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xoralkindi

29 karma · joined November 24, 2020

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xoralkindi··on Claude for Financial Services
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xoralkindi··on AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
How are you confident in the code, coding style and practices simply because the LLM says so. How do you know it is not hallucinating since you don't understand the codebase?
xoralkindi··on The upcoming GPT-3 moment for RL
Now instead of having accountants audit transactions you will have accountants audit LLM output for possible hallucinations. Seems counter productive.
xoralkindi··on Are we the baddies?
It can scale economies and can run on the global level, it also brings about rapid advances in Science and Technology. It also provides more options for individuals than in Socialism, in this regard Capitalism is more decentralized than Socialism.
xoralkindi··on Are we the baddies?
> Most people aren't looking to eliminate capitalism. They want sensible constraints to be put on it. Things like higher taxes on wealth, stricter antitrust enforcement, or investing in social infrastructure don't prevent capitalism from working.

In capitalism the capitalists end up being the government. They can choose who gets elected, the laws, they even start political parties.

xoralkindi··on Are we the baddies?
I also believe that technology is the solution. But all the key technology is centralized Chips, AI, Batteries, Cryptography, Email, Internet access, Radio Waves
xoralkindi··on Are we the baddies?
> Someday, people will have to realize we live in a society. What will it take?

Anarchism, socialism and communism can work perfect in a small village where everyone knows and trusts each other. But if you scale it up it does not work well because people can be corrupt. If you want to scale up to a Geo Global level that is trust-less the best way we know is to use Capitalism, but Capitalism ends up becoming more and more centralized.

Because Capitalism is inherently competitive there will always be winners and losers and these are not just businesses it's everyone in the system because capital is required to partake in the system. This competitiveness is also what leads to the lack of "morality".

What will it take?

I think you cannot have the benefits of capitalism without these side-effects.

xoralkindi··on Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately
> It can generate data that mimics anything humans have produced...

No, it can generate data that mimics anything humans have put on the WWW

xoralkindi··on Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B
Shor's algorithm, originally designed for integer factorization, can also be adapted to solve the discrete logarithm problem in polynomial time on a quantum computer. There is also the less efficient Grover's algorithm can also be used for unstructured search problems on a quantum computer.
xoralkindi··on Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B
Bitcoin is designed with clever incentives to prevent this kind of thing. If you can afford to bruteforce wallets the incentive would be to just mine bictoin which is more probable and it also help secure the network. If you can bruteforce wallets bitcoin is effectively worthless. Or you could even use all of that compute to mine something else for example Monero.
xoralkindi··on Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B
People always forget about the great Wei Dai, who like Nakamoto is already sort of pseudonymous, he also created Bmoney which is allot like Bitcoin. He is also the creator of the Crypto++ cryptography library for C++ (bitcoin is written in C++) From all the OG Cypherpunks he ticks allot of the boxes.
xoralkindi··on Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
> I audit everything myself before making PRs and test rigorously

How do you audit code from an untrusted source that quickly, LLMs do not have the whole project in their heads and are proned to hallucinate.

On average how long are your prompts and does the LLM also write the unit tests?

xoralkindi··on My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]
I think it will push opensource/ free software hackers to close source their code because it is being used to feed LLMs. Similar to how allot of hardcore free software proponents don't use Github. Is closed source the future?
xoralkindi··on Jack Welch, the Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022)
Its like chess in that white has an advantage because they get to play first. The rich get richer because you need capital to efficiently participate in capitalism and it has a compounding effect. It than becomes a zero-sum game where the poor are trying to play catch up with the rich. For example if you start an innovative company the rich can simply buy it or start a competing company that is hard to compete against because of their resources.
xoralkindi··on Jack Welch, the Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022)
"zero sum: relating to or denoting a situation in which whatever is gained by one side is lost by the other."

The data from the Fed show great inequality which can be expected from a zero-sum game. Another example check how under develop DR Congo is in the electronic age, while hardware (and to an extend software) companies are some of the most valuable companies, they all source raw materials from Congo.

xoralkindi··on Jack Welch, the Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022)
The US Federal Reserve data indicates that the top 10% of households own about 67% of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 50% hold less than 4%

Also let us not forget other tools that have significantly helped capitalist nations: Slavery, Colonialism, Imperialism, Sanctions, Wars, Coup d'etat's... these have all contributed to what capitalism is today. So yes Capitalism in the grand scheme of things is entirely zero sum.

xoralkindi··on Challenges for Rust
I like the idea of not bringing "irl" problems in cyberspace, but at the same time I can't help but worry that this does not address the root cause and will only perpetuate and normalize these problems. What we need is a change in the consciousness of the people, one should not think of the negative things that can occur by using their face as a an avatar, in this day and age we should not have such problems. But yes on a level meritocracy should be the goal, your code should be what matters.
xoralkindi··on The Ethereum merge is done
This is all about ledgers, traditional banks have a centralized ledger that only they can edit. Blockchains the ledger is decentralized, anyone can edit the ledger (based on specific rules) this provides allot of avenues of attack.
xoralkindi··on The Ethereum merge is done
Good cryptography should be auditable, that means it should be simple. It should not rely on experts knowing their way through the complexity but should rely on mathematical guarantees.

Yes the cryptography primitives should act like black boxes, no need to peak inside but when a number of these black boxes are used together to form a high level protocol allot of subtle things can go wrong for example see the history of SSL/TLS https://www.feistyduck.com/ssl-tls-and-pki-history/

xoralkindi··on Planning Go 1.20 cryptography work
One would think the default mode of all cryptographers not affiliated to NSA would be not to trust the NSA, NSA could as well mean Eve.
xoralkindi··on Coinbase S-1
Someone on here once said decentralized systems tend to end up centralized, this will be my goto example. A p2p system of exchanging digital tokens end up centralized around the a bank.
xoralkindi··on Decentralized Finance: On Blockchain- and Smart Contract-Based Financial Markets
Why do people think cyberspace is not the real world? I think smart-contracts as envisioned by early cypherpunks where meant to run in a world where Governments are obsolete, they won't work well in our current society.
xoralkindi··on Learn Quantum Computation
Keep it. You will need it in a parallel universe.
xoralkindi··on The Dark Future Where Payments Are Politicized and Bitcoin Wins
> (Or actually, read the whole thing, it's interesting, but it's obvious that the experiment really didn't turn out the way it was planned)

Bitcoin set out to implement the ideas of Wei Dai's b-money system and was also inspired by 2008 financial crush. I think Bitcoin is a success from the cypherpunks/crypto-anarchy perscpective and it is the fruits of their discussions/debates.

xoralkindi··on The Dark Future Where Payments Are Politicized and Bitcoin Wins
You see money was one of the first distributed systems, it transcended languages and flags, the protocol was deployed everywhere. But this protocol of value exchange always had issues with trust, related to the double spending problem so it always required a third party. Gold is almost perfect because it is rare and recognizeable, but gold can be faked and is too heavy to carry around in large amounts also violence can come from gold and violence is a big no no for the cypherpunks. So for our traditional protocol to work we invented money printers that we trust to print our money (Banks) and monitor it for tax purposes. But now maybe for the first time in the world it is possible to have a P2P system of value exchange, no banks, kings or even governments required, the only requirement is a cpu. The new protocol offers new ways to structure our economy, it makes old ways obsolete but it has its own set of problems. Is the new protocol good or is it bad? I say it is too early to answer this, but I also think crypto-coins should be given a chance, it is good that people are starting to use this protocol it gives us real-life data to compare its pros and cons against our traditional protocol.
xoralkindi··on Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached
> both of your big-O comments have counter examples (check out Coda for 1)

That's the typical blockchain reply, suggest yet another ICO out of the ocean of ICOs out there.

> as does your energy comment (Eth2 is an effort to switch to Proof of Stake, amongst other upgrades)

I don't know muuch about Eth2 so I will give you that one.

xoralkindi··on Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached
Blockchains have a few problems that I think make them unsuitable for internet money, I know more about Bitcoin but I think this applies to Ethereum also:

- Early adapter become extremely rich (Developers)

- Transaction costs O(n) network complexity

- Every operation in the network result in no more than O(polylog(n))

- Energy Issues (Proof of Work)

- Speculative markets making the coins not usefull for day to day shopping

- Scams

- More Scams

- Pseudo Decentralization (centralize around Ethereum Foundation... Blockstream, Miners, Dev environments (Github), ISPs)

- Scams