Altman has proven time and again that he is little more than a huckster wrt technology, and in business he is a stone cold shark.
Conman plain and simple.
Conman plain and simple.
It's a Musk-error not an SBF-error. (Of course, I do realise many will say all three are the same, but I think it's worth separating the types of mistakes everyone makes, because everyone makes mistakes, and only two of these three also did useful things).
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
It's still bad, don't get be wrong, it's just something I can distinguish.
I don't think the cookies thing is a good example. That's passive incompetence, to avoid the work of changing their business models. Altman actively does more work to erode people's rights.
> It's still bad, don't get be wrong, it's just something I can distinguish.
Can you? Plausible deniability is one of the first things in any malicious actor's playbook. "I meant well…" If there's no way to know, then you can only assess the pattern of behavior.
But realistically, nobody sapient accidentally spends multiple years building elaborate systems for laundering other people's IP, privacy, and likeness, and accidentally continues when they are made aware of the harms and explicitly asked multiple times to stop…
Worldcoin is centrally controlled making it a classic "scam coin". Decentralization is the _only_ unique thing about cryptocurrencies, when you abandon decentralization all that's left is general scamminess.
(Yes, there's nuance to decentralization too but that's not what's going on with Worldcoin.)
Decentralisation allows trust-less assurance that money is sent, it's just that's not useful because the goods or services for which the money is transferred still need either trust or a centralised system that can undo the transaction because fraud happened.
That's where smart contracts come in, which I also think are a terrible idea, but do at least deserve a "you tried!" badge, because they're as dumb as saying "I will write bug-free code" rather than as dumb as "let's build a Dyson swarm to mine exactly the same amount of cryptocurrency as we would have if we did nothing".
That is indeed something it does.
But it also gives you the assurance that a single entity can't print unlimited money out of thin air, which is the case with a centrally controlled currency like Worldcoin.
They can just shrug their shoulders and claim that all that money is for the poor and gullible Africans that had their eyeballs scanned.
Sure, but the inability to do that when needed is also a bad thing.
Also, single world currencies are (currently) a bad thing, because when your bit of the world needs to devalue its currency is generally different to when mine needs to do that.
But this is why economics is its own specialty and not something that software nerds should jump into like our example with numbers counts for much :D
When and why would BTC or ETH need to print unlimited money and devalue themselves?
And the answer to that is all the reasons governments do just that, except for the times where the government is being particularly stupid and doing hyperinflation.
It’s both.
So scammers see other scammers, and they just think there's nothing wrong with it.
While normal people who act in good faith see scammers, and instinctively think that there must be a good reason for it, even (or especially!) if it looks sketchy.
I think this happens a lot. Not just with Altman, though that is a prominent currently ongoing example.
Protecting yourself from dark triad type personalities means you need to be able to understand a worldview and system of values and axioms that is completely different from yours, which is… difficult. …There's always that impulse to assume good faith and rationalize the behavior based on your own values.