Hacker News Reader

Comment by willj | Hacker News Reader

I’d argue Bitcoin is Obscene Energy Demand.

If obscene means "I dislike demand for X personally", then sure. But if the actually useful definition of "demand for X will unavoidably collapse society" is used, then you need to actually read the second link.

At least ChatGPT is writing essays.

Whereas Ethereum has clearly shown that you can have a safe chain without this craziness.

But from reddit to Bitcoin talk to Bitcoin core development, there's a handful of people that control everything and want the status quo preserved.

it's plagarizing other people's essays

Where are the copyright lawsuits, then?

You've missed New York Times having sued OAI and Microsoft recently, and joined by several others?

IANAL and I haven't dug deeply into the lawsuits, but my understanding is that using deliberate prompt engineering, they were able to get it to reproduce copyrighted material verbatim from its training set. That is obviously a problem, just as it would be if a human read the article and then reproduced part of it verbatim without attribution, but it's a very different argument than a blanket "everything AI generates is plagiarism"

Precisely. These headline repetitions as arguments do get tiring after a while.

humans can have original ideas, since they possess reasoning ability, whereas large language models cannot, since they have none

It doesn't? That's great! Why didn't you say so? And, of course, you have proof of that?

I'd suggest Chomsky for this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...

of course there are others who disagree with him but they're wrong of course

It's plagiarizing essays in the same way that I'm plagiarizing dinosaur breath by using the same air molecules.

Bitcoin is especially obscene because it counteracts efficiency gains. If a new Bitcoin miner that is 10x more efficient for hash rate comes out, Bitcoin won’t use 10x less energy, instead the difficulty will get 10x harder so it continues using similar amounts of energy.

With AI, on the other hand, efficiencies help. Of someone comes up with AI hardware that does inference or training 10x more efficiently, people will incorporate that and the energy usage for the same amount of work will decrease.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose of the difficult mining in Bitcoin. It is to keep the currency scarce and difficult to obtain. If it didn’t scale with increases in technology all the Bitcoin would quickly be mined and you’d have money printing like the fiat money we are trying to escape.

Yeah if I had to stack rank 'obscene' energy consumption technologies, Bitcoin would be number 1 and AI would be pretty low on the list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com