That's an economic problem to be solved just like the printing press and the industrial revolution. Like I said, we've been in a BS economy for a while now.
126 karma · joined August 13, 2013
And it will be much more fair / accurate than the droves of human artists who intentionally omit attributions.
When a human artist composes a new song, they often have no idea where they got the compound basis for it either.
If anything, human attribution is vastly inferior to ML as-is, nevermind of what's to come.
This is exactly what machine learning does - a novel recombination of what has been previously observed (ie., "reusing the music" - building upon that which is)
Whether this process is done by a human or not is irrelevant. ML, for the most part, does exactly what humans do.
There are currently very few capabilities which ML performs that humans do not - namely, blatant plagiarism.
People whining about their exact job being done by a machine is as old as time. Farmers, industrial revolution, the printing press (scribes whined), etc.
Nothing new here. New jobs will be created to replace the lost ones. We've arguably been in a "BS economy" for quite some time now.
There is a lot of evidence that language drives cognition and there have already been instances of ANIs creating their own efficient languages. Imagine that the year is 2040 and euclidian encryption is augmented via transcoding into AI languages to safeguard against quantum computing or replaced with quantum-resistant algorithms altogether. A turing complete quantum processor was actualized a few years ago, or we just finally figured out that ML and the probabilistic nature of Quantum Computing are a perfect fit. People tend to vastly underestimate the rate of progress over 10+ years.
Literally nothing about the government's stance on or (severe lack of) understanding of cryptocurrencies makes any sense other than it definitely reminds me of good ole' Reagan: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
RE: if something happens to you ...that is an excellent point. You wouldn't get this without an exchange, yeah. If subjecting yourself to all of the above to reap this benefit is worth it to you, that's a favorable tradeoff to make and one you definitely should.
The only thing regulated exchanges do is profit by losing you value via fees and then some more via taxes while carrying risks of being rugged or having "your" assets frozen. Just... why?
- How many Dollars does a bitcoin buy?
- How many Bitcoins does a Dollar buy?
- When the exchange rate varies, what does that say about the relative value of each currency?
- How many Potatoes can a Dollar buy?
- How many Potatoes can a Bitcoin buy?
- How many Drugs can a Dollar buy?
- How many Drugs can a Bitcoin buy?
The above is extremely oversimplified but much like a global foreign exchange relies on shifting exchange rates, so does the value of all currency in terms of relative buying power. In terms of absolute buying power - my personal highly subjective bid is that a currency's "value" is a compound of its' exchange rate as well as the amount of people willing to exchange it, and the amount of it in circulation as well as the breadth of people willing to accept it in exchange for goods and services.
Cefi is great. It's fast, it's secure, you are protected from loss up to a certain degree, it's often cheaper than blockchain transaction fees, etc. But it's just a tool with tradeoffs, much like Defi.
Games like CSGO/OW, where teamwork above speeds viable for human to human communication is required, can often topple "individual rockstars" with superior team coordination (each member of a team reacts to an event within 150-350ms knowing exactly how their teammates will react, and this is executed in tandem). The biggest difference between Top .1% and professionals is very similar to the difference between good and excellent engineers in terms of organizational efficacy: while their individual raw skill levels may be quite similar, the ability to communicate / coordinate makes a world of difference. A well-oiled team, in gaming and in software, will almost always run circles around a disjoined one comprised of people who have an otherwise higher skill level individually.
Source: Been to a few world finals and top 0.01% in CSGO/OW/SC2/SCBW/others.
At the end of the day, you relinquish control for a false sense of security. Everyone storing their money in banks in Venezuela found this lesson out the hard way: you don't have any money. The government allows you to store and pass around notes for debt, which are commonly agreed upon as valuable and so our economy spins onward. You know what they say about those willing to give up freedom for security.
Realistically, use your head please. Full tradfi and full defi are equally unwise. It's risk management 101. And yes, some very unsavory things going down in any country are always a risk if you are planning a resilient infrastructure for your estate spanning generations. Usually this has taken the form of multinational diversification, but now we have the extra option to secure long-term wealth without all the legal expenses. Don't dismiss it.
A non-material agreed upon medium of value transfer completely outside of control of governments is unprecedented. You can go to any country, and get someone to give you their paper currency, for a digital one you possess - without ANY restrictions or moratoriums. I'm not sure how that can possibly be called a step backwards. It's a valuable tool even if most of HNs audience has no use for it. Control comes with risks and responsibilities. This is true for being your own bank, running your own infrastructure, and everything else. Literally nothing about this tradeoff is new or shocking, except that it's now available for currency as well.
At the end of the day, things like drug and human trafficking don't happen because the people behind them are able to launder money - they happen because of a complete and utter failure on the behalf of our government. All of these issues were here long before crypto, and while yes, CC definitely does not help these issues go away - quite the opposite, actually, and that part is unfortunate ...but it's not the root cause of the problem. And the half-assed solution currently in place is so inadequate that even otherwise sane individuals resort to scapegoating things like crypto. Is the current precedent of "lots of drugs are coming out of [XYZ] country, let's destroy everyone's lives in it unilaterally with sanctions in an attempt to hinder those responsible" really something you are okay with?
For example: the US goes to war with a country I have family in, and now I can't support my loved ones. I could not care less about the economic policy, because enabling my grandparents as well as great grandparents to buy food and basic life necessities is far more important to me. In some parts of the world, even Western Union and those services restrict this - or charge exorbitant fees which make CC transaction fees look tame in comparison. Choosing a geographic location and unilaterally destroying the standard of living there through economic sanctions might as well be mass genocide.
A good part of financial "regulation" is not for consumer protection - it's not for consumers at all, it is for governments. The US government is free to regulate the dollar, because it is a currency they issue. Given their track record of mismanaging fundamental economics, I have no interest in a value store issued by a notoriously incompetent entity that is also inconvenient, volatile, unreliable, being actively hyper-inflated, and not even under my control to begin with.
This whole "you dont need crypto unless you are ponzi, ransom or drugs" shill is getting really old. We all know how "if you're innocent, you have nothing to hide" plays out logically and ethically. I haven't held onto USD for more than a day after getting paid in over three years now, other than what is absolutely necessary for transactions that still rely on USD. I'm a software engineer with no criminal record/affiliations, and strong morals as well as ethics - which is why I still pay all the taxes I should in USD, and circumvent the otherwise technologically inferior and fundamentally unethical method of value exchange for everything else. So please, give me a single reason to use a dinosaur bank over crypto that is actually in my own best interest.
This is difficult to do without unfairly discounting the cases where people with talent still encounter unfair discrimination ...but this isn't it.
There are plenty of female developers / engineers who have their colleagues' respect. They would also never find out they are diversity hires.
If you are simply bad at your job, but also [protected status here], it's suddenly somehow newsworthy - I never liked this part of our culture.
This leads to frightening considerations. The reason FDA testing is so stringent is that trying to explain statistics along with a myriad of other fields, that are at this point likely too complex and exhaustive for any one human to fully comprehend even if they spent their entire lifetime learning, to the "public" for them to truly make an informed decision is a futile effort.
A vaccine is no doubt a great thing and much needed. Two things bother me very greatly about it:
1) A lot of testing was skipped. This will be injected into tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of people long before we even know the long term side effects. If by some very low chance this introduces an inheritable change, and if by an even lower chance that inheritable change leads to genetic collapse in 10-20 generations - just to be very clear, this is extremely unlikely - we have opened the window to humanity's end.
2) A far more realistic ethical concern is what happens to states (god forbid if the fed does it) who legally require this (unconstitutionally, of course, since most modern laws already are and nobody seems to have an issue with this) like New York who've already had a number of terrifying assembly bills for something similar, if this backfires and causes permanent harm to people?
The human body is incredibly complex. A doctor's oath includes "above all, do no harm", and most of the people that will be vaccinated have a 90%+ survival chance. Granted, the above is a very myopic view that completely ignores large scale economics - so please bare with me and use your medicine/ethics hat for it. Is this the right thing to do in the long run?
As a country, the US has proven track record of making stupid decisions in tough times (911 -> PATRIOT, etc).
Reductionism fails as completely as it does hilariously when it comes to systems where the whole does indeed exceed the sum of its parts due to laws of the universe we have yet to grasp. A much more sane approach is to think of the matter something is comprised of as nothing more than a filter/transformer for the entropy and environment it exists within. Life routinely harnesses entropy whereas our current technology is so ass backwards it does little but struggle against it (dendrites in batteries, for example). What science considers to be degradation or wear and tear is the very process living things rely on to exist - let that sink in.
Any society worth much will do its best to provide the basics for everyone, and utilize everyone's capabilities regardless of range, but if you remove all that ...yeah. All you're left with is the weak and the strong. The whole point of societies is to incentivize those useful to the collective and grant them "power" rather than the psychopath killers who used to be emperors 1000 years ago.
Better yet, in the good interest of being my own devil's advocate, what would you say is an equivalent for this on the other side of the gender coin flip? I want to be very clear about the above: shitty people will be shitty people regardless of race / gender / religion, nor do I imply this happens often. But the massive imbalance of opportunity is already there is my point.
The best recent example I can think of is the law requiring % of Fortune 500 board member presence based on gender - it is blatantly sexist, and is a complete "equality of outcome" blanket with no counter-equivalent. Where's the law requiring 40% of undesirable positions, like trash collectors and electricians be a certain gender? More than anything, I would just like to see consistency and it is simply not there. My biggest issue with this is "equality" matters in high income prestigious positions, but for the other ones it is somehow not an issue. How can people even use the word "equality"?
If you ever talk to a male nurse, good example. They're likely the only guy there, and the work environment for them is not good - but the answer there is: deal with it or get out. A counter-example this board would be very familiar with: what it's like to be the only woman on an engineering team. It sucks just as much, but the answer is very different. Alas, this contradiction is often just ignored.
Personally the sad irony in this is that "privilege" is a real thing, I'm not contesting this - but the insane overreach is hurting the goal of providing equality of opportunity.
My guess is that if equality of opportunity was objectively proven, and the outcome was not equal, people would still be upset ...and as a society, that's dangerous.
Keep in mind I wrote the above with the assumption that equality of opportunity is the goal. Based on what I observe daily, it is very hard to actually believe that.
Alas at the forefront, it's much harder to attribute GAN and Transformer performance to statistics.