Can't see commit pages.

the name matters, chess.com= automatically associates with something central about chess. (dot com) lich-ess can be read as lich-chess or leeches, both leave repulsive associations, effectively sub-conscious anti-marketing.

So it's all about who has millions of dollars to buy common word domain names from scalpers. That's a marketing expense.

Its going to be next few decades version of asbestos x100, The difference with asbestos is plastic is basically everywhere, industrial plastic coatings in many "non-plastic" surface to reduce wear or damage, since plastic resists acids/chemicals better "allegedly". This paper is going to upend most dogmatic ideas on "non-reactive plastic" soon. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11141-y

I can believe that 100x the exposure is a lowball estimate, but surely the danger is much much lower? Like it’s low enough we still struggle to define it, compared to asbestos which was incredibly deadly just on a 2 decade delay compared to most deadly things.

We’d know by now if plastic was anything like asbestos, it’s been around for long enough.

> surely the danger is much much lower

It depends on what chemicals the plastic reacts with. Its more of class of pollutants like aromatic hydrocarbons, randomly forming when the plastic reacts with something in environment, the paper has this explained:plastic is "conditionally inert" material until it gets some electric charge. Then it suddenly a chemical factory floor.

IIRC in weird corner cases, JS code can outperform wasm/C/C++ because JIT optimizes with escape analysis/inlining.

>where it doesn't optimise to SIMD even when beyond obvious What was that code?

Yes, it does beat -O3 C sometimes. I took code from diverse 'language speed' benchmarks from the internet and had to rearrange them to get -O3 to beat equivalent-looking JS (Node 25.8.1 w\ V8 14.1 and clang 21 on MBP3).

> What was that code?

literally:

``` function numericKernel(a, b, out, n) {

    for (let i = 0; i < n; i += 4) {

        out[i]     = a[i]     * b[i]     + 0.25;
        out[i + 1] = a[i + 1] * b[i + 1] + 0.25;
        out[i + 2] = a[i + 2] * b[i + 2] + 0.25;
        out[i + 3] = a[i + 3] * b[i + 3] + 0.25;

    }

} ```

i've tried various options, Firefox prefers ` for (let i = n; i--;) out[i] = a[i] * b[i] + 0.25;` Its already at peak optimization so no form is significantly better.

Any "central payment system"(like e.g. obsession with Paypal) is a single-point-of-failure vulnerability. Cash is decentralized and independent of any technology failing. people find this the hard way during electric blackouts, that credit cards are useless without electricity, but somehow still think "electronic payment" is worth completely switching over.

So there's no electricity. But you were prepared, you have cash. You go to the shop to buy something with cash, and their cash register doesn't work, they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes, so you cannot buy anything anyway.

It is helping a little bit, but the benefits of this kind of preparedness are overstated.

I once went on a date where we hit a state-wide power outage. (Let's just say that the date did not go as planned.) We wound up eating at this restaurant, two towns over, that we saw a bunch of cars parked at. Turns out they had gas grills. They were working by flashlight and candlelight, they were cash only, they were adding up the bill on a hand calculator, they couldn't do shakes or french fries, they were pouring soda by hand out of bottles, but wow, were they ever doing business.

When something like that comes, you find a way or the business goes elsewhere. Taxes? Count the cash - that's what you sold during the power out. Multiply by the tax rate, and call it square.

Where I live, any taxes are built-in to the sticker retail price.

In a shorter term crisis, I can absolutely imagine smaller grocery stores near me using a cashbox for takings and recording purchases with a pen and paper. Any government would be highly supportive of this as it would be essential to prevent anarchy.

Any sane country has a sticker/menu price that is the price you pay when you settle up.

Sure, same here, but you cannot sell anything without recording it on the cash register anyway because of tax evasion.

> their cash register doesn't work, they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes

I say, if there's no electricity, nobody owes any taxes to this government.

>they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes, so you cannot buy anything anyway.

They don't have a piece of paper and a calculator as backup?

I think it stops at “after 2 hours the fire alert system stops working and anyway it’s too dark inside so any accident would not be covered by insurance hence we should wait it out”. Cash helps but it’s really overstated.

Two power outages where I live told me that.

Except total loss of electricity is not the only case of payment system being unavailable.

I think it is important to distinguish between major credit cards banks (visa, MasterCard etc.) and payment method like GiroPay, EFTPOS , Wero, etc.

This doesn't help that much because cash today is also useless without electricity. You can't go to a bank anymore to get cash from an actual person. The machines run on electricity.

This is why you keep some cash in a safe place, like your wallet, purse or dwelling.

I live in Canada where not all that long ago, Rogers took out digital payments at most places for ~48 hours.

I had cash and zero problems. Many had no cash and many problems.

You specifically mentioned banking as a problem and I mentioned a specific solution. Based in real life, not fantasy.

I am arguing your point and you are attacking me rather than making a point of your own.

You are arguing something I did not discuss. The post I replied to made a general case that cash is decentralized and immune to issues like missing electricity. My entire point was only this: while true and thus having some cash is smart for short term issues (e.g. I am now traveling and took cash with me I am unlikely to use, but don't want to be stranded without money away from home), cash itself is long term not immune because today we need electricity to get the actual cash. True btw even if you could walk into a bank and ask for money because without a working computer they're not giving you any money. So overall the ship on cash is sailing, it's not really a solution anymore.

Cash solves the problem of getting through a widespread week long power or internet outage, which is already a pretty serious situation. Beyond that is another situation entirely, and starts to enter the realm of canned food, gold, and bullets.

That's a fair point to make that for 90% of us we get cash from a machine that requires electricity.

It's not a fair characterisation that cash is useless without electricity because once you have it(presumably before the electricity stops) then you can still transact with it.

Just because it wouldn’t help with a long-term crisis, there’s no need to overlook the benefit for a short-term crisis. Especially as the latter is far more likely.

It reduces tolerance for dealing with bullshit. Who wants to start a stackoverflow humiliation ritual and breadcrumb following random websites to find reliable stuff(90% of which is AI generated), when prompting gets you directly to the answer? Before that, the "Google rots your brain" articles prophesied the fall of humanity to search engines: now its mark of intellect to able to manually curate and search within websites for relevant info. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid%3F

Two things can be true at the same time. Google rotted our brain and AI will rot our brains even further. Google made remembering unnecessary. AI makes thinking unnecessary.

I see AI as allowing me to delegate details I'm aware of but don't care to think about to AI, while thinking about the larger picture and the details AI missed.

I'm still thinking, just about different things at different levels.

Same thing we argued about Google, that now we don't spend time learning stuff to remember, but we can just look it up and use that time to do more, spend it on more important problems than remembering. Yet it made us stupider.

Prior to Google, I kept a thesaurus and a dictionary on my desk so I could find new stuff and avoid having to remember everything. There was also a huge set of encyclopedias in the living room, along with a globe.

Did those tools make me stupid, too? (Can we do libraries next?)

Yes, according to Socrates all writing is brainrot and libraries are essentially TikTok bingewatch.

Actually, its just inertia and lack of reliable forum hosting, the actual "killer app" that replaced volatile and unarchivable chat content, but no one learned from it and people flocked to Discord, which is even more hostile to archiving/scanning chat history.

I am starting to wonder is archiving or scanning history even possible with how hostile internet has become. Especially when so many tech companies will scan and download same content countless times without single care of damage or cost the cause...

Just imagine hosting that history on your instance for users and then some vibecoder without care in his work starts scanning it automatically every 5 seconds just in case it might have changed...

> I am starting to wonder is archiving or scanning history even possible with how hostile internet has become.

Future generations are going to be looking at a historical black hole.

The problem is scale. Trying to replace something big like Reddit/Browser/some-huge-library requires enormous resource investment which is inviting the same forces that enshittified the original. The original reddit was a link list with voting, no comments/media/etc it was cheap, and as it grown into social media giant with insane complexity, it became much more expensive and slower to process(both on client and server). But the users loved it, they now don't need to host the video/image/comments elsewhere, its all included inside the walled garden, and reddit which was 100% links to outside resources is now mostly self-contained media with pictures, videos, blog posts(self.subreddit) being most of content and hyperlinks to "outside" being mostly mainstream "big websites" with social clout.

I agree that scale is one of the factors involved, and businesses tend to go down the Reddit way. That said I don't think it can be generalized to all the businesses out there, and a few of the examples I do, first of all Proton, seems to show to me that a differen kind of successful (albeit not über greedy and trillions-making) business model is possible.

It's probably more relevant for content, e.g. the massive amount of (good) content present in YouTube (and YT music) is the reason I'm willing to pay the premium price even if I have close to zero sympathy for Alphabet as a company. But for services like email, or products like a browser, I really don't care about scale at all, I just want it to work well and possibly don't spy on me to sell my data.

"Cheap-to-generate" mediocre content forces the floor expectation to rise, becoming the "minimum", which raises expectations of "current mediocre" further. Its largely invisible, slow process, where you can't gauge past "floor-level" expectation for content, because it implicitly assumed the 'current year' standard is the norm(while its evolution of expectations). In a few years, expectation for "mediocre slop" would likely include stuff that considered top-level today, but has some minor deficiencies and the "slop of years past" would be relegated to unusable/useless junk, like\ e.g. Stable Diffusion 1.5 images and GPT2 texts.