ETH_start

Had it not been for crypto, there would be massive covert espionage on US information systems. Crypto has acted as a canary, leading to hackers exploiting those vulnerabilities in a very dramatic and public way. That has led to a massive hardening of networked computer systems, which has likely saved far more money, in prevention of corporate espionage, than has been lost through the crypto heists.

And that's just on the cybersecurity front. In terms of economic empowerment, reducing financial friction, enabling greater participation in commerce via stablecoins, it's been a massive boon. There would be totally law-abiding people right now who would have practically no international banking options if it were not for blockchains.

Sure, but that's a zero-sum situation. There are many areas of life where you producing more doesn't harm anybody else.

I mean strictly positive from a general welfare position. Competition through innovation is not a negative externality or else the automobile would be a negative externality on account of wiping out the horse-drawn carriage industry. And the camera and photography would be a negative externality because they eliminated most of the portrait drawing industry.

Automation will of course harm whichever sector of the economy remains on the manual processes, but it leads to more abundance overall.

Even the people who lose jobs due to automation are better off overall. If you personally consume goods and services produced by 100 different classes of professionals, and you yourself work in one of those 100 classes of professional work, and your job gets automated, you lose out in that narrow sense, but you gain from having the products and services produced by the other 99 classes of professionals, become more abundant through automation.

With respect to authenticity, that's easy to prove. Take coffee for example. People are willing to pay more for coffee that was made by hand. So what do companies do? They simply have the baristas make the coffee in front of the customers. Market incentives will produce efficient ways of proving authenticity.

There was nothing normal about the whole movement that MLK Jr led. He presented himself as a holy man while participating in rape.

His close advisors included major organizers of the Communist Party. And this was at the height of the Cold War. The steelman argument for the FBI's decision is that it faced an extraordinary threat to national security in the person of MLK and resorted to extraordinary measures to try to neutralize that threat. And as far as the FBI went there were certainly lines that the FBI wouldn't cross.

There are also, of course, very strong arguments against the FBI's covert action against King, and those are well-known.

Exactly. There's never an excuse for a bailout, for any industry.

It's incredibly hard to maintain your own voice while using LLMs. It requires deep discussion with the LLM itself so that it comes to understand your perspectives and also explains to you the premises on which its own recommendations are based.

I haven't really done a systematic analysis to compare the quality of fully human-written content and content generated via this kind of deep human-AI collaboration, but my intuition is that the latter is vastly superior. Perhaps AI at its best is a research tool, but a genuinely intelligent one that we need to engage in conversation with in order to use to its full potential.

The sense that I get is that as a conversation gets more in depth, the LLMs start behaving more like reasoning engines and less like statistical averaging machines. The former is vastly more useful to a person who wants to develop an idea and articulate it well.

I think it's because the FBI had tapes proving that King was involved in rape.

This is an incredibly partisan take and I don't think it's appropriate for Hacker News, which is not supposed to include flamebait comments.

Ah yes, white people are oblivious to racism and black people are systemically abused. This is just the standard Democrat narrative. And it's fine to believe that, but again, it's far from an objective non-partisan, non-flame-baity take.

The Supreme Federal Court in Brazil has been notorious for censorship. The New York Times has found that it has ordered 223 account-blocking orders since 2020.

I did. The article treats modern arguments about reduced spending for the disabled as Nazi ideology.

It's surveillance of anyone who is receiving money. They don't have to be playing a formal merchant role to be under that surveillance.

Nazi ideology justified sterilizing and eventually killing the disabled. Arguing that less taxpayer money going to subsidizing the disabled amounts to Nazi ideology is quite an inflammatory leap. It frames lack of not taking on the responsibility to provide for another as equivalent to murder, and hence, those who reject social democracy as Nazi-like mass-murderers.

Perhaps the word "spying" implied the wrong thing. I did not intend to imply that this is in secret. This is an overt surveillance system that uses a known backdoor, not a covert one that uses a secret one.

My initial statement might not have been clear: when I use the word creative, I do not mean it in this narrow sense of creative arts. I meant in a sense of creation, producing valuable goods and services for others.

Even if we're talking about creative arts, if people cannot tell the difference between AI-generated content and human-generated content, then how are they being harmed by the AI-generated creative content?

Assuming they value them equally and they prefer to have more content, AI is strictly a positive for people.

"3. Auditability - enable the state to tax income and crack down on illegal business activities

As a payment system must comply with local laws in order to operate legally, GNU Taler must be designed to comply with these requirements. GNU Taler must provide an audit trail for investigators operating under the law. Furthermore, we consider levying of taxes as beneficial to society, and fair taxation requires income transparency. Thus, GNU Taler must enable authorities to track income."

GNU Taler: Principles https://www.taler.net/en/principles.html

There is a third party — the exchange — that records everything that the merchant receives. It's explicitly designed not to be peer-to-peer. This exchange acts as a gatekeeper and the state's delegate, for the purposes of gathering financial information on private citizens.

If you don't like the word backdoor, use a different one. It doesn't change the point I'm making. In any case, backdoor does not necessarily mean it's secret. There are known backdoors and there are secret backdoors. This is a known backdoor.

ChatGPT is now used by 1.2 billion people on a monthly basis. This is not an embedded product that people are being forced into. They are navigating to the website to use it.

GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying. You cannot create an open system in line with FOSS principles and be compliant with laws that mandate centralized control. That's why this project began with an architecture that prefaces dependence on the backdoor key holders, and is now going even more pronouncedly in the direction of asymmetrical power relationships, by becoming an entirely centralized bank. This is the only way it can remain compliant with the laws in question.

If you want to maintain FOSS principles and provide people with monetary technology, you need to be noncompliant — whether in letter or just in spirit — with the law in most of the world, where the law limits people's access to financial activity, in order to fulfil a public policy of empowering gatekeepers.

This is a tool for creation. So if it's giving one party a competitive advantage over another, that suggests it gives people creative powers. This is very much unlike a weapon where another party having a more effective weapon imposes only negative costs on you. Another party having more creative powers has significant positive externalities that benefit you.

Americans reveal their preferences in their consumer choices. AI is the most rapidly adopted service in human history.

I would also add that the infrastructure that Robert Moses was able to get built in New York, massively improved logistics in the city, which massively improved job opportunities. A lot of later problems, like the flight of higher-income residents to the suburbs that was caused by the crime wave of the 1960s, is falsely attributed to those projects. And those projects are arguably not nearly as harmful as claimed to those specific communities. The owners of the property were compensated, maybe not always perfectly at the appropriate level, but it wasn't some highway robbery.

And in terms of the black communities that were disrupted, there were many more black communities that were helped by the improved logistics.

I've been to city hearings for a new condo development in an area with high levels of substance abuse and a lot of social spending generated by that, and it was dominated by NGOs who received a significant fraction of their operating income from the government and they almost unanimously opposed the development and the development eventually got rejected, so this dominance by private developers wasn't my experience.

The October 2 headline is cherry picking. The preceding yoy quarter was inflated by the tax credit crush before it expired. Q3 was also higher than Q2.

You've also cherry-picked an instance where Tesla reported weaker than expected growth but you've omitted the times where it reported stronger than expected growth.

As for shrinking margins, that's largely due to growing R&D spending. That's not necessarily or even normally a negative thing.

The growing investment into AI and autonomy is part of a very long standing trend that has been declared for about decade. It's not an indication of desperation (beyond the ever-present desperation that companies always feel with the heat of competitive fires under their feet) or some failure of some previous plan.

>A car that is dropped that ejects a significant fraction of its mass in any direction is going to alter its trajectory but that won't change much: it's going to come down, and sooner rather than later, it isn't 'hovering' it is just very temporarily staving off the inevitable.

That meets the definition of hovering.

Economics is the science of how scarce resources are used, produced and distributed. AI is in its developed form is post-economics, because it turns what used to be economic resources into free resources.

The concern over what will happen to people who can no longer earn economic resources from their occupation misses the point. Post-economic abundance is already the ultimate goal of an economic system. And in so far as AI eliminates jobs, it does that by moving us to that post-economics paradigm. People are going to be orders of magnitude better off.

Imagine we lived in a world where oxygen was scarce. There were oxygen merchants that sold you oxygen so that you could breathe. And then suddenly the planet transformed and oxygen was plentiful. It became a free resource instead of a scarce resource.

Everyone would be better off. Even the oxygen merchants, while being harmed in one narrow sense, would be vastly better off in general.

The evidence I've seen suggests that the most common source of scarcity is restrictions on trade, like taxation.

"What if we had taxed the internet?

"What was once framed as a trivial tax—half a cent to download a photo, or a cent to send 100 emails—would now cost the average American household an estimated $784,000 per year."

Incredible stats from @JaredWalczak"

https://x.com/senatorshoshana/status/2095980044657021352?s=2...

AI being able to work for us does not mean that AI reduces employment. Every form of automation does work for us. But there is no limit to how much work can be done. And there are things that humans uniquely do that AI will never be able to do because we will never want to create AI as dangerous as human intelligence, but those same traits that make human intelligence dangerous also provide it with unique value in many domains.

There is no evidence that AI will increase unemployment.

It's inconceivable that X would employ bots to mimic humans just to inflate its own web analytics.

I think the future is people's AI agents evaluating the content generated by other people's AI agents and vice versa.

What the humans would see would be that it's filtered up to them after all of this evaluation is done. And content generation would be the reverse. People would provide a seed of an idea and then their agents would turn that into potentially useful work.