beefield

> This is so obvious to everyone who has used their ad system.

This. I tried once and am still a bit confused if I understood it correctly. Google seemed to refuse "too low" bids completely for no other disclosed reason than that they were too low. And the UI was hellbent to make me give google authority to bid on my behalf on googles own ad auction. Like, WTF? Who on their right mind would agree to that? I'd very much like these folks to be my customers. I guarantee, I will sell you whatever (legal) you want, as long as you agree that I can set the price to whatever I want. It just boggles my mind.

> Can't achieve your "AGI" without that.

Can I ask, what makes you so confident on that? For all I know (which is admittably not much), current AI may be going to a direction completely orthogonal to achieving AGI.

I have a feeling that it is more like 99% of people are insane 5% of time. Or if not insane, at least forgetting the principle of charity. And given that a typical social media text does not contain all nuances, someone is interpreting the text in an absurd way almost guaranteed. And downhill from there it goes.

> Except that with our current systems we involve a lot of lawyers, banks, and notaries, that to a large degree would be dis-intermediated into code.

I don't quite see how it could be a significant share of workload that would go to code. The parts you can dispatch there just are not that significant in costwaise when running a financial organization.

Furthermore, even the part that could be dispatched to code, won't. See DAO in the early days of etherium.

I can walk to a bank and have a loan without any collateral. If I put a car or a house or a company as a collateral, I get a discount in the interest rate. Can I do that with crypto?

To be clear, those products, lending money without fiat collateral are much, much more significant feature of modern financial system than payment settlement. Until crypto solves those somehow, any comparison is meaningless. Like trying to compare wheels with cars.

> IMO, Ethereum is actually doing a fantastic job at moving itself forward. The issue with Bitcoin has always been the lack of innovation to overcome its fundamental problems. Ethereum isn't afraid to do what needs to be done to become adopted.

My occasional lazy-ass status check: what's the status of non-crypto-collateralized loans at the moment? Can I get a crypto loan to buy a car or house nowadays without having to post crypto as collateral?

(If the answer is yes, I'd be curious to know what aspect of present day crypto makes it competitive to establishment finance.)

> If a business is known to offer 10% settlements after 2 years... that predictability will eventually be taken advantage of.

Yep. And the next order effect is that the business stops selling bad debt and sits on it. And eventually starts thinking more carefully to whom lends money.

> Once one tier fails to collect, they'll sell on the debt

I think there should be a law stating that if your debt is sold to a third party and you are not offered to settle with the same amount than the third party was paying, the debt should be automatically forgiven. Yep, that would make many loans more difficult to issue, and that would be net good.

Closest to non-junk that I know might be buying allowances out from EU emissions trading system. And even that I am not quite sure.

> hallucinations of regular ChatGPT worries me to no end

Why? I mean, I see very much potential in LLM providing hints to doctors based on the symptoms about things the doctors would not think themselves. I also assume doctors would quite easily note majority of baseless hallucinations. So there remains two problematic cases, first, where both doctor and LLM misses the actual reason for the symptoms and second, where LLM makes a mistake that makes the doctor to apply wrong remedy without realizing it. First one is something you can't blame the LLM, and second one, well, what makes you think it outweights the benefits?

The easiest is to look where the money is. Might be risky to let your custo^H products hide the pages where you have most revenue generating ads.

Not only just as easily, but much more easily assuming somewhat functioning democracy.

This is something important that people do not seem to grasp. Intelligence is a really high dimensional thing. Even the ones that are highly intelligent in some dimensions are dumb as rock in vast majority of other dimensions. So we all are basically morons with some occasional flashes of intelligence in some individuals.

> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.

It can't. I did the numbers some time ago [1], and they are bad. If you take electricity as a proxy, western countries consume something like 5 times as much as the global average per capita. So if we are willing to let the poorest to get to the global average while not cutting global consumption at all, the west should reduce their consumption by something like 80%. That's not crashing the economy. Thats... destroying the society most likely.

There are two solutions: 1. We force the global poor to stay poor. 2. We figure out how to make lots more stuff sustainably than we currently do.

Feel free to make your choise. Reducing consumption in the west is not going to make a dent anywhere and should be not on your list of worries if you choose 2.

Edit, add [1]: I don't habe the numbers now but you can replicate it pretty easly by taking population and electricity consumption data by country from wikipedia.

We very rarely need specific minerals. We need energy, nutrition, conducting materials etc. Most of these needs we can fulfil with many different minerals. And the amlunt of all [1] minerals in earths crust is staggering compared to any foreseeable futre, so we are just going to flip to whatever is easiest/cheapest to dig. None will "run out" as in there is no more available, only that the remaining ones are too expensive to extract at the moment.

[1] Helium may be one of the exceptions here, but I would guess even that is produceable with some future nucleaf technology given enough money.

Oh yeah, and even then:

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/kaust-spinout-wil...

We have not run out of any mineral ever and I don't believe we ever will.

I was referring his claims about electrification of glo al car fleet. Now that you mention, he had also some claims about lithium needs for replacing all fossil production with lithium batteries, baut also there the assumptions were not so realistic if I recall correctly. If you want to quote him, I would recommend going through his assumptions very carefully.

I find his work not so credible. He seems to assume LFP does not exist as a viable alternative for nickel/cobolt requiring chemistries. and He's also missing that the lithium reserves keep on increasing on a rapid pace. (I refer to his work a couple of years ago, if he has something brand new, I don't know about that.)

I solved that by buying a tv that was on sale (sales guy warned that they have gotten lots of returns because the smart features were somehow not so good on the model) and promptly never connected it to internet. So far no ads outside tv channels' own ads.

The most low hanging fruit for seasonal storage is most likely thermal storage connected to district heating. At least technologically, not 100% sure on economics, but given the scalability laws (heat loss scales to square and heat capacity to cube of the size of the storage), I am optimistic there as well.

It's a bit funny that at the same time it doesn't sound good reason to an adult, it is one of the main reasons adults buy all kind of stuff themselves. Keeping up with Joneses...

> EV chargers aren't this "dumb" for one simple reason: they need to be able to charge you for the power used. A dumb outlet, if metered properly, would still need some app or something to be able to restrict you from just taking power infinitely.

I'm scratching my head here. The old gas/diesel dispensing stations have solved this problem of restricting people taking all of the fuel in the pump with a disruptive financial technology called blo^H^H^H credit card. And I am really, really struggling to understand why I cant buy electricity directly with my credit card. (I do understand why the app might be better experience in many ways, but it is no excuse for not making it possible to pay with card without stupid obligatory app)

> brands like Shimano have "generations" of motors, each going with specific batteries (with baka yoke features and no other engineering)

And the different gen batteries even look and fit the same, the first time you figure there is something fishy going on when you try to insert your old spare battery is when you try to turn the thing on!

E-bikes really need open standard interfaces for components. (Feel free to have multiple, and even a way to propose new ones, as long as they are open) Regulators, please step up.

I have a kobo libra. What would be the easiest way to get terminal app (with ssh client as a minimum) running on that? I'm thinking it would be a nice really thin client with low energy consumption.

I don't have any excuses but being non native in english having exposure to both British and US english seems to confuse my brain.

> LLMs won't get intelligent. That's a fact based on their MO.

I kind of agree. However, I see a real possibility that in the near future LLM behaviour would be practically indistinguishable from intelligent/sentient behavior. And at that point we (or at least I) are facing some really interesting/difficult questions, namely how do you know an intelligent looking thing actually is intelligent (or sentient). How do you prove me you/LLM are/aren't a philosophical zombie?

How we are supposed to treat very much intelligent/sentient looking things when we are not sure if they are sentient/intelligent or not? Let's face it, lots of people are dumb as rock (too often very much me included). Why we should be able to treat something badly just because we think we know they can't be intelligent, even if they walk , look and quack like intelligent duck?

I personally have started to think that the behavior of humans should be judged by the behaviour, not the target. If you want to behave like an asshole towards a teddy bear, then you most likely are an asshole.

I would propose a regulation that if a food package somehow mentions there is not something (sugar, fat, artificial sweeteners etc) in the food, but the food contains some other element of the same list, the thing that is contained should be mentioned with at least as visible labeling than the one that is missing.

> Financial services is particularly interesting as a study case as it is almost 100% information processing, hence fully "disruptable". Why is it not happening?

I'm not sure I agree finance has not been disrupted. I can immediately think a few financial industry disruptions, some even outside incumbents. Fractional reserve banking, credit cards, asset backed securities, online payment providers, regulation, hedge funds are some things that have changed dramatically how financial business (some aspect of it) is done during the last century or two.

One thing that may hide all this is is that the ones currently shouting loudest about disrupting finance seem to have a serious lack of understanding what finance actually is and how it works, and until they do, I don't think they disrupt anything.

...or it tells how easy it is to sell insurance to the parents of newborns

> we do that because everybody loves a philanthropist giving.

Count me out. I have a really unpopular opinion that philanthropy is nothing more nothing less than entertainment for the giver. There is no difference between me buing a movie ticket or giving money to a charity. (Well, other than in the movie case I create jobs, in the charity I foster helplessness)

If society thinks there are some things where money should be allocated without getting anything tangible back, it should be funded via taxes, not charity. No need to subsidize private charities.

(If your government can't be trusted to manage the money, it would be more efficient to use your money to try to fix the government instead of getting yourswlf some feelgood by giving money out to whatever else)

Effective altruism? Go and pay your taxes, that is according to economic theory the most efficient way to be altruistic in all the cases someone may bee freeloading on your charity (see tragedy of commons/prisoners' dilemma)