A hundred times more time is spent reading a given piece of code, than it took writing it, in the lifetime of that program.
OK I made up the statistic, but the core idea is true, and it's something that is rarely considered in this debate. At least with code you wrote, you can probably recognize it later when you need to maintain it or just figure out what it does.
In the olden days I read the code I wrote probably 2-3 times while in the process of reading it, and then almost always once in full just before submitting it.
The thing is that in practice, if China knows my secret, they can't do much with it, first because I don't criticize China (I don't live there, I don't know there, why then ?), and the second, is that it is a rather isolated world. Unless you speak Chinese, they don't really care about you. So it's in some way "safer" (unless they resell the data to americans or israeli companies for 'advertising' purposes)
You're all overthinking it. They dumped their kitchen waste in the fields, and it happened to contain broken pottery too. It's the same for other archeological sites all over, many are waste dumps that contain interesting objects.
Does this matter? That is extremely difficult to differentiate via the archaeological record, so most archaeological research simply abandons the distinction. You should essentially never read intention into archaeology unless someone makes an extremely strong case the alternatives might be firmly excluded. As an example for a strong case of intention: if you find twenty skulls with pickaxes in their heads lined up on a shelf in an underground cubicular room, you should probably not assume this is a coincidence.
If you're reading about the use of pottery in soil, it does not matter what the people intended—at least, not as a primary concern. It is easy to read intention into headlines though.
This is the intention the previous poster was countering:
> These discoveries suggest that the area’s Indigenous farmers may have dumped their household waste and the remnants of fires onto their fields, using them as compost
I had forgotten what a big deal 'freezer' cartridges were on the C64!
A friend's uncle manufactured these himself using an EPROM burner and God knows where he got the casings, and sold them to us kids. Worked great. I had no idea about the amount of hacking that went into making them work.
One of the cited studies (Khafagy et al., 2024) directly contradicts such claims. The study explicitly said "we did not find supportive evidence from MR that erythritol increases cardiometabolic disease".
The primary human study they reference (Witkowski et al., 2023) has a few issues:
- All subjects had a "high prevalence of CVD and risk factor burden" and represented the sickest patients in the healthcare system
- Erythritol was measured only once at baseline, despite data which shows that levels fluctuate dramatically with consumption
- It did not differentiate between dietary intake and erythritol produced by the body
- Seeing as they were already sick they the subjects may have been consuming more artificial sweeteners than the general population
There are two more human studies referenced but I didn't read them.
It still seems fantastical to me that lightning network is presented as "something running on BTC", when it is "something running completely separately, instead of BTC". Transactions on Lightning network are not transactions on BTC, and have none of the guarantees of BTC (and in fact have no reliable guarantees of no double spending).
The only way to get BTC-like guarantees of no double-spending for Lightning network transactions is to put every transaction on the BTC block chain ("close the channel" after every transaction). And then, of course, you get back all of the problems of BTC (minuscule TPS not enough for a small village, 0 privacy, huge energy costs).
If what tsimionescu says about Lightning is wrong, can somebody kindly reply to them explaining why rather than just downvoting which doesn't help anyone. (Maybe there's a reason they were downvoted that isn't their being wrong, but I don't see what that would be.)
(And sorry for going against the guidelines and talking about downvotes, but I'm really just asking for someone to either confirm what they said is right or explain why it isn't, I'm not caring about the votes themselves.)
As that post makes clear at the end, if you don't monitor the BTC block chain actively (with an app or by paying a third party you trust to hopefully do it for you), you can be cheated out of your BTC with Lightning.
not a downvoter, but a criticism is yhat BTC doesnt actually offer defenses agaisnt double spend, at least when you use it to buy something.
if the chain swaps a month from now and drops my bbq purchase, the bbq shop isnt getting their bbq back, even though i get my BTC back on the new chain. the ethereum fork for ethereum classic also doubled everyone's wallets, which i'd consider to be a double spend
The double spend protection is quite limited, so whats the big loss from lightning?
First, if people didn't believe that BTC protects from double spend, then it would not be used by anybody. Secondly, the whole point of the proof of work scheme is that it's impossible, or at least extraordinarily costly, for anyone to outrun the main chain enough to publish a new block that replaces blocks from a week ago. It's in fact considered impossible for blocks from an hour or so ago.
So, assuming the BBQ supplier waited about an hour for confirmation, the chance that the money would be lost is minuscule with BTC transactions. With Lightning transactions, the same is not true at all - the customer could close their channel abruptly two months later when the BBQ joint is on vacation, and the money would suddenly vanish forever (assuming they don't catch the fraud in the time window before it becomes permanent).
Of course, in both cases, if you're the person who sent the money and the BBQ never arrived, you're out of luck entirely. Which is why the claim that BTC or Lightning enable trustless monetary transactions is mostly bogus, even with a no-double-spend guarantee. And waiting one hour for a payment to a BBQ joint to clear is basically unworkable (and the reality is more like two hours - one hour for the transaction to make it to be mined, and the other hour to confirm the block where it was included remains permanent).
