I am sorry but this is not true, the Danger Hiptop also known as T-Mobile Sidekick series was incredibly popular in the US starting with the color version in 2003. By any definition it was a smartphone. (Also, Android is direct successor to it as Andy Rubin left Danger to start Android.)
> I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ”machine learning” field that leads to a general AI any more than I can see a path from continuous improvements in horse-breeding that leads to an internal combustion engine.
You can counter it doesn't necessarily need an AGI here but that doesn't change the fact you can't crank this engine harder and expect it to power an airplane.
> You might be surprised to learn that I actually think LLMs have the potential to be not only fun but genuinely useful. “Show me some bullshit that would be typical in this context” can be a genuinely helpful question to have answered, in code and in natural language — for brainstorming, for seeing common conventions in an unfamiliar context, for having something crappy to react to.
> Alas, that does not remotely resemble how people are pitching this technology.
Follow Jesse Anderson's Extra Focus substack (there's a book too), his newsletter helps you understand ADHD much more than anything I know of. And there are useful tips too. Remember, if it works for you, it's not weird :)
> just as it has not decided to make training data have to pay per file.
That's quite exactly what the copyright law states, though. I never thought the day will come when I root for Getty Images but the techbros have managed to do it. Congrats, I guess?
Also, this blog post misses body doubling which is incredibly helpful and can even be done virtually with focusmate or a similar service (I use focusmate personally but I do want to spam so no referral link or crap like that). Indeed, for me the only way to swallow a frog is focusmate.
Yet we didn't conclude only from this all crypto is a ponzi.
That all crypto is a scam clearly comes from the fact it is a negative sum game. When you have a game where you can tell which set of players in total are going to lose and which set of players in total are going to win without knowing the rules of the game -- that's clearly a scam. All you need here is any commodity with baked in transaction fees. The exact same would be true if you traded with plastic poker chips but you needed to pay someone a fee whenever you bought or sold one. Indeed, reviewing the process with such chips makes it more clear, stripped of high tech mumbo jumbo.
Stolfi argues all crypto is a Ponzi because 1) people invest into it because they expect good profits, and 2) that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However, 3) there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead, 4) the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, 5) while the operators take away a portion of this money. Our argument in the previous section was 3-5, you need to add 1 and 2 for it to become a Ponzi. https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon...
> If you put in $10K when WaPo told you it was a Ponzi, you'd have $1.6M today.
In 1999 Harry Markopolos had informed the SEC Madoff was running a fraud. Yet it took until the 2008 financial crisis for Madoff to be exposed. I am sure you've made quite some money if you invested with him in this time period.
Y'all really should read Stolfi because he carefully addresses all these, gold stock etc
> gold has a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale. When one buys 1 oz of gold, one gets a chip of a metal that one can sell to those consumers, and thus obtain some money that does not come from other investors.
Investment into a corporation becomes capital. It is used to buy resources which when combined properly can be sold for more than the raw cost. You are entitled to a share of these profits in the form of dividends.
On the other hand, buying crypto"currency" becomes ... just that. It sits there until you sell it to someone else.
In other words, if you rolled back all transactions in a stock ever made you'd end up with a positive sum totaling dividends paid out. If you rolled back all Bitcoin transactions you'd end up with a big fat zero. Minus, in both cases, transaction fees but while it's a mere convenience for stocks it's inherent in Bitcoin which makes it a negative sum game and as such a scam.
It's not an investment. You are gambling. And even worse, you are gambling by robbing the less informed. Make no mistake: every cent you made is a cent someone else lost -- even if they haven't realized their loss yet, it's there. And even worse, it's not a cent, it's a bit more because bitcoin is not even a zero sum game but a negative sum game and those are inherently scam. But, I guess, good for you?
Maybe the rubes can be exonerated for falling to the incessant hyping of crypto but a smart person should know all crypto is a scam because the Washington Post, the bloody Washington Post told you it's either a Ponzi or a pyramid scheme in 2015. In 2017 you had Preston Byrne challenging that article in that he considered the scam to be significantly different from a Ponzi and gave it a new name, a "Nakamoto scheme" (as an aside, Jorge Stolfi will continue the debate in 2020 where he considers the difference not to be significant and I find his arguments to be rather convincing). But he didn't, not for one second, challenged the fact it is a scam. Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain came out in July 2017. There's no way to enter the crypto space without mens rea in 2019.
