The article says in the title how that won't solve the problem. Their chief solution is guarding against invisible tracking pixels all over the web, and how using a properly equipped browser and extensions can hopefully mitigate them. I found the article's recommendation of suitable browsers to be quite poor: a brush off to Firefox and no mention of LibreWolf, IronFox, etc al.
Stoicism often gets conflated with apathy, which to some extent is a fair interpretation. But it’s not being indifferent to everything - rather, only to the things that disrupt your psychological stasis.
Then Silicon Valley ran with the idea and made it about tone-deafness. So now it’s almost fashionable to be intentionally cruel and tone-deaf, and then chalk it up to Stoicism.
> Xi's already suggested making the Yuan a global reserve currency, and seeing as much debt they're holding, I'm a little worried they're able to make it happen if this is the US financial strategy.
I wonder why you’re worried. Regime’s change all the time. From a third party perspective, China is no better or worse than the US. Also, given how literally every country under the sun despises US now, this might just happen.
The way China manages it's currency is very different to how the US manages theirs.
China maintains strict controls on capital flows in/out. A reserve currency requires free convertibility. Holders need to move large sums instantly without permission. China has repeatedly tightened these controls during stress periods (2015-16 devaluation fears, for example).
Limited access to Chinese bond markets and equities for foreign institutions. Reserve currency status requires deep, liquid markets where central banks can park hundreds of billions. US Treasury market is $26T and extremely liquid. Chinese government bond market is smaller and less accessible.
Reserve currency issuer must run persistent current account deficits to supply the world with currency. China's economic model is built on export surpluses. They'd need to fundamentally restructure their economy.
This is PRC's fundamental disagreement. US reserve currency morphed into high liquid, high speculative instrument to fund unsustainable debt, hollowed out domestic industry (triffin)... but this is not by design. It's the result of emergency adaptations moving off gold, then people post rationalize the trinity musts (open capital, floating rates, independent central bank) is what makes reserve when it's unintended structural outcome from failed gold peg.
Now we see hints of end stage USD reserve behavior, debt snow balls and reserve controller will pull the our dollar, your problem card. This US doing current conniptions trying to either reduce USD strength or inflate away debt... costly instability. People forget, liquidity / storage only matters to sovereign buyers who needs reserve for utility... everyone else (now plurality) are private buyers who buy for returns. If we enter end of dollar cycle and USD reserve cost them money, then they go elsewhere
Elsewhere is what PRC wants to offer, HIGHLY CONTROLLED, BUT STABLE reserve pegged to PRC industrial chains, i.e. real economy instead of speculative financialization. This what recent yuan reserve talk is from (note it was old Xi speech republished in Qiushi), so the propose model isn't even in response to current USD conniptions but prediction on end life of US behavior when USD reserve goes from exorbitant privilege to just exorbitant.
It's precisely because logical outcome of current reserve "musts", i.e. triffin charity/global good that makes it ultimately a stupid arrangement where the system breaks when US/owner can't afford to maintain or develops bad habits (deficit spending). Hence, what PRC plans to offer in parallel: stable regulated reserves for "real economy" financial utility. Stable Yuan "bank" reserve can coexist with volatile USD "casino" reserve. Now of course this all heterodox theory, but we are seeing theory of USD reserve limits peaking it's head, and PRC not retarded enough to pickup triffin baton. IMO PRC fine with US dealing with triffin headache and IMO betting US will fuck global creditors when shit hits fan, i.e. they waiting for USD reserve to implode due to inherent contradictions, to show world precisely why yuan reserve not modelled to repeat same mistake.
1. No one sane trusts EU after RU sanctions either.
2. Euro share of SWIFT shrunk from ~40% to ~20% post URK war. Part of this technical (t2 reforms), i.e. actual reduction not as dramatic, but Euro as toxic as USD with even less leverage.
Meanwhile PRC went from single digit % cross border settlements 10 years ago to 50%+, plenty of the world trust PRC with their money, not just money but PRC alternative to SWIFT financial plumbing, CIPS. Meanwhile PRC also recycling it's surplus USD to lending... i.e. they're financing more than imf/worldbank/paris club right now. Another indicator that countries "trusts" PRC to manage monetary system, or rather they balancing from losing trust of west.
TBH trust is western mindless muh reserve orthodoxy nonesense. Ultimately PRC has much stronger reserve posture for the same reason US did... for 80+ years countries needed USD for US techstack and then petrodollar, aka modernity was locked behind USD, all the other muh reserve "needs" is downstream of that. Need > trust.
Ironically where trust actually comes in is whether PRC TRUSTS others. Qiushi suggests PRC stable reserve functions something like panda bond lending, where PRC lends liquidity to trusted VIP (real economy) players. Everyone else can keep gambling with USD reserve with high likelihood of debasement. It looks like PRC doesn't want be THE reserve, they want to be VIP reserve while THE (USD) reserve burns.
> 1. No one sane trusts EU after RU sanctions either.
The RU sanctions were implemented 'only' because RU invaded another country. If you don't plan on invading countries is there much to worry about?
To a certain extent if you 'just' want to participate in the world economy the EUR seems fine. If you're looking to start geopolitical drama with military actions, is there any currency of a major economy that would not be a risk? Major powers tend to want stability, which would allow them to stay major, so would frown upon anyone stirring the pot (besides, perhaps, another major power: see China with Russia against UA/EU).
Europe wasn't breaking sovereign immunity / sovereign bank seizures when historically fighting each other, current actions historically unprecedented. So the answer is war is not sufficient excuse for RoW. EU extra delulu because RU/UKR not even over direct EU/NATO territory i.e. EU breaking sovereign immunity over "peripheral" interests. Like EU seize/sanction US when? Point of sovereign immunity is provide some semblance of neutrality for rest of world to do their thing while drunks fight, neutrals still want to buy from the drunks, EU has made things both hard not neutral.
Settlement and reserve currencies are two very different things. The USD isn't great as a reserve currency but it is still better than all the other options.
Settlement is leading indicator / proxy of trust. The point is countries trust in PRC running financial pipes is increasing, because vs US/EU, PRC simply look more responsible.
USD treasury isn't great now AND trending towards bag holding catastrophic "our dollar your problem" depending on debasement velocity. Hence central banks ditching dollar for gold etc... it's still currently better than other options in the sense that no other options really exist except metals with no counter party risk. More this happens the more exorbitant and less privilege USD becomes, the worse it serves as reserve, the more opening for alternatives. This where PRC eventually comes in, i.e. recent reserve talk is for eventuality not hand off. In the meantime they are banking on USD being not great, and getting worse. Which increases rates -> increase debt finance / servicing cost. The system is getting worse for everyone, including US. Don't underestimate watching US debt servicing growing from 1T to 2T in a few years when US realizes exorbitant reserve currency without privilege is not worth maintaining. Waiting for US to recognize USD reserve isn't great for US is part of the transition.
Swift is a neat language, but it’s a hard sell for server-side software. The ecosystem is tiny, and there’s nothing you gain from using it instead of Go or Rust for infra / distsys.
Also, it works okay at best with VS Code, and you couldn’t pay me to use Xcode.
Kotlin tried doing similar things to gain adoption on the server side. But server-side programming is a crowded space, and people just don’t like writing distsys code in another JVM language. Swift’s story is a little better on that front.
If you want a quick-and-dirty language, Python and TypeScript do the job. For perf-sensitive, highly concurrent environments, Go is hard to compete against. A lot of ops tooling and infra code is written in Go. For systems programming and embedded code, Rust is a better choice.
So while it’s fun to think about what language X gives you in terms of syntax, in practice it’s rarely enough to pick a language like Swift for your next non-toy backend distsys work.
Also, Apple. Given their stance against free and open source software, I wouldn't be too thrilled to pick a language that works better in their walled garden.
This makes me think you haven't really tried it ever? Sure writing a hello world is something but, one of the best features of Swift on the server side is that it seamlessly interopts with anything C (and nowadays C++, though that is after my time).
I wrote an entire, well performing backend in Swift because I could just directly plug in to already existing libraries without having ot provide a whole bunch of "FFI" glue.
All the other languages you suggest is something that Swift excels at while staying performant (also none of those have an IDE like Xcode so idk why you even bring it up). Though for actual systems programming I don't think Rust can be beaten by Swift, simply because of its more explicit (and therefore confronting) nature.
We use server side Swift extensively since about 2016 for decent production load and it's easily one of the worst decisions I've ever made.
- C/C++ interop is great but if we wanted to use C/C++ libraries why use Swift at all? It's annoying to interop with them even if there is no FFI and still requires a lot of glue code for memory management etc…
- The stdlib (Foundation) is not identical on all platforms even today. This has been a major thorn as releases constantly have discrepancies and subtle bugs that are hard to diagnose and track down. Even Swift 6.1 broke non UTF-8 string encodings by just returning "nil" on Linux and took until Swift 6.2 to be fixed (nearly a year).
- The compile times are awful, with a large Swift codebase it takes us ~10-20 minutes to compile our backend Docker container and thus deployments to dev take that long and it's only going to keep getting longer as Apple seemingly has no interest in making the Swift toolchain much faster and Swift has a fatal flaw in it's design around bi-directional type inference that ensure it can never be compiled fast.
- Talent is impossible to find. Yes lots of people know Swift for iOS apps but nobody knows Swift for server code and a backend dev is a very different skillset than an app dev.
We chose it because it allowed us to share some domain code between our flagship iOS product and the server with a custom built sync engine but as our platform has grown it's just gotten harder and harder to justify keeping Swift on the server which is why we're actively migrating off it.
> - The stdlib (Foundation) is not identical on all platforms even today. This has been a major thorn as releases constantly have discrepancies and subtle bugs that are hard to diagnose and track down. Even Swift 6.1 broke non UTF-8 string encodings by just returning "nil" on Linux and took until Swift 6.2 to be fixed (nearly a year).
sad, I was doing server side around v4/5 and this was the biggest issue at the time for me (lots of stuff was not implemented and you only found out at runtime). that this is still a problem is very disappointing...
I have been using Swift Vapor for personal projects for awhile and it's great. I kind of regret it now on some projects since I use a lot of Go too and I miss the speed of compiling/testing when I'm using agentic coding (where my goal is to put the agent into virtuous loops leading to a success state) - it just takes longer in Swift.
In agentic workflows, Go’s fast compiler and simple syntax make things so much easier.
I no longer write Python or JavaScript, even for trivial scripts. Why suffer sluggish performance or tooling nightmares when choosing a typed language no longer costs much?
As for Swift, it’s a harder sell. The docs aren’t there. The libraries aren’t that great. Apple-ism scares away a ton of folks, and the alternatives create less friction.
The target group for server-side software are iOS and macOS developers that also need a server component, thus like the JS folks, they get to use the same programming lanugage.
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