Not really.

No. A smear compaign does not use facts. It is based on rhetoric. You can't refute rhetoric with facts. Because there are no facts to refute.

"I'm not a particular fan of x politician, but if you can't see a smear campaign for what it is, I can't help you."

I refuted the message and I shot the messenger.

I don't know, but to me it seems like nobody wants to give the UN $23bn, in the same way nobody wants to give their own money to help a stranger keep smoking crack.

I used to read the FT, but I stopped reading when I realized there's no value anymore, when the entirity of financial markets began to operate on insider trading. I suppose there's always still the use in observing and learning how narratives are spun.

25 years ago, you could still read it and glean some insights, follow the money, read it again later and see that you could have made money from reading it. Now, it just seems to be either columns laden with political persuassion (like this one) or a kind of financial almanac (not much use unless you are Marty Mcfly.)

You can palpably sense the FT's HR policy selecting only views supportive to trade dynamics that benefit their own board. Certainly never overstepping the boundaries of questioning the status-quo's narrative on everything that eminates from its pro-global ideological agenda. Would anyone actually believe that their is no underlying policy to cast aspertions that challenge the status-quo or favor the institutions that the publication represents?

Like I read someone else write today about a completely different politician, in a completely different geographic region. "I'm not a particular fan of x politician, but if you can't see a smear campaign for what it is, I can't help you."

I'd buy the one that was not some weird, communism-era-insprired synthetic gruel masquarading as an authentic animal product that came from a farm.

I was thinking many of these tiny ad-like transaction were all of the probes. So, they just use HTLC, then release it. Thanks for the explainer. That's much clearer now.

I wonder whether they'd be some kind of WOT system for nodes that are well-established and known to you. A rule set, like, has this node opened a channel to you in the past, did you initiate a channel with this node in the past, has one of your trusted nodes opened a channel to this node in the past, and so on.. that might develop.

Sounds curiously like the L1 spam problem, in that if you have some filters it stops some spam, but if your channels are all zero-fee, it's kind of like leaving your letter box open to mail or anything that will fit in that hole.

Default channel base-fee to 10 sats, what would that do for probing?

Meant to say sub-optimal

I see! But if a node processes a payment through a channel, ergo, you know that its capacity is greater than the payment. Isn't this comparible to paying for a chocolate bar in cash with a $20 note and the other witnesses knowing you have $20? I.e. participation requires some kind of reveal?

Does the privacy problem lie with network stats analysis tools?

The spam part is clearer as a problem to me. However, if all channels have a minimum fee, does this not help?

Why exactly is probing undesirable? I understand it's definetly optimal. But I mean, we even have probing built into third party tools like balance-of-satoshi (bos probe.)

Serious question though. Not a dev. Is this mainly a privacy concern, or just spammy?

Is there any news on what has been happening with regard to the 4,600 displaced residents? I hope they will be able to start a new life.

I'ts also ironic for anyone with a memory before the EU existed, that there was probably a lot of easy access to trade and tourism from all the same countries, including to and from the UK. All you needed was a passport and you could happily fly or drive from country to country, get a stamp in your passport and enjoy the local specialities of each country and bring much back with you, up to a certain amount.

Hypermarkets were invented for the purpose and everyone benefited enourmously from the simplicility and commonsense of rules and regulation on import, export and trade.

The Euro really brought nothing of benefit to the region to my knowledge.

I reserve a large dose of skepticism for the genius of the Oracle of Omaha, and not being from the US, I'm pretty ignorant on this history between them. But seeing Dell put there money where their mouth is reinvigorates my hope for humanity.

Europe and the UK seem pretty close to circling the drain of civilization, and I'm not aware of any examples of companies that would dream of similar initiatives. The dialogue between government and industry doesn't even seem to exist.

Benefitting the future of a nation, shows the world that corporations can straddle the fence of self-interest and at least invest back into itself through future generations. My hat's off.

For some reason when I read this I wasn't surprised that it's Dell that's doing this. Can't say I know much about them, other than they are nowhere near the size of some of the largest in tech, and makes me wonder why you haven't seen similar industry leaders that grew in the US to 10-100X Dell's market cap, make a similar gesture.

That's pretty interesting.

Beyond pure entertainment, what do you think the underlying meaning of an alien predator finding companionship with a Wayland-Yutani synthetic was all about, if any?

I had to re-examine the concept of reflexive qualatitive research. After that, I couldn't understand why any intelligent researcher would expect a language model to be reflexive.

Surely, reflexive qualitative research is undertaken by humans and directed by organizations and corporations?

We could simply summarize this as observer paradox.

Whenever you're not sure what to do, build another tower on Canrary Wharf. Surely, this is what London needs.

If books turn muggles into wizards, we were all muggles once. Not sure if short--form content has the same effect though.

Gen Z aren't mugs.