What we're talking about here is the immanent arrival of it being impossible for a very large number of people to get a career in something they enjoy (making images by hand).
It's fair to suppose (albeit based on a very small sample size, i.e., the last couple hundred, abnormal years of history) that all sorts of new jobs will arise as a result of these changes- but it seems to me unreasonable to suppose that these new jobs of the future will necessarily be more interesting or enjoyable than the ones they destroyed. I think it's easy to imagine a case in which the jobs are all much less pleasant (even supposing we all are wealthier, which also isn't necessarily going to be true)- imagine a future where the remaining jobs are either managerial/ownership based in nature or manual labor. To me at least, it's a bleak prospect.
At the risk of demonstrating a total lack of empathy and failure to identify, we long ago passed the arrival of it being impossible for a very large number of people to get a career in something they enjoy (making images by hand). Art has been a famously difficult career path for quite a long time now. This does not really seem like a dramatic shift in the character of the market.
Now, I have empathy. I paused a moment before writing this comment to identify with artists, art students, and those who have been unable to reach their dreams for financial reasons. I emphatically empathize with them. I understand their emotional experiences and the pain of having their dreams crushed by cold and unfeeling machines and the engineers who ignore who they crush.
Yet I must confess I am uncertain how this is supposed to change things for me. I have no doubt that there used to be a lot of people who deeply enjoyed making carriages, too.
Yes, and there will be much fewer of those jobs and they might not pay.
Ultimately though this isn't a technical problem but an economic one about how we as a society decide to share our resources. AI growth the pie, but removes leverage from some to claim their slice. Automation is why we'll inevitably need UBI at some point
"Sure it might produce convincing examples of human speech, but it fundamentally lacks an internal point of view that it can express..."
Sounds just like the chess experts from 30 years ago. Their belief at the time was that computers were good at tactical chess, but had no idea how to make a plan. And Go would be impossible for computers, due to the branching factor. Humans would always be better, because they could plan.
GPT (or a future successor) might not be able to have "an internal point of view". But it might not matter.
Having some internal point of view matters in as much that not having one means it's not really trying to communicate anything. A text generation AI would be a much more useful interface if it can form a view an express it rather than just figuring it all out from context.
And being sold used for 700-ish. Heck, an ancient D700 beats any smartphone whatsoever at larger prints and screens. You do have to do some post-processing yourself, true. And you need proper optics, there is only so much you can crop out of 12 MP. Smartphones take great pictures, and I love the fact that it gets a lot more people into photography than back during the film days. making art more accessible can only be good. But let's not kid ourselves, the reason why smartphone photos do look so great is a ton of heavy automated post-processing in device. I'd prefer to have that same functionalities available as stand-alone post-processing software. Or not, I'm fine with darktable.
I think the problem is less about the number of megapixels and more about the size of the pixels (i.e. sensor) personally.
Smartphones simply cannot resolve the same level of detail that a proper camera can, regardless of how many MP of resolution they provide. Computational AI helps a bit, but...
But was that the reason it collapsed? Matt Levine thinks it's something else[1] (tl;dr: bad loans given to alameda research backed by FTT tokens). 8% pretty close to the rates that decentralized lending protocols provided[2]. There might be other issues with the product (eg. inadequate disclosures), but if it does what it's promised (eg. invest your money into decentralized lending protocols and/or yield farming) and the underlying product collapsed that's not really a ponzi any more a ETF composed of junk bonds going under is a ponzi.
Most of the well known historical Ponzis started out as legitimate investment funds. Then the fund manager started commingling funds and taking risks with customer money in an attempt to boost returns. Inevitably, there was a loss, and at that point the Ponzi component (paying existing investors with new investor's funds) got started, with the intent being to only do it until they could catch up on the losses and then return to being legitimate. The "catch up" never happens and eventually all new inflows are going to pay out existing investors. It blows up when outflows exceed inflows. In the case of FTX/Alameda it seems the blowup just happened earlier than usual, before they could reach "Full Ponzi".
[2] is referring to 1inch offering 8.05% APY on the 1inch token _only_, which is easy when only 621m out of 1.5b tokens are circulating (i.e. more 1inch tokens are printed to pay the fake interest).
Using new user deposits to pay off old users is a ponzi.
Issuing bonds to pay off old debt is not a ponzi because the premise that you will lose your money if the company defaults is known and evaluated up front. And the yield on the bond is commensurate with the risk.
There is no reasonable expectation that an exchange will gamble and possibly lose the money you deposit
Obsidian works perfectly fine with iCloud Drive if you're bought into the Apple ecosystem. It also works well with Google Drive, but that doesn't play well with iOS.
This reminds of of the chess computers from 30 years ago. Experts were convinced computers would never beat GM humans, based on the state-of-the-art of the time. They never took into account all the future advancements in hardware and software.
The chess experts were wrong qualitatively. They were saying that best play was about intuition and feel, that computational power would never replicate regardless of its scale. (Data on Star Trek always lost chess matches implausibly.) Turned out that brute force calculation thirty moves deep does in fact outperform anything a human can foresee.
The same thing happened for both Go and Starcraft in the next decades, the experts said computers couldn't replicate enough spatial feel, and then they did. And now it's happening for AI art. Enough computational power and a sufficiently well-trained neural network can indeed exceed anything a human can do.
AI has been roughly doubling in performance every year or two, for quite some time. We just never noticed when it went from 0.0001% to 0.0002% of human capability. This is the year that it doubles from 10% to 20% and everybody notices. And there's not a lot of doublings left until it shoots past 100%.
I think they were asking with regards to why does Meta cares about Protein structure. It doesn't care but it does help them keep up with the state of the art in ML I suppose.
The problem is theft of your funds without your consent over your unpopular political speech. Bitcoin cannot be taken from you by any third party, provided you self-custody and adequately protect your keys.
>If I buy a video card with bitcoin, but get sent a brick instead, how does "Blockchain as Arbiter" get my bitcoins back?
Unrelated to the problem being discussed, but still a problem. Unfortunately, this is not a problem unique to Bitcoin, nor a problem adequately solved by PayPal, as explained in other comments, so it's hardly a robust criticism against BTC.
Full dislcosure: I own BTC, but less than 0.5% of my net worth, I do not own it for speculative reasons, and I do not view it as an investment or store of value, only as an alternative payment network.
> The problem is theft of your funds without your consent over your unpopular political speech.
As much as I want to roll my eyes at this, it's important no matter what your political opinion is! For now we might be talking "unpopular" but what if you have political speech that is popular but opposes what the people in charge at the time think?
BTC doesn't help with transactions, you still end up trusting a 3rd-party (or the party you're transacting with, in which case a bank transfer would also work fine). There will be no censorship to send your BTC, but you can't give guarantees about what will happen for the other part of the transaction without this trust.
The use-case you mentioned is just that of a bank account. The right to have such a bank account should be enforced by regulation where it's not the case yet, as storing your wealth in an asset with such high volatility is not an actual solution.
Legally, no, which is why I don't use PayPal and never will again, but to the layperson, who almost invariably does not read those contracts, and might be incapable of understanding the contract even if they chose to read it, I suspect it would look, sound, and feel a lot like theft.
But again, that's the beauty of Bitcoin. There is no dense legalese with sneaky technicalities that allow other parties to seize your funds over the contents of your speech, so long as you self-custody and adequately protect your keys. I understand that's also not something all laypeople can be expected to do, but I prefer to have the option than to not have the option.
Paypal refused me a refund after someone didn't even send me a brick, but just sent me someone else's FedEx shipment confirmation. Didn't even say my address and was delivered before I ordered. I was instantly denied because their shitty AI dispute process just checks the FedEx zipcode. Paypal wouldn't even let me talk to a real person. Fuck that company.
Use a credit card instead. Luckily, I payed paypal through a credit card. So I disputed it through the bank instead.
Bitcoin fixes it by reducing the number of scammers in the chain. if you deal with a seller and paypal, either the paypal or the seller can scam you. paypal is immune to bad press because their reputation is already rock bottom, so they don't even lose any reputation anymore by rampantly thieving and scamming. At least if, with a cryptocurrency, the seller scams you, you can voice it somewhere their reputation will be at risk. It doesn't delete the risk but the fixes the problem of "middle man is a scammer and thief and nobody is willing to do anything at all about it" that exists with paypal.
There's nobody you can complain to to get your money back from paypal in many situations, especially when it comes to receiving payments. If you use a credit card or have a bank send them money you have better options, but many people scammed by paypal have no recourse when they are on the receiving end of the money (which is the primary reason you'd have money held in paypal to begin with, as typically if you're sending it along you're not letting it sit there in the account).
The company has not yet provided any real numbers. I want to know how much electricity is generated at a specific wind speed. The lack of this most basic number leads me to believe this isn't as good as it sounds.
