b1daly

the world is incredibly filled with risk to humans—people in the AI doomer camp are making a claim that AI potentially is a new kind of uncontrollable risk that warrants extraordinary regulation

the basis of this claim seems to be a confusion of logical or deductive reasoning with inductive or observational reasoning

argument comes down to

- it’s possible to imagine a super intelligent machine that has properties that will kill everyone (this is an exercise in logical reasoning)

- since it’s possible to imagine it, this means it will come into existence — this is an error because things that exist in the real, physical world do so based on physical processes governed by inductive reasoning

generally, there is a long series of steps between the imagining of some constructed, complex machine and its realization, along with its conceptual foundations it requires sustained effort, trial and error, maintenance, generally a serious fight against entropy to make it function and keep it functioning

the sort of out of control AI imagined by AI doomers is not something we’ve seen before

so we shouldn’t make costly decisions based upon this confusion of reasoning

doesn’t your example make clear the existence and nature of free will?

it’s obvious in its absence

this is my pet peeve with discussions of ‘free will’ they have an implicit definition—everything being exactly the same at a different time or place—that is non-sensical as far as we know.

I’m still disturbed by peoples confidence in a deterministic universe—I suppose such confidence is based on the success of inductive reasoning but inductive reasoning is a phenomenon based on how our minds work.

As far as I know the philosophical problem of causation is not considered solved?

In any case, elements of randomness seem likely to play a role in human intelligence but what that role is, who knows?

I’ve never understood his crankiness on this subject: the concept of ‘right to repair’ is entirely synthetic.

Government intervention in markets is usually predicated on some kind of ‘market failure’ and I don’t see how that is the case here. There is plenty of competition in the phone market and if the option to have a phone repaired by third parties was really desired by consumers then someone would sell such a phone.

It seems more like Rossmann is angry there is not a product-market fit for his services. Something like that.

Really? Like in the next 200 years? That’s ridiculous. The scenarios from IPCC envision a future of prosperity, albeit at a reduced level than if we could somehow drastically cut carbon emissions.

In the US landlords do have some liability for criminal conduct on their property whether committed by tenants or others.

Most web services do have strict restrictions on conduct. This is a far cry from vigilantism.

It’s messed up for Cloudfare to wash their hands of any responsibility here.

No he is not. The Strike in question is the one run by Jack Maller and the description of using USDT for remittances to ES comes from Miller’s own Medium article.

https://jimmymow.medium.com/announcing-strike-global-2392b90...

When have ‘the media’ ever not published lies and ideology? Serious question...

I agree with the thrust of your comment in general. I thought that Trump’s China travel ban was a choice of common sense and the Democrats labeling it as xenophobic was counterproductive.

While it certainly was xenophobic in Trump’s hands, it was practically a decision that made him happy as a China hater, the motivation of the decision is independent of its utility.

Trump certainly made a mess of it after that.

All of the politicians got fooled by the relative stability and rareness of the pandemic. Most of the time telling people not to panic it won’t be as bad as you fear works OK as a strategy in a country like the US.

Isn’t this a problem of efficiency and optimization? Running the system lean leads to lower costs, but with risk of occasional shortfalls due to exogenous effects. But to optimize for those relatively infrequent events would increase the cost of the frequent events (the everyday shipping).

Given the challenge of finding an optimum it seems like the world hasn’t done too badly.

This argument about code inspection does not make sense to me. The number of people who are going to even have the ability to inspect the code of the applications they use is infitesimal and of that small number the people who have time and inclination to do so is microscopic. Given that applications are complex, written by groups of programmers over extended time what is the chance of meaningful code review by an individual? It could take years for a single application.

I don’t know if Free software makes software less secure but I don’t see how it makes it more secure? Especially given that security might not be a high priority for the authors.

I’m not a programmer so it’s hard for me to understand the arguments, but from what I gather is that any popular software could be a vector for threats and that users themselves remain the biggest vector.

The author suggests greater use of code signing could help. It also seems to me that progress towards computer security needs to be the province of large, well resourced organizations.

Our own (US) government seems to not be prioritizing this correctly, preferring to maintain their own exploits at the cost of defense. This is a political problem. It is of a piece with the historical arrogance of the US security-military apparatus that is being badly outplayed, mistaking pure military superiority as the most important type of security.

We need protection from which government? All of them? I think that is probably impossible.

This article is an example of the pure propaganda that 'mainstream financial media' participates in on-the-regular. Why that is I don't know. Symbiotic business interests I guess.

It's not that the information is incorrect. It probably is and it does tell us something about some of the big players around Coinbase.

But the whole bitcoin 'ecosystem' is essentially a collective criminal organization, with some players being closer to the dirty parts than others. (I'm leaving out everyday holders of bitcoin, just talking about insider types.) These big Coinbase players might not 'touch the poo' directly, but their hands still get stinky.

The price action in bitcoin is determined across a network of exchanges, most of which do not use real dollars (or other govt currency). They use crypto only for trading, including the fake 'stable-coin' tether.

Tether (the company who issues the currency tether) has been shown definitively to be running a scam and are completely dishonest.) They have issued $35Billion worth of their fake dollars. Until recently they were issuing on the order of $1B per week!

Tether is a sister company to the exchange Bitfinex with the same owners and management. So essentially the same company. They just signed an agreement with the New York Attorney General where they paid a fine of $18.5M (notice difference in scale). The agreement spells out exactly how they have been scamming people. This is based on information coming from the company itself. This is not FUD, just FACT. (interestingly since they signed this agreement ~10 days ago, they stopped issuing tether.)

One of the central players in this ongoing criminal operation who has been taken out is Crypto Capital Corp. They ran a shadow banking system for many of the big exchanges, including Bitfinex and Binance. The Feds seized $850M from CCC for money laundering, which precipitated a crisis for these entities and intensified the criminal activity of the many industry insiders connected through this shadow bank.

My guess is that Tether issued $35B in fake USDT (tether) almost exclusively without dollar collateral backing. (the original premise of tether was each would only be issued on receipt of a true USD by tether, and therefor each USDT was pegged to a USD, the peg holds for now but the dollar backing is not there, that's another story.)

Most of this $35B was issued over the last year when we have seen a huge rise in bitcoin price. The tether currency only has one purpose, to buy cryptocurrency. So this is a huge amount of liquidity introduced into the market. (Compare to the hype around Tesla's $1.5B bitcoin purchase.)

It is the price appreciation that drives this whole market, including the business of Coinbase, even though they do not deal with tether.

The OP article mentions none of this! Sure, it reveals some insiders, perhaps on the more legit side, but ignores the real engine of this speculative bubble/fraud.

It has the effect of 'white-washing' this dirty game.

It's really gross.

The difference is the moon landing or ‘who shot JFK’ are about subjects that are low stakes, very low. Having millions people believe the Presidential election was corrupt is corrosive to the basic civic foundations of the political process.

I believe what they are saying is that if their is a correlation between skin color and vitamin D levels (people with darker skin have less vitamin D) and there is another reason people with darker skin have poor outcomes (let’s say bad healthcare), it would make any conclusion that the vitamin D levels have a causal relationship to covid-19 outcomes less likely.

To account for this, you would need to control for skin color.

You are not acknowledging the core economic problem which is that the productive capacity of the economy is going to be destroyed if this doesn’t end soon.

What you are describing is essentially how to ration the dwindling supplies of goods during the epidemic.

Enacting arbitrary taxes where the government simply appropriates funds from entities that have it and gives it to those who don’t is unfair, dangerous, and will undermine trust in the rule of law. It will be ripe for abuse and predatory behavior. It is also a system that loses the critical information market mechanisms provide, instead replacing with “command” based allocation which is a dangerous precedent.

The way to achieve what you propose that is not at odds with civil society is for the government to “print” new money, and distribute it through moderately means based criteria.

The US has unlimited capacity to increase its money base as a sovereign entity. Normally this is done through the Fed buying bonds from the treasury. The treasury has the authority to create money directly if they choose.

This has the effect of devaluing the currency as a whole. By distributing the new currency ti citizens that need it, it is effectively a transfer of wealth that is distributed throughout the economy in a decentralized and proportional way.

It is only necessary to target those who need help, opposed to harder problem created when the need to target who can “afford” to sacrifice their savings is added.

This doesn’t address the problem of productivity lost, but it allows what productive output there is to be more fairly rationed.

It also less subject to being the legal and political nightmare your suggestion entails.

I like Serum a lot, but it has the same set of issues that make all of these digital synths limited as performance instruments compared to, say, a piano.

The issue starts with the low resolution of MIDI. Most instruments implement only velocity connected to keys, with max 128 layers of resolution.

A real piano has near infinite resolution on velocity alone.

This exacerbates the issue that digital synths are generally deterministic, meaning for the same input they produce the same output.

Because the resolution of the controller is so low, attempts to introduce variety rely on randomness. In an acoustic instrument the same sound cant ever be produced twice. But this is a result of a complex, chaotic system, not randomness.

A major factor in the inherently chaotic sound is that each note is exciting the same physical object, even a note played with the same velocity (like a disklavier piano system could) will sound different every time based on the state of the whole large object. As notes are added to a chord or arpeggio, they are not just superimposed over each other, instead they each contribute their energy to the whole object.

The use of mod wheels definitely helps with expressiveness in the hands of a good player.

But my sense is that even “players” are forgoing using these instruments as performance tools, and instead loop the sections, and piece through the whole song, listening carefully, modifying the midi data directly based on what they a hearing.

This has definitely resulted in some very imaginative and striking work, but, to my ear anyway, it has a very different feel as a mode of artistic expression. It’s more “cerebral” in some way.

I wouldn’t say modern electronic music has a higher level of ‘sonic texture’ than orchestral music, or any music using traditional instruments. The difference is that in modern music ‘sonic texture’ is an explicit mode of “authorial expression.” The sonic textures creates by acoustic instruments are arguably richer, as they are capable of much more subtle modes of expression as playable instruments.

It’s just the case that the development of novel acoustics instruments is a whole separate craft, subject to the annoying vicissitudes of the sonic properties of physical matter. The instruments were developed over centuries.

As soon as instruments became electrified artists began using the ability to express themselves directly by manipulating the sounds themselves.

The sonic experimentation dominating modern pop music is entirely the result of the complete digitization of the sound generating chain.

I also think another factor is that digital synthesizers are woefully impoverished as instruments capable of expression through musical performance. Outside of the voice, modern pop is devoid of real-time musical expression. It’s become a non-real-time process, closer to writing, animation, the visual arts.

This forces the composer to rely on the native capacities of the instruments to express ideas, and the one that is completely unavailable in the acoustic realm is to chain the fundamental timbre of the instrument.

I’m a producer, recording engineer. The author of the original piece is missing that the only reasons a composer could imagine they were working primarily with the modes or melody, harmony, rhythm is that there is highly developed tradition of musicianship and instrument design to fill in the most fundamental aspect of music, which is the actual sound.

Edit: there is another huge factor in the decline of melody which is the product of two interrelated technology developments. The first is the use of loop based sequencing techniques for compositional work, and the second is that the random-access editing techniques made possible by modern digital audio workstations extended the loop based composition process to all sounds, including the voice.

Loops are basically short compositions. If you spend a lot of time in this mode or composition, your ideas will tend to be short. The actual mechanics of how the music is made disincline the composer from constructing both traditional harmony and melody.

The DAW has fundamentally disconnected music from the strict relationship with linear time that was inherent before the age of recording. To some extent musical notation allowed composers to work around this, but the end result was always an expression that had to have a thought out beginning, middle, and end.

I wrote an essay on this subject that I think is pretty good. https://dnamusiclabs.com/harmonic-distortion/daw-and-end-tim...

That doesn’t require a blockchain based system though. A single entity can secure a crypto currency.

You can convert PayPal directly into US dollars at your bank, so I don’t think they would see any benefit to supporting such a distributed token system unless the could make a cut on every transaction.

I’m having a hard time seeing Facebook being able to support a stable coin without being subject to the same regulations and cost as any other system.

Perhaps they will get a competitive advantage through data mining and could charge smaller transaction fees.

In reality, the attack surface with crypto’s is ever expanding.

There’s no free lunch, and the minimal security provided with crypto currencies is provided at a high cost.

But it really depends on being able to transact at one of the very limited set of vendors who would accept crypto, especially overseas.

It’s a chicken/egg problem because without an extensive ongoing economy which would allow one to conduct a significant portion of total spending in crypto, it will be required to buy and sell back and forth to fiat.

So far costs of exchanging crypto to fiat are significant. I tried to figure out a way to use it to transact with a vendor I do business with overseas. We don’t care about bitcoin, we were just looking for a cheaper way to make the remittance.

Doing it with crypto was harder and more expensive than even PayPal. Especially because it subjects you to volatility risk and information blocks due to transacting between 3 currencies: USD-BTC-EUR.

You could argue that as “adoption” increases (using crypto as real currency) this problem would lessen.

I doubt this will be the case, even if the “scaling issue” is solved.

I don’t see any reason that crypto will lower the cost of securing transactions. Currently, the cost of digital transactions include fraud protection and regulatory compliance.

A currency that operates out of the jurisdiction of government cannot scale, as being a “black market” currency is inherently limited is scope.

The biggest problem is that distributed, peer to peer, currencies provide a vastly larger attack surface for hackers. They also require large scale duplication of security practices, implemented by relatively inexperienced (at providing security) users.

This is the worst of all worlds. The drastic consequences of being hacked either require the user to undertake the costly risk mitigation strategies and accept the risk of losing funds or...use custodial solutions like exchanges or banks.

That means at least a lower cost per user for security, but it shouldn’t be any lower than cost of bank security practices, at best.

For proof-of-work coins the cost of securing the network must also ultimately be borne by users. There are not infinite speculators willing to cover the mining costs.

Ultimately, this leads to a currency that has a high cost. It therefore will lose out to centralized currencies.

Crypto currency has two properties competing digital currencies lack.

True peer to peer transactions and censorship resistance.

They also have some properties that make them useful as a vehicle for pure speculation, which is a perennial interest of humans.

But the type of transactions that benefit from the peculiar properties of these digital token systems are not that numerous, and are mostly black or gray market activities.

When you add in the fact that it is trivial for governments to crackdown on crypto currencies, just by making them illegal, or even just enforcing existing tax regulations that make each transaction a taxable event,it’s clear the odds are stacked against crypto currencies becoming widely adopted.

Facebook is not going to be able to avoid the costs that other digital cash systems have. So they may succeed, but their token will not really be in the same category as the “real” crypto currencies.

They will be subject to as many regulations as PayPal, Apple, Venmo, etc.

They will also have the same need for security and fraud protection.

I agree with a lot of his points, and I would do well to embrace them.

When he gets into diving people into “makers or takers” that’s an arrogant and ugly way to look at the world. Because “taker” has a perjorative element.

People are not one thing. Maybe I’m biased by living in the US but most people I know try to be a positive member of society, even if they lack wealth.

Perhaps you could apply the “taker” label to the severely disabled, or to pathological criminals. If ones criteria is net contribution to the worlds wealth.

I thought GM did a great job with the Volt. My Dad has one. He usually only drives around town, so he never needs gas. But the car has a range of 400+ miles on a full charge and tank of gas. He says the switch from the electric motor is seamless.

It seemed like it really solved the range issue while being a true “plug-in” electric vehicle for daily use.

I think he paid $33k.

It completely failed in the market.

Not sure what to make of that.

The middle class enjoy the benefits of subsidies to the oil industry already. They are also getting cheaper prices due to the political resistance of including the costs of atmospheric carbon dioxide to the planet.

If the middle class would be willing to pay a carbon tax, then the current system would be needed.

Yes it does mean it’s not a monopoly! That’s the literal definition.

You could describe it as a duopoly but I think it’s pretty clear that Apple and Google are fierce competitors. And Apple has minority market share by far.

Neither company has anywhere near a well protected position in the market. The mobile computing market has not seen companies establish long running monopolies.

Two of the top competitors in the sector, BlackBerry and Nokia, are long gone, shells of their former selves.

The problem you complain about is due to structural elements in the market, specifically that network effects are inevitable in the market for operating systems.

The purpose of anti-trust laws is to protect people against predatory markets practices, not to interfere with market function because it doesn’t support a product.

FWIW, there are other mobile OS options available. You just don’t want to use them because they have not reached a market share significant enough to support the kind of rock app ecosystem we expect.

The Soderberg remake is excellent and adapts the pacing to more familiar levels.

I don't think there's any need to pretend Apple is marketing this simply as a virtuous act. They have competitive advantages in some areas, and not in others. They are taking advantage of such an advantage.

I don't see how any anti-trust laws based on having monopoly-level market control could possibly be applied to Apple.

Apple simply does not have a monopoly in any market, from either a narrow "by the book" perspective or in a broader functional perspective.

Unless the DoJ Apple is unfairly monopolizing the market for Apple's products and services...

Well yeah, but don’t you think this is exceptionally hard with a touch screen?

Didn’t microsoft try to do this in Windows 8 with little icons in the corners? The problem is that little icons provide only marginally more information, if at all, than the existence of the corner of the screen.

It’s a very hard problem and Apple works on it. They have abandoned previous standards on discoverability because of the inherent limitations of a touch interface on a small screen.

Sacrificing discoverability for usability is the right choice.

I think one issue is that some UI conventions have not been settled on, so I often have to look up how to do something on iOS.

The most recent example of this was “shake to undo.” After looking this up, not only did I learn how to undo typing, I also learned why I would occasionally get these inexplicable warning windows asking if I wanted to undo!

I’m not quite following you here. Are you suggesting that there is an alternative to the current system that allows buyers and sellers to opt out of the ~2% fee built into prices to cover the cost of fraud?

And that this system is currently precluded by law?

As I understand it, merchants are now allowed to offer a lower price for cash purchases. The fact that so many merchants use credit card systems seems to speak to their marginal value.

My off-the-cuff analysis is that there is a certain amount of fraud that is inevitable with any non-cash transaction, especially those that allow chargebacks.

The credit card companies have tried to enforce the lack of a cash discount because it enables them to spread the costs across virtually the entire system of users. Without the ability to do this, I don’t see how a system as widely adopted as Visa and MasterCard could have got off the ground. This is what makes it work.

If we assume the cost of fraud is independent of the structures that determine who bears the cost (a big assumption) then the argument is going to be about how that cost is apportioned among users.

Since the system has been adopted, overwhelmingly, by both buyers and sellers, it seems reasonable to conclude that it has been a (huge) value add to the whole economic system.

If you allowed participants to use the system but opt out of paying what is essentially the insurance policy against fraud, the total cost of fraud in the system can’t go down without the gross level of transactions going down.

You seem to be saying that there should be a tiered, opt out system of fees. Buyers wanting to use their card in high risk (of fraud or chargebacks) industries, like porn, should bear the cost of providing the fraud insurance buy paying higher fees?

It begs the question why such a service is not being provided by the market. Essentially, credit card companies have come to the conclusion of providing such a service is not profitable.

In a sense, they are offering an “opt out” for the extreme cases like porn, by making it hard for the porn providers to offer credit card services at all.

Forcing a universal fee structure on everyone provides two huge advantages:

It facilitates the build-out of the network itself, which provides tremendous value to all users.

And it lowers the total cost of determining what the actual cost of fraud insurance should be. This cost would fall across all parties.

The card providers would have to build the industrial infrastructure to understand the costs at a more granular level. It would require both capital investment and ongoing costs to manage such a system. It would also incentivize non-productive activity around trying to “game” the system. Essentially it would be a new attack surface.

It would also move some of the costs of evaluating the risk of a given purchase onto the consumer. This would result in a large net increase in total costs as individuals who lack the skill and scale to properly do this would be forced into it. This would also result in a massive “duplication of effort.”

Intuitively, I think this would result in a large decline in overall economic activity, as it simply would not be worth the investment to make certain kinds of purchases.

The current system puts the costs of fraud mitigation into the entity who can provide it at the lowest cost.

There is also of course the simple argument that the credit card system is opt-in. It is possible to conduct business with cash or check. I use a tech who repairs speakers that I collect. He adds 3% to use Paypal. I opt to send him a check.

You can also send cash through the mail. In this instance, a transaction where the seller won’t release the product until they receive the funds provides the kind of transaction you want, where the entire risk of fraud (or loss) is borne by the buyer.

I think most small businesses at least would accept cash in person or the mail.

It’s not ideal, but my guess is that how the net cost of fraud protection with electronic transactions is distributed is pretty close to ideal.

This is just one of the many problems that render crypto-currency systems to be hopelessly expensive. The lack of ability to build in “socialized fraud protection cost” will prevent mass adoption.

They also suffer from the problem that the cost of securing the network should rise in a system lacking inflation as the total value of transactions increase.

The game theoretical costs of providing the minimum of security a proof-of-work system offers are hard to parse. But the current cost of bitcoin transactions is outrageously high, when accounting for mining cost.

IMO, the bitcoin system is being supported by a combination of outright fraud, speculative investment, and money laundering.

The real costs land in a very disproportionate manner, for example, when exchanges go belly up, or when an individual is scammed out a large sum.