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This is pretty similar to the argument for why humanoid robots will be a big deal. The physical world is also built mostly for humans, so having an autonomous agent that can interact with it is huge.

Just got the latest Apple Watch, so also glad to hear they perform better on HRV. It seems they get a lot of the little details better than competitors in the wearables space. I read previously about how they likely had the most accurate sleep tracking and also had some special sauce in their GPS handling code that made it outperform Garmin.

Yes, I think you're spot on. They showed a video of a robot arm cleaning the car's inside, and it appears the vertical opening doors make that kind of access easier. The car will also have wireless charging, which makes that easier to automate as well.

They're going for lowest cost per mile. Most rides have 2 or less people, this will address that huge market in a very efficient way.

A similar thing happens with stock and crypto traders. They do a ton of trading during a bull market and feel like a genius, because they bagged a few big wins, but they downplay all their big losses. At the end of the year and once short term capital gains are factored in, they end up making less than the total market index, but due to poor record keeping are convinced they’re some kind of trading savant. Once the market turns down they’ll likely lose it all and be forced to become a social media influencer selling bullshit trading courses to unsuspecting victims.

Once again, I never claimed this was a scam. I'm simply pointing out that the system has an inherent flaw regarding account selling, which makes it not sybil resistant, as claimed by the founders. I usually give projects the benefit of the doubt, but I've never heard Sam or the other founder talk about this major issue with their system design.

I’m not saying it’s a scam, just that it seems their system isn’t really Sybil resistant due to the issue of account selling. And if that’s the case they either didn’t think this would be an issue, or they expected it but don’t really care, and the claim of Sybil resistance is just marketing. Is this wrong in some way you’d like to explain?

I can’t imagine how naive you have to be to not see account selling as a massive problem. Especially when your plan is to first onboard users in poor countries. Why would these people do anything other than signup and immediately sell their accounts, for what may amount to a month or two of normal pay, just for waiting in line and getting scanned. I find it crazy that they claimed their system is Sybil resistant when it had this most obvious flaw. Maybe they don’t really give a crap and just wanted to collect that sweet sweet VC money.

Remember, Sam Altman is the guy who made open AI into closed AI, and he’s the cofounder of this. If you think he has any intent of making this an open decentralized system that benefits people you’re likely mistaken.

I think fake iris scanning is the least of the concerns here. The big problem, and likely reason this will fail, is there’s nothing preventing you from selling your account for a small fee after getting your initial scan to set it up. And that’s likely exactly what will happen, because they’re onboarding users in poor countries first. These users don’t give a shit about world coin, they’re simply lining up and being scanned to make a bit of easy money.

And these people don’t give two shits about world coin, they just want the free money the company is throwing at them. This things is doomed to fail, because the biometrics are only authenticated when you setup your account initially like in this photo. So these people can collect the sign up fee and the then turn around and sell their account to a someone else, thereby nullifying the sybil resistance of the system.

I think this type of course should come very early in a CS program. Yes, many students learn these things on their own, but many don’t, and it’s a good idea to put them on equal footing.

Being able to efficiently use common software tools allows students to learn more effectively in other courses, so a class like this provides a leverage to the other classes. Yes a lot of CS is theory, but it’s pretty hard to learn about that without having a solid grasp of the tools.

Honestly using an off the shelf gaming controller isn’t crazy, even military subs have used them for certain applications. But why on earth would you chose this controller when you can get a much more reliable wired Xbox controller for 80 bucks. This poor design chose makes me question their judgement during the design process.

The killer app is financial freedom. If people chose to use that to commit crimes then that only proves they are criminals. Any sufficiently powerful tool can be used for good or evil.

But it’s still a store of value. No store of value is perfect, USD will lose value over time to inflation, stock indices are subject to volatility, gold is subject to theft and volatility, other foreign currencies are subject to government corruption and hyper inflation, fine art is subject to fraud and damage, etc.

So as a store of value Bitcoin actually has a good track record and is trending towards lower volatility as adoption grows.

People really need to stop thinking in absolute terms regarding value storage. It’s analogous to energy storage. Batteries leak energy over time, but we don’t sit around yelling about how they are not stores of energy.

Exactly. Anyone who’s ever done something good for someone else partly did it because it felt good. This is what drives humans to help others, and society would fall apart without this basic urge to help others.

But if he’s honest in telling his origin story about figuring out how to optimally drive engagement, doesn’t that actually make him genuine? There’s no lie here. He’s upfront about how he’s optimizing content for views and using profits to drive further content, grow the business, and donate to charity.

I don’t really find his content very interesting, but he seems like a decent guy and you can definitely make an argument he’s doing some good in the world.

Oh for sure, the gov is willfully looking the other way on this one. Increasing home prices drives up tax revenues.

1) The US isn’t the entire world, and crypto is a very global thing since it’s essentially borderless finance (outside of exchanges anyway)

2) Crypto cannot be killed due to its decentralized nature and every attempt makes it more clear how anti-fragile it is. You cut off one head in the US, two more will spring up in other countries.

Wow, those captchas almost look like satire. On a side note, what the hell is up with branding for HBO streaming? They’ve gone from HBO GO to HBO Now to HBO Max. And now, according to ads I recently saw, it’s just Max. Talk about whiplash.

I think friction is a big part. I’ve never paid for a website subscription but I have several subscription apps on my iphone because the payment (and cancellation) process is streamlined.

This is inspiring. I think I’ll pickup your book. I used to be on the lower tech path in the early smart phones days. I remember I refused to have data service on my phones for years, but sadly I caved eventually and here I am now phone addicted like everyone else.

Okay, but then what causes depression? It seems more likely that a range of environmental, lifestyle, and genetic factors cause both depression and mitochondrial damage.

Chamath talked about manager bloat on a recent All-in podcast in a way that seemed to make sense. Basically there is pressure to grow your career by moving from being an IC to a manager and once a manager there are incentives to grow your number of reports. The organizational efficiency suffers when you have top tier ICs start managing teams of average people. You might get a team of 6 engineers that’s only doing 2x as much work as the former IC that’s managing them used to do, which means the cost per unit of work has increased tremendously.

It really depends on your height and preferred wheel height setting. I'm tall and in some cars the wheel obscures a good portion of the insturments.

Spot on. I think part of the problem is in the common framing of cryptocurrencies as trustless. At the end of the day there is trust in every human made system, blockchain or not. With Bitcoin, you're still trusting that all of the developers, miners, and users won't decided to increase the block reward at any point in the future.

So what's the point of Bitcoin (and other cryptos) from a risk management perspective if it's not actually trustless. It gives you exposure to a significantly different risk profile, and one that can be better reasoned about. You're no longer at the whim of governments and corporations, but instead a loosely "organized" set of developers, miners, and users. And we can reason about what those actors will do, based on human psychology and the fact that people tend to act in their financial best interest. And Bitcoin is setup in such a way that the system operates correctly when the participants behave this way.

I think the confusion is the parent is talking about an implementation detail (blockchain), rather than the main problem cryptocurrency actually solves. Cryptocurrency solves for internet based financial sovereignty. Whether or not you think that's important to the world is a different discussion.

the killer feature is actually permissionless composability

This right here is it! Everyone is always focused on the main feature being decentralization, but decentralization isn't a feature, it's an implementation detail. Decentralization is certainly a requirement for these goals, but permissionlessness is the goal. I'll note that permisionless for users, in the ability to create accounts and send transactions is every bit as import as permisionless building.

This is why I think the term DeFi misses the mark a bit, because it's a nod to the implementation (decentralized) rather than the features (open and permissionless). But at the end of the day I think it's catchier than something like OpenFi, and the terminology is set at this point.

It just occurred to me, there may be a reason they don't tell you that I hadn't considered before. If they tell you exactly what income they do know about, then they're implicitly providing information about your income they don't know about. This might make people with harder to trace income less likely to pay taxes on it, as they have some upfront assurance that they won't get in trouble. In some ways it could be seen analogous to a common rule of negotiating, which is to get the other party to say a number first. This allows the IRS to prevent lowballing the tax number, and if the person comes in with a low number, they can still "negotiate" it up.

I don't know, just a theory. I still think the whole complicated process is stupid and they should just give you a number at the end of the year.

Psychedelic enthusiasts can be even worse in this regard.

Oh yes, I've had a run in with a "psychedelic enthusiast", and this is so accurate. It was my girlfriend during my late 20s, a woman who was 12 years older, very into psychedelics, and pretty obnoxious about how beneficial they were. Of course, at the time I ate it up because I was kinda lost in life, and let her overcome my better judgement with her guru bullshit.

I'd previously only ever used marijuana, and had mostly negative experiences resulting in anxiety, so had mostly sworn off the idea of trying psychedelics until she came into my life. Long story short, I tried mushrooms once with her, fun for a bit, but then led into a crazy making spiral leading me to be convinced I'd never be the same.

I guess I was a glutton for punishment back then, because I also tried LSD with her twice, and it had pretty similar results. In fact the second trip shook me up in such a bad way that I think it took nearly a year to get the negative bits still remaining out of my head.

Of course her reaction after all this was that I was being too resistant and that I simply needed to have a "corrective experience". Fuck that! She seriously couldn't comprehend the fact that everyone reacts to psychedelics differently and that they might be quite dangerous for some people. Which seemed kinda crazy because she was actually highly intelligent, but possibly too arrogant to look outside her world. I seriously could have ended up in an institution if I had stayed with that woman (can you tell I'm venting a tad :) ).

I've later come to learn that I have a genetic mutation that reduces my ability to degrade dopamine in the prefrontal cortex by 75% (COMT met/met), leading to much higher baseline dopamine levels. After learning about this, it makes a ton of sense why I have such bad experiences with dopaminergic drugs like caffeine and Adderall (euphoria followed hours later by intense anxiety). Now I don't know how LSD and mushrooms impact the domaine system, but it does make me wonder if this genetic SNP, partially explains my propensity to anxiety/psychosis on these drugs. High baseline dopamine leads to hyperfocus, which is great for coding or other technical work, but terrible when you're stuck in a spiral of thinking you're going crazy and will never be the same.