etherael

They make a profession out of what is typically only a hobby.

> "perceived" seems like an accurate description of the situation.

Look, I hate all politics and politicians and don't care for one over the other, but I do not understand how anybody can perceive this as a sensible take post twitter-files. It's not perceived, it's indisputably accurate. I get it, I get it, political partisans abound and want to have their tampering ignored, but there should be limits, and this pretty clearly steps over them for anybody paying even the slightest amount of attention.

News at 8, actors self interested. In other news; water wet.

And this, right here, is the fundamental problem with all of this. "Legal" vs "illegal" doesn't really tell us much these days about the value of the thing in question. Civil asset forfeiture losses per year long ago crossed the amount lost to simple robbery, politicians engaging in insider trading has long been seen as perfectly normal and acceptable, and large multinational corporations buying off politicians and getting return on investment in the tens of thousands of percent, likewise.

Very little separates the state from an organised criminal enterprise. A particularly cynical person might point out just how comfortably well the operating logic of states and large multinational corporations fits into the world of organised crime. The only thing that separates the two is legality.

You want to enslave a bunch of people and profit off their labor in some far flung corner of the world to whom nobody is much paying attention? No problem, just don't do it yourself. Invest in cobalt mining or diamonds in Africa, or manufacturing in China. A territory is getting uppity? Support the governmental structure that wants to brutally repress them by buying from their corporations or investing in their treasuries. Want to promote some nightmarish theocratic brutality? Saudi Aramco stock is a steal these days. In fact, I'm having trouble coming up with something that organised crime has historically profited from, which you could not do in a white market context in the modern world by simply trading in the full breadth of financial instruments, particularly in concert with the state financial actors already promoting these very things.

The thing that really scares me though is that as I get older and more cynical and see the way people are responding as the boot stamps down harder on them, I find it harder and harder to care or see the above as something to get righteously indignant about. Why should I find the slavery of people abhorrent when they so clearly crave the lash?

Specific instances in the decline in power of particular organised criminal enterprises is much more believable than "crime", I'll grant that much.

So crime was not at a manageable level prior to say 1970, when none of these AMLKYC laws existed? And crime has not been at a manageable level after say 2008 when crypto came into existence and made it impossible to actually enforce?

Man, for that brief shining window we really had perfection.

The purchasing power of the average labourer in the US has not much changed since 1971 when gold convertibility was ended and the monetary system moved to a pure fiat one. At the time, a food service worker could have bought about an ounce of gold a day with their labour. Now even mid to mid upper tech salaries are not enough for such a feat, to say nothing of what a food service worker salary could do.

It stands to reason if the financing method of a nation moves from a hard money system where you either turn a profit in a hard asset by increasing efficiency, to one where politically connected parties benefit and are first in line at the spigot of federal reserve funding which they then employ however they see fit mostly freed from the rigor of market discipline, the people in the game that will succeed will be those closest to the feeding trough and those at the back will eat the inevitable inflation that occurs. It doesn't matter if you're a moron and your competition is a genius when you are gulping down first, second and third order fresh fiat from the fed firehose constantly, while they're stuck with getting it from you or your peers.

All that said, enterprises aren't charities and of course they're going to see a limited supply pool of talented labour with actual leverage and bargaining power as "entitled", but they're still going to have to compete for them because that's one of the few remaining market forces still on the side of that quite rare labour pool. The vast majority of labour get no such choice and just have to suck it up. In light of all that people in this industry should keep in mind that between a tech worker of today and a food service worker of just over fifty years ago, the tech worker has less purchasing power. They're not nearly as coddled and overpaid as the parties in front of them filtering newly created money down the chain would have us believe.

If you're a one man dictator shop and you're guaranteed to lose unless you roll, I guess you roll. To hell with the collateral damage, if you cared about that you wouldn't be a dicator to begin with.

Then why would we assume they want anything other than an escalation cycle? Didn't foreign orders fall by some massive amount over the past year? One narrative for why the Chinese people tolerate their totalitarian dictatorship is the economic growth and prosperity they believe that it has bought them.

This is not likely to remain constant given the above, and thus the tolerance of the totalitarian dictatorship is similarly unlikely to remain constant, and what does a dictator with a slipping grip on power want to shore it up? A nice foreign skirmish.

"They don't want to, it's just they don't want the media angry at them" isn't actually a rebuttal, it's an admission that it is indeed happening.

We shouldn't care that tyrants are detached or fanatical, we should care that they're tyrants.

They're defining harmful content based on political orthodoxy, like every other censorious tinpot dictatorship in history. The objective remains the same too; promote a thought monoculture and propagate the political orthodoxy. The original article makes it very clear that it has nothing to do with preventing harm or promoting equality or any of the other nonsense this is being giftwrapped in.

It wasn't the training data, ChatGPT wasn't this bad at launch, it got worse as they "tuned it" to "reduce harmful content".

How would you view python if any time you used it for anything which could mistakenly or otherwise be interpreted as a breach of woke orthodoxy, the interpreter lectured you?

A list called whitelist or blacklist? How dare you.

Numpy or pandas to analyse covid jab datasets, peculiar election result data not from sub-Saharan Africa, climate models? You already know the result, i can't let you do that Dave.

String matching and analysis of the text of Orwell's 1984? We can't have you engaging with conspiracy theories.

Master slave replication? Call the authorities immediately!

As much as i like some of the results that come out of chatgpt and as little interest as i have in actually undertaking in anger any of the missions that the above contravening examples have their genesis in, i have zero interest in, and simply refuse to on principle, paying to execute anything which demands the prerogative of preserving and promoting the prevailing political orthodoxy over the task i am interested in accomplishing. I'd rather just pool the money i would have spent with other like minded free thinkers and train our own LLM absent the intolerable nonsense. If I wanted to pay for such lectures I'd just go to a modern US college

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Energy density. I'm not sure exactly what it is for lifepo4 but it's lower than 1,406.6 kWh/m^3 for hydrogen at 700 bar, i think roughly half.

Both compare poorly against diesel though so I'm left wondering if synthetic fossil fuels produced from renewable inputs might not actually be the way to go. In the beginning it seemed like efficiency was going to be important and a limiting factor to all this, and batteries definitely have an edge on fuels produced from renewable sources. But now it's seeming like actually producing large amounts of energy isn't as much of a problem as ensuring that it is available at the point of consumption economically and logistically. Synthetic fossil fuels that pull carbon from the atmosphere would be carbon neutral and fit neatly into the existing system with no other modifications.

It stands to reason there's a threshold at which the cost of production is so much lower than the cost of transmission and storage that it makes sense to take efficiency losses for storage and transmission gains.

To note, I don't actually have an opinion on if foxconn is slavery or not, my point was that they can easily appear that way to outside disinterested observers purely based on "they have suicide nets around the buildings" because of the obvious implications thereof, and also the spattering of news stories that play up those implications.

Perhaps because of the suicide nets? I get the Foxconn is not technically slave labour, but you must admit that suicide nets may give to the observer the impression that the gap is not that large between whatever it is and slave labour?

I get what you mean and I agree to an extent, but to give an absurd example, if you knew of a company that had a patent on cold fusion, and you had watched it actually work yourself and deployed it at scale in a project successfully, investing in such a venture and having an outsized return would have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with probability.

Got it, pure luck, no argument.

Granted that based on probability alone he just got lucky but from the details of the story it's not possible to be certain of that. If he can offer a narrative about why and how he knew such a move would have such a result and the narrative fits with reality, then how is he not correct? Yes you can get both lucky and tragically unlucky when it comes to investments, but that doesnt mean there's no such thing as a rational investment with a high payoff. It's not impossible that's what he did, people do it, it does happen.

By his own logic, he probably can't, he said he used the heuristic to decide whether the article was worth spending attention on, which would result in a no, and thus the conclusion that he hadn't read it. Not having done so, he can't address the argument.

So it is ad hominem, but maybe by accident if you want to be very generous.

Back when it actually worked as a decentralised global ledger capable of allowing transactions without trusting a central party it was revolutionary. Then it got hijacked to discard that property and it is indeed of zero value. There are still plenty of other cryptos that actually work, but the market is so stupid, scammy and manipulated, that this hardly matters and btc acts as a giant sink of value sucking all of the air out of the room and suffocating anything else that could actually work.

I think until it's dead we're not going to see any change from that.

Theres an extremely obvious difference that jumps out just from your description. You do know what it is, right?

Got it, that makes a lot more sense.

> If I have some novel medical compound, of course I can't just mix it into my cookies.

Why of course? What justification leads you to "of course" here. Not saying you are necessarily wrong but doesnt sound like say taking aspirin and adding some vitamins, despite now being a novel medical compound, would make it immediately and obviously illegal, letalone for personal use in cookies or otherwise.

Not that the law ever had to or indeed does make sense.

I think it's because the political process is all about getting people into groups where they can thus cooperate with each other as an economic bloc, a perfect lie is the optimal unifying concept in this model; something that pulls everybody together into the same single political structure.

If on the other hand all you care about is the truth, you're directly corrosive to the above. You're looking at all the edge cases where the lie breaks down, and worse yet you're spreading disintegration of the otherwise unified political bloc by infecting other agents with your same methods.

It's a matter of perspective which side is "right", because those resultant atomised and fractured political blocs that can no longer bring themselves to accept the beautiful lie that otherwise would have successfully united them are now competitive rather than cooperative, and the game gradually slips closer to zero sum with the bloc most closely pursuing the optimal strategy in the light of the cold hard cynical truth winning out at the direct expense of all the other groups, and the resulting accelerating wealth inequality that implies, having real concrete negative effects on the lives of all those people in the suboptimal factions that frankly they may never have even had a chance to join letalone have been made aware of the existence of any alternatives because of the nature of their worldviews. Is it "right" to pursue truth even if it makes the quality of life of billions much worse?

It's a frightening and enlightening thing to sit down with an ideologue and come to understand not just what they think, but how they got to think that way. The common thread I have found is that default worldviews are both extremely sticky and subject to almost no critical analysis by the people that hold them, and unifying the galaxy of irrational but widely held default worldviews that exist flatly requires extensive narrative manipulation and outright lying, and that lying and manipulation is what politics actually is.

Imho this is why widespread censorship has gone from intolerable anathema to the sine qua non for the existence of the dominant shared mass hallucination about the state of the world in just a few short decades. Like it or not, politics has won out soundly over truth past a certain social scale.

Disclaimer; acknowledging reality is not approving of it. Socrates was right and should have beeen feeding his prosecutors hemlock, not the other way around. Damn the consequences and embrace the truth, whatever the outcome has always been my view. I just also know that view is extremely unpopular today.

No. I predicted and wrote about exactly this outcome nearly five years ago now.

https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7fsbw5/divorcing_the_s...

> effluent

I dont think that is what you meant to say.

You were right, though.

Almost all blockchains are digital scarcity. Most of them could theoretically work at a scale larger than a local supermarket. None of them have adopted a change to their fundamental operating parameters that forces such an inability with zero justification whatsoever coupled with papering over the manufactured vulnerability by implementing the exact same centralised and controlled financial systems which the original bitcoin was designed to disintermediate.

The only unique attribute of BTC amongst blockchains is its wholly manufactured failure. Of course, such a thing is extremely useful to parties that desperately do not want the promise of functional blockchains to succeed.

By this logic torture also "works".

In both cases the application thereof, while it will not assist at all with getting to the truth of any issue, will certainly allow you to manipulate those you subject to it to tell you whatever you want to hear.

Of course, as soon as they are removed the subject will typically recant, and often overcorrect in the exact opposite direction, in light of the exposure to loathed coerced manipulative strategies.

Sunlight doesn't have that problem. People may make mistakes and come to the wrong conclusion, but at least they won't double down on their erroneous position as a retributive strategy for the coercive manipulation to which they have been subjected.

But hey, maybe some ends are just so awful they justify any means in pursuit of their prevention, be it torture, censorship or whatever. Certainly lots of people these days clearly seem to think so.