2,318 karma · joined March 22, 2009
If present trends hold it won't be long before a few years worth of energy bills even in Europe finance a full off grid deployment. There doesn't seem to be much room to cut on the energy companies pricing which remains variable and pointlessly complicated vs "I bought this off grid system and now I never think about energy anymore".
Just people in high density housing, people in a lease, and those who can't afford the up front cost will constitute the majority of residential grid energy usage and purchasing?
However, this move flips the question: instead of asking how much they can make, they must consider what happens if their competitors partner with OpenAI. The concern then shifts to what competitors can achieve in the market that could threaten not just their economic interests but potentially their entire business model and worldview.
Suddenly, the desire to be the one partnering with OpenAI isn't just about accessing a lucrative revenue stream; it becomes a strategic imperative to mitigate risks and maintain competitive parity.
This isn't actually true, BTC requires a certain amount of subsidy every ten minutes from the global economy. If that subsidy is not forthcoming it ceases to function. That subsidy is constantly increasing in terms of purchasing power.
Further, the regulatory authorities of the world have complete power over the transactions that take place on the ledger, and pretty much full visibility into and out of the ledger when it comes to their controlled fiat currencies.
Neither of the above hold true for many other cryptocurrencies, but I'm not interested in shilling for them, because the entire cryptosphere as a whole is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, largely because of attempts to force the above status quo from BTC onto the remainder, which given the multitude thereof, and the ability for them to endlessly replicate and spawn, is basically doomed to failure.
Note: I am well aware that the popular opinion of BTC is not aware of much of the above, but I didn't say "people believe x" I just said "x".
said nobody, ever.
If for any reason any one of these systems either is destroyed or is no longer master, picking up from where I left off is as simple as picking another system up and marking it "master". No restore process, no changes, nothing at all, and it picks up from exactly where I left off when I was working on the other system. Means I can just grab my EDC laptop and stuff it in a bag not knowing how long I'll be out or where I'll be going and also know that it will be completely up to date with my datasets, or I can grab my desktop replacement laptop and its enormous external disk if I am going to be on a different continent for an extended period of time and want full geographic dataset locality. At no point in time does any of the above require the manual running of any process or replication or anything like that.
Reprovision and restore would take a whole lot longer than this, wouldn't give the abilities that it provides, and the above is only possible because of zfs snapshot replication.
I also use a USB C external SSD that is a member of a ZFS mirror and a md raid group that is bootable, so even if my EDC laptop were to spontaneously combust, I could immediately get up and running on any similar laptop with roughly comparable hardware simply by putting that SSD in and booting from it, then adding the SSD on the laptop to the zfs mirror / md raid group.
That's a fair criticism to the extent that any theoretical decentralised ledger process pipeline touches the real world, but the extent to which they do touch the real world, and the benefits available from each of them varies enormously.
> Which puts a huge target on your head for any kind of real world malicious actor.
If the choice is between that and having a bank and its chain of dependencies as a tyrannical real world dictator, I'd rather have to deal with that target than be trapped in that tyranny. That risk can be mitigated, it can be compensated for, structures can be erected to address it.
If you're slave to a tyrant, you're simply immediately subject to whatever their whims are. That is utterly unacceptable, even if it does theoretically reduce some risk for some people sometimes.
In a society that was not a cyberpunk dystopia, the price for instruments that allowed you to circumvent said tyranny would probably be much lower than it is. But this is not that world, I guess.
That's not the same as denying access to global markets, as long as legitimate cryptocurrencies maintain liquidity with global markets, that attack can be ruled out if you self custody. It doesn't rely on any physical state, it relies on you using a centralised service of custodial account management where a third party can direct that entity to deny service to you, or that service can independently decide to deny service to you. There's no centralised service to attack in a proper peer to peer system, they can't stop you interacting with the market.
Assuming you live in a world where everything happens mediated by decentralised ledgers and no central source of enforcement or power, an entity is dispatched to repo the house and auction it in order to pay out the initial smart contract financiers. It's a long way from here to there, I know, but there's no "impossible" about it. If you want to get really tricky, just incorporate a token for the house, the ownership of which is decided by a clause in the smart contract for an auction if the terms of the payments for the smart contract are not met, then the physical arbitration component boils down to "this person says they own the house, they have the deed, please leave" just like it would in present world.
> How exactly do cryptocurrencies prevent this?
Because you hold your keys and you get to decide what is broadcast on their behalf on the ledger, not a custodian. There is no central point to pressure or capture in order to execute the same attack as above in tradfi.
As long as some suckers are trading actually liquid assets for the instruments on the sabotaged chain, it is economically rational for the miners to mindlessly rubberstamp the rules of the chain.
Which is exactly what we have.
For the rest, there's no reason you couldn't do any of those things in a legitimate working peer to peer cryptocurrency in principle, regardless of the fact that at the moment people don't and the structures you engage with instead are staples of tradfi.
They do many things, but the ones I want to avoid the most are their mechanisms of control in the global economy. The fact they can lock your bank account and deny you access to global trade because you said something or did something they don't approve of is utterly unacceptable and this alone is enough for me to aim for their destruction.
If you meant something else, I don't understand your question.
But;
> more akin to the program above
I note that you don't continue this sentence with a "than x" alternative candidate that would qualify for some form of non human sentience. Even the claims you do make, for example;
> certainly not believably capable of an setting its own goals be in any sense distraught, in pain, or worthy of a continued existence.
It would be possible to modify the model weights in question such that all of these things could be contributory (pain, emotional distress, "worthy of continued existence" by any objective arbitrary definition thereof, if you can test it, you can shift the model weights to pass the test). There are plugins that do this already for setting goals and long term tasks and "being unleashed" on the broader internet for example.
All that said, I think on close examination, we basically come to the same conclusion;
> prudence is advisable.
We live in interesting times.
As a strict materialist I see no reason to assume that artificial consciousness is not possible.
And the above is what leads me to the uncomfortable conclusion about compassion that I can't rightly say one way or the other. I will say however that I'm polite and cooperative when interacting with LLMs on principle. Better to err on the side of caution and also they just seem to actually work better when you treat them like you would treat an intelligent human that you respect.
And yeah. That is my point, this entire field right now is awash in uncomfortable uncertainty.
I'm not saying it is, but I'd be very careful saying it's not and being absolutely certain you're right.
Enjoy
And it's articles like this one that largely cause this. They leave no room for the possibility that someone is genuinely provoking a response that mocks their view by the very absurdity of those views. Instead it's just oh no the ministry of truth signed off on those views and you're perfectly sensible to hold them and if anybody calls them into question they're hostile sadistic psychopathic trolls.
https://gist.github.com/HarvsG/cc86381dc99169159d6d4cd870c36...
This plus dimming plus red lights in the bedroom and flux for devices I have found works pretty well.