I suspect this is true of many great songwriters, maybe even most of them. I would even argue that studying music theory may even make you a worse songwriter, because the most innovative songwriters don't seem to follow some clearly established rulebook, but rather they bend/break the "rules" unknowingly because their focus is on what they are feeling/hearing rather than something more analytical.

For example, McCartney tells a fun story about The Beatles traveling across Liverpool to learn a single B7 chord in their early days: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_r5B1AhP1Fo

I was referring more to being well read in music theory in the academic sense. I am doubtful McCartney ever picked up a book on the subject. Traveling to meet someone so they can show you how to position your fingers so you can play a B7 chord is a bit different than that in my opinion.

Music - rhythm, harmony and melody - has patterns. Those patterns can be described / named. There are systems to also write them down.

When you mention reading / writing music and music theory, western notation and western music theory are what first comes to mind for most of us here. They are obviously not the only ways. Any one of us can trivially make our own systems, or adopt tiny portions of the western system. I have no doubts that people have done that.

From my personal experience, back we were teens, my friend group and I knew a tiny bit of theory (5ths, major, minor, 7th chords + pentatonic / blues scales) so we could use that in communication. The other thing we'd do is refer to motifs by citing them from songs, like "drum beat like When the Levee Breaks" or "strumming pattern like Where is My Mind). Or "for the brigde, turn it around like in Goddamn Lonely Love". Your group knows the same songs, and then you just cite that + show someone something on a guitar.

If you play with a wider group of musicians, a language likely starts to appear, and things get called fixed names more often. No doubt that all the blues people did it, the Beatles and that whole scene did it, ...

Now, if you're into music enough, and want to communicate with other musicians from different backgrounds and genres, it makes sense to just learn the regular western notation (because it's convenient for noticing harmony) and theory (because it has names for all the concepts). It's a bit infuriating that such fancy names ("dominant", "leading tone") are given to such seemingly simple things, but this is true of any jargon.

I've seen the equivalent with self-taught programmers, where they understand some CS concept, but can't name it properly. Maybe in your local demoscene, it got called something else, because nobody has formal CS knowledge. That was quite frequent before the internet, but still is possible when people do something as a hobby.

But for western music theory and notation, you can use it strictly descriptively and not prescriptively. Learn some, then transcribe your favorite songs, write down the progressions in roman-numeral-notation or something, figure out which scales are used, figure out how melodies fit over chord changes, ... Shame music education is closely tied to a classical (and / or jazz) repertoire in most places, it doesn't need to be.

But in any case, both playing well and writing songs obviously takes a lot of practice and effort, and you use whatever you have at your disposal to help. The "we don't practice, we don't care, this just comes out of our soul on its own" is plainly disingenuous, that's the most toxic part of it. But you can't write music without theory, at least your own pidgin theory.

Capitalism is all about aligning incentives. Those of us who have experienced startups know just how important it is to have your employees aligned with the interests of the company in the form of equity grants. I've always personally wondered why this isn't more common outside of Silicon Valley. I respect the goal of researching these topics more deeply.

I actually experienced two successful startups (one YC funded even), stayed few years past acquisition in both, seen those rsu and such, and also seen communism with my eyes a little bit. I had some close relatives who paid party fees to soviet communist party for about half a century too, true believers if you can say so. Heard the stories, recognize the pitch.

It does sound very much familiar to me. Maybe RSU grants work a little better compared to having a trade union or a literal commune, more transactional maybe, more appropriate for inherently bourgeoise knowledge work as opposed to working on a steel mill, but I have a deep suspicion it's all the same both in intent and sometimes in the end results too.

https://ethereumclassic.org/blog/2024-04-03-ethereum-classic...

Are those appropriate sources?

This would be like finding a quote from some old poorly maintained Linux distribution and attributing quotes from the maintainers as being representative of all kernel developers.

While I must admit that I have some anti-cryptocurrency biases, I am also not that familiar with the cryptocurrency world. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge.

The industry cannot appeal to the protections of law enforcement, civil tort, and other features of the regulated banking system, without simultaneously undermining the "crypto" part. If you're going to summon authorities when hackers hack, you're no better off than if you just acted like any other bank and stored the client's balance in an excel sheet.

Is this really an accurate characterization of "the original idea"? And according to whom?

I personally know of at least one person who was able to escape Russia at the very beginning of the Ukraine war because cryptocurrency was a viable way for his brother in America to fund his escape despite sanctions and other hurdles.

On top of that, many traders were involved in a "Yen Carry Trade". Meaning they were borrowing Yen (because of the near-zero rates which beat out the 5% USD rates) and were using it to trade equities, crypto, whatever.

When the Yen started gaining against the dollar, these traders were actually losing money (since they were short Yen due to their Yen-denominated debt). This caused an unwind, meaning the traders wanted to close their positions (sell their equities, crypto, whatever) and buy back Yen to repay their debt, which pushed the Yen up further.

The only "infrastructure" in the traditional sense operated by him was a static website hosted somewhere online (which was eventually taken down at the request of law enforcement). The static website offered an optional interface to the Ethereum network for convenience in interacting with the deployed smart contract. The network requests from this website were made to a public Ethereum API provider specified by the end user through their own general-purpose Ethereum wallet browser extension.

If he had not deployed anything and it was just code in his repo I would have said this is a really dangerous ruling. It opens up every open source dev to be on the hook for any use of their software.

On the other hand if this was something deployed then it becomes much more subjective.

So which is more likely?

1. Uniswap Labs, a Delaware C Corp based in NYC, is risking everything to burn millions or billions of dollars in order to place fake trades and bolster volume numbers.

2. Uniswap, the top on-chain exchange on Ethereum (a network where the primary use-case is creating and trading assets, and which has an ecosystem market cap of something like $800B) has over the course of over 5.5 years, done $2T in all-time volume (~1 billion / day on average)?

Occam's razor says 2.

Are there any practical advantages to high yield savings account, then? Or do they only exist for people who don't understand how to buy money market funds?

I personally like CDs since the rate is locked and everyday someone is calling for a rate cut.

If the spread was 5%, the calculation would be different, of course.

I'm not a power user. I used Mint mostly for a window into the current state of my accounts, and to check recent transactions. I find the Monarch UI to be snappier and less laggy than Mint, which makes sense given it seems like Mint was not a very well-funded project at Intuit.

I've toyed around a bit with Monarch's transaction tagging and grouping features and they seem to do what I expect. I've also played with their budgeting feature which is helpful as a way for me to try to keep tabs on my spending per-category month-to-month.

Personally I do prefer the idea of paying for a service like this, but that's because I know it will probably decay if it's not supported monetarily by users. I also prefer my data _not_ be sold to third parties (which Monarch promises.. for now). Unfortunately I suspect the end goal for Monarch is to get acquired by one of the FinTech giants which probably sadly means it sees a similar fate to Mint down the road.

Unfortunately the importers were just terrible compared to Mint's. I had to re-login to each account on Monarch every time I used it, and I would get constant spam SMS notifications from my bank as their importers would run in the background - often throughout the night.

I know that Monarch uses 3rd party importers, so its technically "out of their control" - but it is a key aspect to the usability of their product.

I also understand that there are security trade offs here - in terms of 2FA, but ultimately on the user side here - I need something that is usable, and "just works". Especially if I am going to pay a premium for it.