So there is a middleman that can be blamed or used as a fall guy or whatnot. Also, non governments can arbitrarily deny services without recourse for customers, whereas governments in developed countries have to provide justification.
it's a personal account in the ECB, it's insured by the ECB's digital printer and interest will likely be whatever the ECB decides; it'll need to pick a value that doesn't blow up commercial banks as the article says, and even if does and chooses a very low deposit limit, it'll still cause stress.
> The study, requested by European legislators, was aimed at evaluating the risks that a digital currency, essentially an electronic wallet guaranteed by the ECB, would pose to the banking sector under different scenarios, including a hypothetical "flight to safety".
I believe the idea is not to provide any interest rate, precisely so people will be inclined to hold their savings in a "regular" bank, and only use the digital euro as a "wallet" with amount limits and no interest, similar to holding the cash yourself.
> it'll need to pick a value that doesn't blow up commercial banks as the article says, and even if does and chooses a very low deposit limit, it'll still cause stress.
or, more likely, everyone in the EU will ignore this "digital euro" nonsense and it will just be another unnecessary waste of taxpayer money.
I really don't understand the hostility here. The digital euro seems like a good way to reduce the power of companies like visa and mastercard, and reduce the fees too. If the government is providing a way to pay freely in a digital way, why would I pay a company to do the same (or worse, see the last scandal between the card companies and steam)?
1. You can easily have a local payments system without creating a new digital currency. So it's not hard to make people wonder, in perfectly good faith, why those two distinct ideas are being bundled right now.
2. Before you portray disagreement as "hostility," please try to keep the site code of conduct in mind.
What makes you think that card comapnies/steam scandal wouldn’t happen with digital euro. EU could easily put some constraints on money usage and they wouldn’t need to justify it to anyone…
And the hostility probably come from experience with EU that makes decisions solely in interest of politicians and corporations instead of EU citizens in my opinion.
The EU doesn't have anything close to the police force necessary to enforce a cash ban in the face of public opposition, and doesn't have the money to pay for one.
> This is effectively already the case in parts of Scandinavia
Ironically this isn't quite as consequence-free as some people thought:
"In 2018 a former deputy governor of Sweden’s central bank predicted that by 2025 the country would probably be cashless.
Seven years on, that prediction has turned out to be pretty much true. Just one in 10 purchases are made with cash, and card is the most common form of payment, followed by the Swedish mobile payment system Swish, launched by six banks in 2012 and now ubiquitous. Other mobile phone payment services are also growing quickly.
In fact, according to the central bank’s annual payments report, published this month, Sweden and Norway have the lowest amount of cash in circulation, as a percentage of GDP, in the world.
But in the context of today, with war in Europe, unpredictability in the US and the fear of Russian hybrid attacks almost a part of daily life in Sweden, life without cash is not proving the utopia that perhaps it once promised to be.
Such is the perceived severity of the situation that the authorities are trying to encourage citizens to keep and use cash in the name of civil defence..."
It’s an engineering problem: you have to design the system so that it remains functional in this exact scenario - it follows that the system isn’t just code and build artifacts, but also its deployment processes.
Hi, Thanks for the reply. This is what i figured too. So there is essentially no way to achieve this without service downtime when using application which is not written to handle those kind of situations (eg. 3rd party things).
Again an engineering problem. You can deploy with zero downtime and people have been doing this for decades. It takes infrastructure like load balancers, ability to run versions in parallel and runtime support for feature flags, but it’s absolutely doable and ultimately just another day in the office for anyone with global operations. A lot of 3rd party tools actually support these workflows for this exact reason.
You gonna pause writes for cutover so while not downtime, specifically for postgres load balancers, ability to run versions in parallel not gonna help you there.
Typical use case would be a anyone who has global presence, but serves users in particular geos (think AWS): you want a global user database but it’s soooo convenient to be able to join with regional data in a single query.
Is it fair to categorize that it is a pyramid like scheme but with a twist at the top where there are a few (more than a one) genuine wins and winners?
No, it's more like a winner take all market, where a few winners will capture most of the value, and those who sit on the sidelines until everything is figured out are left fighting over the scraps.
I'm not sure, why must it be so? In cell-phones we have Apple and Android-phones. In OSes we have Linux, Windows, and Apple.
In search-engines we used to have just Google. But what would be the reason to assume that AI must similarly coalesce to a single winner-take-all? And now AI agents are much providing an alternative to Google.
>I'm not sure, why must it be so? In cell-phones...
And then described a bunch of winners in a winner take all market.
Do you see many people trying to revive any of the apple/android alternatives or starting a new one?
Such a market doesn't have to end up in a monopoly that gets broken up.
Plenty of rather sticky duopolies or otherwise severely consolidated markets and the like out there.
* PCs (how are Altair and Commodore doing? also Apple ultimately lost the desktop battle until they managed to attack it from the iPod and iPhone angle)
* search engines (Altavista, Excite, etc)
* social networks (Friendster, MySpace, Orkut)
* smartphones (Nokia, all Windows CE devices, Blackberry, etc)
The list is endless. First mover advantage is strong but overrated. Apple has been building a huge business based on watching what others do and building a better product market fit.
Yes, exactly! These are all examples of markets where a handful of winners (or sometimes only one) have emerged by investing large amounts of money in developing the technology, leaving everyone else behind.
LLMs aren’t high school students, they’re blobs of numbers which happen to speak English if you poke them right. Use the tool when it’s good at what it does.
Read about the jagged frontier. IanCal is right: this is a perfect example of using the tool wrong; you’ve focused on a very narrow use case which is surprisingly hard for the matmuls to not mess up and extrapolate, but extrapolation is incorrect here because the capability frontier is fractal and not continuous.
It’s not surprisingly hard at all, when you consider they have no understanding of the tasks they do nor of the subject material. It’s just a good example of the types of tasks (anything requiring reliability or correct results) that they are fundamentally unsuited to.
Sadly it seems the best use-case for LLMs at this point is bamboozling humans.
When you take a step back it's surprising that these tools can be actually useful at all in nontrivial tasks, but being surprised doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Bamboozling rarely enough for harnesses to keep them in line and ability to inference-time self-correct when bamboozling is detected either by the model itself or by the harness is very useful at least in my work. It's a question of using the tool correctly and understanding its limitations, which is hard if you aren't willing to explore the boundaries and commit to doing it every month basically.
the dates on x axis are all wrong, hardware was cheap at least 30 years earlier. people were complaining about the concept illustrated by this chart for all this time, too. I was using Python professionally before 2010, ask me how I know.
> and yet when Americans set foot on European soil the first thought they have is 'everyone is so thin'.
I’m not sure how this interacts with the point I’m making.
> if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) .
Sure, free sugars are associated with risk (which is reflected in dietary guidelines). Plenty of UPFs are not (which is why they generally aren’t flagged as a concern in dietary guidelines).
> (3) Not more than 35 percent of its total weight shall be composed of sugar, including naturally occurring and added sugar. This paragraph shall not apply to fruits, vegetables that have not been deep fried, or a dried fruit and nut and seed combination.
wonder who'll be the first to argue that HFCS isn't sugar.
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