svetb

Not OP, but we have contractors in Nigeria, and paying them via regular bank transfer is nearly impossible. For example many banks will outright refuse to make SWIFT transactions to Nigerian accounts.

This is just one example of a few factors that lead to a sort of isolation from international banking.

Europe “missed the Internet” (and the US didn’t) because of various underlying factors - smaller/more fragmented markets, a more muted entrepreneurial culture, shallower pools of capital, etc.

I don’t think the fact that Google, Amazon, and Facebook were built in the US is down to EU regulations.

It’s no more difficult to start a tech company in Europe than it is in the US, and it’s generally no more onerous to grow it, from a regulatory perspective. But ambitious entrepreneurs often head to the US in order to tap into a larger market and more developed ecosystem.

So I’m not sure the analogy is that valid. But yeah, I do think that EU regulation of AI may be an additional factor that skews the playing field.

The absolute value of a complex number is defined in a different way than that of a real number. For complex number z it is sqrt(Re(z)^2 + Im(z)^2). GP’s examples are correct, I don’t think there’s any ambiguity there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_value

Am not the author of that comment, but the fact that comes to mind is that aluminum is used for virtually all transmission and distribution lines - for price reasons - even though copper has better conductivity.

If we did discover a room-temperature superconductor, I suspect it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compared to what’s already available.

> WireGuard supports TCP and UDP directly, which allows securing MQTT or AMQP directly without adding an extra layer of HTTP/QUIC.

MQTT over TLS is pretty standard, and supported out of the box by virtually all clients/brokers. I suspect the same is true for AMQP.

Some time ago I did a set of benchmarks of MQTT+TLS vs MQTT+WireGuard. Although I was rooting for WireGuard to blow TLS out of the water, the overall bandwidth requirements are quite similar. Under normal conditions WireGuard overhead is a bit higher than TLS, though various network pathologies can swing things the other way. The main one being roaming: if the client frequently switches networks, WG tends to handle this far more gracefully than TLS (not surprising given the underlying design and protocols).

In short, TLS can actually be made to work really well in a context like this - I jotted some notes on an optimal setup here: https://medium.com/p/b880285da526

Beyond this, there are some really interesting efforts to unify MQTT and QUIC - from an architectural perspective I feel like that’s the future for IoT comms. (https://www.emqx.com/en/blog/getting-started-with-mqtt-over-...)

Mypy can work really well in many cases, but we seem to get bitten by bugs on a daily/weekly basis. There are >1,000 currently open on Github [0], so it doesn't take much effort to hit one. And having the type-checker tell you that something's not valid when it actually is is a real turn-off...means that we end up with code that's riddled with "# type: ignore", which kind of defeats the point.

Pylance (the VSCode built-in linter, based on Pyright I believe) tends to do a better job than Mypy, but not as easy to integrate into CI. It's a real shame that the Python ecosystem doesn't have anything nearly as robust as TypeScript.

[0] https://github.com/python/mypy/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue...

Thanks for the pointer, this seems really neat! Although from what I can tell it primarily provides a data interface geared towards relational databases (or other record-oriented data sources).

I played around a little and am missing actual spreadsheet functionality - like the ability to do calculations, or other manipulations that you could do on tabular data in Excel/Google Sheets (and presumably Rows). Am I missing something?