Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • A company that can’t offer a ROI to its stockholders, is a startup that should never be allowed to go public; stick to angel and venture investors instead. Public stocks relying on the hype of “growing quickly”, are a Ponzi scheme through and through.

    If we speak of company ages, the argument doesn’t hold either:

    • AAPL - 49yr - 0.48%
    • MSFT - 50yr - 0.88%
    • NVDA - 32yr - 0.04%
    • AMZN - 31yr - 0.00%
    • GOOG - 27yr - 0.49%
    • TSLA - 22yr - 0.00%
    • SpaceX - 23yr - not traded

    A good chunk of the US market is made up of Ponzi scheme companies. With 401k-s tied to market investments, people are setting themselves up for a very rough awakening.





  • The bill hasn’t passed yet, we’ll see what amendments get into the final version.

    The general downside of this kind of bills, is that they require marking “any amount” of AI-based modification, like for example: using an “AI optimized” curves modifier to adjust a photo, makes the whole thing into “made using AI”.

    My phone camera has an AI based detector for focusing on faces, pieces of paper, brightness and color correction… so ALL photos I take with it are automatically “made with AI”, which is BS.







  • They are examples of a simple prompt you can put into an AI, to get similar results.

    One is little more than random noise. You can put this comment into an AI prompt, in the presence of a legal witness, and when people start liking the output, say “aha!”.

    The second is an automated process of canning food, that the artist used to can his own feces. Yes, they were real, about half the cans have exploded after being exposed in places when the sun would heat them up, which was part of the artist’s plan. Another piece by the same artist is Fiato d’Artista, a balloon blown up and sealed by the artist, that over time has deflated. The “art vs. automation” of both, fall heavily on the automation part.

    The last can be generated with a single sentence prompt to any image generating AI.

    The interpretation you make up to justify a piece, is independent from the means used to generate it… so you have to choose:

    • The interpretation is the art, making all tools a valid option, including AI.
    • The piece itself has to embody some interpretation, making the examples into “not art”.

  • There is no “safe” store of value, it always depends on demand; there is no single item with a constant demand. One would think that air, water, food, housing, etc. should be always in demand… but reality is showing how people are willing to sacrifice those for something else all the time.

    Bitcoin transfers cost pennies on the Lightning Network. An argument can be made, that SEPA transfers cost exactly 0… also an argument can be made, that SEPA didn’t go all the way down to 0, until cheap crypto transfers became a thing. But SEPA is an Euro thing.

    China, I think the powerhouse of an economy that it has will make it awfully enticing for investment orgs

    China has a 100% intervened market, there is exactly 0% security that any investment won’t go to 0 in an instant, by decree. There is a reason why Chinese people invested 30% of GDP in the housing market, allowing scammers to build ghost towns they never planned on completing… and then it all went crashing down.

    The US sees the Euro as a competitor of the Dollar; for the US to buy a strategic reserve of EUR, it would definitely mean recognizing defeat.




  • Same misunderstandings as usual:

    crypto transactions can be done anonymously

    Except for a couple “anonymous coins”, no they can’t.
    KYC+Blockchain = full traceability.

    asset with little proven real-world application that regular old U.S. dollars can’t already account for

    Close. Consider the following scenario:

    1. USD is a US government IOU, same as every other fiat currency.
    2. Fiat money’s value depends on the trust in the credit it represents.
    3. Trump&co are destroying USA’s trust worldwide.
    4. External countries like China, have huge amounts of US credit… have given a lot to the US in exchange for a pinky swear.
    5. The US keeps emitting USD credit by manipulating interest rates, hoping to attract investors and greed/trust.

    But what if the US were to default on its obligations instead, break trade agreements, break defense agreements… what would be a safe store of value then?

    • Gold, will say some… but there is not enough gold to go around to represent all the credit currently tied in money, that was the reason to abandon the gold standard in the first place.
    • Others will pick the Yuan, after all it’s the second largest economy GDP PPP… but really? Does anyone trust China? I doubt so.
    • Euro seems much more trustworthy, but it will take long after Trump has utterly trashed the US economy, for the US to recognize defeat.

    That leaves little more than fantasy money, with the stablest of them being: Bitcoin.



  • I think automation only cares about increasing the output, not about the effort or exclusivity of the input.

    Since you propose reviewing history, let’s do it together:

    • Artists used to perform for a single patron, getting paid for each performance.
    • Amphitheaters allowed multiple patrons to attend each performance.
    • Recordings allowed performances to be reproduced over and over.
    • Copying allowed millions of patrons to reproduce the same recording multiple times, independently of each other.

    …and now neural networks are suddenly the preposterous advance? Nonsense.

    Luddite propaganda is corporate propaganda is elitist propaganda, a step back towards less efficient ways of reaping the benefits of labor so it can be more easily controlled and restricted, an elitist approach where artists perform at the whim of someone wealthy enough to be able to afford them.

    If you want to discuss the fair compensation for labor, we can start talking about total production, compensation inequality, an UBI system, or whatever. Don’t come in blindly claiming that cutting down technological labor amplification, is the only way to get paid enough to live… or that getting paid is even required to live in a post-scarcity world, much less that artificially imposed scarcity is something positive.