HN user
I had an email from openai last night saying I now have to credit up front for api usage, rather than paying at the end of the month. Thought it was a bit odd for user paying like $3 a month for embeddings. Then looked at the news.
I think they have cash issues. Can’t get more uses due to lack of gpu, and current users are costing too much.
The Dutch flower markets are still a big tourist attraction, on the top lists of things to do in Amsterdam.
People say “bubble” with their mind so focused on what they think is dumb ways of spending money, and they miss the lasting cultural impact, which is actually what matters.
I’m not a fan of the apes(there’s more interesting tighter communities in the nft space), but I see more and more ape-branded stuff appearing here in China. That’s probably not making the nft holders any direct money as they’re unlikely to be paying for taking the images, but these waves are unpredictable.
Mona Lisa wasn’t that famous till it was stolen…
The more complete quote from Brand is: “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.”
People often only remember the first bit…
—— “ On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other”
Just get them for free off GitHub https://github.com/search?q=delete+OPENAI_API_KEY%3D&type=co...
I’ve recently been enjoying using Alive with vscode(and copilot). Everyone suggests emacs+slime but it always felt like too many things to learn at once. Being able to use my usual ide has made it so much more pleasant. Recommend it to newcomers.
All of your examples, bible etc, have all been repeatedly edited for different cultures and age groups.
People act like this is the end of Dahls legacy, yet his stories have probably been discussed more in the past 24 hours than the past few years combined.
I recommend the book Graveyard clay on the death on languages, and how the dead are still as chatty as the living- in many ways the dead are harder to silence.
Capitalism. It’s paperclip maximisers all the way down.
Harberger taxes on ip could be neat
This is absolute nonsense conspiracy I keep seeing repeated.
TikTok/Douyin is just as cringe over here in China too.
The idea of “official” is intentionally being rejected. There is no official version of anything, just community consensus of the spec, from which anyone can implement a client.
In the past the ethereum foundation has made their own wallets/browsers/clients but they’d rather focus energy in other places and instead have grants and donations to others to help them get started and to operate their own companies.
The reason is to break away from being an authority, over time the EF should become less powerful. They are making decisions to reduce their importance and the reliance the ecosystem has on one group. Ethereum users were never ethereum foundation users.
The other listed organisations and their clients are all excellent. This is a much more healthy approach.
Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering rather than going after the people actually committing crimes. Sounds about right.
Privacy is not a crime, it’s a human right! Sorry that it makes the polices job harder, but our rights are more important.
And didn’t we go through all this already in the 90s? Are we now gonna start arresting all cryptographers?
This is because they don’t like money that is independent from state control. They hate the idea of bitcoin and eth not being $ or €. The large majority of money laundering happens through banks, who just pay a fine and sweep it under the rug.
You should understand that this is a very USA centred opinion. There’s a whole big world of different cultures and politics, and it is possible to believe there are other approaches where we reject violence and authority.
It’s the usual “you’re helping drug dealers/terrorists/North Korea, but what about the children?!” state simping that ignores the violence of the existing systems, and ignores the billions of people in the world who aren’t any of the above and are also benefiting from our attempts to design systems that respect liberty.
I think we absolutely should build infrastructure that allows people within oppressive regimes options with which they can resist, escape, coordinate. For example, we shouldn’t accept that Iranian devs get booted off GitHub.
You are posting on hacker news.
Hacker.
The defining thing of hackers is taking things apart, understanding them, modifying, breaking, rebuilding, improving, dreaming!
What a sad ideology of “don’t touch, leave it to the authorities”
I urge you to go flick through http://pessimistsarchive.org/
Stablecoins without collateral backing them have repeatedly failed (and they failed when they were tried before crypto too), but dai/rai/usdc are working fine.
At this point I’d like to sees US regulation around $ stablecoins so we can use something else and reduce the power of the US dollar in the world. Go ahead America, regulate yourselves.
I was surprised too. You have to have secret votes to stop intimidation, and also collusion. If people can prove they voted a certain way then they can be bribed.
I’m glad to see pushback on the “crypto means cryptography” meme, which is really just an indicator they aren’t interested in the leading cryptographic research.
I think it really is light client development that will make a big change to being decentralised e2e. Being able to talk with the chain directly from an app or webpage without needing to make api requests to a node (be it local or infura/alchemy). If we can get light clients for indexing/search networks too that would be the dream.
Groups like DappNode are doing good work here. You can buy a nuc from them with their os installed and then pick from a list of apps to install (owncloud/ eth nodes/ ipfs pinner/etc) and it handles the messyness of dyndns/openvpn/updates and all of that. Anyone can contribute docker packages with their markup for people to install new programs. I’m working on a funkwhale port so I can pull my music back locally and not digital ocean
It requires a change in mindset from “efficiency first” to “robust first”. That’s a tough learning curve for trad web devs, the best web3 dev I know comes from aerospace engineering where resilience and redundancy are part of the process.
But ultimately succeeding in making something that can live in the sometimes hostile environment on chain means you make something that can last and is reliable. There can be awkward UX issues with that though.
Relying on stable gas fees won’t work because the network has to have a priority list when it’s busy, so those willing to pay more will be prioritised and you’ll be stuck. If you want to inherit the properties of the chain that are why you would build on it in the first place then you have to work to those constraints.
The closest attempt I can think of is status wallets token ranking for dapps. You could burn your tokens to say if you liked something in their listings and that would rank it for others. The issue they hit is when the lists got popular (in like 2018-19) vc funded projects just bought up the supplies of tokens and burnt them to get their project rated higher. So basically Sybil attack and they became unreliable.
It’s the same problem across all decentralised protocols, if it’s cheap to say something you get spam(see email) but introducing costs can just skew it to those who can afford to spam instead (essentially those with an advertising budget).
So there’s been a lot of research on proof of personhood (BrightID/ideas/proofofhumanity) to add Sybil resistance mechanisms so we can do 1p1v across the network. They’re working ok, but the next big step is adding zkproofs so we can anonymise the voting (which is needed to prevent collusion) which clrfund and sismo are working on.
Kleros have an interesting curated register protocol, which seems to work on small scales. Some groups are using it to token rank guy issues to prioritise work and get feedback.
The status blog has some interesting writing around these ideas over the past few years https://status.im/research/
The idea of light clients is they will be bundled inside of apps/websites/extensions. So yes running a light client will be easy because it’s just happening in the background of the app, replacing the api hopping we do now with direct call/response to the chain.
So for metamask they would replace the calls to infura with a light client instead. Easy. They’re probably a year away from adoption, this year will accelerate development as it’s something lots of us want.
fwiw I follow a lot of crypto people on Twitter and 0 of them are following this message app, it has 700 followers and you decide to jump into the discord? To me that’s like getting a random email about a product and saying “yes tell me more” I’m not sure what you are expecting.
I’m not an economist or banker. Other people will have better answers. I’m sure there’s a lot of excellent stuff we can use in existing systems. But I just don’t hold it as a precious untouchable thing. People tell me they are scared crypto is dangerous, but we’ve already been badly hurt by the current system I’m not gonna apologise for trying something else.
I think a key idea to pursue is how we could provide privacy for individuals and transparency for institutions/corporations.
And I think it’s important to try ideas. Try something, anything. Accept that most things will fail, that 90% will be shit. Break things, take things apart and rebuild them, remake old ideas anew. Take the same energy i have to getting mods to run in a game, or monitoring the rain in my garden and doing it to money and banking and lending, community currencies, universal basic income, trust networks, etc.
That’s not to say don’t be critical, there is a lot to question and weird speculation(imo a result of the abusive financial system we live in, it didn’t just appear with crypto) but hackernews could do with more hacker mentality on crypto imo. It’s a massive design space for people to try out their ideas for money and debt and gift giving and public services and taxes and where digital worlds and communities meet real world politics and institutions and economies.
I’d like it if my bank was hentai death metal themed not hsbc blandness. And that I can build my own savings account logic on top of it that automatically sends half the profit to animal charities. I’d like to be able to spin up an instant bank account for my new guild of strangers around the world at the click of a button so we can share materials and grow together. I’d like my money to be pictures of dogs not pictures of a president or queen. I don’t think these ideas are silly, dangerous, or impractical. And it doesn’t require the permissions of tradfi. Just public and private keys. Wild.
I’d be willing to bet over the next five years we see the biggest most impactful developments for reforestation/carbon offsets/political lobbying for change/rewilding programs /etc will come from crypto groups, funded and organised by daos. It’s brewing already. I also think we’ll see bitcoin become a smaller part of crypto and pow being banned in some countries. It’s going to be an interesting decade.
I feel like lots of people forgot about 2007/08 and the impact on so many people around the world. It was truly painful and destructive. And very clearly people responsible got off free, with bonuses and some even ended up with jobs in the treasury.
A lot of people I know working in crypto saw their families hurt badly by that crises and will happily spend their lives trying to build something else (even if the odds are stacked against them). They protested at OWS and saw little political will for change.
Eventually we are left with the question: Do we just sit around voting every few years for another colour to be in charge, or do we try build something else, maybe it’ll work, maybe not, failure is ok we already live in a failed state, maybe all we need to do is threaten the existing political/financial institutions so that they do things differently or risk irrelevance. Who know. Trends and forces.
Here’s a paper from a few years back with a low end estimate of 11MTCO2e for a year of digital advertising https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019592551...
For comparison that one year is about the same as the entire history of ethereum, which gets a lot of criticism. Or about 4 world cups.
And a crazy 10x that on the high end of the estimates. Be interesting to see some new numbers on this.
NFT content is 99% of the time already available free. You can think of it as one person paying the cost for everyone else to get free access. They are usually stored on ipfs or arweave so you can just follow the content id for the file you want. Beyond immediate metadata which you can access the use of the nfts are like keys to services (chatrooms, merch, club memberships) which you cant copy anyway because they are behind the private key of the owner of the nft.
So there would be very little reason to duplicate a chain for that. You can already get the free stuff and you can’t copy the rest because clubs will look at their register not yours.
Uk has this law too. If you freelance to just one company you’ll be classed as an employee of that company instead of self employed.
The reason is companies were abusing self employment laws by only recruiting freelancers even for full time roles so they didn’t have to provide sick pay/parental leave/holidays/pensions/etc.
clr.fund is a good demo of how this sort of thing can be used in online distributed communities to distribute funding across public goods and implements maci (minimal anti collusion infra) https://github.com/clrfund/monorepo