senya's recent activity
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Comment on What's your attitude about Russian classic literature? in ~books
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Comment on For those involved / interested in Web3, what do you make of the near and long term future for it? in ~tech
senya Link ParentThank you! I don't mind at all, and your guess is correct -- I have left the space very quickly a while ago. On a personal note, I didn't expect to be that miserable at that web3 job in the...Thank you! I don't mind at all, and your guess is correct -- I have left the space very quickly a while ago. On a personal note, I didn't expect to be that miserable at that web3 job in the context of "what am I even doing here?". I mean, it's not as objectively world-impacting as working for Lockheed Martin writing missile software would be, but the feeling of colossally wasting time made me really demotivated to continue working in the field even if the money was good.
These days my main role is somewhat closer to a traditional full-stack engineer, at an AI testing/auditing startup. With things like the EU AI Act coming up, the technical+regulatory assessment space is really heating up, but it’s still a “build the car while driving it” situation for everyone involved with a lot of good work yet to be done.
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Comment on For those involved / interested in Web3, what do you make of the near and long term future for it? in ~tech
senya (edited )Link ParentApologies ahead for the wall of text ahead — brevity is not my strong trait. I think I see your point, but it strikes me as cyclical. How can the startups depend on the support given by mainstream...Apologies ahead for the wall of text ahead — brevity is not my strong trait.
But without mainstream adoption, many startups will fail, especially in this market.
I think I see your point, but it strikes me as cyclical. How can the startups depend on the support given by mainstream adoption, if they’re by definition supposed to be the trailblazers ahead of mainstream adoption? (now that I say it, maybe that’s what killed the whole thing: simultaneously trying to both change the fundamental blocks, and desperately find a business model to sell ahead of time)
due to the paradigm shift expected of both the general public
That's an interesting point of view that I would like to address.
I think I understand the more philosophical undertone of the "sometimes people have to be nudged towards what's better for them long-term, but the capitalist market is not optimized for that". Getting somewhat quasi-communist, haha. That's not a point I feel qualified to discuss, but having seen the underbelly of both web3 and traditional fintech, I don’t believe the friction of paradigm shifts is the driving reason behind lack of mainstream adoption.
Setting aside the argument on whether web3 actually could deliver on its promises if it were "properly" adopted, it's simply that implementing web3 demands unreasonable upfront investment for too vague or too little a potential value.
I struggle to imagine the tech composition of a world that has truly embraced universal, efficient and secure web3 with tailored infrastructure. There’s way too many fundamental things to change across the whole OSI model, so to speak. Maybe too grandiose of a comparison, but it’s like imagining “what if Von Neumann architecture never became the standard in computers?”. Or maybe less grandiose "what if everyone universally adopted POSIX 40 years ago the way they did with HTTP, and all operating systems including Windows were implemented that way?".
Theoretically it could happen, but who's to make the call on everyone's behalf and force-push such a large-scale experimental change when it didn't work out in its trials stage anyway?
(who is used to the comforts of centralization)
Centralization is certainly not without problems, but it reminds me of that Churchill’s quote: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. The "comforts" it provides is a result of decades spent on debugging security and efficiency of such systems -- and we still suck at it, but less.
Web3 as an alternative simply cannot propose a good value+risk+cost formula at bigger scales, or in places that are outside the technobubble of the rich first-world countries (where they can at least afford to spend resources to play around with the concept without redirecting too much from more pressing problems)
I'm bullish on it eventually finding a solid niche
It may seem that web3 has never gotten over its early adopters stage, and as such never achieved “full potential”. But my view is that it has, in fact, already captured almost all of its potential userbase — and it’s concentrated in the very same solid web2.5 niches that still exist today
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Comment on For those involved / interested in Web3, what do you make of the near and long term future for it? in ~tech
senya LinkSurprisingly active discussion thread! Looks like many still feel pretty strongly about the topic, one way or another. To establish some credibility: I've written a thesis on the security of...- Exemplary
Surprisingly active discussion thread! Looks like many still feel pretty strongly about the topic, one way or another.
To establish some credibility: I've written a thesis on the security of (Solidity) Smart Contracts, and then interned at a web3 startup as an engineer dealing with quite low-level nitty-gritty of ERC tokens, deployment and management of Smart Contracts, dapps and such.
Relevant discussions often shift toward ownership concepts, personal freedom, moral values, revolutionary paradigms or whatever else this technology is associated with or is said to represent -- but I always find it a little amusing how much these pale in the face of pure nightmare it is to implement the said technology.
From a software design perspective, once you go into the practical "so how do we actually design this to be reliable, secure and deployable to serious customers", the complexity and shortcomings of web3 become very clear very fast. To summarize it without going into details, web3 tech fails to address the web2 problems to an adequate level, while adding a whole new set of unique problems that we simply don't have good ways to mitigate due to their nature. In a way, you're forced to combine the worst of both worlds if you want to make it adoptable in the real use-cases, and for most of those use-cases this is simply way above the tolerable risk threshold.
As such, I think both the short- and long-term future for web3 is with the things that are already at the top of usage today: money laundering, casinos, scamming, NFT speculation schemes, and so on. In other words, highly niche communities of individuals who are highly motivated to go through all the trouble and accept the risks.
web3 had a very good run in terms of investment/development hype -- now long eclipsed by GenAI, which funnily struggles with similar problems. During that period a whole zoo of different approaches was tried and tested (including high-level architectural changes, proof of X, etc); none too successful, since they're still ultimately only fixing the symptoms. Like with any new big tech hype wave, there was a lengthy "solution in search of a problem" period, and yet with all these startups and initiatives and experiments, I'll be hard-pressed to find anything that actually stuck to the wall.
TLDR; It's a fun but highly, highly problematic academic concept with limited applicability. It may fascinate some people from a philosophical perspective, which is what in my impression the original Satoshi paper was basically aiming at in the first place, but it's not an innovation driver or a world-changer worth spending more human effort or computational power on.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
senya Link ParentMay sound a bit dramatic, but it’s the first shooter in a while that made me feel child-like “locked-in” again and scream excitedly with my friends, having burnt out from the other options. It’s...May sound a bit dramatic, but it’s the first shooter in a while that made me feel child-like “locked-in” again and scream excitedly with my friends, having burnt out from the other options.
It’s not as random and inconsistent as Fortnite, not as toxic and sweaty as R6. The only big catch is that, as you experimentally confirmed too, the probability of success/fun relies heavily on whether you can team stack with friends, or at least communicate with strangers effectively. Solo queuing brings mostly disappointment for me, most players seem to have Voice Chat off anyway.
Also loving the relatively smaller scale of options as @EsteeBestee mentioned — there’s just enough to keep track of and experiment. Apex became overwhelming with meta stuff you have to know to git gut, which may be somewhat inevitable to keep players engaged through seasons.
Destructible environments on Cashout missions can actually be game changers (Heavy with a Sledgehammer = you got yourself a mini Teardown demo); makes sense this is done by ex-Battlefield folks.
Shame it got review bombed into “Mostly Positive” for a hilariously unjust reason
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Comment on What is a classical music piece you like? And why? in ~music
senya Link ParentI also highly recommend Max Richter’s… reimagining? of The Four Seasons! Especially when listening back-to-back to the original version, it’s quite fun to pick up on the “modernized” bits that...I also highly recommend Max Richter’s… reimagining? of The Four Seasons! Especially when listening back-to-back to the original version, it’s quite fun to pick up on the “modernized” bits that make you go “oooh, nice”, while respecting the mood/style/flow of the source material, in my opinion.
There seem to be newer “official videos” released just a year ago, but I prefer the sound of the older uploaded recording specifically for Summer 3 you’ve mentioned above. My personal favorite is Summer 1, which got a beautiful video to match!
Not OP, but I just also find the topic of translations for artistic works fascinating. And at the same time agonizing, as an overthinker, when reading the original is not an option!
Kind of a tangent, but personally I found that apart from reading the same chapter in several translations at once and then choosing and committing to one, the next best thing is, when possible, to aggregate reviews from bilinguals to see which translation gets the right "vibes". Technical correctness is very important yes, but I also believe the translators have a certain liberty in rephrasing things in order to hit the correct emotion and flow, like:
With this said, for the specific part you mentioned above, the context in Russian is:
Word-for-word (clunky) translation:
The rest of the paragraph goes into detail about how (super-duper-simplified) true suffering is the realization that the time for love has passed and you forever missed the opportunity to correct things, so you become the eternal martyr of your own choices. The bigger context is that these are notes left by a monk, and should probably be read like you would a tome of philosophical/teaching musings, so somewhat preacher-y. Hence vibes-wise, I think the second Chinese translation you referenced feels more appropriate in its poetry. However correctness-wise, the "no longer to" part is quite important, so the first Chinese translation is more "truthful" if we take only that sentence without the rest..
One last advice I'd have is to check what kind of reception the respective translator's previous works had, or whether they had a good track record. And then of course, have some energy left at the end of the whole torturous process to actually read the book :)