frazbin

Hm is that really true? I thought that there was quite a lot of sharing from industry leaders at the research paper and dataset level, and that these could be used imitate production systems given some hacking. Kinda seemed like the majors were enjoying the benefits of the scrutiny afforded to public scientific research, while keeping their monopoly confined to the silicon/speed/throughput axis. Hence all the free AI software toolkits and also high priced specialty hot-off-the-wafer chips you'll never get.

The really scary thing is that this could be used as an excuse to hide production ML models and even the tech used to generate them. Sounds like we can expect the state-of-the-art AI techniques to be jealously guarded eventually. I guess optimism on the ground is enough to have prevented that so far, but once the scales tip away from sharing and towards exploitation.. well, we know it's largely a one-way process on the 1 decade time scale. Is this the chilling effect that will bring us into the next AI winter?

well basically you have to throw out proof of work and then it's fine. If that's a philosophical thing then you're constrained to highly inefficient systems that yeah, are designed to fork like you say. But if you're okay with any kind of proof of stake setup, you don't have to consider forks, because you trust your validators.

Ultimately it comes down to what you like about the blockchain chimera. Some people like proof of work for its own sake; they think that's the way forward. Some of us think that public distributed append-only log structures with cryptographically enforced permissioning are super interesting all by themselves, maybe even MORE interesting without proof of work!

Long term I don't think it's going to be any fun until a larger subset of homomorphic computing is cheap enough to run distributed-consensus style. In the meantime all I know is it's a lot more fun once you stop trying to be the source of truth for the universe, and accept proof of stake as a natural compromise necessary to keep playing with our toys w/o burning up.

I'd be happy to share but you'll have to message me. And I'm an idiot.

oh man I wish! The thing about the elements necessary for life, is that by definition they're present in sufficient quantities in all life; and it's not like humans need any special elements. What's true is we spend 80+ years picking up trace amounts of stuff that's inimical to life, but our bodies can't get rid of it. I'm thinking about heavy metals and halocarbons, because they are toxic, they persist, and they are absorbed by the soil ecosystem. Deep well injection seems much more ecological a fate for a human body. Also, in terms of last wishes, it seems bloody arrogant to think that the contaminated shell I used to pillage this planet would be in any way useful after the fact. Chemically speaking, we have declared ourselves independent from nature. And biologically speaking, nature doesn't need any of our filth.

end of the day a dead human body is the ultimate useless tchotchke. "What were they good for?"

"Dunno but they sure cranked out a lot of em"

Being able to query arbitrary past blockchain history is kind of gross, because you can neither partition nor elide any of the data under consensus- your verifiers need to have a copy of everything. Leads to expensive nodes cause disk space and RAM use explodes. Not an uncommon complaint about immutable programming techniques generally. Idk, kinda seems like a bad tradeoff to me. But then again if you're building it on top of the literal money fire that is bitcoin, who cares about scalability and resource use!

> just deploy a new version of the smart contract, and ask users to use that one instead. If it gets confirmed, then an honest majority of block producers will ensure that it stays confirmed.

I can't see how the operation you describe here is defined or possible for any blockchain that hosts more than one smart contract. Just for a start, how do you decide whether to include a smart contract upgrade that the majority of verifiers doesn't care about either way (surely the most common case)? It's like saying that legislation doesn't matter because we have elections. The elections (consensus) produce the legislation (allowed transactions). You can squish those two layers together, but starts to break the premises of the underlying system (e.g. DAO fork).

I would love to know what software system you were thinking of when you wrote this. Or were you? Sincere question.

</sarcasm> <!-- apparently needed --!>

Step 1: throw away modern western democracies, those are obviously going away. Step 2: look, now we're so screwed almost anything looks better! Step 3: crypto profit.

Luckily modern western democracies aren't so easily thrown away IRL as in an essay.

I'd rather be liquified and injected into an oil well. The carbon cycle has enough carbon for now, no reason to delude ourselves into thinking we were ever actually helping this poor planet by existing.

What the hell are you saying? Is it "the existence of state censorship is a good countermeasure to online speech when applied at the platform level"? Because that would be sneaking some pretty authoritarian shit into your opinions. I want facebook to go away too but unilateral action on the part of states isn't going to do it (no matter how influential you might want China to be). Now, some kind of international coalition to support fact based information via sanctions (otherwise you trade one kind of propaganda to another) might help.. guessing big red not into that idea tho.

so 'hard' in fact, that ipfs/ethereum can't do it. Try for instance to discover the replication status of your data on the ipfs 'network'-- or to determine how you're partitioned relative to other actors. Ya can't do it. But hey as long as the cloudflare gateway works, right?

idk it's not untrue. So far my time investment in distributed ledgers hasn't done a damn thing for anybody, but it has been fun (in a 'playing with your food' way, as someone said downthread). I suspect many here have had a similar experience.

Ipfs is kinda junkware though, given its age and lack of basic features. I had a lot more patience with the unpolishedness 5 years ago, but at this point a greenfield implementation with none of the same people might be the best way forward.

Unfortunately the foul smell seems to be coming from the direction of ethereum.. like the devs have an incentive to keep e.g. discoverability crippled so that ethereum is less useless. shrug

Tea is amazing.. the fluoride content is a bit bothersome though: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4808922/ shame-- "all" you need to do is grow it in soil w/o F

if this headline reads like clickbait, you might be a little jumpy.

only if you live in the technological present. They won't really have us until they can chase us out of the past and/or future

That's a good point. 500 gigawatts over 15 megameters gives 20kw/m of local heat to deal with, which sounds kind of yikes.. but then again a pool heater draws 5kw. Seems clear the biggest effect will be on the seabed-- but that's already true because you gotta drop the cable. I reckon the cable itself, and its underwater infrastructure, might have more impact than the heat it generates. Another consideration is that there have always been heat sources in the deep ocean.

hmm, 500 gigawatts dissipated over 300k square gigameters of ocean surface gives a forcing effect of 1.6 milliwatts per square meter. Global warming right now is forcing 1w/sqm, so it's not a problem at this scale. But it's not a crazy question either.

In a very literal sense, we have been using the atmosphere as half of a battery since forever-- combustion on earth uses atmospheric oxygen as as an electron acceptor.

This is totally true, awesome, and under appreciated. Check out project vesta. Basically there's an infinite amount of magnesium silicate minerals, and they weather to absorb co2 and release magnesium. You get some iron for free, but no heavies or toxics.. You can put it in the soil too, which is great because fe and esp mg are being depleted in soils. You can dump it in the ocean and raise PH while also mobilizing calcium. It's a win win win win win win.

Yep, California has raised the bar, and to do so it had to take risks. In particular, it risked looking silly-- and in penis-politics looking silly in front of your opponents is an existential risk. The good news is, some of these risks paid off and became national standards. So, thanks to California, you are poisoned a little less every day.

Speaking personally: fuck you for making fun of that effort!

And if it were, stop anyway! Humanities classes are sposed to help us engage with content like this, but stem students often don't take them seriously (

I think it's a profound fear of ambiguity that drives these behaviors: the urge is to move past the 'understanding' part by finding some single interpretation and then move on to the 'doing' part, which is the satisfying part. I think formally writing down the specification for any kind of work starts with holding all the ambiguities in of it in your head. In this case, the approach depends on whether the student is more interested in 'computer programming' or 'software engineering'

Nope that's wrong about the livestock feed. Beef bioaccumulates pesticides in fatty tissue just like anything else. You can't test every steak (yet), but that doesn't mean organic is a scam-- just means it's scammable.

It'd all feel much different if we had more data to empower consumers. Imagine e.g. a meat thermometer that gave ppb/ppt of 100+ pesticide residues.. suddenly you find one kind/cut of meat has orders of magnitude more pesticide than another.. "oh weird I never felt good after eating that brand of meat, maybe I'll pay an extra $2 a pound next time".

Jumping in to point out that while this stuff happens on linux, at least one doesn't feel so hand-wrigingly powerless when it does. I know it's a choice between starting a career in maintenance and complete learned helplessness.. and the former option well seem a lot more appealing when it's no longer available.

Don't worry everyone, I'm not experiencing this issue. -- Apple flans

no, it's definitely "not right" -- mac os ships with ancient, crippled versions of the bsd utilities, afaict simply because it's bad for open source and because they can. E.g. `man sed` then check the date at the bottom

So the problem is that it's the not the 15th century, and the solution is mercantilism? Color me skeptical.

Now in the 20th century there were these things called 'unions' for a while..

at the end of the day it's all "money... for people!"

holy crap that was terrifying. Basically, an economist and a law professor very authoritatively talking as though the last ten years didn't happen. I guess it figures-- in America you have the Chicago school and the Originalist camp: the two shit slices of shit bread in the shit sandwich we're eating.. and everybody defines themselves relative to that, more or less. So I guess these people lack even the language to talk about community investment, generational trauma, social services, infrastructure, city budgets, civic corruption, oh yeah POLICE UNIONS, yadda yadda. Jesus christ we all live in fear of the police in the US and these guys have no idea. What a red blooded wank.. I don't even have to quote just pick any random paragraph.. jesus. Oh, props to never mentioning gun laws once! Wonderful.

What really boils my clams is the ignorance-so-profound-it-must-be-wilful of the MASSIVE roles the two classes of people represented here (lawyers and economists) have played in the fucking up and routing out of the poor in America, and of the perpetuation of our primordial slave state. it's just so damn arrogant. Kinda reminds me of Russ Roberts: perfectly smart people for whom reality just does not exist.

Maybe the unifying thread of all this is just not understanding human frailty at all, and so missing the mark on everything that depends on it.

I wonder if it's especially bad because it's a transcript of a podcast.. people might be used to hearing spew like this in audio form because of talk radio, but you don't often see it written down quite so baldly.