Liron

Wait I know Google search to content sites is largely dead, but I thought Google ads still worked fine.

I don't know what you mean. Circle is a US company that needs to follow US laws. There is no USDC without Circle.

Yep, I mean regulated with respect to who's allowed to offer and hold digital accounts in the currency. Circle itself may not do anything too funky, but big chunks of USD then get stored elsewhere online for banking-like activity in a way that wouldn't be legal with USD — right?

It's entirely at the whim of the US government whether they allow non-KYC foreign people to have USDC accounts.

Right now they say USDC:Yes and USD:No. They could easily say yes or no to either one at any time. Blockchain as technology is irrelevant.

Let me help explain whether blockchains are useful or not: They're not.

The US gov let Circle be a less-regulated bank than other banks. This is called "regulatory arbitrage". You can take advantage of it by checking the box that you have a "blockchain".

Stripe noticed "wow, things labeled blockchain are nice for some people to use" because of this dumb inconsistent banking regulation situation.

Stripe doesn't mention that the underlying tech is impotent, they just have to play along, and here we are.

I think the balls stop when the tab isn't focused

What if you want an HTML-first page with a canvas in it, but then you realize you want some layout/styling for the text within the canvas? Seems unnecessary to propagate that situation up to the type of top-level page.

I often don't endorse the behavior of Israeli settlers. I'm responding to the question of what Israelis think about the news in general, a question to which I wanted to contribute the context of Israel's precarious existential security as a sovereign Jewish state.

Israeli here, can't directly answer your question since I've lived in the US for 99% of my adult life, but I consider myself pro-Israel and resent the way Israel is currently/always being portrayed. I see the key problem as people removing context: Context for why the current situation could easily be different if Hamas acted/acts differently, and context for why there is no "just stop fighting" option that leaves Israel with a high confidence that another Oct 7 won't happen in the next few years.

The "Do you want a Pebble?" "No" button is hilarious

Being a toy implies some niche of users is getting fun out of the product. Who's having fun here and how?

There are countless use cases for a good AI agent.

The problem is temporary: good AI agents don't exist, because sufficiently intelligent AI doesn't yet exist.

(Agency and broad-domain intelligence are basically the same thing. Being able to answer questions relevant to planning is planning.)

This state of affairs is in stark contrast to the crypto/Web3 space, where no one ever presented a use case even conditional on the existence of good blockchain technology.

This is decent as a "rah rah techno-optimism" piece, but it continues Marc's pattern of cheapening the discourse when opining on the topic of AI existential risk.

It's easy to mistake this piece as making an argument for accelerating AI development by touting the virtues of techno-optimism. It's not, though.

The claim that "AI has a high risk of becoming unaligned & uncontrollable in our lifetimes", if sufficiently true (e.g. 99% confidence), implies that the current speed of AI development is unwise, independent of how much one likes techno-optimism in general.

Here's how OpenAI could show they're minimally competent at AI security:

Before beginning training on GPT-5, submit a version of ChatGPT that’s immune to prompt injection.

If no one can successfully jailbreak it within 1 week, go ahead. If someone does, they're banned from training larger models.

Fair?

I downloaded a huge Firebase backup looking for a particular record.

I ended up using the “split” shell command to get a bunch of 1gb files, then grepping for which file had the record I was looking for, then using my own custom script to scan outward from the position of matched text until it detected a valid parsable JSON object within the larger unparseable file, and return that.

Really important for folks to understand what the AI doom argument is. It's surprising how the key concepts still haven't percolated this late into the AI revolution, though they are somewhat complex.

Here's my Twitter thread [1] with a summary of Eliezer's key points and some abridged clips.

[1] https://twitter.com/liron/status/1627863228519960576

This is a kind of product that’s easy to scope creep so I’m curious, how many person-months did it take you to build this MVP?

Yet another pg classic.

When I first read this essay, it made me go from writing 90% similar to the way I talk, to 100% - literally only writing words and phrases I'd realistically say in a conversation. And I think it's been a good improvement!

Is there a way to donate?

Love these Stripe HN answers. Seems no other big company has this ability to go on HN and answer a question.

I agree 100%. This post from the EdgeDB team makes a great case why SQL is outdated [1]

[1] https://www.edgedb.com/blog/we-can-do-better-than-sql

This is amazing marketing. I would never know or care about Zulip but I like how they’re dissing Slack so now I’ll keep them in mind.

It’s a standard MLM tactic to pretend like some product at the bottom of the pyramid makes economic sense to sell. E.g. Herbalife sells some kind of herbs right?

This is a big reason why I've switched to SolidJS. It's extremely similar to React from the developer's perspective, just architected with cleaner primitives so you understand what's happening in precise detail, and can also use the primitives to do other types of reactive state if you want.

What’s revolutionary about this brilliant piece of Web2 technology is that now you don’t need a human anymore to manually check if Web3 has any use cases. All you need is an HTTP client that reads status codes.

I'm really happy this is happening and hope to see more. Namely, the AI safety & alignment challenge attracting our best minds who would previously have prioritized other math, physics and comp sci.

I clipped the 3 minutes where Tyler pressed Marc on a specific Web3 use case: https://twitter.com/liron/status/1537186589486460928

We both hashed "theragun" in all lowercase. We actually bought each other two different models of Theragun but it was pretty natural to refer to them with that string.

Yeah I'm not sure what's the best protocol that's actually zero-knowledge here, but since we both trusted each other to only want to find out whether or not our gifts were the same, and otherwise to not spoil the surprise, this did the job.

Last year my wife and I suspected we might have gotten each other the same Christmas gift, but didn’t want to spoil the surprise in case we didn’t. So we compared SHA256 hashes... and sure enough they both came out cb17007d (theragun)