I would suggest the mods change the title here to something that communicates that this project hasn't been associated with Facebook in years (maybe "ex-Facebook"?); and also that this isn't something that just came into existence, but rather has existed for years. As it is, this is drawing comments mostly from people assuming that this is something just happening now, leading to very non-productive conversation.
Facebook has abandoned Diem. It is now an open-source project that's ripe to play around with. There are some neat, performant design choices in HotStuff, the underlying consensus protocol.
I actually thought they were going to go ahead with it, lawmakers be dammed, in the spirit of Uber. Laws don’t apply to big tech until they come into direct conflict with banking I guess.
> Note to readers: On December 1, 2020, the Libra Association was renamed to Diem Association. This report was published before the Association released White Paper v2.0 in April 2020, which included a number of key updates to the Libra payment system. Outdated links have been removed, but otherwise, this report has not been modified to incorporate the updates and should be read in that context. Features of the project as implemented may differ based on regulatory approvals or other considerations, and may evolve over time.
They have to throw Facebook's name if they want traction. Devs and public alike have a really bad perception of Facebook. Tbh, Zuckerberg needs to resign, enjoy its billions and let someone else to start the PR "healing" process.
PR healing won't be enough if Facebook continues its dystopian practices. What Facebook really needs is a deep ideological change along with new management.
Facebook has obviously just been seeking to maximize profit for their shareholders as possible (maybe at the expense of some people, but no more so than any cigarette or oil company). Are you implying that ideology should be changed?
> Facebook has obviously just been seeking to maximize profit for their shareholders as possible .... Are you implying that ideology should be changed?
Not me.
But they are a poster child for greed destroying a fabulous business. They were on the verge of connecting every single person on the planet, becoming the hub of everybodie's communications.
And they threw it away for a bit of extra monetisation
That's a contradiction. Either profit ideology is good or it isn't, but you're trying to say it's situational, uncaring markets don't work that way. Facebook/any private company goal should never be anything egalitarian, and if it is, that's arbitrage and will eventually be stripped away.
Bob Iger (ex-CEO of Disney) is the king of this: “We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money"
> Are you implying that ideology should be changed?
Yes. Privacy and Monetization can go hand in hand but this is a problem Big Tech isn't looking to solve because they do not consider it a problem in the first place.
If we continue on the current path, the dystopia will only get worse. Companies that refuse to innovate in this space are going to face the consequences sooner or later or on the other hand, people that refuse to stop supporting companies that enable censorship and surveillance will face the consequences as well.
Lol, remember that time like a year ago when Facebook had redefined their company to chase some other thing of the moment that has nothing to do with the new thing they have totally redefined their company to chase.
a) VR is completely aligned with the mission of the company which is to connect people together.
b) Meta has always been chasing their competition. It's why they have overhauled their feed algorithm multiple times, acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, implemented Stories etc.
c) They are hardly flailing around. Apple has shown them how sensitive and vulnerable their business is to privacy changes. And that if they can own the whole stack and be the Apple of potentially the next computing paradigm then that is a goal worth betting the company on.
> the mission of the company which is to connect people together.
I guarantee you Zuck doesn't wake up every morning and say "how can I connect people just a little bit better today". He was just able to say this because the world threw money at him for 15 years so he didn't have to worry about that part.
Facebooks mission is to make money. Crypto didn't help them with their mission. Recreating miis with a vr headset is doing the exact opposite of that mission.
Time will tell. Maybe he will look like a genius in 5 years. I've got skin in the game betting against that
every company's mission is to make money but how they do it is the real question.
facebook, instagram, whatsapp are all designed to connect with people. VR makes sense especially with facebook users aging out and instagram losing to tiktok.
Thought experiment: if you're in a situation like Zimbabwe ~2010, or Argentina recently, who do you trust more with your currency? Facebook, or your own government?
Relatedly, with ~3B users, this is why I think the regulators shut this down before it started.
Yeah, otherwise it would be impossible to print on-demand to fund hostile, militarized occuptations of other countries OR punish people for saving rather than spending by diluting the value of existing units of the currency. What a horrible world we'd live in without granting governments such abilities. /s
How does a deflationary currency not simply divide the haves and the have-nots even more? As a world we need to move towards greater equality, not lesser.
Equality of opportunity leads to unequal outcomes because people are not equally productive, equally competent, equally motivated, or equally skilled.
To ask for equality of outcome is to ask for equity, which is a dangerous and disgusting ideology as it requires totalitarianism to enforce. It goes against the deeply western values of freedom and individualism.
If you want equality of outcome, you're welcome to leave and move to a society that shares your values. Just know that your destination society may not allow you to change your mind and come back, because again, enforcing the objective of equality of outcome requires totalitarianism.
To put this into more SWE friendly terms, imagine human beings as different inputs. Some are large, some are small. The socioeconomic system is the function the inputs are being fed into. A equality of opportunity function acts as an exponential multiplier - the 2's become 8's, the 10's become 1000's, and the 100's become 1,000,000's. This is why even those struggling to stay above the poverty line in the USA are often in the top 10% of income globally. Even schoolteachers here making a measly $30,000/y are unfathomably rich by the standards of the 700,000,000+ people living on less than $2/day.
It is true that the 1,000,000s and the 8's have a larger gap than they did when they were 2's and 100's, but even the 2 is substantially better off.
An equality of outcome function takes the floor of the inputs, and simply reduces the value of every other input to match (plus a little added corruption for those at the top). 2's remain 2's. 10's are reduced to 2's. 100's are reduced to 10's ("some animals are more equal than others"). This is fundamentally why the Soviet Union failed - the socioeconomic system kneecapped human potential.
Got it, so your response is "it doesn't, and that's good because <word salad>".
The equality of opportunity vs outcome dichotomy conservatives like you present is nonsense. Individualism and freedom (values I care about) are made better with greater redistribution, not worse.
I'm not remotely close to a conservative, I'm pro-abortion (not pro-choice), anti-war, am staunchy opposed to the existence of social security and medicare altogether, think the DoD should be defunded, don't hold any religious / spiritual views and don't think they have any place in public life, am dating a trans woman, I believe Reagan, Bush, and Trump were all among the top 10 worst presidents we ever had, etc.
It's clear to me that you're engaged in partisan ad-hominem rather than a rational, reason-based debate, and therefore are not arguing in good faith. Have a nice day.
>pro-abortion
>anti-war
>think the DoD should be defunded
>don't hold any religious / spiritual views
>dating a trans woman
>hate Reagan, Bush, and Trump
It is cognitive dissonance to classify these positions and views as right-wing, plain and simple. You're projecting a binary worldview onto a nuanced world.
You are (economically) right-wing because of your views about equality of opportunity vs outcome, which is an incredibly right-wing framing of the debate. You dating a trans woman or hating Reagan doesn't make you not right-wing; plenty of trans women are themselves right-wing.
I have a tagging tool for HN and the more used tags are: big-tech, oss, cryptocurrency, dev-language... The only missing tags are "climate" and "entrepreneur".
Edit: the perfect headline would be "How Facebook acquired my climate friendly cryptocurrency startup, rewrote it in rust and open sourced it".
Couldn't be more wrong about rust. People are using WASM with Figma everyday and Rust is the most production ready for both WASM and non-WASM targets. Sure, Rust is the future, but it's also the present.
There are already versions of OpenEmbedded leenucks that can't be built (whole system distributions, not the kernel.) To repair that you have to do A LOT of work rebuilding recipies, guessing which patches were included in various source bases.
And now we're going to have to maintain version closures for multiple editions of rust (unless there's a fiat indicating leenucks use is fixed at a particular edition.)
I like Rust. But the last time I used it extensively was around 0.8 and I just don't have the energy to keep learning new editions every couple years. And after surviving the Python 2.3 -> 2.5 -> 2.7 transitions, changing your syntax every couple years just sort of makes me want to curl up in a little ball and cry myself to sleep.
Seriously. I would rather keep coding in C. I hate C. Okay, maybe I just have a mild dislike for C. But I have non-trivial C programs I wrote in 1982 that still compile and run. I have one or two Rust programs from 5 years ago that don't compile and a whole bunch of Rust code from 10 years ago that flat-out doesn't compile.
I dunno. Backwards compatibility is a thing for me.
Linux use is fixed to a specific version of Rust, not just an edition.
Rust today is very different from Rust 0.8. And the changes in the last few years have generally been small and in targeted areas that need work. It's nothing like Python in the old days.
Backwards compatibility is a thing for Rust as well. Almost all old code in existence works without modification in newer Rust. (The breaking changes are mostly soundness bugs, and possibly some type inference.)
But of course Linux kernel is fixed to a specific version of Rust. It needs unstable features [0]. Changing the version may break. Which reinforces dingosity's point about the language:
> (Rust) needs to stabilize before it's used for critical infrastructure.
+ A particular version of the Rust toolchain is required. Newer versions may or may not work because the kernel depends on some unstable Rust features, for the moment.
They decided it was good enough. It will be locked in for some time. Mainline Rust development will be separate but related to Linux Kernel Rust development. It will be like using TinyGo instead of Golang because you're doing WebAssembly or embedded.
> needs to stabilize before it's used for critical infrastructure
What do you view as unstable? What features have you seen disappear? What do you know of that existed in the past post-1.0 that doesn't exist today or has materially changed?
I've been writing rust since about 1.4 back in 2015. I think once in ~2017 I ran into an issue where a bump in the compiler cause an existing crate to not build. That's it. It was bug that was quickly fixed. As style changes and new crates and features are build, old ones are still very stable/reliable and can be intermingled inside the same program. I have trouble thinking of a more stable ecosystem I've worked in.
Rust is already used in a ton of critical infrastructure. Major CDN services (CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly) use it for critical HTTP and DNS infrastructure, and other major cloud services that everyone here uses daily are using Rust.
Sure - not every open source library out there is mature and perfect. But that doesn't mean the language isn't ready to be used.
> rust (great language, tool ecosystem and community, but needs to stabilize before it's used for critical infrastructure.)
There's hardly another mainstream language out there that's more stable than Rust: the standard library as well as the language itself follow a strict backward compatibility policy – breaking changes are only allowed to fix safety-relevant bugs.
Rust is very cool. It is a language I have been waiting for since 1999
But it is not ready for critical infrastructure for two reasons:
1) It is not defined. the definition of rust is "the compiler accepts it"
2) There is one implementation
I use rust for a lot of things, things that I really want to be solid and reliable.
But I would not want to use it for systems where lives were at risk.
That is not a domain I work in, so I am hazy on what is available but I know the avionics people have systems and processes. Have they adopted Rust yet?
Rust will be excellent in this space. But it needs definition and alternative implementations first. Probably will not be long.
While I’m not sure about avionics, there’s some aerospace and automotive uses in non-critical places. A version of the rust compiler is undergoing certification so that it can be, but that work is not yet complete.
Also, there are multiple implementations, though they are in various stages of completion.
I work in a safety critical critical software and we're starting to use Rust. Most other things at work are C or Ada, with a sprinkling of C++. Having a formal spec is nice I guess? But 90% of our chips are obscure special purpose CPUs anyway, so we're always trusting the vendors closed source version of gcc, and we find plenty of bugs. One of the upsides (from my perspective) of rust is that obscure platforms are less well supported, so we'll likely end up with an ARM core. This limits chip choices, but it means we end up using the same backend that apple does for their watch/phone/etc, which gives us a lot of confidence.
Sorry for the daft question. Just to clarify, do you mean that the vendor modifies gcc and doesn’t release the source, or that the vendor has its home-grown C compiler that is functionally equivalent to gcc?
