dumbfoundded

It's absolutely wrong. We also have: Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey & Ernst Chain who contributed significantly to antibiotics.

You could even add politicians. How much wealth did FDR create?

It sounds like they gave you a feature for free you didn't want, and now are trying to charge for it. Very much a dark pattern.

Have you tried creating skills for your agents to follow your patterns?

Will organizations want to control their own proxy or use OpenRouter?

I'm working on Ito.ai : https://www.ito.ai/

It's Agentic QA + auto-provisioning sandboxes. Makes it plug and play to do code reviews that actually run your code instead of looking at it really hard. B/c the agents control all of the environment (ie running all of the services), it's able to collect runtime evidence about pretty much everything.

A couple open source examples: (Excalidraw) https://app.ito.ai/share/d1cb1475-fbe5-4c71-901b-409ba2aa6d6... & (n8n) https://app.ito.ai/share/bb7d73aa-fd08-482d-9938-87938e2a232...

If the question is storage, bitcoin itself provides a perfectly good mechanism. idk the exact costs but it'd be in the range of ~$0.45 to store a commitment. That's cheap enough to enable good users with small numbers of keys but also expensive enough to prevent spam. It's kind of the whole point of blockchains.

As for verification being expensive, it sounds like you don't know the actual costs. It's basically a hash. Finding the pre-image of a hash is very expensive to the point of being impossible. Verifying a pre-image + hash function = a hash is extremely cheap. That's the whole point of 1-way functions. Bitcoin itself is at ~1000 EH/s (exahashes per second)

Again, this isn't a technical problem. It's a coordination problem.

I don't think you're understanding how cryptography works. A commitment is basically a hash that is both binding and hiding. In this example it's probably easiest to think of it as a hash. So you hash your post-quantum public key (something like falcon-512) and then sign that hash with your actual bitcoin private key (ecdsa, discrete-log, not quantum safe) and then publish that message to the bitcoin network. Then quantum happens at some point and bitcoin needs to migrate but where do funds go? Well you reveal the post-quantum public key and then you can prove that funds from the ecdsa key should go there. From a technical perspective, this is a complete and fool proof system. DoSing isn't really a concern if you publish to the actual bitcoin network and it's impossible for someone to use up the key space (2^108 combinations at least).

The reason this is a dumb idea is because coordination and timing. When does the cutover happen? Who decides which transactions no longer count as they were "broken" b/c of quantum computing? The idea is broken but not from technical fundamentals.

It's an electron app but latency sensitive bits are written in rust: https://github.com/heyito/ito/tree/dev/native/audio-recorder

Corporations will require everything going through an LLM to meet company standards.

It's definitely a middle ground, but PR reviews, are not perfect. So it's easy to miss a lot of things and to have a lot of extra baggage. From reviewing code it's not always easy to tell exactly what's necessary or duplicate. So I agree, this is a middle ground of using LLMs to be more productive. Removing one bad line of code is worth adding a hundred good lines of code.

The difference between a government and a corporation is the ability to use violence. A government is just a corporation with a monopoly on violence (police, military, jails...). The structure of how people are organized is more significant. Are we talking about a dictatorship or a functioning democracy? Are we discussing a non-profit or a publicly listed company?

I'm not sure. Somewhere around 10^12 kg of initial mass would be evaporating today (1). So perhaps there is no meaningful minimum, only a minimum initial mass. If it's just about to evaporate, it could perhaps be arbitrarily small. Earth is ~10^25 for reference.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole#Expected_obse...

It's not a practical possibility. The black hole wouldn't last long and would be too small to actually absorb anything. It's the equivalent of asking if a nuke would set the atmosphere on fire.

Even a "large"ish primordial black hole would probably just pass straight through the Earth without anyone noticing.

Strange matter on the other hand...

Best analysis I've seen: "Balwani might have been perceived as someone “a little bit older and wiser” who should’ve known better."

https://qz.com/theranos-sunny-balwani-jail-time-elizabeth-ho...

Programmers just move up the stack with some staying behind to manage the edge cases and optimizations in the underlying tech. Same thing happened with the move to cloud.

It's unclear which jobs with be enabled with more productivity vs replaced completely.

Many other places have solved this problem. San Francisco has relatively low population density compared even when only looking at US cities. NYC is very livable.

It's in CA best long term interest to support as many people as possible. Remote work isn't going to solve the problem that someone who works at Walgreens cannot afford to live within 20 mi of the city.

I think cryptographic AI will become a reality. The use-case I was thinking is more of immortality/digitizing human consciousness. If you could be uploaded (like the show Upload), what would that actually look like?

Well, plain text representation would just be too dangerous. Companies could mine your consciousness, duplicate it at will or whatever else they wanted. It's a scary thought. FHE provides the solution.

This is already doable with most wallets today. Most wallets enable you to create 2^64 addresses from the same seed phrase. These are hardened and can't be linked together by just creating them.

So if Alice wants to send Bob an NFT, Bob creates a new address (recoverable with the same seed phrase) and Alice sends it there. Bob can then fund the wallet with tornado cash to use the NFT.

It's a stupidly complex way to achieve privacy and Tornado Cash is illegal. That's why we need private by default chains like Aztec & Aleo

College education is ~30x more expensive (1). Home prices (2) & Health care (3) are ~22x more expensive. Farm land is up 20x (4)

The main[1] answer to your riddle is that the economy grew about ~6x faster than we have been mining gold. The dollar is closer to being worth 7x less than 45x less.

How are you measuring it? It's a circular argument if you measure it in dollars. If it measure it in anything that can't be made more efficient due to automation & offshoring, it's no where near a 7x decrease.

[1] The secondary answer to your riddle is that late-night-infomercial-manufactured demand from goldbugs and other morons can easily raise the price of gold significantly above where it 'ought' to be. Beanie babies, baseball cards, etc.

Gold is simply a good that's impossible to mass produce with technology. Use land, housing, healthcare, education or whatever you feel is most representative. Using toothpaste and tv's for CPI is a bad measurement in the last 50 years, our technology for mass producing them has lowered the true cost.

(1) https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year

(2) https://www.in2013dollars.com/Medical-care/price-inflation

(3) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS

(4) https://www.statista.com/statistics/196400/average-value-of-...

I agree that the Fed was right in letting these crypto scams fail. The problem inherent to the system is inflation. As the Fed expands its powers, it can avoid significant recessions/depressions but one day it won't work and the dollar will fail like every other fiat currency in the world has eventually failed. This system "working" isn't eliminating risk, it's polarizing it.

I wrote a longer comment a year ago but here's a piece: "The price of gold was $45/oz in 1970. 52 years later it's $1,800/ounce. That's roughly 7.6% a year or 45x increase. If you use the inflation provided by the government, CPI, (1), they say inflation is only 3.6%/year or roughly 7x since 1970. Obviously we have a discrepancy. Is the dollar worth 45x less than 1970 or 7x times?

When we look at prices of things like education, housing, and healthcare, the 45x number makes a lot more sense. Education has 30x in price over the same time period (2). If you're comparing prices in dollars, it feels like education got really expensive compared to the basket of goods the BEA tracks but in reality, education requires less gold than it did in 1970. Our incredible supply chains and manufacturing automation have lowered most consumer prices such that we don't really notice inflation but when you look at things that can't get much cheaper like housing, healthcare, education, asset prices of all sorts, you can't miss the fact that they correlate more closely with gold than the USD."

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dumbfoundded&next=29...

Monero & Zcash are the best examples right now but like bitcoin, they are volatile and not practical for actual commerce outside of use-cases (like crime) where it's worth the cost.

Stablecoins are a large use case in crypto now but there isn't a private stablecoin yet (I'm ignoring all SGX based technology). A private stablecoin, fully backed by audited bank reserves would enable something like a private Venmo. This private Venmo would know how much you brought in and took out but would have no idea what your transaction history looks like. I think in the next few years we'll see a private Venmo.

I responded to: "Name a financial firm that had a significant negative impact on consumers?" I didn't respond to which financial firms stole money from customers. What SBF did was more like Bernie Madoff.

The only reason we didn't have bank runs and frozen accounts is because the Fed stepped in to provide liquidity to the whole market. The banking system would've collapsed similar to the Great Depression without such action. Lots of people lost their savings in the Great Depression.

It's still useful for now, but it will get less and less so. The tornado cash dev is in jail for writing code that made such efforts easier. Since coins can be marked by "good" actors as having been involved in illegal activity, they can't ever be used again.

Let's say a US company gets ransomware attacked by a Russian national and demands payment in bitcoin. US company pays in bitcoin and later reports crime. All accounts get flagged. Anyone helping that address offramp the money will be in trouble. So there has to be a Russian exchange dealing with Russian banks that's creating a track record of provably aiding in crime. It's either going to be such a small amount no one cares or the Russian companies involved will be sanctioned.

Because of the public permanent record, the utility of ETH and BTC are decreasingly useful. Things like instant international settlement, fast payments, and the alike can always be better done with tradfi. Privacy and avoiding regulation was the only real utility ever.

Our banking system nearly collapsed in 2008. Lots of people got hurt. Financialization of the US economy is a larger, delayed version of what happened to General Electric.

It's the dumbest technology to try to buy illegal stuff now. Most coins have touched an exchange and everything you do is public. Once deanonymized, it's the opposite of private.

Monero & Zcash are exceptions and the only parts of crypto I'm bullish about (including some new upcoming chains like Ironfish & Aleo). I think private p2p cash has a lot of value. BTC & ETH are the opposite of private.

Not too much longer. I think the big difference is now there are private chains coming out like Aleo, Aztec, and Espresso that use zero knowledge proofs. You can think of them as private Ethereum much like Monero is a private Bitcoin. They've only been possible to build in the last couple of years.

Honestly, I think 98% of Web3 is garbage. It's a worse system than our current financial system. I founded a web3 company in early 2022 based on a new way to put data onchain in a permissionless & trustless way to make smart contracts more useful. People don't actually care about decentralization so we pivoted a couple months after our raise.

Our team explored the space in depth by speaking with established founders and execs of many protocols and companies in the space. It's almost all driven by speculation for imaginary use cases. We went back to basics and asked, "Really, what is the point of this tech existing?" IMHO, the only reason for this tech to exist is privacy.

Right now, there's no private digital cash. I believe the ability to purchase things anonymously is a fundamental right. To me it's the same as private communication. Right now there's no private way to digitally send money. BTC & ETH seek to make this worse by making every transaction public instead of concealed by a trusted third party. I personally believe it's socially important that we figure out stable private digital cash.

Monero/Zcash don't solve the problem because they fluctuate wildly and are largely driven by speculation. Our long term goal is to create a private p2p venmo using a stablecoin. There are definitely up and downsides of privacy as there are with any freedom. Scientology wouldn't exist without freedom of religion, neo-nazi marches wouldn't exist without freedom of speech. All of the illegal activity on the internet wouldn't exist without encrypted communication. Nonetheless, I think the social benefits of empowering individuals outweigh the costs and I don't see any other technology capable of delivering private digital payments.

I completely agree and it's why I wrote it as a joke.

Companies/Tools/Projects that plan to exist beyond 2038 should just migrate their code.

You should just make the right npm package. You could call it: "probably_correct_time" and it'd just add 137 to the year if it was less than 1937 or so. Then raise some money to fund AI research to decipher if it's about the great depression or something to guess the right year. I joke but honestly someone is going to build this and then get acquired by Grammarly.

I think your read on the parent is right but despite that, I'd encourage you to check it out. IMHO, the most interesting developments in computer science are happening right now in web3. Stay away from the NFTs/DEFI and just learn about the new systems being built. If you look into the technical details of these new distributed systems, game theory applications, and zero-knowledge proofs, I have a hard timing believing any programmer can't see the new features unlocked in how we build things.

It's also socially important for well intentioned people to join the system right now. Web3 is a thing, it will happen. Mobile happened and now two companies worth roughly a trillion each control it entirely. Web3 is roughly on the same path. It's being built right now to gate keep and capture value. If you don't want to the internet to continue to dwindle down to a privatized button pushing consumption app, the battle ground is web3.

Okay, that's a change in the narrative. It's not useless. It's only useless if you're not a criminal. But that's sort of backwards. Technology is just a tool. It doesn't decide how it's going to be used. Humans decide the ways in which tools are used, adding morality & legality.

What about this tool makes it criminal by nature?

It's censorship-resistant, private (if you want it to be), and very inefficient energy-wise. It's the logical extension of encryption. Encryption is also useful for criminal purposes and internet crime wouldn't really exist without it. Privacy != criminal. Also, do you know how much energy it would save if nothing was encrypted?

Every government in the history of the world has eventually collapsed causing devastation for its people. Money printers go wild. Corruption everywhere. People cannot afford basic necessities. If we can figure out a money that cannot be messed with, maybe that's not such a bad thing.