vadimberman

Did they really "break away"?

I skimmed through the article so I may have missed something, but what I read was about how the municipal authorities took over many of the state / federal responsibilities. The last one is engaged in a turf war with the state police.

What about the federal taxes? Infrastructure projects? Salaries of the state employees?

> When trying to make a seemingly arbitrary architectural choice, then perhps to break the tie you can ask yourself "if an error occurs, will this allow me to get the right info to the user?"

Definitely. That is something I've never heard discussed, and it really should be discussed. User experience is influenced by the inner works of the engine, too.

Great advice, BUT: apart from the laziness and the poor written communication skills, often the real reason for the vagueness is that these pesky details are simply unavailable to the coders who throw that exception or issue that message. It is buried somewhere deep in the bowels of inner components.

Better error messages start with better architecture.

Because today, most lay people equate deep learning with AI.

The black box part is also an issue which both the author of the paper and literally everyone else, including Google's Peter Norvig, is concerned about. But that's not related to the hype part.

I should have added, "what cryptocurrencies are to fintech". Is it better :) ?

You hit the nail on the head.

Oren Etzioni has been shouting about the knowledge representation for years (full disclosure: this is something I'm focused on, too).

Actually, Tesla was not founded and named by Musk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#History

> deep learning must be supplemented by other techniques if we are to reach artificial general intelligence

I don't think anyone major ever disputed that.

Having said that, thousand times yes to the author's concerns. Deep learning is AI's cryptocurrency in terms of being overhyped, although its main proponents are not to blame for that.

> Opcodes and values can be combined to yield a vast array of possible contracts, just like any programming language.

It's not Turing-complete and doesn't even have loops (or goto to provide an alternative). Definitely not "like any programming language", you could as well try to use Brainfuck (which is, BTW, Turing-complete).

This is really cool - good luck with this one, if you're associated with it.

This seems exactly the kind of applications Ethereum was meant for; however, is there a dispute resolution organ?

Same as with the open source projects, yet they exist. In case of loosely associated syndicates, there's the incentive of guaranteed uptime and availability. Of course, it'll require a more selfless criminal which is an oxymoron.

On the other hand, money can be made from supervision.

And how did it work with the Silk Road?

A question to the experts: why don't the criminals use smart contract platforms like Ethereum?

My amateurish take is that, for instance, a smart contract could work as an untraceable distributed Silk Road with escrow and everything else. Because there is no one machine where everything runs, it's impossible to shut down the server; there is nothing that links these transactions together, except for the commonly used Solidity code.

I strongly suspect an average cop is not equipped to take advantage of the bitcoin's vulnerabilities, be it US, Japan, China, or Russia.

Not every criminal handles bajillions, so most won't be investigated by young cyber-savvy hotshots.

Not sure about crashing the market, but cashing it out would definitely be a monumental challenge.

Why stop at "corporations"? How about any sufficiently large social group?

That, or maybe some of these people held senior managerial positions and ran their companies and know what they are talking about.

Portfolio theory. 1 investment succeeds, 9 fail. The one that succeeds pays for the rest. That's why they are "top allocations".

The question is, how many of his investments worked out? If the ratio is less than most, then it's mostly sheer luck with the really good ones.

Real-estate tycoon, Dubai, 3-months-old startup, take on Amazon.

I get that he is a billionaire, but IMO this is not newsworthy.

You could say that, or you could say that bragging about being better without a solid proof is disingenuous or flamebaity. Not unreasonable, is it?

In this particular case, I've seen scores of advanced economies where the eloi are clueless about the stinky and dirty morlocks breaking their backs to power the paradise, and I believe a tiny bit of blindingly obvious sarcasm is not an overreaction.

Yeah, I read that. It's a nice theory, I am asking about the practice.

Given the abundance of low-skilled workforce, I have my doubts.

Does "automation" mean immigrants?

Wow.

Does it count as passing the Turing test, or the scammers don't count as experts?

Come to think of it, the scammers themselves would fail the Turing test.

> What could we build that would take 1000 years?

A great what-if. While not exactly the same, I think you could look at the publicly funded projects like the Euro-projects, NASA, or the Soviet space program that still yield results.

Now imagine the big public companies doing the same.

An incredibly important initiative, although I'm wondering how it will catch up.

The current public trading framework has so many issues, it defeats the original purpose.

* amazing number of parasite intermediaries that create absolutely no value. Someone sells a day after they bought, how did it contribute to the economy or the company that tries to create the value?

* opacity required to keep the system "fair", and used to avoid responsibility

* populist decisions harmful in long-term because the management will be long gone after the effects emerge

and much more.

> This is a popular opinion, but I find it difficult to believe. It relies on the notion that stockholders are fools and unable to recognize when a company destroys its long term prospects for short term gain.

Not necessarily "fools". "Not experts" and "easy to influence" would be like it. Very much the trouble with the modern democracy: incompetents elect those who scream the loudest and say what they want to hear.

Like many others here, I experienced the short-term thinking firsthand. Reckless and pointless acquisitions and hiring spree to prop up the KPIs and scream to the entire world, "look how great we're doing!!!" is just one example.

> The trouble is, once the short term gain is there, who are the short termers going to sell to? A bunch of suckers?

Absolutely. The greater fool, sadly, is the foundation of much of the modern global economy.

Look at any bubble over the last 50 years.

Wow, even that! In the US it's normal to charge US$2.5 or even higher, although some bank accounts refund these charges back to you at the end of the month.

I knew someone would comment on the borderless account (I opened these, too), but it's not even close.

The borderless accounts are:

1. Limited to a handful of currencies. OFX isn't.

2. In the US at least, can't receive international transfers. OFX can. I'm sure there are other limitations, too.

3. It's unclear how much is to be paid to transfer the money from the borderless account to yours. OFX charges nothing to keep the incoming funds "in custody" for up to a month.

Excellent points. It just takes time.

Just like with the "job-stealing automation", despite the hysteria in the press. These things take decades.

> Cheques are now mainly used for business to consumer payments,

I vaguely remember a couple of times years ago (late 2000s, I think) I had a cheque sent to me, but it was done electronically in most cases. Point taken though.

> and for large value transactions, where it's done as a bank-drawn cheque usually.

True, but a bank cheque is a different thing altogether.