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Honest question: if you are nvidia, why not publish the interface specification for your device? If there are silicon bugs, publish the errata and the workaround. I've seen SOC manufacturers do similar. What's different about GPUs?

Well this is interesting: my perspective is that we are actually already living in the age of the bureau and the technocrat, with only some vestigial democratic traditions, and we have been since 20th century wars. Burnham (who is well worth reading, in my opinion) called this the "managerial system". Of course, it still calls itself "democracy" despite not really being democratic at all. In fact, whenever you hear the word "democracy" -- a word which tends to have positive valence in society -- in the official press, you can substitute "managerial system" for a more neutral term without loss of meaning.

That age might be coming to an end, but it's less about some vague general mood of the 2020s and mostly due to proliferated networked communications. This allows people to find their frens exchange ideas and coordinate actions. Oh and everyone starts to see how transparently duplicitous the official lines are.

We perceive all this as "populism." From Arab Springs to meme stocks to Donald Trump, the phenomena are clearly a form of network dynamics. Is it bad? Is it good? Well... it's certainly disruptive, and is probably both good and bad in different cases and at different times. Which are which depends on your point of view.

But disruption of any kind is certainly bad for the managers, so the natural reaction is precisely what you suggest, effectively, sinification: tighter control ("moderation") of online communications, suppression of opposition parties. Policy drafted by career mandarins. The CCP has done alright, so I suppose if (big if) they can execute it well it might buy them some more time.

But unless you are a party insider, I'm not sure why you would throw your lot in with them.

I recently sent a low-fee, nearly instantaneous payment over the lightning network with exactly zero trusted intermediaries. LN may or may not be ready for wider-scale adoption, but it was incredibly cool. It gave me that same feeling of power and possibilities as when I first learned to program a computer. I'm not sure if I can convince you but there is actually some there there.

If, as I predict, volatility goes down as the network grows and bitcoin becomes used for more things, so does average return. In other words, the "deflation" rate reaches some small but steady level. The days of number go up will be over, bitcoin would be something boring that goes up only slowly over decades. Like the foreign exchange of a virtual country, its market price vs other currencies would be determined more by balance of trade than by currency speculation.

Of course, that future is far from certain. Buying bitcoin now is like buying an option that pays out if that future comes to pass. The price of an option is very volatile, but it is never zero until it expires. Bitcoin might wax or wane in popularity, but it will never expire.

This is all that the words "speculative asset" entail: they are risks that work out in some possible futures and don't in others. So it doesn't bother me that some people bought bitcoin and $10 and are now sitting on a nice stack. That bitcoin could have easily gone to 0.01 today. They took that risk. Why shouldn't they reap that reward? Without those early market participants in bitcoin, wouldn't be even more highly concentrated? My advice to such whales would be to spend their bitcoin on business investments that help spread the coins and bootstrap the network. Bitcoin-related businesses that pay employees in bitcoin. There are still bold people out there who want to live in an alternate future and try to make it real.

Of course, I don't think everyone should get into speculation... It's got a pretty high attrition rate even among the professionals. But you know, oddly enough, it's when inflation rates are higher that the more people are forced to be speculators just to stay in place.

Being on the cutting edge means that most of the time, what you are doing just doesn't work.

I've been listening to old timers tell stories about working at MOS technology back in the 70s. MOS was rather vertically integrated, with chip design and fabrication feeding all the way to consumer products. So chip designers dealt with buggy manufacturing processes, board engineers got buggy new chips hot off the wafer, and software guys got buggy dev boards. A lot of time was spent trying to go back and fix bugs at the lower layers, sometimes all the way down to manufacturing defects. It might sound crazy today, but for a time they could do things that very few other companies could.

"It's slow", "it's buggy", "it's inefficient"... all of these are ways of saying "I can't, I won't". Expressions of fatigue. They don't lead anywhere.

"I'll make it fast," "I'll make it work," "I'll make it efficient"... all are expressions of will. This is the attitude that the builds the future.

Where did you acquire this point of view? You sound very certain, but I think you've got it completely backwards: You say bitcoin cannot be a currency because it is highly volatile, but I'd argue that it's just as true that Bitcoin has high volatility because it isn't in widespread use as a currency. I suppose they can both be true: it's a network bootstrapping problem. This is the future bitcoin long-term buyers are speculating on, that the network will succeed and become more widespread.

And though the network is small, people spend bitcoin all the time. You say this is irrational, and maybe it is in some very static model of economic action, but as we know, the real world is dynamic. That is, it has a time component, the future is unknowable and there are very few guarantees. It turns out, that at some point people tend to decide they would rather have something now than wait for later and potentially get it more cheaply. A man's gotta eat, and sometimes he wants to enjoy a few luxuries as well. People didn't stop trading things when there were "massively deflationary" commodity monies in the past, and I don't see why that would be different today.

In fact, the whole "deflation" bugaboo is only indirectly about price. The real core of the matter is credit: "deflation" acts like a higher interest rate, which makes life difficult for debtors. We can already create debt products linked to inflation, and I see no reason why that term can't have a negative sign next to it. This changes one's view of what investments look wise or not, but that is not necessarily a bad thing at all.

The ARPANET has been around since 1971. It's been 25 years of bullshit. Because Andreessen is behind the "web" scam a lot of people are in... FOR THE MONEY. Let me guess none of you would be involved in this if it wasn't for $$$. As soon as internet becomes the savings and loans crisis of the 2000's this cough "technology" will disappear.

I hope you find work that's exciting and meaningful to you in whatever industry you like, but you should really consider the source when it comes to the anti-crypto moralizers. If someone accuses you of being a scammer when they know nothing about you or what you do, is their opinion really worth your time?

People will always be resentful of success and even just the attempt of it, whether it's a business growing big or putting a man on the moon. Made an advance in robotics? Given the obvious military applications, someone somewhere is going to call you a murderer. You have to get used to this if you want to accomplish anything great. You can't let yourself be ruled by someone else's morality.

Where do the crypto-haters cluster? With those who praise accomplishment and greatness or those who are resentful of it? My view is that they are clearly in the camp of the latter. You have to start hearing the "constant onslaught" as praise, my friend.

Voting as a simulated war where the armies show up, get counted, but don't actually fight makes sense to me as an analogy, but doesn't this break down when you add the notion of universal suffrage to the equation? That is, if you have large fraction of the voting population who would be worse than useless in an actual battle, doesn't the output of the simulation start to drift from reality?

Alex Jones actually is a very serious performance artist who never breaks kayfabe, like that one old magician that Christian Bale's character in the Prestige respected for perpetually keeping up his act while in public. There is a lot of overlap with what Jones is doing and something like professional wrestling.

I don't much care for his style, but I think one day, maybe long after his death, people will give Jones the respect he deserves as an artist. A well-flowing rant is not an easy thing to improvise, and he is just a machine for generating them. To paraphrase a quote about jazz, you don't just wake up one morning, pick up a microphone and start raving about the new world order.

There is a real art to conspiracy theorizing. You can't just make things up. You have to take random true things and stitch them together into sort of framework that's wild and entertaining enough for your audience while still seeming plausible. You have to shade them in with sinister undertones. It's a sort of dark impressionism.

He is his own brand of genius.

You need to be hand-assembling your machine code. You need to stop using code written by anyone else. You need to be punching in raw bytes to bootstrap an interactive forth environment. Writing your own interrupt handlers, task schedulers, and specialized allocators, bit-banging wire protocols as well as using DMA. You need to control your own computer.

I'll take a crack at it. How about a two-person consularship with a red consul and a blue consul? Together they wield full executive control, but nothing happens unless both agree on a particular action. Would you ratify?

If a constitutional convention actually happened it would be a mere formality. The new government would effectively have already been established by an informal process and written a new constitution. The convention would have exactly one item on its agenda: vote to accept the new constitution.

It's foolish to think it's just about money and industry.

I mean, yes, be very skeptical of publications that justify an outcome their funders' wanted. But why should that stop at industry? Should we be so naive as to think that all the other science funders and fundees up to and including NSF itself don't have their own "agendas", not necessarily aligned at all with figuring out what's true and what's not?

Top of the agenda of all institutions is to survive, and second is to grow. In industry, that means making more money and making it more efficiently. In academia? Here our currency is "impact". In government? Here our currency is "power". "Impact" is really just another word for power.

The desire for power, for relevance, and for status are just as potent, and just as corrupt when compared to what you might consider an "ideal science", one whose practitioners are motivated by something like "curiosity." How much has our Science been influenced from these directions? It's a disturbing question, right?

I mean, can you even imagine that article? "How Scientists Weaponize Science to Create Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones and Serve Their Agenda (moar sinecures and grant money)". "How Bureaucracy Weaponizes Science and Sows Compliance to Serve Their Agenda (moar sinecures, bigger slice of the budget pie)". Seems crazy, right?

But is it? A Minister of Truth is a bureaucrat with a bureaucrat's salary, and has no real interest in "profits" beyond holding onto his position and advancing in the ranks. Such an organization is basically outside the realm of the market and profit-motives, and yet, would you trust such a ministry to produce good science? If not, why not?

Of course, we do not have an official ministry of truth, but if you adjust the telescope lens to bring into focus the constellation of universities, government agencies and other funding apparatus, it is rather difficult for me to distinguish what we do have from that one unified ministry. "They're the same picture." The org-chart is just more complicated.

Always hide your power level.

Respeto.

Imagine caring about ideology and morals in the middle of a political, technological, and martial competition.

There's being aware of Lisp and then there's having learned Lisp's lessons. Urbit is interesting to me but it is also interesting for me to imagine what it would be like if, perhaps, Curtis had attended MIT instead of Berkeley.

Where you see nefarious intentions I see someone pursuing their own aesthetics, something that is very admirable and that I think more systems engineers should do. It's obviously not your aesthetic. It's not even really my aesthetic. It's Curtis's. But isn't "radically different from anything that has gone before" just a roundabout way of saying "cool?"

As far as the "cult" goes, I am reminded of that part in Jodorowsky's Dune where he's all "I am looking for my holy warriors!" For any system, whether technological, religious or philosophical to remain living and breathing, it needs its adherents and believers, and I see neither bad intentions nor bad outcomes here. Maybe that's just what happens when you are deep enough in the cult. But the cult is... calm. Cozy, even.

Is that so bad?

You are somewhat wrong about how urbit works.

Stars and galaxies don't really work as routers. They are more like DNS servers: they provide the peer discovery mechanism, translating from urbit IDs to public hosts and ports. Most communication is peer-to-peer. Software updates still flow down the tree from the root, but as I understand, they are looking to make that more flexible, though this poses some technical challenges.

When you have an urbit planet, it's yours, and no star or galaxy can take it from you. There isn't a "lease" arrangement, it's bona-fide cryptographic ownership.

Comets are currently served by the galaxies and can communicate with any other VMs that are willing to talk to comets, and at this stage in the network, that's basically all of them.

On that group, they mostly discuss urbit.

There are a lot of other interest groups with varying levels of activity: cat pictures, art, cryptocurrency, tech, emacs, politics, finance, ham radio, weightlifting, cars, tea... All the different kinds of stuff that people discuss on the web.

If you want the world to become Tlon, don't you need an Orbis Tertius?

As someone who has never met Curtis but has been initiated into both the cult of urbit and the cult of lisp, I've sometimes wondered how familiar he was the works of the latter, as you can often see some familiar things when you squint, but it's covered up with strange materials, quite possibly of alien origins.

Sounds great, to be honest.

> what’s the use of owning crypto if no one accepts it?

I mean, when your currency is being heavily devalued, putting your free cash into anything else is beneficial. The Turkish airbnb hosts I spoke with years ago had euro bank accounts, and immediately fx'ed into euro whenever they got paid. If bitcoin is too difficult to get then Turks will just go back to putting their money into euro.

Oh, and they can all still access bitcoin markets in a manner opaque to local government via a trl -> eur -> btc path, and if they need some local currency, via the reverse. Any Turks in Europe with contacts back in Turkey: you could probably make money facilitating this.

> I don’t see how Turkey’s ban is “silly” in anyway.

It's silly because it's unenforceable, and trying and failing to enforce unenforceable laws just makes you look weak. The storefront bitcoin brokers in Istanbul will have to shut down, but money is already digital and it's going to flee a sinking lira whether it's into crypto, foreign exchange, real estate, precious metals, art, or whatever.

If governments are so powerful, why would they ever feel the need to ban cryptocurrency? If they are not so powerful, how could they possibly succeed in banning them?

Since I'm not sure the author (asciilifeform) is still around:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=asciilifeform

I am not sure why I should trust kraken, but even if I trusted them completely, this only proves tether has enough liquidity to maintain their peg, not that they are "mostly backed." That is to say, it only puts a relatively small bound on their reserve ratio.

In some unpleasant circles, yes, this is forbidden. It's strange to me, because people in those circles seem to be defending a sort of metaphysical equality that is obviously false.

Presumably, it is possible to believe both that IQ is highly heritable and that it is very important for success in the modern world, while also concluding, "this is why we need full communism now," but you rarely encounter those people at all, at least outside of SSC-adjacent places.

The funny thing is, the critiques of Marcuse, Foucault and the like are 100% applicable to these status and sinecure seekers in the academy. They are worth reading for this reason alone.

Lindsay defends the old-academy classical liberalism. The sort of gentlemanly debate that arises from such values is good, but only possible between people with a collegial relationship who both prefer truth over power. They cannot be used against enemies. When dealing with enemies, one must bring weapons, and the postmodernist weapons can be made to work in anyone's hands.

I see Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as part of a larger movement that's looking for an "exit" from institutions like, well, Harvard.

I think the building of those alternatives is actually rather important, given how poorly these well established institutions seem to be at solving problems, including the ones you list.

I am not convinced of the deflationary spiral.

No one invests for a "net benefit to society as a whole." They invest for a return, and you can NPV your project in both inflationary and deflationary environments.

Only weakly in that others will only extend credit to USG as long as their revenues are sufficient that they do not default.

"Computers?"

All trading losses can be explained as losing traders not understanding and properly accounting for the risk of their strategy.

It is a safe bet that most retail traders are not at all systematic in their trading or use poor systems, which are moral equivalents in this world.

A good trader looks for arbitrage opportunities, or failing to find any, takes calculated risks.

In bubbling markets, FOMO makes people risk-seeking as opposed to risk neutral. They overpay for risk, the volatility becomes a selling point. The bet works out for some, but most will be burned. It is basic statistics.