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It's a binary consideration if you think of it rather than hexadecimal.

If you have to prominently represent 10 things in binary, then it's neat to allocate slot of size 16 and pad the remaining 6 items. Which is to say it's neat to proceed from all zeroes:

    x x x x 0 0 0 0
    x x x x 0 0 0 1
    x x x x 0 0 1 0
    ....
    x x x x 1 1 1 1
It's more of a cause for hexadecimal notation than an effect of it.

> read online: https://www.readanybook.com/online/641149#458432

"Gitterton denied everything, claiming that the Computer was simply hallucinating—which does indeed on occasion happen to our senior automata." Written around 1961.


Yes, actually car rentals is the only reason why I still keep a credit card. I vastly prefer that to any kind of insurance.

Probably merchants like Netflix would also love recurring payment functionality. Let's just hope they'll make them cancelable this yime.


> In the US, when people hear Mastercard or Visa, they usually associate that with a credit card (virtual or physical), meaning the money is not taken directly from your bank account. You pay the balance later, which gives you credit and strong dispute protections.

Europeans use these dispute protections much less, so Visa/Mastercard are mostly seen as expensive pass-throughs.


Third party escrow, if you explicitly used one. There's no free lunch.

And now you have invented Visa and MasterCard again.

Rather a dissociated escrowing from payment processing.

When you go to your local restaurant, do groceries you are paying a few percentage in tax for using you card.

Platforms online already act as escrow anyway. PayPal, Stripe, act as escrow..yes they take a percentage, but that's more granted for these cases.


I'm confused by your comment.

PayPal and Stripe are the payment processors who are taxing the card usage and acting as escrow. The technology part of transactions is with Visa and MasterCard. Who will do that part for free if they are not to be involved? What would be the benefit of separating escrow and processing, and how would it realistically be done?


> Maybe this is a case of East, South, and West Europe being treated differently.

Just my pet peeve, but say Central Europe here, not East. Unless of course you mean Ukraine or Kazachstan.

Referring to old Iron Curtain is refueling the animosity of the ancient past.


Interesting, even if tad too wordy. Shows a few details new to me.

> what's your take on "Parse, Don't Validate"

Always aspire to that. Translating that to Go conventions, the constructor has to have signature like:

    func NewT() (T, error) {
      ...
    }
Such signatures exist in the stdlib, e.g. https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.25.7:src/... although I've met old-hands that were surprised by it.

In larger codebases, I've noticed an emergent phenomenon that usually the T{} itself (bypassing NewT constructor) tends to be unusable anyway, hence the constructor will enforce "parse, don't validate" just well enough. Only very trivial T{} won't have a nilable private field, such as a pointer, func, or chan.

I'd say that "making zero a meaningful value" does not scale well when codebase grows.


Yes. But crackpots are still vital.

Let me put it this way. Once upon a time people didn't know about solar eclipse. But then a day came when a certain somebody was instantly promoted to a Lead Staff Senior Astronomer, just because they predicted to the hour that the sun is going to disappear.

Well, but think about the field just one day before that:

- maybe 10 theories that said "it's just a reformulation/refactoring, nothing to see here, all business as usual, no new predictions, very safe for the author",

- maybe 100 crackpot theories. Undoubtedly, unashamedly crackpot, with wild predictions all over. Of which 99% were in fact pure trash, so, retrospectively, people were rightfully considering them trash. Yet 1 was the key to progress.


> The thinkers of the day rightfully saw a conceptual shift with no apparent advantage and several additional costs.

I'm holding a big fat Citation Needed banner. Seemingly none of these "thinkers of the day" took it far enough to write down the thoughts.

While at it, were the "thinkers of the day" fond of the idea of Ptolemy's equant?


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