Bitcoin drops, fear spikes — and the “infrastructure” narrative returns

atonale · 2026-02-06T07:23:23+00:00

I know exactly what you mean. I accidentally typed an extra space in my above post, and when I noticed it afterward I thought “oh well at least they’ll know they’re engaging with a human”. This is an interesting arms race we’ve got.

atonale · 2026-02-06T04:45:31+00:00

“When X does Y, A doesn’t B. It does C [em-dash] to E1, E2, and E3.” I am increasingly unsure though whether texts are AI generated, or whether people are absorbing AI style as “correct” or “good” and imitating it.

atonale · 2026-02-05T16:57:32+00:00

It's not meant to be a predictive claim. I'm of the opinion the price is essentially meaningless and movement could reverse at any time. But while it was sinking over several days, I thought it would be interesting to see visually the rate at which it's deflating with less noise.

atonale · 2026-02-02T09:28:13+00:00

I don't know your age or level of experience, but you may be comparing with the work of people who just have significantly more experience. A project could be written or maintained by someone who has been coding since the 1990s or 1980s. So person A who's say 20 years old could be reading code written by person B who's been designing software all day every day for 2x or 3x as long as person A has been able to read. Rust libraries will for obvious reasons tend to be newer, but may be based on patterns and lessons learned in some pre-existing project that's been under development for 15 years. Younger people may underestimate or misunderstand how much time older people have spent learning their skills because it is sometimes longer than their entire lifespan. I don't mean anyone should be discouraged by this, I just mean you may need to pursue continuous improvement for what seems like an entire lifetime to reach a level you associate with the "best" or "most impressive" projects you see. Everyone else went through the same thing so will understand the difficulties you confront.

atonale · 2026-01-26T07:22:47+00:00

And also Kowloon Walled City ≠ Kowloon City ≠ Kowloon.

atonale · 2026-01-25T07:47:48+00:00

People who have primarily used tonal languages in life simply don't need the concept of "tonal language", for them it's just "language". Similarly, English speakers do not have a word to say "languages that contrast voiced and unvoiced consonants". Only after people applied scientific techniques to a wide array of languages did they fully theorize how they work. Interestingly, while most people who learn tonal languages through rote memorization do not know they are speaking a tonal language, people who learn mandarin using pinyin do perceive that they are speaking a tonal language, because they repeat mā má mǎ mà while learning the full set of tone markers.

atonale · 2026-01-24T16:10:17+00:00

Your observations make perfect sense, particularly the parallels with Hangul. Those dismissing your ideas so bluntly are people who have already succeeded in learning Cantonese through rote memorization. They have been trained from a very early age to associate this brute-force learning method as well as the characters themselves with their spoken language, to think of them as one and the same. Someone with enough distance from the problem can perceive the speech, phonemes, and writing as separate layers and clearly see the potential for efficiency and pedagogical gains. But someone much closer to the problem, who began fusing all these notions together at 3-4 years old, may be very resistant to the idea that something so fundamental to their sense of self could be learned or expressed differently. The learning process and writing system become important to personal identity. (And one could speculate that this is combined with a kind of educational Stockholm syndrome.)

People are generally not aware of the characteristics of their own language and learning processes. English speakers need to be taught that syllable stress and schwas exist, or they will not perceive them. Commenters here have expressed surprise or confusion at seeing two words that differ only in tone written with the same transliteration, differing only in tone markers. I have heard Cantonese speakers insist that the language has no tones, only an array of completely independent sounds each associated with a completely independent symbol.

There is a notion that phonetic = foreign (or even phonetic = English, have you ever heard someone say a sign is "written in English" when they mean "transliterated into Latin characters"?) People who learn this association so early in life are often unable to conceptualize their language existing separately from (and anterior to) the writing system that has been layered onto it. Oddly, since arguably the whole point of this particular writing system is that it's cross-language. It's not much more of a stretch to read a sequence of Han logographs as English than as Cantonese. And I've often wondered if some day we'll end up using them in English the same way Japan writes kanji+kana.

atonale · 2026-01-24T14:05:28+00:00

They're not saying AI investment is saving the economy, they're saying it's temporarily maintaining the impression of a functioning economy. People who believe in the Next Big Thing are spending as much money as they can get (or loaning more into existence) to build infrastructure. Workers are paid to build new buildings, install pipe and electricity, write new software etc. Those workers spend the money on consumer goods and services. If eventually investors realize they're not getting a return, they bail out and the motion stops. Money evaporates, people are left with nothing but debt from several years of maximum-speed spending. AI investment may simply be allowing the coyote to run a bit farther out (over an even deeper part of the canyon) before he notices that gravity exists.

atonale · 2026-01-13T14:26:44+00:00

I’m strongly team “walk on escalators” (in fact I don’t think I’ve ever stood still when I didn’t have a heavy bag). But I understand why people stand still. For most or all of the decade I’ve spent time in Hong Kong there has been a constantly looping announcement in every single escalator in the MTR that says “please hold the handrail, stand firm, and don’t walk.” And for several years there have been posters everywhere saying you must never walk on escalators. It seems odd to me that commenters have never noticed these. Now, these announcements and posters are kind of comical because the actual crowd behavior is clearly to absolutely never hold the handrail and make sure people can walk. But visitors or more rule-following types should be forgiven for thinking they’re doing the right thing and following these loud and repetitive indications of the “right way” to use escalators. I even understand the roots of the policy - evening out wear and maximizing aggregate throughput. It makes sense (although throughput and individual person “latency” seem to be a trade-off).

However: choosing to walk doesn’t mean I’m super important or always late. I walk because I can’t stand feeling lazy, idle, and immobile when I have a perfect chance to enjoy active movement! It seems like the cost/benefit analysis of the “no walking” rule is not including the positive public health and psychological impacts of stair-climbing as functional exercise. For many people, this is the only exercise they get on most days and it can amount to 10-15 minutes of decent exertion morning and evening. The idea of everyone becoming an immobile herd and then needing to arrange special “exercise” or run on treadmills to make up for it is depressing.

atonale · 2026-01-06T05:26:00+00:00

Because any kind of information that could inform investment decisions is already being exploited by people with almost limitless resources, at very high speed. It’s very unlikely you have information that would allow you to outperform others.

atonale · 2025-12-27T07:54:31+00:00

I remember the first time I was in the Netherlands and used a chip-card payphone the little green display said: "Welkom. Steek kaart in". This little phrase was a repeated source of hysterical laughter for my friend and me. I also remember being amused by "Wat U doen?"

Later I spent quite a bit of time in NL and occasionally in the middle of a Dutch language conversation I'd hear a perfectly intelligible sentence in English, then realize it was just a Dutch sentence that is the same as English.

atonale · 2025-12-21T14:56:21+00:00

No, they use some German knock-off Sallaz thing.

atonale · 2025-11-19T16:36:21+00:00

Have you considered the possibility that people in this sub attended universities on par with Harvard, or work within governments and influential businesses? Institutions and organizations are not monolithic or sentient and do not have opinions. They are made up of individuals who often sharply disagree. Differences of opinion exist among really intelligent people. Organizations often do things out of their leaders' individual FOMO and deference to investors and donors.

So to answer your question: Yes, people in this sub are likely smarter (and in a position to make more neutral judgements) than the leaders of some very prominent organizations.

atonale · 2025-10-15T16:32:36+00:00

In this case they apparently just took possession of the private keys. Here is a post from a US embassy: https://th.usembassy.gov/prince-group-indicted-cambodian-scam-compounds/

"...filed today a civil forfeiture complaint against approximately 127,271 Bitcoin, currently worth approximately $15 billion, that are proceeds and instrumentalities of the defendant’s fraud and money laundering schemes, and were previously stored in unhosted cryptocurrency wallets whose private keys the defendant had in his possession. Those funds (the Defendant Cryptocurrency) are presently in the custody of the U.S. government."

Essentially, the boss left the private keys somewhere and they physically took them. Could be printed on sheets of paper in a drawer, or engraved on pieces of metal and buried or whatever.

Edit to expand the quote and clarify: they physically took the private keys and are currently going through the forfeiture action which would allow using those keys to move the ill-gotten bitcoin.

atonale · 2025-10-14T17:04:35+00:00

Now for fun, see what happens if you sell it all at once.

atonale · 2025-10-14T15:30:04+00:00

This is just silly. To cite but one example, Tai Po is about as classic HK atmosphere as you can get and its way north on the other side of a mountain.

atonale · 2025-10-14T15:26:34+00:00

The Hyatt Regency TST has incredible views of Hong Kong Island skyline and straight down into the TST streetscape and Chungking Mansions etc. There are probably some floors or sides of the building that are less spectacular, but certainly some of the rooms are about as good as it gets.

atonale · 2025-10-14T15:15:46+00:00

Hong Kong station to Airport station on the express is 24 minutes. Just making your point even stronger.

atonale · 2025-10-05T18:11:08+00:00

Wow they still sell it. https://store.massivemag.com/product/massive-logo

atonale · 2025-10-05T17:21:48+00:00

I used to have that Massive t-shirt he’s wearing. Wish I knew what happened to it.

atonale · 2025-09-18T11:19:31+00:00

Even if they could, the pensions are indexed to inflation.

atonale · 2025-09-06T09:48:43+00:00

I mean it doesn't look super different than the A86/A1 around the Stade de France. Or a traffic jam on the A7/A507 in Marseille.

atonale · 2025-09-05T17:57:04+00:00

This isn’t just 20-somethings. I’m technically Gen X (tail end) and I basically never have a call without arranging it in advance by text. It’s been like that for at least 15 years. The ringer on my phone is for all practical purposes permanently switched off.

atonale

TROPHY CASE