mindcandy

> AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning"

What would it mean for authors who publish content publicly to the web, without access restrictions, to provide consent for learning from it?

"EULA: Most people are allowed to learn from this text. If you work in an AI-related field, even though you can clearly see this page because you are reading this text right now, you are not permitted to learn anything from it. Bob Stanton, you are an a-hole. I do not consent to you learning from this web page. Dave Simmons, you are annoying. But, I'll give you a pass. For now... Also: plumbers. I do not like plumbers for reasons I will not elaborate. No plumbers may learn from my writing in an way."

The DoW is engaging in simple crybullying. In my time as an online moderator I see it all the time.

“You are impinging on my freedom to force you to participate in activities you have expressly indicated it is against your will to engage in! You bully! I am such a victim!”

https://xcancel.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070?s=20

This is endemic of the entire current administration. It is as disappointing as it is unsurprising.

I would very much like to see us return to something resembling the original copyright terms. Like: Manually file for 22 years of enforcement. Then manually file 20 years later for 22 more.

You could create some great masterpiece at 18 and live off of it until you are 62 and starting to take social security payments.

My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public.

The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.

What I’ve observed from internal reports from multiple companies is that, if you don’t assume an outlier blockbuster game, major game studios’ normal plan is to target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected variance of +/-20% each year.

So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not just being there, but surviving at least a couple months is the difference between “10% profit moving the whole company forward on schedule” vs “10% loss dragging the whole company down” or “30% profit, great success, bonuses and hiring increases” depending on the situation.

Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS “My Software version N+1” just as an excuse to update their DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can’t just buy desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and incidentally convenient in other ways.

> especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).

“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.

And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.

Is the content of the comment productive to the conversation? Upvote it.

Is the content of the comment counter-productive? Downvote it.

I could see cases where large walls of text that are generally useless should be downvoted or even removed. AI or not. But, the first example

> faced with 74 pages of text outside my domain expertise, I asked Gemini for a summary. Assuming you've read the original, does this summary track well?

to be frank, is a service to all HN readers. Yes it is possible that a few of us would benefit from sitting down with a nice cup of coffee, putting on some ambient music and taking in 74 pages of... whatever this is. But, faced with far more interesting and useful content than I could possibly consume all day every day, having a summary to inform my time investment is of great value to me. Even If It Is Imperfect

“About half of all food deliveries globally are shorter than 2 and a half miles, which basically means that all of our cities are filled with burrito taxis”

There is a future where a city's burrito taxis are replaced with drones rolling on the sidewalk or flying to the rooftops. And, the large majority of the remaining city drivers are replaced by robotaxis with multi-sensor 360 tracking. Where there are nearly zero parked cars. So, the parking spaces have been replaced with bike lanes of bikers and scooters with every robotaxi on the street planning around their motion.

Far less fuel consumption. Far less street crowding. Far fewer accidents.

And, of course everyone hates the idea.

> in fact they can start doing so today

In fact they already have. There are 10s of thousands of forks of Bitcoin. Only a handful ever got significant attention. And, the original is still much larger than all of the forks combined.

There are at least two reasons to buy Bitcoin:

1. You need it for use as a collateral asset for smart contracts. There are no crypto cops or crypto courts. Only collateral gives contracts teeth. There are many options here. Just like there are many options for collateral assets in traditional finance. But, BTC is the top dog for the role and the first choice of individuals and institutions trying to lay down the foundations of decentralized finance.

2. You are speculating that the growth of BTC's growth in value as a collateral asset will outpace the growth of other assets. This as played out well over the past decade.

At a logical level, Bitcoin should be decorrelated from stocks. The fundamentals of Bitcoin network adoption and utilization are largely separate and independent.

But, at an emotional level, Bitcoin is considered a high-risk asset. So, whenever fear gets heavy in the fear/greed equation, Bitcoin is one of the first places people pull money out of as they flee to safety. It's also the "High Risk-High Return" spot for folks to plunk their "spare change" when they are feeling safe. So, in practice short term moves in Bitcoin are highly correlated to short term moves in equities.

Meanwhile, if you actually run the numbers, Bitcoin has out performed the SP500 (or even the SP10) by a large multiple over the past decade while having a volatility usually around the median of the SP500-top-10 that everyone is currently betting heavily into. People just have a hard time getting out of linear thinking and so they look at the big dips as short-term linear disasters while on a long-term, logarithmic view they have been rather boring. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd...

> would prefer to pay all their employees $0 and have all diners/customers/etc pay 100% of the wages out of guilt.

It is my understanding that this is literally the origin of tipping.

After the abolition of slavery, there were many black people newly looking for work. And, there were employers looking for workers, but unwilling to pay money to black people.

So, someone got the idea to promote that tipping was something fancy European aristocrats did. And, you can be fancy like they were by tipping my workers (that I refuse to pay).

Tipping was previously seen as un-Americanly classist. And, most states tried to ban it when it started to pick up steam. But, it was too late. So many employers were enjoying unpaid labor that the bans were repealed.

Later, when Minimum Wage was established, workers who lived on tips alone were almost all black. So, unsurprisingly, tipped workers were excluded from the wage regulation. And, today they are only acknowledged as fractional minimum laborers.

One of the greatest problems in argumentation over the internet is that people gravitate towards acting as if every statement is intended to define a universal truth so they can argue against that strawman.

> This means if you ask it one question every two minutes, you're using about as much energy as a 10W LED lightbulb.

Meanwhile your idle desktop PC and monitor are pulling 20-100W each.

People tend to forget that doing the work the old fashioned way uses energy too. Presumably for a longer time for equivalent results.

Compared to the “Magnificent Seven”, Bitcoin’s volatility has put it in the middle, while it’s performance puts it at or near the top depending on the time window.

https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/research-and-insights/...

https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/06/bitcoin-has-been-a...

> I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems.

That’s quite a mischaracterization. We can at least agree that Bitcoin’s supply is set up to increase at a pre-set rate over time. The math problems are the means to enforce that rate. Not the controlling factor.

You can buy a pizza from me with Bitcoin now.

I’m not a vendor or even a chef. But, anything is negotiable.

> Maybe they should work on fixing that

It’s not an either/or. While we figure out the practical solutions to corruption in impoverished nations, we can /also/ do other work to improve the situation in Earth. And, in doing so, we will make solving the impoverished/corruption problem easier to fix.

I still remember from over 20 years ago I was sitting in the kitchen talking to my grandmother. She was smoking and had some Fox News talking head on in the background. Maybe Hannity?

What I noticed what that there was a main story for the hour long program. But, it was pretty dull. Meanwhile, the host kept randomly going off into short non-sequitur diatribes. All of the non-sequiturs were depressing. They were about random stuff that made you feel just awful. Then he'd pop back to dull main story like nothing happened.

I realized the non-sequiturs were all designed to make you feel hate, fear and disgust towards liberals. The main story was just filler. The real product was a steady stream of emotional hits of hate, fear and disgust. Over and over forever. Just like puffing on her cigarettes.

That was decades ago. The hate, fear and disgust pipeline has refined a lot since then.

Decades later, the news got my father so deeply filled with hate, fear and disgust that he would randomly launch into hateful diatribes about the libs unprompted. It got bad enough that the kids had to tell Mom we weren't visiting until he got it under control. He wasn't like that at all until he retired and had more time to watch TV.

We're getting warmer.

Back in the days of king and country, people went through all that, went home, and some lived normal lives. A whole lot hid in that trauma from the neighbors and instead took it out on their families because it wasn't acceptable to let it out to anyone else. Everything was "great". That's how it's remembered decades later. That’s how we got a lot of boomers raised by dads who never got therapy.

Recently, in the days of plague, while millions actually suffered and died, a person in a million cried out online about masks. That's 350 a day in the US alone. And, everyone around the world got to watch. How it's remembered today is every one of us saw at least one of them break down and it still sticks with us all.

> This used to be called a whinge. It wasn't celebrated

And, this piece certainly is not a celebration.

The difference between a whinge and a trauma dump is significant here. You should whinge with your buddies occasionally. Not so much you become annoying. Trauma should only be dumped on people who are professionally prepared to help you through it. But, a whole lot of people don’t find prepared help for a whole lot of reasons. Instead they dump it on unprepared strangers. Frequently. Randomly. Commonly. Thus, the term.

> "explosive word vomit" is, as yet, the most accurate three-word description of it I have seen so far.

A trauma dump is usually explosive word vomit. Random chain of thought. But, consider the possibility that this piece was crafted carefully. I know it’s easy to dismiss out of hand. But, try. Why is each sentence there?

> That doesn’t make it a poem!

I’ll grant there is not a lot of structure to be found here. It’s free verse without the line breaks. Not really prose. It’s not telling a story. There’s a beginning. There’s a state of frustration, compassion, boredom, despair, and a loop back to the beginning. Over and over. For decades and counting. That’s the structure. It’s no iambic pentameter. But, it’s something.

But, impressive vocabulary and flowery visuals? Really? I’m going to assume you are flexible there and don’t require a high school English class interpretation of poetry. As called out in the article.

I think the two of us are on opposite sides of the "These elements include:" list :)

"Laundry to do..." is a trauma dump for pretty much everyone in this third decade of 24/7 local/global disaster reporting. It's the opposite of a unique perspective. But, it's nice to see the common vent presented in a thoughtful way instead of the daily routine of "Everyone holding it in and a few people explosively word-vomiting frustration."

And, I don't need rigid structure, impressive vocab or flowery images to appreciate a message. I'm good with it just putting me in a moment. Feeling it. Taking a breath and exhaling "yessssss......"

Compared to the dollar over the past five years…

The dollar down vs itself by 20ish percent.

The median home price is up 30ish percent.

Oil is up 45ish percent.

Gold and the SP500 are each up 80ish percent.

Bitcoin is up 1000ish percent.

If you snooze through the day-by-day, season-by-season noise, the volatility of Bitcoin is a fun and relaxing rocket to ride. You just have to ignore all discussion focused on time frames of less than four years.

Of course. But, then there's the rest of my comment...

From what I've read, the deficit looked like a huge problem and turned out to not be a problem from WWII to 2008. That's the situation most economists, finance leaders and regulators grew up in.

But, the demographic crisis means that moving forward our growth in entitlement spending for the growing population of seniors is far outpacing our growth in GDP from our slowing population of workers.

We can't tax or cut out way out of this. Elon's cuts are going to be performative at best. Real cuts would put tens of millions of seniors, vets and disabled people into destitution. Taxing the billionaires more would be nice. But, taxing them to zero would only paper over a few years of the problem.

The only way out I see is through massive investment to increase per-capita GDP long term. As a super duper liberal, I'm gung ho on "Bring manufacturing back!" in the form of

1. Re-prioritize trade schools and trade skills so we can actually perform high-skill work in factories if/when we build them. 2. Do everything we can to catch up with China making locally-built green energy tech dirt-cheap and highly effective. 3. Figure out how to incentivize the market to local build the interconnected web of advanced manufacturing capabilities needed to produce high tech goods fast and cheap.

I see the work of https://www.hadrian.co/ as an example of what I'm talking about. I'm starting to see some senators act like they need to stop talking about it and actually do something about it. But, the "best" I've heard from Trump is "Drill, baby. Drill!" and "Tariffs are magic."

If Trump laid out a plan for how to target tariffs surgically and use those proceeds to build up manufacturing, I'd be on board. But, he hasn't. Instead, he has made it clear his only plan is to create chaos, achieve performative concessions, and declare personal triumph while netting great harm for everyone in the end.

I applaud the goal of rooting out the pork. But, "We have to do something. This is something." doesn't excuse how it's being done.

Turning off the entire flow of money is unnecessary, even counter-productive, to understanding how the money is flowing. Even if half of the money is waste, turning off the other half is causing tremendous real harm for no reason.

It is completely unnecessary and horrific to rubber stamp around national security protocol for something as incomprehensibly impactful as the federal payments system.

And, in the end, what are we going to get out of all of it? What I'm seeing out of Elon is propaganda about programs like "studying shrimp on treadmills" which was an microscopic piece of a very sensible study on marine safety and security. That's exactly the kind of work the government is supposed to be doing. But, if you frame it badly enough, you can destroy it for everyone and claim it as a victory.

I would be 10X as concerned and so would everyone else because mishandling those programs could absolutely wreck the lives of tens of millions of people.

My point is that a lot of people seem to be in an "ends justify the means" mindset here where it's OK to rubber-stamp over laws, security, any sort of requirements for competence, or even basic understanding of what's being destroyed because in the end, this is chaos is going to have such a tremendous impact.

But, it's not. It mathematically can't. Even if it all turns out amazing it will be a small dent in the problem it's claiming to solve.

So, in the end, all of this is actually just chaos for sake of chaos. In the process, a whole lot of real people will be hurt in real ways. It's not bad at the same scale that "Turn off Medicare until we understand how it works" would be. But, it's nonsensically destructive in exactly the same way.

76 of those days are social security, medicare/medicaid, vet benefits, income security for the poorest citizens and interest payments.

15 of those days are national defense.

9 of those days are what Elon hopes to cut in half.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

The deficit is a huge problem. I don't know how to fix it. But, what DOGE has done so far is exactly the opposite of what makes sense.

This is a strawman that assumes choosing between the volatility of a memecoin or USD/Euro when the reality of the situation being discussed is choosing between the volatility of a USD-pegged stablecoin vs. that of a developing nation's currency.

I'm finding a lot of these arguments to be disingenuous.

Much of the discussion is around "Meanwhile, most people trying to use cryptocurrency to improve financial inclusion aren’t even thinking about on-ramp problems." Kuhn is assuming an argument against a crypto purist who wants 100% crypto-to-crypto services and from there bringing up the real problem than there are not many cash<-->crypto services for people who need better inclusion. But, Kuhn is in exactly the position to provide that service and is choosing not to. Arguing that you don't want to provide crypto services because it's not inclusive because people aren't providing the service you could provide but choose not to because crypto is not inclusive because...

> These problems are solvable in principle, by using a stablecoin on a much more efficient blockchain. But that’s a whole lot of effort just to get the user experience back to the baseline that we’ve already built! And even once you’re there, it doesn’t seem like the blockchain has any meaningful advantages that are worth that cost.

Comes after arguing a strawman of "memorizing the exchange rate of fish to crypto" to say that the past few paragraphs are invalid and instead of building up the security of a literal money-vault Postgres database, the could have just built a secure key store for a stablecoin based service.

> For a technically sophisticated early adopter, the cryptocurrency pitch—“these algorithms guarantee that we can’t get your balance wrong, even if we’re malicious”—makes some sense. But a typical underbanked person in Senegal, who may not understand Merkle trees or Byzantine fault tolerance, might justifiably be skeptical. For us, it’s much more important to have more traditional markers of trust, like approval from bank partners, billboards in major cities, TV and radio ads, and so on.

This doesn't change regardless of what tech you use. The only difference is if the end goal of your marketing is "Trust me bro" or "You don't even need to trust me bro".

> if it was clearly labelled as AI I wouldn't even look at it.

If you dislike it without even seeing it, that would indicate the problem isn't with the video...

Tens of millions of people are having fun making art in new ways with AI.

Hundreds of thousands of people are making AI porn in their basements and deleting 99.99% of it when they are… finished.

Hundreds of people are making deep fakes of people they know in some public forums.

And, how does the public interpret all of this?

“The most popular use case is deepfake porn.”

Sigh…