The network of belief people have in this is quite impressive even if I think they are fools.
Still though, in the grand scheme of things crypto just hasn't been around that long.
MSFT is so close to taking out its old high while crypto is all 2X away from the old highs. Over time, crypto is not going to be able to compete with stocks of cash producing businesses. Crypto fools have mostly confused commodity investing with stock investing and not understanding that the upward drift of the stock market is from the cash produced from business. Gold and silver looked like pretty genius long term holds in 1981 from being able to hold them again in 1974 but gold bugs paid an absolutely enormous opportunity cost over time.
The worst part to me for crypto fools is that because the anti-crypto people have a narrative that the price is going to zero, their false beliefs are reinforced when this doesn't happen and won't happen. The risk is not going to zero, it is the risk of trading ranges forever like gold and eating massive opportunity cost.
That sounds amazing. I am going to try this today. I have been irrational to the point of not trying this because I just love the notebook so much even though I love VS Code too. I imagine you just would never go back to notebooks.
That is nice the company pays for all that cloud compute but for an individual it would just seem more practical to build a beast of a machine.
FTP servers at that time for MP3s were ratio servers. You had to upload something in order to download and at a specific ratio of kb. Most wouldn't give you credit for uploading something they already had as well.
Finding the songs was no problem. I can remember some kind of web search engine. It was just too hard to get a collection going to even be able to download something though. I guess the idea was to rip your cd collection but that idea simply didn't occur to me at the time.
Napster took off because it was a free record store at a time when everyone was use to paying $13 an album in 2000 USD($23 adjusted for inflation).
The worst part to me is the binary nature of internet points.
Up or down. No difference between something one simply doesn't agree with vs utter and complete bullshit.
On the other hand I am not sure what the old internet forums I loved would look like if you scaled up the users 100X and then linked all these random forums together so one username interacted across message boards. That would have basically been a disaster and internet points would not have been the major problem.
The whole idea is absurd as if we are operating at the optimal peak level of software and the optimal peak level of knowledge work.
I would imagine there are far more people that work with databases today than there ever were people working on filing papers in a filing cabinet. Filing papers in a file cabinet was a massive constraint on what would be stored.
We are highly underestimating a boom in knowledge work from AI breaking so many constraints on knowledge work.
To me, to not make up your own rituals is to not really understand any of this.
A good modern Crowley ritual based on the Absinthe book is to get some wine and other substances of choice, get quite inebriated over many hours and listen to Celtic Frost - To Mega Therion. Even better with a lover involved.
To just copy Crowley is to not understand that every man and woman is a star.
To treat Crowley as just some author of text is pure blasphemy.
It seems to me gamification is a feature in some situations, a bug in other situations and with no uniformity between two people.
I despise the upvote/karma bullshit when it comes to discussions. It completely changes how people think and interact. The "witty" mention from the author is so cringe to me. The average person is just not a comedian and it is really the main reason I never use Reddit. To me, Reddit is an engine of non-comedians trying to be witty and funny playing an upvote game. The worst part is I imagine many are like the unfunny person who thinks they are funny because people fake laugh at their jokes because otherwise the interaction is just uncomfortable given the volume of bad jokes from the non-comedian. It all becomes self reinforcing in an awful way.
That is so different than something like duolingo that is motivating just to do a little bit of work that you might otherwise would not have and keeps bad streaks from forming. I just experienced this using Anki where all of the sudden I haven't practiced my language in 2 weeks but my language of choice is not on duolingo.
How is your life better with having Standard Oil broke up in 1911? We didn't get to see the counterfactual of Rockefeller strangling the oil industry by 1920.
Big tech though has gone beyond the definition of a monopoly. We didn't breakup Standard Oil because we were worried about them taking over the garment industry too.
I imagine we already pay for big tech dearly as a society but we can't run reality a 1000 times over to see the alternatives. We basically run the Windows 11 version of society and since we can't actually have a different experience we conclude "hey this Windows 11 society isn't that bad, how would any of this improve my Windows 11 life?".
If we could actually see the alternate paths this would be the biggest political issue in democracies by a mile. Instead we have big tech controlling what people see and read almost entirely so of course this is no big deal. Big tech told me so!
It is systemic but it isn't really a flaw. It is the higher order effects of flooding the system with liquidity.
If you look at the richest people in America in 1985 and adjust their wealth for inflation no one even makes the top 100 in 2023.
If the richest person in America only has 5 billion in 2023 USD then systemically there is just not enough liquidity to think about the risk/reward of buying a vet.
We have basically diluted the price of all businesses and all assets. With the amount of liquidity in the system you can either have it pool and do nothing or buy business you would never have previously.
This is the price we pay for avoiding what probably would have been two depressions from the financial crisis and covid.
Everything in economics is a trade off. It is very hard to say if we would be better off or not. If we had spent the last 15 years of life dealing with two depressions who knows what society looks like now. It is a very different answer if you are 20 or 45 too I imagine.
There is also a problem to me that "stochastic parrot" is too clever. It is too good of a name and evokes such a strong mental image. It is a great name for branding purposes but because of that it is a terrible name if we are actually trying to discover truth. It can't but help to become a blunt, unthinking, intellectual weapon and rhetorical device.
Totally agree. Hunter S. Thompson would just be a substack writer with a small following.
Conversely, I am sure there are many substack writers with a small following who would be just as big as Thompson if they were born at a different time.
Not only has media changed but the entire relationship of society with media has changed.
I would compare it to Adele being the only artist in the last 15 years to be on the best-selling album chart and probably wouldn't be there at all if she was 10 years older.
Hopefully the whole thing implodes and we go back to specific message boards.
HN would hardly be better if random people mostly interested in cooking or martial arts were putting in their two cents here.
I really can't think of any subject that is better on Reddit than it was on an old message forum that was killed off by these giant platforms.
Compare any subreddit about psytrance or trance music to the corpse of forum.isratrance.com.
It isn't even close. The forum owner is also self interested to not be labeled oppressive. I can't think of any old forum I was ever on that had problems of oppressive moderation.
That isratrance forum of course though doesn't scale to a few hundred million people and early investors getting rich.
It is interesting as the later I get into my 50s, I start thinking more and more how I should never listen to what people over 50 say.
Life is non-ergodic and the older you get the more you are over fit to a time that no longer exists.
At least youthful ignorance has a chance of actually being right. There is a pseudo-wisdom that comes with age that is almost always wrong going forward.
I have literally never watched a Mr Beast video but if I go to youtube under a new username or stealth mode then the probability of Mr Beast being on the front page I would put at about 95% and it has been that way for a long time.
We have agency. Anything could be promoted instead but instead we get this nonsense. Over time of course all this gets lost and we just pretend this is all organic.
If you google that line, that is the best you can do in a sense. It is a message encoded in a sea of absolute noise.
Fool the sky to cross the sea.