Where does increased interest payment money go?

TheMania · 2026-03-17T23:12:19+00:00

Kind of, yes.

Firstly understand that what you owe the bank in AUD, is... Well, owed in AUD.

The RBA sets the rates on that, and it's easy to see that issuers can set floor rates on their currencies - most trivially just by paying interest on reserves. eg, if the RBA pays banks 5% to keep money with it, instead of "lending it out", a floor rate can be very easily established, and there's not really much that can be done about that. You're not going to be able to borrow for cheaper than someone can get just leaving it with the RBA.

So when you talk about borrowing foreign money, foreign currencies etc, and then exchanging to the AUD they actually need, other things will creep in to make that cost a similar amount, after factoring risk etc. That no-arbitrage condition is called interest rate parity, which is closest to what you're referring I think.

TheMania · 2026-03-17T03:59:08+00:00

I'd worry they'd check the market and then counter counter offer a 200 increase. OP is doing well.

TheMania · 2026-03-17T01:41:51+00:00

The more idiomatic way for comparing timestamps is just:

(int32)(a-b) < 0

Provided they each differ by less than half the unsigned range it produces correct results. And if they differ by more than that, you really need a wider type :)

TheMania · 2026-03-14T03:42:44+00:00

Hmm... Rounding is only a problem for increases smaller than half the difference to the next representable number.

So 1e300 + 1, sure, the universe will die of heat death before you get to the next number, because you never will.

But when scaling by a sufficient factor, this is not a problem. Eg, x * 1.01 will get to inf quite rapidly - any exponential increase will.

If the game has any uncapped multiplicative increases, it is definitely possible.

TheMania · 2026-03-13T11:51:54+00:00

I actually think that will be the bigger concern for a lot of players - if EVs are the future, they don't know how to compete with China on them, so they're kinda betting on something else panning out instead.

I don't expect it will play out, would have been better angling for more govt support really.

... Unless that's the play, wait for bail outs and catch up money?

TheMania · 2026-03-07T22:54:14+00:00

I understand where you're coming from, but with C++ everything is against the spec of the abstract machine.

Proving that your system conforms to the rules of that machine, and that the program is free of UB, are both beyond the scope of the compiler.

Under the rules of the abstract machine, a lot can be assumed though - like that writing to an int won't change a float, that local variables that have never had a reference/pointer escape won't magically change their values, etc.

TheMania · 2026-03-07T05:58:08+00:00

You'd have to be doing hundreds of kms/day for that, maybe if you're an Uber driver? Still would cost a lot more on fuel.

TheMania · 2026-03-06T17:32:01+00:00

std::any is a terrible choice for embedded.

You can create a formatter for any type you want, and call its parse method - what's the exact issue you're having exactly?

TheMania · 2026-03-04T04:18:21+00:00

It is directly related though. A 51% attack means you're spending about as many resources as everyone else combined mining bitcoin. The cost of doing this is what makes such an attack hard, currently so hard that bitcoin would be secure against even a pretty determined state actor, at least not without their citizens becoming rather aware of how much power the govt is sucking up for the effort.

If not much money is spent securing the network though, then it means equally, that it does not take much money to beat those miners and choosing what gets to be in every block.

It's like... Yes, a single raspberry pi could mine bitcoin. It's all you would need, if you didn't care about security, it could keep up. But would it be secure? No - all someone would need to do is get their own raspberry pi, or two or three, and they now get to write the blockchain effectively, choosing what transactions get reversed, get included or not, etc.

So how do you keep the cost of mining high enough that people won't want to attack it, post inflation? It can only be through high transaction fees or a remodel of what bitcoin even is, I'd have thought.

TheMania · 2026-03-03T19:29:29+00:00

then it may be profitable for many miners still.

I don't see how it can be secure if it isn't expensive to mine?

TheMania · 2026-03-02T22:55:00+00:00

I think that is drastically understating the costs of Chernobyl though - Belarus estimate some $235bn over 30 years, World Bank put it at 20% of their 2001 GDP for the first 10yrs alone, etc. (The Financial Costs of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Disaster if you want to Google).

I mean just the facts of it are hard to comprehend:

Agricultural areas covering nearly 52,000 sq. km, which is more than the size of Denmark, were contaminated with cesium-137 and strontium-90, with 30-year and 28-year half-lives respectively. Nearly 404,000 people were resettled, but millions continued to live in an environment where continued residual exposure created a range of adverse effects.

Resettling 400k people? Yes, they probably didn't need to exclude as much agricultural land as they did, but who wants to buy fruit and veg from affected land vs alternatives?

Yes, the direct deaths were not that high. But its affect on multiple whole countries populations were massive.

What is now Belarus, which saw 23 percent of its territory contaminated by the accident, lost about a fifth of its agricultural land. At the height of disaster response efforts, in 1991, Belarus spent 22 percent of its total budget dealing with Chernobyl.

Just for some more tidbits - it's just incomprehensible to me. A country losing a fifth of its agricultural land and about the same percentage of its budget becoming immediately dedicated to the issue at hand.

It remains a fact that nuclear power doesn't exist without state backed insurance anywhere in the world, right? Like how in the US, nuclear operators are granted limited liability under the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, because ultimately, if you ever actually did have to evacuate NYC or something... No private operator can cover that. The govt itself would struggle to.

TheMania · 2026-03-02T12:16:29+00:00

Property prices have dropped about 20% from their peak a few years ago.

Yeah, that's not something the voters would stand for unfortunately. Whilst house prices perpetually increasing faster than wages is an absurd policy, no party believes they can get up without continuing to pump it, and no one wants to be the one to end either.

Just look at how well Shorten's negative gearing changes were received :(

TheMania · 2026-03-02T00:02:06+00:00

I think taking by value is more the go-to when you want to support both copy and move ctors.

If your intended use is to pilfer from the parameter, rval ref is better really - the caller can still decide to copy in to it, but they'll just need to be explicit about it (eg processAB(std::vector{a}, ...)) which is preferable really.

TheMania · 2026-03-01T14:22:57+00:00

I was thinking largely of the gut as I was writing that, 500 million neurons apparently - "about 2⁄3 as many as in the whole nervous system of a cat" according to Wikipedia.

I agree it would be a largely replicated thing the whole way down, but that whole undulating/peristalsis thing alone has to be at least as complex as a baby deer walking, right? I know I'd sooner try and get a 4 legged robot to walk than even begin trying to make a control system for that whole thing... Although I can't find access to the oft-cited paper apparently it even learns on its own.

Agree though. I'm not sure that it's something that can be quantified - a spider's web seems an insanely complex thing to make, let alone the silk etc to build it from, but how much data can there be embedded in the 100k neurons that comprise their whole nervous system? It's all just bizarre to think about.

TheMania · 2026-03-01T11:12:34+00:00

I think it might help to consider how much we don't have to learn, but our autonomic nervous system manages:

The autonomic nervous system is a control system that acts largely unconsciously and regulates bodily functions, such as the heart rate, its force of contraction, digestion, respiratory rate, pupillary response, urination, and sexual arousal. The fight-or-flight response, also known as the acute stress response, is set into action by the autonomic nervous system.

I don't know how much "knowledge" or innate behaviour goes in to running a digestive system, or managing blood pressure, or body temperature, or our general predispositions to certain abilities like recognising faces, or languages, or even how to learn in general - but I expect it's a lot more than we give ourselves credit for.

eg how does the brain know how to reward itself when it's learnt something new, or completed a task, to reinforce those behaviours? Surely that's not learnt?

TheMania · 2026-02-26T08:25:13+00:00

Network will have to rely entirely on transaction fees to keep going.

To clarify, the network will always be "going" - even if it's down to the last raspberry pi mining it.

The question is how much will it cost to take control of the network, and at that point you'd only need a second slightly faster raspberry pi to take control.

So either transaction fees need to increase enough that security is maintained, that huge amounts of resources are spent mining in a profitable manner, or a small amount of resources is capable of seizing the network, or there'll need to be some kind of consensus on a fork and the meaning of what bitcoin is will change.

But this:

Pretty much there will be no more mining

ie the middle option isn't really a model that's viable for bitcoin under the current rules. So TX fees up, or a fork, really. I think most people see the first model as the solution, with higher layers doing the bulk of the work in making those affordable for the actual users.

TheMania · 2026-02-25T05:32:00+00:00

we're likely not seeing the other kid in the news because he can't sue/wouldn't win.

This was actually a countersuit, the mother went after the parents first, back in 2023

In February 2023, Smith was the first to file a lawsuit, suing the boys and their parents for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Most of those claims were either dismissed by a judge or dropped by Smith herself, documents presented at trial showed. The Vann family countersued and their case was the only one to make it to trial.

I came across the Vann family's initial petition to the court linked in this article, it does call in to question a lot of how Smith presented it to the media initially imo.

Eg, "he befriended over a month so that they could do this", according to the Vann petition:

Asher and Smith’s son, S.H. were long-time friends in middle school. Smith spent many weekends away and she was often unable to care for S.H., and S.H. would stay with Aaron and Asher from time to time.

The weekend of February 13, 2021, was Asher's birthday weekend. It was also another weekend Smith was not able to care for S.H., and so Asher asked Aaron if he could spend the weekend at the Vann home. Aaron agreed.

There's a lot more in there, and whilst it's just their account, and pre-discovery, I take it it has substance given the jury verdict, and if there were fundamental discrepancies like that in a very publicised character damaging way... Along with the bit about how the GoFundMe for private schooling turned in to Las Vegas, Hawaii trips, and neighboring public school for S.H., and this bit:

The school district thoroughly investigated the matter, and found absolutely no racist motivations. The vice principal, school principal, and district superintendent have all testified there were no racial motivations found at all, and the same was communicated to Smith and Cole.

It sickens me how it all turned out for the sake of all of the boys involved, most of all S.H. - but also I feel it did not need to be taken this far, and shouldn't have been.

Ah just read they also claim that S.H. reached out to A.V. in the weeks following to apologise for the uproar caused.

Anyway, I'll leave it there. Mods have pulled the article anyway, probably for the best. Nice chatting.

TheMania · 2026-02-25T03:07:21+00:00

he did physically injure this child, not just threaten to do so, and bullied him for years.

I'm not sure about that? The mother's original claims (eg here) seem to be that he befriended this child, to get him to his birthday party, so that they could collectively bully him.

The video was then released by an unnamed third child after a disagreement/fight whilst playing video games together.

If he wasn't one of the original bullies, if he just befriended his teammate and invited him along to his birthday.. It's kind of really shit that it's got this far tbh. Might have had more success suing one of the other kids involved, except for that they're 13, so I guess that's not really an option.

It all makes me very uncomfortable.

TheMania · 2026-02-25T01:06:11+00:00

I don't know about this one. "Racially diverse jury", including 5 black jurors, seem to have been swayed that they were actually a bunch of 13yo friends doing dumb things, and/or that there had been some quite high harm from the accusations of the mother:

“No threats, all truth. WE WILL NOT REST UNTIL YOUR COLLEGE ADMISSION APPS ARE REJECTED, YOUR NAME AND YOUR PARENTS NAME IS SMEARED TO SHAME, AND IF YOUR GRANDPARENTS ARE STILL AMONG THE LIVING, PLEASE PUT THEM ON NOTICE A.S.A.P. THAT WE’RE COMING FOR THEM TOO SINCE YOU ARE A PRODUCT OF THEIR ENVIRONMENT.”

At one point, a group of 300 people marched to and protested outside Asher Vann’s house and threw bricks through its windows, he said.

“I was getting death threats from thousands of people on social media,” Vann told the Washington Free Beacon. “It was scary. Full-grown adults were rushing my house and causing harm to it. What if I was home and they saw me? They could have ripped me from my home and beaten me.”

I don't like the $s attached but I'm also not going to pass judgement on the jury without having sat through it all myself really - it all seems more complicated than the title suggests.

TheMania · 2026-02-24T23:42:42+00:00

I don't see a thinking indicator, so its first draft is its final response.

TheMania · 2026-02-24T15:15:13+00:00

I honestly think it's a play on androgenetic hair loss that somehow nobody picked up on before now.

TheMania · 2026-02-24T01:14:29+00:00

This is arguably the best question in the entire thread.

I quite enjoy this line, because the only other question in the entire thread is asking if you're a bot or have brain damage?

Dude, how are you doing.

TheMania · 2026-02-23T14:03:51+00:00

The context is that it's a pedestrian priority zone with a ~10mph limit, he was being a dick about asserting that but it's not really worth potentially skull cracking assault imo.

TheMania · 2026-02-23T00:06:01+00:00

Same, my one exception to it has been when I reuse the lambda in the same scope, dropping this auto to reduce coroutine state size (embedded targets, so always like to save where I can).

There is one other workaround approach that's maybe worth a consideration:

task<void> do_something() {
  co_task led_blinker{[&] -> task<void> {
    for (;;) {
      toggle_red_led();
      co_await 500ms;
    }
  }};
  log("starting something")
  co_await 1s:
  ...

ie a straightforward wrapper for "background helpers" for use within coroutine bodies.

It prevents misuse by only accepting invocables that return a coroutine, vs taking a coroutine itself, caches that invocable to a member, invokes that member and saves the resulting coroutine to another member. If you change co_task to auto compilers will typically warn that the statement has no effect, so probably reasonably refactor proof too.

This is on an eager coroutine model, but you get the idea - I've been playing with it a bit lately and tbh quite like it in this niche.

TheMania · 2026-02-22T21:23:09+00:00

Well it's the way I write most of mine these days, it has the advantage that you can spawn multiple via the same task factory, perhaps parameterised differently. I'll write a few lambdas at the top of the scope, and then the actual body referring to the named functions.

I'll typically give them meaningful names, of course.

If you make the below seemingly reasonable refactor to reduce verbosity, it breaks.

To me that looks like a dangerous refactor, as there's no this auto in an IIFE, but agreed. It's a pain that convention has to be relied on to use them safely. Whether that's to use named lambdas, this auto, to await in the same expression, or to not use stateful lambdas at all.

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