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markdestouches

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For now. I really don't like where it's going long term. Right now your worth as a human is in what you are able to do. I am terrified to think of a time when for everything you could ever hope to learn there would be a model that would be able to do this 10 times better than you for $3/hr amortized cost. The few who would own the models would own the world and the rest would be rendered essentially worthless.

This moment will never come if you just sit and wait for it. Practice in writing is just as important as in coding. Unfortunately, as many great arts of the past, writing is dying due to the publics' interest shifting away from reading (reading fiction in particular) to something else.

This same reasoning is why I'm not bullish on AI; what the potential is and what we peasants get to use are vastly different

It's not peasants who's gonna use AI, it's the elite. Peasants are gonna get nothing.

It's like banning shovels because someone can get hit with a shovel. It's not a language problem, and it cannot be solved by chopping the language up on the Procrustean bed. All it's going to do is annoy people and rally them against what used to be perceived as a good cause. And guess what, sometimes one needs to get hurt by being called a fucking idiot especially, if they act like a fucking idiot. Real life is not kindergarten. You have responsibility, not just rights.

150 ms is the time it takes for a person to see the input and then do something (like pressing a key or blinking). That's a two way communication with processing (thinking) time included. The actual input reaction, as the time it takes for your brain to register something, is faster.

In addition to that, the reaction time does not actually matter. You would be able to see a sub-reaction-time delay because your brain has a way of timing and synchronizing events. Look at it this way. You send a letter on March 1. You receive a reply on March 10. It doesn't matter how much later you actually read the reply, on March 11, 15, or in April - you still would know that it took 10 days to get the reply.

There are two different types of "want". You want to live a full and meaningful life. You also want another cigarette if you're addicted to smoking. Sure there are people who would consciously choose a cigarette, but they are a minority. Most people would rather be productive and do something that makes their lives better even if they end up lighting a cigarette.

AWS and Blockchain 4 years ago

It's not investment when there is no industry behind it. It's called speculation. Or gambling - for some people.

AWS and Blockchain 4 years ago

Bank runs still happen.

I do agree with that. But it has become an extremely rare occurrence that usually indicates some deeper problems.

A lot of banks in Europe during the 2008+ crisis -- which is why "capital controls" were enforced.

Well, one of the root causes of the whole crisis was deregulation, poor enforcement of regulations and "new" financial instruments that allowed for circumventing regulations.

People attempted runs on Chinese banks a few months ago at the beginning of the real estate collapse there.

China is a bad example for many reasons. It is not really a market economy. There are extreme levels of corruption at all levels of the government. The real estate bubble has been growing for a long time at this point and the whole industry was marred with bad practices that eventually lead to the present state. I am no expert in the Chinese banking system, but I have heard about deep problems in there as well, which, I'd assume, would be at least partially tied to the corruption, poor regulation and poor enforcement of regulation. In such a situation when the whole real estate industry is collapsing due to the issues that have been ignored for more than a decade it would be odd not to expect it to negatively affect the banking sector also in the form of bank runs.

It is good that we "believe" bank runs don't or are not going to happen and that is the whole idea.

It is indeed good that we have this belief. But it's also the result of the banking system's stability (even with all these crises). These two things reinforce each other.

Can't Unsee 4 years ago

I wonder why rounded corners are somehow more correct than square ones.

AWS and Blockchain 4 years ago

Crypto is very special in this sense.

I noticed crypto's quality of being special is in reverse proportion to the Fed's interest rates. Just an observation.

In all seriousness, the are two real drivers here: 1) speculation 2) money laundering and avoiding regulation in general. These are the things that keep crypto afloat and cryptomaniacs repeating promises of the next big thing that's gonna change everything tomorrow. The real question is what's gonna happen sooner, Tesla's fool self-driving to Mars or blockchains taking over the world.

AWS and Blockchain 4 years ago

One benefit is that you can more credibly offer to keep your promises.

We are yet to see a working example of that.

Meanwhile, users of FTX depended on government regulation and pinky-swears to keep their money safe, but since SBF owned the platform he could do whatever he wanted.

These two sentences contradict each other. And no, there was no government regulation that insured FTX deposits. There was so little regulation, they didn't even keep their transaction history.

AWS and Blockchain 4 years ago

It's not the type of currency you have that prevents bank runs. There were plenty of bank runs with very real dollars in the beginning of the century. What stopped it was proper regulation. EDIT: I mean the beginning the 20th century, of course.

AWS and Blockchain 4 years ago

> You're still missing the forest for the trees. All of this was created in the last 2-3 years and already it's replicated most of what's in traditional finance.

Making a copy of an existing technology while repeating every historical mistake on the way is not innovation but rather poor learning ability. It's been 13 years since the advent of blockchain and we are yet to see anything actually useful. Yet all we see is smuggling, money laundering and fraud. With stories like FTX we also see incredible ineptitude, incompetence and ignorance. I am so tired of seeing these same groundless arguments over and over again, especially now, once money got dear and all of the crypto started crashing down.

This is nonsense. First, no one can interact in "arbitrary user-defined ways" with anything. Second, anything you can imagine on the web and more has already been done in games. Please don't tell people that running a 3d strategy game or a AAA multiplayer first-person shooter is somehow less complex than scrolling an effing window with a bunch of text and forms in it.

I'm pretty sure there are teams out there that could have developed a successful product for that money, if you don't include the infrastructure costs.

I strongly disagree. First, to adress the grandparent comment, Valve is a private company that is still lead by its founders, so the sentiment does not apply to them.

First, Half-Life Alyx, from the technical standpoint, is a more complex project than a regular AAA fps due to the sheer amount of innovation that was required to make it work. They also developed their own VR set alongside it.

Second, measuring a company's capabilities by how popular their products are is not fair, imo. Activision, Ubisoft and the like have been churning out "blockbusters" for years at this point, essentially packaging the same game under a new title. Are they really more capable than Valve, which has released an innovative product in a completely new field?

Third, the reason Valve does not release HL3 (and this is me speculating) is not because they are unable to "pull it off" - technically, they are, they just did it with Alyx. The real issue is that the amount of hype generated behind the title is so immense almost anything they make would be underwhelming. Their decision to venture into VR complicated matters even further. VR, still being niche, would essentially make the game inaccessible to most of the fans. With valve having developed their own set, it would have looked like an intentional rip-off.

It has been a dumb idea from the start. In a nutshell, making the whole process secure to acceptable levels would slow things down to the point where it's the same time as a regular plane flight. Yet it would cost orders of magnitude more. Edit: I'm commenting on Musk's rocket travel proposal

Everybody can pass calculus. The only way one can fail at math is gaps in knowledge. If you managed to get through something like Kant or Hegel, you can get through any math subject provided you have the necessary prerequisites.

Yes, you can do that. But the price should be such (say, $30) that people like you would be a very small minority. Of course, there will still be people that could do that. The system does not eliminate such behavior completely, but it reduces it to the point where it does not affect the availability of the service (in theory, ofc). Moreover, under such system the ones who pay the most are the exact same people who cause the most mess.