solveit

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7 個月前discuss

The bright side is that it should eventually be technically feasible to create much more powerful and effective guardrails around neural nets. At the end of the day, we have full access to the machine running the code, whereas we can't exactly go around sticking electrodes into everyone's brains, and even "just" constant monitoring is prohibitively expensive for most human work. The bad news is that we might be decades away from an understanding of how to create useful guardrails around AI, and AI is doing stuff now.

8 個月前discuss

I get the feeling that you're winging the specific numbers because they're spectacularly incoherent.

But anyway, the United States is extremely rich and has essentially no big problems that can be solved by a small amount (say, a few billion) of money. The problems are either so big that it would take trillions to solve (supporting aging population etc), or blocked by something other than money (politics, regulations, etc). The big problems that can be solved just by throwing a few billion at them are solved quite easily by either the government or by private entities like the Gates Foundation.

8 個月前discuss

Even the US median household income is "only" $83k. Looking at stuff like this + the rest of the blog I'm not convinced the author is any less out of touch than the people this post is criticizing.

4 年前discuss

At a large enough company you kind of have to... as this situation shows.

5 年前discuss

> Not for those of us that don't invest our money in banks/stock markets, and don't take out loans. Private businesses meeting the above criteria would have boomed under those conditions, as there competitors were wiped out.

These two sentences contradict each other. You see, the competitors that get wiped out have employees who would lose their jobs regardless of how their money was stored.

5 年前discuss

How do you reverse a cash transaction in a way that doesn't apply to crypto?

5 年前discuss

> Everyone arguing regulators are evil is genuinely tech and finance savvy. The regulator is not there to protect them. They are there to protect the vast majority

I agree. But a funny thing I wanted to remark on is that this dynamic makes defi (and any other esoterica) better (or less worse, depending on your POV) than it "deserves" to be. It essentially functions as a less-regulated side track for those savvy enough to use it, and this self-selecting population is one that does not need as much regulation as the general population. Of course, this is until defi gets packaged into nice, consumer-friendly products you can buy with a couple of swipes, which is already happening.

5 年前discuss

> I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it.

I mean, cash transactions are irreversible right? Unless you mean that there was always a government willing to force a reversal, in which case crypto (and all technical solutions) isn't all that different. It's just another day in the never-ending arms race between the regulator and the regulatee.

5 年前discuss

> This feels like some sort of opportunistic resume-building kind of project, made from the very real deaths of thousands of innocent people.

They dislike the current state of the tech industry and cannot stop thinking about it no matter what the topic.

5 年前discuss

> FU money is literally the ability to say FU and do something anyway when someone says you can't.

I always thought FU money was enough money that you can say FU and not do something when someone says you have to. That is, enough money to retire (get fired) on a whim. Of course, even by that definition, 750k isn't FU money unless you're single in a LCOL area (or fairly close to a predictable death, I guess).

My personal criterion for FU money is 3mm. This is fairly achievable, market willing, if you have make six figures.

7 年前discuss

Yeah but OP says they were only promoted once, so they're probably not on track to make L6 in six years.

7 年前discuss

But federal minimum wage ($7.25) is a lot smaller than, say, the NYC minimum wage ($15), which is more relevant. At the NYC minimum wage, 100-hour work weeks get you about 80k a year, which is about the base pay for an undergraduate new hire at McKinsey.

7 年前discuss

You should be concerned about debris from the truck in front of you flying through your windshield. Unfortunately, I don't think anything short of an armoured hull will stop that. The stronger glass is useless.

7 年前discuss

Kind of. ASICs aren't exactly super available, but the manufacturers are also players, so if the attack is severe enough to be an existential threat to Bitcoin, I expect Bitmain (largest ASIC manufacturer) will fire up their unsold inventory which amounted to more than a billion dollars worth as of last year.

Separate from the manufacturers, relatively easy courses of action I can see are buying hashing power from marketplaces like nicehash, and temporarily concentrating their machines on BTC and not mining BCH. This can only get you so much though since BTC hashrate dwarfs BCH hashrate.

7 年前discuss

Yes. Also, an attack would be fairly obvious and miners invested in the future of the blockchain (i.e. everyone using ASICS, which is everyone that matters) would increase their hashrate to mount a defense, increasing the cost by some hard-to-predict but significant amount.

7 年前discuss

It doesn't matter if the US government is doing the attacking, they're not winning with general purpose hardware. ASICs are literally thousands of times faster with lower power consumption than GPUs. Also, any state attacker worth their shit would have the ability to develop their own ASICs so I don't know why you're hung up on using general purpose hardware.

Finally, you certainly cannot buy off the ASIC miners with a few million, not least because they own billions of dollars worth of ASICS that can't do anything but mine Bitcoin, and a successful state-orchestrated attack on Bitcoin would make all of them worthless. I don't think a state government taking down Bitcoin by its own rules is completely impossible, but you don't seem to have any grasp of the scales involved.

7 年前discuss

Sure it does, we (should) decide policy based on what is possible, not what adheres to some God-given set of moral consistency conditions. A ban on e-cigarettes is probably politically feasible, a ban on cigarettes is not.

Anyway, I still disagree with banning e-cigarettes because it seems they're so much less harmful than regular cigarettes that even if the marketing was so effective that everyone started vaping, I'm not sure the harms would outweigh the gains from smokers quitting.

7 年前discuss

I'm seeing this sort of thing often these days. People absolutely insist on taking a moral stand on the flimsiest of situations. Not everything is a value judgement for Christ's sake, sometimes words just mean what they mean!

7 年前discuss

First, it's unclear whether the debt is actually a bad thing. Note debts for countries don't work like debts for individuals, especially if said country controls the world's reserve currency.

Second, the idea that immigrants and women getting jobs is a major factor in 40% of Americans not having significant savings is so completely ungrounded in reality or even popular thought as to make me wonder if you're being deliberately dishonest.