No, because, as forgotoldacc points out, Trump is going to just keep doing whatever he wants regardless, and he wasn't appointed based on actual expertise or prior success: he was appointed because he validates the biases of Trump's base.
It’s shifts like that, going from a copyleft to a copyright crowd, that make me increasingly suspicious the HN is authentic as it was years ago. Another weird one is the socialism lean instead of more libertarian ideals by many commentators. I think it might be generational issues and being 50+ years old makes me an old timer!
I'm guessing it's because every year, younger people join HN. I've been on this site for at least a decade and a half with various accounts and it's interesting to see the shift.
It’s wired and very finicky. Basically a 10 year old solution to this problem. I have on in my collection. It’s cool but not really useful or in same tier as the other products being mentioned.’
For some reason when I charge at public chargers a very common vehicle next to me are those Chevy Bolts. If you’ve never compared them side by side you will be surprised, the Leaf is a MUCH nicer car, the Bolts just look way cheaper and lower quality vehicles.
I also don’t get this CCS drama, I have yet to come across an actual fast charger station that doesn’t have CHAdeMO in addition to the CCS connection. Maybe in my area of midwest all the charger stations were installed during the dual standard being the standard.
The 2026 Bolt moving to the Ultium platform may also improve some of the interior quality (because the battery platform will be cheaper again). It is probably a couple months still before we can easily test drive one to get a good feel, but I am curious to see what they do with the new model, especially because GM is especially returning it to be their cheapest EV.
I drove both before I bought the Bolt. The Leaf does have a nicer interior. While I wouldn't say it's a huge gap, it was noticeable. But the Leaf also felt heavier and more sluggish. In the end, the extra range, the CCS charge port, and the better driving feel (at least to me) made me prefer the Bolt.
I’m wrong about CCS, can’t edit this long after so replying here to myself to clarify.
I’m dumb, of course I always see CHAdeMO because my charger app is set to that for DC fast. Duh … a friend said unset filters and yeah there are more CCS DC fast.
Yeah, in St. Louis metro, I think there are only like 2-3 CHAdeMO chargers, period.
On the trip to Chicago, I only see 4 plugs on the way, and those are all at dealerships... which often have cars parked in front of them, so I can't really rely on those being available :D
I’m looking on the Chargepoint App and I see some CHAdeMO DC Fast in both Springfield and Bloomington. They tend to be in strip mall parking lots near Home Depots and Walmarts.
That said having a CCS adapter working is very interesting and I will be following your experience as I have similar a Leaf to you (2021 SV Plus)
I am very happy with my 2021 Leaf. It’s a very solid around town and commute vehicle. Anyone comparing it to Bolts doesn’t understand the Nissan build quality is just much better, Leaf is in a different league of design, refinement, and reliability.
One thing I would recommend is a set of winter wheels and tires if you’re in St Louis.
I’m on the fence about buying a comma.ai Comma 3x to try with it. The ProPILOT Assist built in is pretty helpful on long distance highways and the Comma 3x adds a bunch of interesting capabilities. My hesitation is partially insurance related, I’m not sure what Geico will say about it if you’re in an accident for example when it was engaged.
fwiw I’m confident after reading your post and watching you video you made the right choice for you and your objectives.
Ignoring any PR or political motivations, I’d argue the Leaf is a better choice for many people. I’m biased as I have one, quite similar, but let me give a pros from my perspective:
- a traditional car feeling, knobs, buttons, the way cars have been for decades prior
- very very reliable. basically never needs anything except wiper fluid. no software updates or crashing. I don’t have stats but might be one of most reliable cars
- compact and easy to park
- compatible with comma.ai
- LeafSpy diagnostics to monitor it
- nice hatchback format with fold down rear seats
- ~220 mile range is plenty for around town use and trickle charge overnight
Overall I’m very happy with it and while constantly tempted by Teslas I think I wouldn’t like them as much.
I thought not having Carplay was a dealbreaker, then I tried shopping other brands and they wanted $15 to $25 per month for remote start, so I went with Tesla. Plus Tesla had dash cam recording, which somehow no one else has yet? And of course, don’t have to deal with a stupid dealer with Tesla, just bought sitting on the couch at home.
Anyway, not having CarPlay has not been an issue. Although, it would have been nice to have.
I’m picking up mine today from repairs. Some kids crashed their ute into me and left me fake details (I found them anyway via OSINT). Since I have full video insurance waived excess and going after them.
CarPlay is trash tho. Had a rental again last weekend. It’s core feature - google maps wrapper - is just barely useable. Sure it does other things, but it’s not worth the hassle.
After dealing with Tesla service, I’d also put having a large and varied dealer network with potential third party service locations as a plus for the Leaf. The word potential is doing a lot of work here - having competitive service options is still an EV issue, IMO. But Tesla service is expensive and difficult to navigate. Texting with a mechanic can work, but a quick 2 min conversation with a person would have saved me multiple headaches. Part of the cost issue may be the ways the cars are built vs the actual shop costs, but parts costs for repair are likely to be higher for a Tesla, even with volume. I suspect getting a Leaf serviced should be easier/cheaper.
So many of the crypto skeptic comments on this story are massively out of touch with the products and sophistication of the crypto industry. For those of us who aren’t, the question has basically been flipped to “what does a bank add to this situation?” .
I’m typing this shortly after buying my groceries with a visa debit card that was funded 30 seconds before the transaction over Lightning Network with Bitcoin that was sold at a 0.1% fee for USD and immediately then transacted on Visa debit payment network.
The reason banks are lobbying so hard recently to close “loopholes” in latest US legislation is because with stablecoins you even need them less and less to hold dollar exposure.
The days of traditional banks are likely numbered and the crypto skeptics commenting on HN have their world models upside down. At least that is my view currently.
> I’m typing this shortly after buying my groceries with a visa debit card that was funded 30 seconds before the transaction over Lightning Network with Bitcoin that was sold at a 0.1% fee for USD and immediately then transacted on Visa debit payment network.
I think I'm confused. You paid 0.1% on this transaction, but if you'd done it with just a Visa debit card tied to a traditional bank account you would have paid 0.0%.
What rate is he getting on his crypto? I get ~4% on my fiat.
Some cryptos are doing better than that, so it's certainly possible to beat, but I wouldn't chance the volatility. Unless it's doing better than that.. then I think inflation is eating the crypto, not the other way around?
Edit: I see, because Bitcoin isn't adding additional coins, it's "non-inflationary". I think this is moot when you ultimately have to transact through fiat, so the only thing that matters is BTC-USD conversion rate.
Unless I read this wrong there were likely two "traditional" banks in this process you just described? At the very least it sounds at least twice as complicated as how I pay for groceries with no obvious benefit.
You are obviously completely unaware of the popularity of Paypal, CashApp, Venmo within the general US population and of Square for POS by vendors.
The value proposition for everyone, consumer and vendors is both lower fees and ability to easily diversify their income/assets into non depreciating digital assets.
Somewhere there is a Steak n Shake presentation that explains their investment into accepting Bitcoin (via LN) has already paid for itself in fees.
The issue is that for Steak ‘n Shake it’s fine because in the card network scheme they’re generally on the hook for repudiated transactions. So they pay fees and on top of that have charge backs from fraud. For you as a Visa card holder you benefit from that situation though because if your card is stolen you can claim fraud or theft and the merchant is often loss liable.
In your world you would be the one holding the loss if your card is compromised in some way. This is of course beneficial to merchants. But as a customer I would always prefer a card network backed transaction all things being equal as my personal loss liability risk is considerably lower - almost non existent. This is why credit cards are generally better for the payer. I have no incentive other than ideological to use any crypto payment method.
PayPal, Venmo, Cash App tend to not be merchant based transactions but cash like transactions by either people that are unbanked for whatever reason, or doing business person to person, or transacting with a merchant who doesn’t accept credit cards. Stripe (and square) make the logistical side of that less an issue than it was, and today it’s mostly about fees and loss liability transfer back to the originator of the money (as in a theft scenario it’s not the payer whose money is at risk).
Steak N Shake accepts Bitcoin, both on-chain and via Lightning Network.
Paypal has USD savings accounts that pay interest, ACH support, and also issues standard credit cards if you like. On top of that they support multiple major cryptocurrencies and allow instant conversion to USD.
A high percentage of restaurants and stores in my area now accept CashApp payments directly along with other payments. Many people are using PayPal and Venmo also with merchants in person, and online Paypal is dominate.
Square is in the process of rolling out Lightning Network Bitcoin payments to all it’s POS terminals later this year with the merchant having control over how they want to handle such payments, auto convert, partial convert, custody Bitcoin. Could get interesting fast if merchants start offering discounts for non-credit card transactions, which they are fortunately now allowed to and the credit card companies can’t terminate them, what happens when USD stablecoin or Bitcoin payments are offered further discounts by the merchants due to their cost savings and preference?
I’m thinking about moving all my ACH auto pay payments over to either CashApp or Paypal also. And remember they both support ACH direct deposits.
What services are left for the traditional bank to provide me? FEDwire and international SWIFT wires … and … investment accounts for stocks and bonds …
I’d say they are on shaky ground as I know crypto focused companies like Coinbase are looking at how to get into traditional equities and bonds and guess what Robinhood already does that and has gone the other direction and acquired crypto companies.
The bigger mystery in all this discussion is why such a significant fraction of HN readers and commenters are so out of touch with what is happening in the real world and real economy with these systems?
I think I touched on all this. These are advantageous to merchants for low fees and loss liability assignment. They offer very little to the payer who is banked and has credit. Of course more merchants are accepting payment methods that are highly advantageous to them, and the payment processing providers capture a better interchange by cutting out the middle men. But the person whose money is being used to transact gains nothing in this and loses repudiation (along with other incentive perks card issuers often provide for their interchange share). This was my point, and I don’t see any addressing of it. For the person paying (you) you literally gain nothing and lose card network loss insurance and other perks.
For bank transfers, again, you gain repudiation. You have a window during settlement to dispute the transfer. It’s short but it exists. This is seemingly inconvenient and not obviously useful until someone is trying to steal your money. Then it’s suddenly very useful.
As a general society the friction that transfer hold periods provide generally globally reduces financial crimes everywhere and provides global stability to the financial system that didn’t exist prior. These seem like stupid fuddyduddy things banks do but there was a time these didn’t exist and there was a reason they were created and that time was not a better time. It was materially worse for everyone everywhere. Having never existed in such a time makes it hard to understand that such a time might have existed and why it was bad - but for those interested there do exist books that explain how we got here.
The consumer benefit would be when merchants start charging lower prices to payers if they use crypto. For example, I know many small businesses that offer lower prices, some on purchases as large as $9k (below AML limits), if paying in cash because it's easier to declare less in taxes when using cash. Likewise if a merchant realizes that they pay lower fees and have lower loss on stablecoin transactions, I can see a world where merchants offer discounts for those transactions.
Obviously time will tell if there's enough margin to even offer a valuable discount to the purchaser and if merchants will become savvy enough to offer this dual pricing scheme.
So you paid a 0.1% fee for a less convenient way to pay? I just tap my credit card or phone, and then the CC company debits my bank account automatically a month later, essentially giving me a free small loan plus 2% cash back.
When I wrote that it seems I needed to give more context for those who don’t understand the benefits of self custody Bitcoin.
0.1% is fee to convert to USD and in context of converting anything to USD, like stocks or anything one would hold in an investment account it’s a low fee. This means I keep my liquid capital in Bitcoin which has a strong tendency to increase in value and yet whenever I need to spend it, it’s instantly spendable in multiple ways, literally instantly and for a very very low conversion fee.
I can also use a CC company and I agree there is a 2% cash back. There are multiple companies that are crypto focused and have issued CC and Paypal issues CC and I can settle the monthly balance using Bitcoin also.
What I predict is coming soon, maybe next year or so, if POS support in the US to offer that 2% cash back directly to the consumer from the merchant should they settle in alternative currencies, like Bitcoin, like USD stable coins.
The combined issue of interest payments on stable coin balances (custodial) and legal settlement rebates is what has the banks literally freaking out and starting to try and spread FUD about USD stable coins. They know their business models in the payments space is eroding and soon the money markets space is under pressure.
I am curious about the Lightning Network, 10 years in it is still perceived as a failure.
What is blocking its adoption?
One I can think about is it is hard to accept that if I pay $20 for a pizza today, 6 months later that pizza might have cost me $40. It is a bit irrational but it will prevent most people from using it.
This is where the stablecoin thing is genius, one can decide/optimise when get in and out of crypto.
There's no native web experience that makes it easy to use Lightning in a browser; this forces everyone to step outside the box to figure out a way to (e.g. install extension or download an app)
There's also not much of an app ecosystem for it providing enough utility for people to use it each week/day
Interesting, so this is I believe the same problem as all the Ethereum type stuff: you need to have it lives with your keys in the most horrific place in a computer, meaning a browser extension. Or put the web browser in the wallet.
Either way, something like Metamask is really slow and scary.
The core Ethereum stuff is pretty elegant but once you want to build an UI you get trapped in hell to plug it to the "web".
Maybe the biggest problem of "Web3" is it was built on Web2.
What does a bank do? Many things that crypto can't but probably the number 1 thing compared to crypto ... the bank (via the FDIC) provides assurances for each account for up to $225,000 USD.
It's important to note that FDIC doesn't kick in for instances of scams or other unauthorized transfers. It only gives assurances to deposit holders. Stablecoins under the GENIUS Act requires 100% backing and is more stringent than banks since reserve requirements are still 0%[1]. I think it's also useful to focus on stablecoins in a conversation like this rather than crypto at large.
What is complicated? It takes seconds on my phone, must less complicated than writing a comment on HN!
The processing fees are lower for vendors than credit card fees if they accept LN Bitcoin. For me the “savings” account is completely self custody held in a non-inflationary non-depreciating currency called Bitcoin.
Massive value for everyone by cutting out the legacy banks. As I said earlier, unless you actually do it, and use it, you won’t understand how rapidly crypto is embedding itself and likely will take over in next decade for sure.
And how did you come to that conclusion? From all the money laundering done by the traditional banks for the cartels once they bribe the right AML personnel?
no, from the lessons that we have collectively learned, from the hundreds of years of history that we've collectively experienced, that have resulted in the banking infrastructure that we have today.
it's flawed and it can be improved, no question, but improvements need to reflect a basic understanding of the lessons learned by past experience, regulations were created for a reason, etc.
I have a Frame and it’s not so great, the prism interferes too much with your vision. You can do images on the Frame. I’m optimistic that Brilliant Labs latest iteration might be better - Halo. They are great at being open source and open design.
Probably the leading current product if you want HUD Bluetooth glasses are Even Realities G1s but those aren’t going to do images however they have very crisp and useable monochrome displays for text.
I really want a display + camera + audio. Halo offers those, but the Brilliant Labs model of releasing a single run of a product and then immediately moving on to the next iteration kind of sucks -- and they're going to do it again with Halo, they've explicitly said so. If I want to build for an abandoned product, well, I've already got these Solos!
It’s a bit of a hobby of mine to investigate wearables for HUD purposes so I have tested Engo 2 among others I would mention that something neat about Active Look’s is they publish all their Bluetooth protocol and have open source libraries to interact with their glasses.
I don’t have a pair of these Solos glasses (yet) but it looks from specs their resolution and display quality is much higher compared to Engo 2, obviously because it’s an actual microled display not prisms or waveguides.
In many applications you are concerned about data you encrypt today still being secure 20 years from now. Especially if your threat model includes a malicious actor holding on to data in hopes of decrypting it later.
From the article it sounds like we will still be safe for 20+ years. On the other hand 15 was just extraordinarily easy, progress after 21 will be much quicker. And we never know which breakthroughs might come in the next decades that speed up progress.
The article lists three reasons why 21 is so much harder than 15. Mostly that with 15 most of the required conditional multiplications are multiplications by 1 and the remaining multiplication can be done with cheap shifts because it's a multiplication by a power of 2 modulo 15 (which is one less than a power of two).
But 22 and 24 are in the same boat as 21 here. All three of them require computing only factors that are not one, all three are not one less than a factor of 2. You need slightly more multiplications (and thus more gates) as the numbers get larger, but that only grows linearly. Maybe the conditional multiplications required get slightly more expensive to implement, but I wouldn't expect a 100x cost blowup from that. Error correction is still an issue, potentially making a linear complexity increase quadratic, but qubit counts in quantum computers also increase at an exponential rate
I think the idea is that it doesn’t matter if it takes billions of gates to achieve, the point is that it can do it very fast. If we thought a table sized FPGA could do it, a state actor would most definitely build one.
The practical problem is that ‘noise’ between gates seems to increase exponentially, so practically it may actually be impossible to construct anything with more than a handful of gates for the foreseeable (possibly indefinite?) future.
You brought up gate noise, there has been quite a bit of progress on that problem.
> so we should totally be able to factor 21 (or larger numbers)…. When?
Just because we solve one problem doesn't imply all the problems in QC are also instantly solved. I guess it does if you assume noise is the only problem and once is it solved the engineering is trivial. That is not the case. Even assuming all foundational problems have been solved, figuring out how actually engineer and also mass produce large numbers of gates, will take a while.
As the article pointed out, going from 15 to 21 requires a 100x increase in gates.
As the article that you posted under says:
"Because of the large cost of quantum factoring numbers (that aren’t 15), factoring isn’t yet a good benchmark for tracking the progress of quantum computers. If you want to stay abreast of progress in quantum computing, you should be paying attention to the arrival quantum error correction (such as surface codes getting more reliable as their size is increased) and to architectures solving core scaling challenges (such as lost neutral atoms being continuously replaced)."
I believe you are thinking of "Supersingular isogeny Diffie–Hellman key exchange" or SIKE which is a post quantum encryption algorithm that was spectacularly broken a couple years ago. The math involves elliptical curves but it's different from the elliptical curve cryptography used in your browser.
Which assumptions? ECDLP is still considered computationally hard, and ECC considered secure. There are invalid curve attacks and small subgroup attacks but that's a problem with key selection, not a fundamental problem with ECC.
I have a strong belief that new mathematical tools and methods can be developed that can make it "easy" to break a lot of modern cryptography primitives without ever using a quantum computer.
The potential is there, we haven't made it yet. It's the same with AI, AGI and all that. Imagine if you'd read a response from GPT-2 back in 2019, you'd also be like "and these are the same models that will eventually give us AGI".
Zero? Aren't you a little bit overconfident on that?
Transformer LLMs already gave us the most general AI as of yet, by far - and they keep getting developed further, with a number of recent breakthroughs and milestones.
No. The fundamental encoding unit of an LLM is semantic. Mapping reality into semantic space is a form of lossy compression. There are entire categories of experience that can't be properly modeled in semantic space.
Even in "multimodal" models, text is still the fundamental unit of data storage and transformation between the modes. That's not the case for how your brain works—you don't see a pigeon, label it as "pigeon," and then refer to your knowledge about "pigeons". You just experience the pigeon.
We have 100K years of homo sapiens thriving without language. "General Intelligence" occurs at a level above semantics.
Yes what a great strategy to embrace the failed ideas of socialism!
You realize support among hispanics will drop to almost zero with that strategy because they know from experience in Latin and South America that such crazy ideas bring nothing but misery to everyone.
