Thanks for the summary!

Yeah, in Python each . is a dictionary lookup. The cost of having a dynamic language where the compiler can do pretty much no optimizations (and yes, Python does have a compiler).

In static languages these lookups can be collapsed to a single pointer address by the compiler.

Of course. That’s one of the basic requirements for something to be an actual hash function.

The power consumption would be 5*10^62 Wh.

The sun outputs 3.9*10^26 W. If you captured all that energy with 100% efficiency, you would need 1.3*10^36 hours or roughly 1*10^22 times the age of the universe to collect enough energy.

That’s incidentally roughly the estimated number of stars in the universe.

So if you put a dyson sphere around every star in the universe, right after the big bang (ignoring that stars didn’t form instantly after the big bang) and you ran them until today, then you’d have just about enough energy to crack one wallet with current tech.

Considering that you’d need a paradigm-breaking revolutionary and incredibly expensive device to do so, I’d find it hard to believe that you could stay under the radar with it.

What I’d expect to happen is that some big corporation and/or university manages to build a quantum computer capable of breaking 256bit encryption, and quite instantly after the announcement bitcoin will tank into nothingness or will change the algorithm to something quantum-computer safe. Well before some shady actor will get their hands on a quantum computer to crack wallets.

Bitcoin private keys are 256 bit long. That means, there are 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 (1.15*10^77) possible private keys.

Say you are using a bitcoin miner that’s roughly 4x as fast as the curretly fastest one at 1PH/s (1*10^15), they you’ll need roughly 1*10^62 seconds or 3*10^54 years.

Lets say you got a million of these miners, then you are down to 3*10^48 years, or 2*10^38 times as long as the universe has existed.

I was going to calculate how much electricity this would consume and how expensive it would be, but the answer to that is plainly “too much to imagine”.

At that point though the whole concept of bitcoins will be moot. If quantum computers can crack lost wallets they can also crack active wallets, and at that point there’s no reason to buy bitcoin at all, which will tank the value of bitcoin making it mostly not worthwhile to crack wallets.

So if we get to that point, there will be one proof-of-concept wallet crack, and instantly after that bitcoin will cease to exist in any relevant fashion.

Moore’s law hasn’t been exponential for ~15 years now.

This. It’s the old “to the moon” mentality.

If my 2yo continues to grow at the current rate, we’ll have to buy new doors soon becouse at age 10 the kid will be the tallest person on Earth.

That’s what you get when the “research” for the article is AI generated.

Only if people give up on the whole concept by then. Each new generation of AI model takes more energy than the last.

I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it

That’s about as useful as saying that shops should be allowed to sell alcohol to 5 year olds and the parents should be responsible for it.

The US is what happens if you push enshitification on a national scale for too long.

You start with a genuenly good setup. Then you reduce investment, cut corners and reduce spending as much as you can to squeeze out every possible bit of profit.

That works for a while, because you can coast along on prior investments, but at a certain point the game is over and all you are left with is a tide of shit that nobody wants anymore.

To even consider that projects carried mostly by volunteers and underpaid staff making a meager living off donations can rival the products of the world’s largest software corporations is laughable, and yet here we are.

And not only because FOSS alternatives have gotten better over the years, but mostly because big CSS projects have tanked in quality.

Symbol names can be outdated as well, but what’s worse is they can be flat-out wrong.

Real-life example that I had at my last job:

var isNotX = isX()

// somewhere else in the code:

var isX = isX()

fun isX() {
  // Code returns isNotX
}

That part of the code had a bug and it wasn’t clear whether the function should return X or not X (the function was much more complex but returned a boolean).

A comment could have given context and/or be used as parity check for which implementation would have been correct.

This way I had to step through the whole flow just to figure out what it’s doing and what it’s supposed to do.

Not only are generally experienced developers really valuable, but developers experienced with the project they work on.

It takes a long time to actually understand everything in a large project, and if you do, you save a ton of time because you just know a lot of context already. No need to research or figure things out, you just know.

That’s why the constant reorgs in larger corporations are incredibly hurtful to performance. If you want performance, let people stick to the few projects they know instead of switching stuff around all the time.

I know it was just an example, and examples are always contrived. It was just a good example to show how complexity can increase a lot if you use classes/types as glorified comments.

This total denial of the existence of comments, which is a common attitude right now, can easily do more harm than good, when you add code not for functionality but instead just to have more space for symbol names to put text into.

The project I worked on in my last job suffered a lot from this. It would lead to some really weird patterns, like e.g. this:

class BaseCommand {
    var commandType
}

class CreateCommand extends BaseCommand {
    public CreateCommand() {
        this.commandType = CREATE;
    }
}

We had dozens and dozens of classes that didn’t actually contain any actual code, but were just flavour for “readability”, which in turn just created garbage lines of code and all that trash would negate any potential benefits to readability. And since the code was spread out over so many classes it would mean that even simple changes would require touching tons of files.

I had, for example, a very simple 1 Story Point task to do. The whole task was “rename a variable”, nothing more than that. I had to change 40 files. Not an exaggeration, it really was 40 files.

Code is for code, comments and external documentation are for documentation. Don’t abuse one for the other.

You can write comments, but you can’t make your colleagues read them. They don’t necessarily have to visit the originating file to read the docs.

When do you need documentation? When you are down in the code or when you are sitting on the toilet browsing Confluence? If your goal is to make people read the documentation, then the documentation needs to be immediately there where you need it, not in some external thing like Confluence.

Same goes with if your goal is to make people update the documentation. That’s much more likely to happen if the documentation is in a comment in the code than when you first have to go hunting to find the correct page in that steaming pile of mess that is confluence.

Just be clear and explicit. Its not gaming; you dont have to care about losing a couple extra frames to type out a few extra characters. Most IDEs have sufficient autocompletes so it’s literally not even a problem in many cases.

You still only got so much screen real estate, and having huge names means that your lines get very long at times, which makes everything really hard to read.

Tbh, creating new code just to shorten variable names is pretty bad practice. Don’t do that.

Each line of code needs to be maintained, each line of code can contain bugs and reusing such a class in locations it wasn’t actually made for can cause more harm than good.

And if you are adding external information (e.g. via a class) why not just add that information as inline documentation (aka comments) instead? Most IDEs can handle that so that if you hover over the variable/function name it will display the documentation. And pretty much all IDEs allow you to navigate to declaration with just one click, and there you find the necessary information.

You example only gets worse if you keep nesting these things, so for example if I have:

int sleepIntervalSeconds = 0;

Then I immediately know:

• It’s an int (not a double)
• It’s an interval used for sleeping
• It’s in seconds

(Putting all that in a comment instead of the variable name is almost equally as visible via IDE)

Instead consider your proposal, which would read like this:

Intervals var.sleep = 0;

I used var as the variable name since you abstracted the informations “sleep”, “interval” and “seconds” into other definitions.

So now I still know it’s an interval used for sleeping, but both the real variable type and the information that it’s in seconds is gone. I have to navigate to the Intervals class/type to figure that out.

IRL this often gets even worse, because Intervals probably doesn’t even contain the fields directly, but instead inherits from a Time class, which then inherits from some other class, and then you might get to the actual definition of the field.

This is only amplified by using Mixins and other obfuscation goodness.

If you have two options, and one option creates extra code, extra classes and extra code paths without reducing the complexity of the code significantly, than that’s the worse option.

Congratulations, you figured out to do comments the wrong way.

You also figured out how to use a bad, unclear variable name, so should we also stop naming variables with sensible words since it can be done wrong?

External documentation can also be done badly, so let’s stop doing that too.

Or what’s your point?

Fair.

It does make sense though. The main motivator for politicians is power. That means, naturally political systems flow towards maximizing power for those in power, that’s just the natural progression.

To change this, major political upheavals are necessary, so basically events where the whole old leadership is tossed out and the new leadership can try to setup something to stop the same thing from happening again.

WW2 was perfect for that. All those countries were in need of a completely new political system and thus they could be built better from the ground up.

The US never had any event like that (apart maybe from the civil war).

To change the system without such an event, two thirds of all relevant politicians would have to vote for changing the system that brought them to power. Not likely to happen.