Not a Single Car Was Sold in Shanghai Last Month

The majority of the city’s 25 million residents were mostly confined to their homes or residential compounds in April. Almost all dealerships in the city were closed during the month, highlighting the zero sales figure. According to the Shanghai Automobile Sales Association, in April last year, 26,311 vehicles were sold in the same period. Around 980,000 people remain under the strictest form of lockdown, unable to leave their apartments.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-16/not-a-single-car-was-sold-in-shanghai-last-month

Bitcoin has no future as a payments network, says FTX chief

• Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the digital asset exchange FTX, said the proof of work system of validating blockchain transactions, which underpins bitcoin, was not capable of scaling up to cope with the millions of transactions that would be needed to make the cryptocurrency an effective means of payment.
• “The bitcoin network is not a payments network, and it is not a scaling network,” said Bankman-Fried.
• His comments came as the fast-growing cryptocurrency market was hit by a punishing sell-off that left bitcoin down by more than 35 per cent since January, at its lowest level since late 2020. Some crypto enthusiasts still see Bitcoin as a way to conduct everyday transactions.
• His criticisms of bitcoin underscored severe environmental concerns about the amount of energy needed to run proof of work cryptosystems.
• Some European regulators have called for a ban on the systems owing to their carbon emissions.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/02cad9b8-e2eb-43d4-8c18-2e9d34b443fe

Is Python About to Get Faster?

• That’s about to change in Python 3.11, currently in the first beta phase of its preview (version 3.11.0b1) ahead of its stable release later this year.
• The fundamental approach detailed in PEP 659 is a “specialising, adaptive interpreter that specialises code aggressively, but over a tiny region, and can adjust to mis-specialization rapidly and at low cost.
• This should result in a faster interpreter for CPython that tracks individual bytecodes during a program’s execution.
• According to PSF, the work on the new interpreter is almost complete but still requires the completion of dynamic specialisations for loops and binary operations.
• Additionally, memory consumption in 3.11 hasn’t changed from 3.10. On the question of a just-in-time (JIT) compiler for Python’s performance, Shannon suggested it was not a priority and would likely not arrive until Python 3.13, according to the Python Software Foundation’s coverage of the event.

Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-languages-python-is-slow-but-its-about-to-get-faster/