I found that (like many things) it's impossible to talk about the HK protest (and somewhat HK future) on the internet. Aside from the obvious trolls, the misinformed and those with a vested interest in pushing a narrative, the protest in themselves regrouped a lot of people, had a lot of things going on, and make you able to push whatever narrative you want.
They were some prodemocratic demonstrators. Laudable but sadly they had no chance of winning that fight. There were some genuinely weird people with weird demands too (like some far-right ultranationalist HKer). The attacks on some politician, journalist and medias, and extradition law passed at all cost, was a clear authoritarian push. But from a chinese perspective, it is just putting HK in line with the rest of the country. There was some weird disappearance of some protestor, the clear usage of the triad to inflict violence on some protestor, and some protestors turn violent too.
One could say, every country would react the same to a part of a country trying to secede. But if we look at, for example, Spain and Catalonia, will independence is firmly denied, there was way less violence and authoritarianism (Catalonia still have some special status).
All in all, the sad part is that some well-meaning idealistic kids might never be able to go back to HK. And with the integration with china, HK will slowly lose its identify and distinct culture. Now that it's no different than most other chinese territory, there is no real interest for foreign investor to invest there specifically, which was a part of what made HK rich. Its landscape will probably change a lot as the land value is not as prized anymore (which, tbf, might be a win for a lot of HKer). A lot of HKer now move to the bigger and richer Shenzhen for work, as more mandarin-speaking chinese move to HK. There are too many speakers for Cantonese to disappear overnight, but it might become a secondary language for most over time. The one you use to talk with you grandparent and feel slightly unique.
Openrouter is useful for quickly testing various models with just one API. In development, it's useful. I would not run it in production tho' for all the caveat mentioned. Go to the first party provider directly, it's cheaper usually. And the cost to rewrite to use their API is usually noting (you can even have both and a feature flag), especially if you just vibe code it.
I haven't really put much thought into this, but now that I think back, in my experience also it's USB cables that are the most fragile and likely to fail over time.
For me, the speed is the least interesting part of `uv`. What I like about it is what it bundle into a single bin : Managing installed python version, automatically creating local .venv for the project (I don't like software like pipenv who install the venv who knows where in a global directory of their choosing), support of pyproject.toml, including of the python version declared in it, and running script with dependencies.
None of it is unique to `uv` I believe, but it does it all, reliably, is easy to install, and easy to use. In terms of DX, for my use cases, it beat poetry, pipenv, pyenv (for python version management) and just using pip
UV can be built (or downloaded) as a single optionally statically linked with the libc executable file, with no other dependencies. That makes it very easy to distribute on weird systems.
Due to how BitTorrent tracker (the actual tracker part, as defined in BEP-3) works, you can cheat your reported upload. There is way to detect obvious cheater (if you claimed that you uploaded 1Tb on Torrent XYZ but the cumulative download on XYZ on the same period doesn't add up, that's sus), but due to the self-report nature of stats and potential loss and inaccuracy in the stats tracking (a legit client can report more upload than upload due to packet loss on the receiving end, how when the client stops counting, for example if a process was killed before sending the stats to the tracker). And due to the fact that it's p2p, you usually need to track and analyze behavior over several torrents to be sure. If torrent XYZ has 300Go download reported over a day, but over the same day seeder1 report 200Go uploaded and seeder2 report 150Go, you know it's likely that one of them is lying, but you don't know each one.
Here is an open secret : A lot of private tracker operator are not dev. Some of them just know how to host a phpBB and one of the open-source tracker and administer it, and that's it. Many private trackers have little to no custom dev done to them. So most of them don't have elaborate cheating detection.
Cheating will get you ban, but if you are subtle about it and don't try to claim enormous amount over little time, you can get away with it.
The proper way to cheat is to not leave a trace on the tracker where a tracker staff may or may not make correct judgement. It's called "ghost leeching." Basically you directly connect to known peers' IPs (e.g. from some heavy seedbox users) and never even report anything back to the tracker.
Of course, those peers where you ghost leech of then would correctly report the upload they generate (making THEM look suspicious of cheating by "over-reporting" upload.) It's impossible for any tracker staff to properly detect and attribute proper cheating in such cases, unless they can detect a pattern. The tracker staff objectively can only catch people that do really stupid things.
That's just the way BitTorrent and private tracker economics work. A "private" tracker is more like a social contract between its users to do the honourable thing, but you'll always have some idiots that do not get that, of course.
The limitation with ghost leeching is that it won't help raise your ratio. It's a way to avoid decreasing it (by never reporting download). If your ratio is bad and for reasons you want to increase it, you will have to generate upload one way or another. You can ghost leech and then seed the torrent you downloaded, but it can also look weird that you are now seeding a torrent that you never downloaded. But due to the nature of torrent, it is also possible.
But that's what I find fascinating. BitTorrent is a very cool tech, and not that hard to understand. It uses a lot of simple idea that works very well together. It's really fun to hack on it. And I add an obsession with findings 'cheating' methods a few years back. Overall, as you said, it's more of a social contract. None cared unless it was stupidly obvious.
Another cool thing about BLAKE3 is that it is a merkle tree. Not only it allows for good parallelism, but it also has a lot of cool property for data transfer. For example, you can check for partial validity, which allow for streaming error-detection and resend during the transfer. You only need to have the data and checksum in a way that you can start to reconstruct one or more subtree.
It's so human that many software engineers started to worry about automation and being replaced when it started to be something that might affect them.
And it is machine like that many software engineers still cheer on being replaced once it is happening.
Software engineers are the socially dumbest creatures on the planet and deserve every bit of scorn that was heaped on them at high school. The industry used them for multi level marketing since about 2010 and now has instructed them to direct the MLM against themselves.
Feels like an impossible project that will end up being 5% of what was advertised (the 5% being what was actually planned all along), but is made with folie des grandeurs to pump a stock who's hype has died down.
Took a look and when I got there, the first post was about bitcoin, the second was an add for a cryptocurrency app, the next one was about nostr and bitcoin. The fourth was actually unrelated to either ! But then it was crypto or nostr again. Terrible way to make a first impression (unless you are into crypto I suppose).
I don't really have this experience. A lot of business I have worked with followed the "let's just do it and figure out the risk later" approach. In highly regulated environment it was different, but then looking for ways to squirt around the rules was the game. See for example the CumCum (don't blame me, it was called like that) tax-evasion scheme put in place by french banks.
They were some prodemocratic demonstrators. Laudable but sadly they had no chance of winning that fight. There were some genuinely weird people with weird demands too (like some far-right ultranationalist HKer). The attacks on some politician, journalist and medias, and extradition law passed at all cost, was a clear authoritarian push. But from a chinese perspective, it is just putting HK in line with the rest of the country. There was some weird disappearance of some protestor, the clear usage of the triad to inflict violence on some protestor, and some protestors turn violent too. One could say, every country would react the same to a part of a country trying to secede. But if we look at, for example, Spain and Catalonia, will independence is firmly denied, there was way less violence and authoritarianism (Catalonia still have some special status).
All in all, the sad part is that some well-meaning idealistic kids might never be able to go back to HK. And with the integration with china, HK will slowly lose its identify and distinct culture. Now that it's no different than most other chinese territory, there is no real interest for foreign investor to invest there specifically, which was a part of what made HK rich. Its landscape will probably change a lot as the land value is not as prized anymore (which, tbf, might be a win for a lot of HKer). A lot of HKer now move to the bigger and richer Shenzhen for work, as more mandarin-speaking chinese move to HK. There are too many speakers for Cantonese to disappear overnight, but it might become a secondary language for most over time. The one you use to talk with you grandparent and feel slightly unique.
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