate has an acceptable count.
People leave boxes blank. The person counting ticks their favourite candidate and scores a new vote.
Fiscals from parties question decisions about all the above. Sometimes there's need to recount. The problems above compound.
Criteria for counting ambiguous votes may change during the course of the counting. Do you recount everything? Do you just pretend it's ok to change criteria depending on what results you have this far?
It also makes everything messier and take much longer. There's a reason we move away from paper-based ledgers. Those reasons also apply here but at much larger scale.
This is just a glimpse of the problems. They're much larger and deeper than I could convey in a forum post.
Of all the problems you listed, only the "colonel" is ~unique to Brazil. Every single one of the others is something a country of any size has also faced, and solved, without introducing black boxes into the system.
Well, since I took the time to answer your previous question with many examples of issues and you seem to think they have been solved, why don't you go through my list and explain how you would solve each of them, or how you have seen them solved?
That would be helpful, and would be the polite thing to do. Simply saying they have isn't.
Also please note the last paragraph on my post. It's an important one.
Also remember, the black box is heavily audited and signed off by all interested parties. There's plenty of space for improvement, but it's not only good enough but it's also much better than what I observe everywhere else and our own past.
I also own a samsung smart tv and hate the ad in the source screen, but more infuriating is their tv app always reappearing in the source menu as the first option… I always delete it but after a while there it is again..
also, it’s very ironic that I got a samsung ad on this site…
this is a huge factor that influences almost every other decision he listed there:
- living with roommates or renting a cheap apartment
- not wanting to buy an apartment
- having the time to do side hustles
- even changing career paths is challenging when you have a family to take care of
- saving the majority of his annual compensation
I don’t want to say his advices are bad, just keep in mind that it’s not applicable to everyone
This is the fallacy with this approach IMHO. Yes you can save a ton my living on minimal spend with no kids. That’s also not a life many/most people desire to live.
I’ll all for saving and do broadly follow a similar approach. With kids I won’t be retiring in my 30s or 40s but I’m investing in life now so that when I do retire it’s a much more well rounded and wholesome experience.
To each their own, but most of the “I’m not gonna have kids and just save all my money” types I know say later they made a poor life choice that’s hard to fix once that realization is made.
The main advice I do agree with is just because you start earning more doesn’t mean you should start spending more. Living comfortably below one’s means is a good way to build wealth over time. I just don’t recommend the “extreme” version of this.
To each their own, but most of the “I’m not gonna have kids and just save all my money” types I know say later they made a poor life choice that’s hard to fix once that realization is made.
You can make the same sweeping generalization with parents who raise kids that are ungrateful and/or complete disappointments.
I know plenty of parents that feel abandoned by their children, who only get a courtesy call once or twice a year. Or worst, children who are continuing to be a financial burden in their 20s/30s/etc.
Very few parents will admit to the fact they regret having children. But the regret is there.
The difference is that those parents are usually assholes and deserve everything they got (or don’t get). People who chose to not have kids and just Scrooge their way to FIRE aren’t necessarily going to be the same people.
By all accounts - if you are certain that you don’t want kids, you’re not going to be a decent parent, or you have some severe issues then yeah maybe don’t do kids. But often what I see is a deeper issue of cheapness/scarcity/whatever that could be addressed with therapy and then happy children with happy parents could emerge from that.
Truth is - if you’re in SV and under 35 - you’ve likely had incredible parents. The overwhelming majority of my younger colleagues in SV love their family and were raised somewhat decently. They’re not the meth heads you’ll find scattered throughout rural America.
With that income? Sure, if kids came into the picture during the last day 3-4 years it would increase his expenses, but he’d presumably also have another income, at least for a few years?
I don’t disagree that for middle income earners kids are a huge expense, but when you’re making $350,000+ each year, $30,000 for childcare isn’t a dramatic expense. Same with all the incidentals.
The biggest expense is college, at least in the U.S. If you retire before they apply, you may want to be conservative and set aside the cost of the most expensive college. MIT is $77k/year [1]. For two kids, that's $616k. And it increases faster than inflation, estimate 6%/yr. If you have enough money in the bank that you're financially independent, they won't qualify for need based aid, you'll have to pay the sticker price.
Columbia is more expensive.
And if one of them wants to become a doctor or lawyer, now you need to pay for grad school too.
Not going to lie, but Americans paying 100% of their kids college is kinda weird as an immigrant.
My kid can take out loans and sure I’ll help, but hell no I’m not bank rolling multiple kids at full private school tuition.
At least where I grew up a solid public school college was not an impediment to a good career.
I’ve notice Americans tend to hyper-optimize - I love it when parents tell me they bought in Palo Alto because the public school was rated a 9.3/10 versus San Mateo at 9.1/10.
“ Americans paying 100% of their kids college is kinda”. As a non immigrant it’s weird to me too.
There are a class of parents who obsess about “the best”. Best schools, best tutors, best nutrition, best ‘experiences’, best neighborhood. It’s a hedonistic treadmill in the making.
Seriously. I went to public school, and the 2022 estimated cost of attendance, including tuition, room, food, books, transportation and personal expenses is around $30k/year. Certainly not cheap, but over $20k of that is just the living expenses. Tuition is relatively affordable.
Every time I see things like this it makes me so grateful that we have a state scholarship (HOPE). I pay like $200 a semester on tuition, then around $1000 on other school fees.
If I don't have to relocate for job opportunities (currently in Atlanta), I plan to stay here and encourage any future children to stay in-state. That's of course assuming that the state doesn't kill off HOPE by then.
I'm living with my son and girlfriend with a roommate. It's doable if you are open minded, know open minded people and don't care too much what society thinks a family should look like. An honestly, it's great to have a buddy right at home in these social isolation times.
Whenever anyone offers any advice on any subject at all, I find it essential to determine whether they have kids or not, because the with-kids solution set seems to be entirely different to the without-kids solution set.
Also, advice depends on the generation the author is part of. Millennials have more difficulty getting to financial independence than, say, baby boomers or Gen-Xers had.
It’s also worth noting that the OP did most of these things at a young age, when most people don’t have kids anyway. Though they may find that that $2.4m won’t generate sufficient income if they do have kids, but then I think they could probably just go back to work if necessary.
no, it probably won't cause a massive pump... For every seller there's a buyer.. who would be in the other side of the trade if tether is deemed worthless?
A more probable scenario is that trading pairs against USDT will just get halted.
> who would be in the other side of the trade if tether is deemed worthless?
Predominantly retail traders who placed limit orders and didn't react to changing market conditions as fast as bots/institutions. Perhaps also some speculators who believe USDT may be able to reclaim the peg.
