A Ponzi-scheme is a specific type of scam, it's not a generic word for any kind of unsustainable investment or scam.
This whole thread looks like someone saying "No, a boat is not a car" and the other going "but it does have an engine, right? It's a car. Let's not argue semantics"
To be charitable, I think it’s more likely that this is an entire area where regulation hasn’t caught up so we don’t have any common names available.
These coins are ponzi-like in that only the earliest of adopters have any chance and only if they know enough to get currency out without hitting an inflection point that brings down the whole thing. But that’s where the similarity ends - the mechanism is different, they don’t operate like a Bernie Madoff and they’re honest about the whole process.
This is something else and while it’s Ponzi-like, it’s a different beast. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with expanding the definition of Ponzi scheme for now, just so we have something to educate some irrationally exuberant retail investors…
If you're looking for the summary, it's about 1/4 the way in.
> Usually, the viruses that humans care about are successful because they shut down both of these signalling programs. The coronavirus is different. “It seems to block only one of those two arms,” tenOever told me. It inhibits the interferon response but does nothing about the cytokines; it evades the local defenses but allows the cells it infects to call for reinforcements. White blood cells are powerful weapons: they arrive on an inflammatory tide, destroying cells on every side, clogging up passages with the wreckage. They are meant to be used selectively, on invaders that have been contained in a small area. With the coronavirus, they are deployed too widely—a carpet bombing, rather than a surgical strike. As they do their work, inflammation distends the lungs, and debris fills them like a fog.
I've been doing some lab & modeling research on this, and it's more complex. I think it's a non-linear dynamics problem.
In a nutshell, SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) does block interferon response by using molecular mimics. Some of the proteins encoded in the virus are really similar to proteins in the interferon pathway, so this is not surprising. Still pretty unexplored and a nice route towards finding treatments.
Now, the interesting part is that the dynamics of interferon is very non-linear. Cells exchange interferon signals with other cells in the same tissue to pass information and coordinate with the immune system. There are fairly sophisticated models (using stochastic message passing!) that confirm lab observations on regular non-infected cells [1].
My hypothesis is that by blocking interferon in a sufficient number of cells on individuals with already disrupted innate immunity (due to ageing, insulin resistance, etc.) the system becomes chaotic. Infection by e.g. pneumococci is tolerated because the signaling is perturbed and then, all of a sudden, you get a massive amount of proinflammatory molecules secreted and cells decide to undergo apoptosis. That's the cytokine storm that everyone talks about.
Sadly, pursuing these ideas within academia is hard as most (but not all) biology labs are really hostile to mathematical models, even if they explain or predict things they can't using hand waving. Perhaps I should seek VC funding.
bio people are not frequently math people and vice versa. The undergraduate departments make fun of each other. This is changing slowly. I suspect that a big part of the reason is that biology is complicated while math is good at dealing with distilling the behavior of a few essential elements.
When you start to find essential elements, they get mathified (look at DNA) but look how much experimental work it takes to do that? Scaling up experiments can also take some math, but once you figure out the trick, you just have a lot of experiments to run....
And this is why steroids like decadron are helpful in the second phase (now being called the inflammatory phase by many in the ID community) of the infection. Steroids decrease inflammation / immune response.
That's not exactly why it's steroids. If this was the main mechanism we'd use more effective immunosuppressants. As is, stronger immunosuppressants show worse survival rates. You want to keep some immune system activity to not get a secondary infection and fight the virus.
Corticosteroids also kickstart healing process (not really in COVID) and regrowth - you also race against tissue destruction. Most importantly they barely reduce scar formation. And they actually improve breathing via action on alveoli as well as reduce swelling.
The specific two to use are hydrocortisone and dexamethasone based on studies thus far, in critical patients - ones put on respirators. (Prednisolone could also work.)
This would be the proper description for the spanish flu. But with Covid-19 it's different. No cykotine, but BK overreaction. Healthy immune systems are not triggered to kill the body, only weak and old are in danger. Besides the neurological damage in some.
Not only that, but the parent is disregarding the human capital put on the line. Time spent educating and specialising is the equivalent of a bet at times.
You know you can put a key with a null value onto a topic. If your backend object store gives you data by key, this should give you exactly what you want.
Later on, you can put a small subset of the data in value to assist with filtering or caching (if you want).
I'm not clear on what you're trying to suggest, here. I would like a system that presents itself the same as a Kafka broker, to both producers and consumers (who are just working with regular messages and topics, not object-handles), but where the MQ broker they're talking to is internally just a shared-nothing stateful write-through WAL proxy for an object store. (Sort of like how, with actual logging, you could think of the local rsyslog daemon on an instance as a "shared-nothing stateful WAL-writeback-caching proxy for an object store." Except rsyslog lives on the producer, whereas this write-through WAL proxy would live on the broker.)
In such a design, "partitions" and partition ownership would only apply to the newest segment of the log; all older segments would be globally-available, because as soon as a log-segment is finalized, it would get pushed to the object store and become an object.
Every node would then be doing Hierarchical Storage Management, with a local LRU cache of segments, populated just-in-time in response to requests, by the object store. (This is what I meant by the comparison to Datomic's storage architecture.)
A lot of the technical parts of this could be achieved by just FUSE-mounting an S3 bucket to a directory on each Kafka node, and convincing the node to move log segments into that directory once they're done. But Kafka would still be wasting time and resources replicating segments between nodes that already now "have" them; and also, without further hacking, nodes wouldn't realize that they now also "have" 99% of the segments of every log potentially-available to serve. A system that was built this way from the ground up would end up a lot simpler than Kafka.
> This is a strange sentiment to find on a board that is at least a partially targeted at aspiring company founders.
It's not inconsistent. Most founders are trying to create companies that provide economic value; one can believe that the creation of economic value is a good thing, while also believing that more of the economic surplus created should directly go to the common good.
Exactly. Everything he's saying seems reasonable, but the consequence is that there are single people that own 150,000,000,000$. Such a staggeringly absurd amount of money cannot be be a good thing for the public at large. We shouldn't rely on the good will of our fief lords to donate their money, in fact just look at Mr 150 billion who openly says "I can't think of anything that deserves a donation".
The corollary is obvious. Tax the ultra-rich at high marginal rates to force them to contribute back to the society that made their success possible in the first place.
The money is a byproduct of a good thing. Amazon is a net positive for humanity. Bezos having $150B is a byproduct of the amazing thing he and many others made.
So a single person having that much can certainly be a good thing, or a neutral thing, or a bad thing. But it’s not something that I have to think about fixing.
The literature is really clear that taxing the rich won’t do what you think it will do. It’s also surprising because this sentiment somehow thinks the rich are not already taxed. Wealth is taxed during transactions, not at rest. And the rich buy stuff like all others.
Assuming a JWT implementation accepts only a fixed header (all header fields must be present and match, no additional fields can be present), are there any other issues with "just use jwt"?
I do like using JWT.
But its point is to offer flexibility. If you fix the entire header i.e. use a single signature method, you might just as well concat that signature directly.
In other words if you stop utilizing JWT, you won’t have JWT specific problems.
