As a happy user of UPI, I think is incredible. I want it to be more resilient, from our national economic standpoint. A (small as possible) fee, judiciously applied, will hopefully create generally constructive back-pressure on the digital side of the cash economy.

---

Why the oxymoron; "digital side of the cash economy"?

Zero-cost-to-consumer one-rupee instant transaction system is basically cash economy. Because, at least here in India, our so-called "informal sectors" have switched wholesale to it in Metro to Tier 2 cities. Significantly in Tier 3 cities and smaller towns. And non-uniformly across rural / village panchayat areas.

UPI, and indeed, digital transaction uptake essentially hews close to the availability of reasonably reliable grid electricity and mobile Internet connectivity and access to banking services. The abundance of low-cost UPI-capable devices is useful only if these precursors are useful.

Reasonable fee as an economy-scale tuned mass-damper.

I hope the result of applying merchant-fee-as-back-pressure, at any size of transactions, translates into a sizeable up-tick in hard cash transactions. Nations of people that want to remain sovereign and democratically-run, ought to incentivise heterogeneity of money flow mechanisms. Especially, they/we, the people, must ensure, through our democratic influence as citizens, that a sizeable portion of the/our economy is person-to-person hard cash transactions.

And this provides a measure for "is the fee punitive?". Let's say, hypothetically, India's money supply mechanism is resilient if about 75% of money supply is digital, and 25% is hard currency. Anything outside this envelope is tending towards punitive costs on the people, both as tax payers and as transaction-fee-payers. Our central bank could manage the money mix, through judiciously tuned per-transaction fee on UPI and other digital payments, not unlike managing the volume of banknotes in circulation. The digital printing press is infinite money, if the effective fee is zero (psychologically). Sometimes, you want to make the fee zero, to bring it all into balance again, but most times, you want to create some friction to keep it from becoming a nation-state level attack vector (whether self-goaled or externally inflicted).

Crypto currencies and/or CBDCs are emphatically NOT the answer for such resilience.

I'd go so far as to argue that those forms of currency undermine (pun intended) sovereign economic resilience, where "sovereign" includes the little guy as much as it does a multinational or a country.Crypto system infrastructure is brittle by design and construction. Its effective use is predicated on the magical availability of wildly complex planet-scale electrical and communication infrastructure, not to mention dedicated tending-to of fast-decaying compute hardware, by literally every single participant in the network. A USB stick of gold-brick valued crypto, buried in the backyard is not at all equivalent to a brick of solid gold buried in the backyard.

Digital money systems make top-echelon black-box corruption easy. Hard cash makes it hard.

Recent years have made it patently obvious that digital-first money flows are wide open to centrally-controlled and/or monopolistic manipulation by individuals in power.

Consider the logistics of managing USD 1M in small bills. Hell, even USD 100 bills because 1M of those is about 10 Kilograms of paper mass (or about 22 pounds for you non-SI enjoyers (why?)). Now you need a large handbag, or a cool trench coat with several large pockets.

Multiply 1M in USD 100 bills, by 1,000, for billion-dollar corruption. That is 10,000 Kg of paper bills alone [0]. Now, add to that, the industrial pallets, containers, and packing material to hold it all sensibly. Let's say 1,000 Kg for each such cash pile.

Further, add to that the real-world infrastructure and organisational capacity to construct, maintain, secure, transport, and otherwise manage the infrastructure needed to hold and deploy your USD 1Bn in hard cash. This staggeringly capital-intensive exercise is subject to economies of scale.

These facts of life make it that much harder for anybody, especially enemy nation-state actors, to physically perpetuate large-scale money-supply based corruption of the kind being increasingly perpetuated by individual people, in private and public life, because they are able to exercise state-level power over digital economies.

Furthermore, currency notes are ridiculously hard to counterfeit --- AFAIK Indian banknotes (and US ones) are among the most secure (as in transaction-trust-secure) forms of monetary exchange humans have crafted.

Printing and injecting those into an economy at scale, to launch an inflation-attack requires nation-state level capacity at multiple levels, and the geopolitical incentive to do so. And if they do, it does not remain surreptitious for long.

Co-opting money systems, especially crypto-currencies to private ends and/or a offensive economy-destabilising tools, is trivial in comparison. You don't need to launch a 51% attack on the ledger. You just need a big enough psychological spanner, delivered into everyone's infinite brainrot feeds, to make 'em believe in The One True Currency; one that benefits you personally the most, obviously...

Obligatory XKCD: "Security" https://3d.xkcd.com/538/

---

[0] More paper-napkin arithmetic: https://www.ehd.org/science_technology_largenumbers.php and https://goodcalculators.com/money-weight-calculator/ etc... (no affiliation to any of them).

(edit: fix typos, add clarifications, maybe I should have made an actual blog post... my publishing workflow isn't indieweb enough yet, sorry :'))

- 1. your central code review (and hosting), which is the critical choke-point on team collaboration.

versus

- 2. the ever-expanding ick of testing, building, deploying it etc... because failure modes of software construction infra are concentrated here.

  ---

Use Gerrit if you care about code review.

Code review workflow is the nub / hub of collaboration, and should never be blocked on anything else failing, including itself. Maintaining robust in-house code review infra. is work, yes, but it is quite manageable. Simple "single-box with full point-in-time snapshot recovery" designs will remain good for a long, long time... Think; workloads of teams of up to a few hundred programmers and bots, who would be pushing and pulling updates against multiple repositories at a time on a single, well-endowed, Gerrit box.

2. CI/CD: Use whatever works best economically.

Be it one giant in-house box running Jenkins, or a clever way to use github and gitlab's job infra as fallbacks for each other.

These systems fail often because pretty much all the ick of software construction is concentrated here. Be it simple test runners, or fancy end-to-end auto-deploy to rollback pipelines.

The mind-numbing ick of software supply chain dependencies, test run jobs, build jobs, failures / retries, bursts of high contention (lots of people / bots needing their test runs passing NOW), pulling and pushing artefacts, and so forth.

This is a true pain to manage, particularly in organisations that are laissez-faire about their software ecosystem ("best tool for the job" mentality etc.).

And on a personal note...

  ---  ---

As if trusting enterprise chat SaaSes with all your company secrets wasn't bad enough. At least that has some contractual defensibility.

Had. Had... Now? Something is deeply wrong with people who aren't completely spooked by the current fad of letting hyperscalers steal literally everyone's data to make content and code re-production autobots. Based on how those companies have behaved from the get-go, and factoring in the overwhelming pressure the LLM industry has created to "become the biggest, no matter what, because biggest wins"; their "terms of service" are as good as their high-flying CEO's mood on a given day.

No thanks.

Besides, it's only been a hot minute since I adjusted to that other fait acompli of 21st century computing.

They who controleth thy hypervisor, controleth thy destiny.

--- Ye Olde Graybeard Wisdom

  ---  ---

You are a soothsayer!

I think I have found three, and they will keep me quite busy for a while.

Read/Think: Bioelectric networks as the software plane of morphology

cf. Allen Center / Levin labs / TAME

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10346 and other work from that fecund lab is ever-fascinating. I have been following their work for five or six years. Much of that informed a giant essay I wrote prompted by an essay contest on Consciousness: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/consciousness-lives-in-a-ded...

Read/Think/Research/Write: How to write a Hard SciFi novel that does not have magic technology genius, and certainly not magic ET showing up to save the day?

A spec fic author friend is on my case about it, because he said "why the hell haven't you written your novel yet?" and I foolishly said "yeah why not? okay let me do it", and now I'm stuck in an honour pact. Write or die trying.

Side-quest of $DayJob: Um, how does the weather even work (metrology)?

Because that's what happens when you're helping an applied sciences team run weather forecasting models, like WRF (pronounced "Worf", which I absolutely love :D). My day-to-day is packer and FreeBSD and shell scripts, but I have to also understand enough about the domain to be somewhat dangerous.

And also... why isn't everybody using FreeBSD + ZFS for all their server workloads?

---

x-posted from my earlier question [0] that David offered to fold into this regular Ask HN he runs... Thanks again; this is cool :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101448#49106213

  _for-sale baby-shoes never-used

  "I must not complect.
  Complexity is the mind-killer.
  Complexity is the little-death that brings obliteration.
  I will face complexity and I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
  And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
  Where the complexity has gone, there will be nothing.
  Only I will remain."

  — Litany Against Complexity

But first, hang in there, and please try to not be alone in this. Let your people help, or at least be there in spirit (share your feelings with them).

Please read the Following as sharing, not advice (how could I, a total stranger know anything about your life).

Details private and personal (soul-crushing endings / losses / grief / damage etc.), but lesson public, learned the hard way over about the last 20 years. An incomplete list:

- Learning to think of, and do, the "betting" on myself thing, as construction rather than moon or bust, based on how I am wired. So for me, that is prioritising my sense of agency and curiosity, community and surroundings (I am a creature of my environment), independence of thought (skepticism, but not cynical fatalism --- let's call it scientific thinking mindset),

- Learning self-care, so that I can keep going as well as give care to others when they are in need. Learning to say yes and say no with grace and self-awareness. This has been crazy hard. Let me just say talk therapy saves lives.

- Luckily, surviving long enough to realise that, if I catch myself thinking; "Well, f#@! me, some really bad shit is happening to me... again? Is this the end? Finally?" ... realising that, oh right, lol, it was the same the last time and the time before that and... Well, I guess I ain't seen nothin' yet. Let me phone a friend and ask for help, or at least talk to someone who still loves me about nothing in particular.

- Being intelligent about money + material resources. Use cash and credit to solve problems, but also learn to have a great time with almost nothing... the less one needs, the freer one is, and more resilient.

- When programming as well as building large-scale systems, keeping state at bay and all them functions / subsystems pure / referentially transparent.

Restated another way, I guess my life has become a bunch of cliches (and it's not bad at all): airline announcement + SEALs motto + pithy sayings:

- Love thy neighbour / community and so forth, but please wear your own oxygen mask before helping others.

- Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

- Health is wealth. (Sleep enough, eat real food, exercise enough, seek wiser counsel and/or therapy, be with kind people.)

- But also, Cash is King/Queen.

- Sharing is caring (and man is it also cheaper and just more fun overall)... Try as much as one can to play non-zero-sum games.

cf. some related meta stuff I blogged:

- My `now` page (needs a 2026 update, but enough to give colour commentary) https://www.evalapply.org/now.html

- On curiosity: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/what-have-you-been-curious-a...

- On orienting one's point of view, when surrounded by inescapable software tech business hustle culture and the concomitant "go big or go home" work/professional pressure: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/systems-scale-value/

- Rare personal share, from a very dark time in the recent past (the post is heavy stuff): https://www.evalapply.org/posts/dont-hurry-dont-stop-sad-ver...

And finally...

If you want to talk in private, I am open to an email conversation, per my "standing invitation". BUT there is a caveat. Please first talk to someone who cares about you. And then, if you so feel, email this total internet rando: https://www.evalapply.org/about.html#standing-invitation

More sobering thought: conviction rates are typically a small percentage of the people who do the foul deed. The definition of "arsonist", for example. What if someone started "just one" fire?

A more sobering thought: of the total fires fought each year, how many are started by those rogue firefighters?

A most sobering thought: why is it that there is so much fallow time, that they get bored?

A marquee remark.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108518

Points: 2

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Weekend reading is going to be good :)

Alas, having died on that hill one too many times, I can be with you in solidarity, but not on the hill. No, not again.

Once the project ended, I never looked back and wiped all but the essential lessons from memory.

I can't name them because my brain legit refuses to look up the name. I know it's there somewhere in the periphery. And even if it did pop back, it shall remain nameless, for harm could come to many innocents.

Um, and this was just one aspect of their software organisation.

Four hundred line floating point dumpster fires, inside a gawdawful dog-slow software system, because, nearly a hundred "microservices" (about two per engineer, I counted), being somehow managed via an elaborate AI of calendar tetris, because everyone in the company was somehow fine with it, because they were mostly young and it was their first or second job and they probably didn't know any different, the poor sods.