mindcandy

While we are all waiting for the world to sort these problems out, companies that are not interested in solving them for the world will continue to use SSO techniques.

I’m very not impressed by this deep, extended critique of machine learning researchers using common security best practices on the grounds that those practices involve an imperfect user experience for those requiring perfect anonymity…

Right now you can get a DeFi loan at places like changenow.io that don't even require you to sign in. You put up crypto collateral. When you pay back the loan with accumulated interest you get your collateral back. If your collateral drops in value to 50% of the loan amount, you lose it and are released from the loan.

This all happens via distributed execution of a smart contract. No banks or governments required.

I don't know off-hand. I do know that millions of people distributed around the world are motivated to the tune of trillions of dollars to figure out how to make this stuff work better in more situations.

Gah. I shouldn't have mentioned houses... Now everyone is drilling down into houses. Which is an obviously difficult use case.

I can't solve all of the worlds problems, for all possible situations, today, in pure crypto. It's new financial system that's just barely getting started.

The easiest solution would be to do a person-to-person trade of a house that's not owned by a bank. If it is owned by a bank, then the bank probably going to expect local currency. So, the buyer or seller will need to find a means to convert crypto to local money. Though with crypto ETFs taking off, banks are getting less picky by the day. As for "What if your govt just takes your home away?", crypto doesn't solve oppression directly in one step. It gives people a lot more freedom from government oppression. Ex: It gives them options to leave the country without worrying about how the govt is going confiscate their local currency in the process --because their wealth is not stored in local currency.

Thanks. I confused the two. It's been a long time since "History of Philosophy" back in uni :P

You are correct. There are no crypto police to confiscate your home as collateral. So, you have to do the whole deal in crypto. Without oracles, your only foundational tools are: wallets, time and sign-offs as inputs to smart contracts. Everything is built up from there.

Right now you can get a DeFi loan at places like changenow.io that don't even require you to sign in. You put up crypto collateral. When you pay back the loan with accumulated interest you get your collateral back. If your collateral drops in value to 50% of the loan amount, you lose it and are released from the loan.

You could pay for home that way. But, I wouldn't recommend it. Maybe there are more suitable options out there I'm unaware of. It's all definitely a work in progress :P

I've only ever seen bad-faith arguments about oracles. They set up the goal posts as if the goal was "You can trust absolutely nothing. You are born and will die trapped in The Matrix. You are in Descartes's proposal where everything you can possibly observe is a deception from a malicious demon. How do you set up a home-loan contract?" And then declare themselves clever by pointing out that any input to the system requires trusting that input.

That's not the goal of trustless contracts.

The goal is that some resident of an oppressive nation can get a loan without being denied all access to finance at the whim of government-controlled bank. Can't trust your region's banks? Crypto is a wild land. But, it's a better alternative for billions of people.

It's easy to say that crypto is useless when you are in the top 2% of global wealth, a well-regulated banking system is scrambling to serve you, your government doesn't frequently confiscate your assets or inflate your hard-earned money to worthlessness.

And, it's easy to complain that crypto didn't magically spring from bottom-up grass-roots overnight, solving all financial problems by the poor for the poor in a single step before enriching a bunch of already-rich tech bros.

Creating a new global financial system from scratch is a lot of work. It requires a lot of investment, a lot of losses, a lot of hard-earned lessons. Blockchains have been demonstrating utility in that endeavor for 15 years. Growing from nothing to being valued higher than the global market of silver in that time.

Maybe "global financial system" is a small number of uses. But, it's a small number of rather large, rather important uses.

As a drooling crypto bro, a single organization creating a blockchain by itself for itself doesn't actually accomplish anything. Blockchains enable decentralized trust. And, there's nothing decentralized if a single org controls everything on the chain.

Corporate/Government attribution chains can make sense. But, only for rare circumstances because the primary requirement is relinquishment of control on the part of the Corpo or Govt. Truly rare indeed...

So, if a group of organizations want to make attestments, and if they all want to be able to recognize those attestments, but they do not want any one of them to be in control of the records, then it can make sense.

So, the articles example of digital car titles could possibly make sense if multiple states get on board. And, maaaaybe it would make sense for car dealerships to be able to participate directly. Preferably with some sort of on-chain collateral as a fraud deterrent. But, even this would need to be fleshed out a lot before I'd get excited about it.

> A lot of code relies on FP operations being deterministic

A lot, but still quite the minority. People do run into situations where the same code with the same data produces slightly different results all the time because of changes in compiler, compiler settings, cpu arch, etc… They just don’t notice.

But, then they run into a situation where it matters and it’s a huge PITA to nail down.

In America, it mostly comes from farm subsidies. Subsidies on feed corn and feed soybeans make it cheaper to buy feed than to grow it yourself. So, rather than grow feed on the same farm, fertilized with manure, farmers buy feed trucked in from neighboring states fertilized with chemicals, much of which is petroleum based, and discard the manure.

And, then there are the cow farts full of methane. Methane is apparently a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon. I’ve heard for over a decade that there is some seaweed-based supplement that dramatically cuts methane from cows. But, I guess farmers have had no motivation to buy it yet.

That's pretty much Tether. You could probably bootstrap a POS coin by staking Tether. There would be a lot of details in getting it to eventually grow independent of Tether. I don't claim to know how that could happen. Especially since Tether is not a highly-regarded/trusted token in the community.

You need some proof of work to prime the pump for proof of stake. Otherwise, you have no security because there's nothing at stake.

Now that we have plenty of proof of work completed, we don't really need any more. You can bootstrap your new coin by burning Bitcoins as a provable value sink to get it started on the path to POS.

There's also https://doersino.github.io/markdeep-slides/demo.md.html#slid...

Be sure to view page source.

Math is mixed up. He's got 43.6 BTC. Currently worth $68K each, for a total of $2.9 mil. He's waiting for it to be worth $4.4 mil.

I'm betting his retirement math worked out to $4.4 mil before taxes. And, $100k is a human-bias round number that BTC is widely expected to hit in the next year.

You sure? Cause this sure looks to me like:

User: Hey, AI. I have a question for you that only has a direct answer in an article from The Onion.

AI: Here is a direct answer from that article in The Onion.

The Onion: Look! AI is so dumb it quoted the answer we gave to a question no one else would ever even consider writing about!

Along with legit news and problems, there has been a ton of outrage this past year that boils down to

User: Hey, AI. Act naughty.

AI: Hee hee heeeee… I am so naughty!

User on Twitter: Look! Look! The AI is naughty!

I’m no lawyer. But, this sure smells like some form of fraud. Or, at least breach of contract.

Employees and employer enter into an agreement: Work here for X term and you get Y options with Z terms attached. OK.

But, then later pulling Darth Vader… “Now that the deal is completing, I am changing the deal. Consent and it’s bad for you this way. Don’t consent and it’s bad that way. Either way, you held up your end of our agreement and I’m not.”

Attacking creativity is not the topic here. The topic is if new art styles can come out of AI.

I think it can because I think that "Style A + Style B + some unique qualities" is plenty to qualify as a new style. Like "Miyazaki made a new style from Toei Doga + Walt Disney + some unique qualities".

But, as expected, detractors require the goalposts to be defined as impossible to achieve. Generative AI has only been around for 4 years or so. Therefore, the current goalpost is placed at "It can't do anything new because it has not yet spawned a multi-decade movement" which is just silly.

Or, "It can't be creative because it can't yet physically go to school and instead it learns from a dataset" as if school was not a means to stream a dataset through a student :p Or, as if humans who never saw a painting before, but still swam constantly in an enormous dataset of nature and people, didn't make stick figure cave paintings.

At least this discussion is more interesting than the usual "I can tell just by being told it was made with AI that this piece has no soul". Where 'soul' is "A thing that AI is defined to not have that is unmeasurable in any way" And, therefore does not affect anything in any way and cannot be shown to exist or not because it is literally the fantasy of a ghost! :D

OK then. Your turn. Show me some humans that in the past four years have made new styles that you honestly cannot find references for in the same way.

Well, if the standard is "A group worked on a style for decades, it changed the field widely, and decades later it is recognized and studied worldwide" then nothing made in the past four years can possibly qualify :P Because random people with and without AI make all kinds of new styles every day. It's only in grand retrospectives that they are declared "A New Movement In The World of ART!"

I don't think it's hard at all for AI to create new styles. Will one of those become a new art movement? We'll have to wait a while for the retrospective.

Meanwhile, I'd recommend reading https://twitter.com/halecar2/status/1731612961465082167

And, checking out https://twitter.com/misterduchamp/status/1785009271010148734

If you don't think new art styles have come out of AI art, you haven't looked for them. Or, you are putting your requirements for "new art style" too high for even humans to achieve moving forward indefinitely.

If it's both "Fake, cringe hype" and also "Going to beat anything I do", then it's Schrodinger's Villain.

Nobody's being fascist here. But, the old fashy trope of "The Enemy is both Too Weak and Too Powerful!" is echoing in here regardless.

If OP was annoyed at either extreme, I'd have nothing to say. But, being down about self-contradictory problems indicates that you're not clear what's got you down.

> The demos just become more cringey, the messaging more duplicitous and fake-authentic.

This part sounds like you are going through a rough patch. Like you are feeling down, not sure why, and are digging around for reasons.

What you are saying is legit. What you are feeling is legit. But, it would be worth doing some deep chill soul-searching to figure out if these really are the reasons. Maybe you need a hike in the woods. Maybe you want a job better mission behind it. Maybe I'm full of shit.

Either way, best to laugh at cringey demos. Learn how to use AI. What is good for and what it's not. Use it or don't. Just build stuff people need either way.

Ohhhhhhhh, boy... Listening to all that emotional vocal inflection and feedback... There are going to be at least 10 million lonely guys with new AI girlfriends. "She's not real. But, she interested in everything I say and excited about everything I care about" is enough of a sales pitch for a lot of people.

US here, and I've heard all of them from Americans and Europeans.

Other one I've heard is that if you start a company and it fails, at least in Silicon Valley they ask "So, what are you making next?". But, in Europe they imply that you apparently are not the right kind of person to be starting companies.

You can get an 8-pack of Philips 2700K non-programmable bulbs off Amazon for $18. No need to get incandescents or filters.

This is true for explicitly adversarial actors. I can imagine a serious-business misinformation group investing the money required to train up a generator designed to defeat automatic detection.

For everyone else though, the people making common tools everyone uses explicitly want their images to be easy to automatically ID as fake. And, the users largely prefer it that way too.

This is exactly the apples I’m talking about. Merchants eat much higher fees on behalf of the customer so they can hide the much longer settlement times from the customer and accept that they’ll also have to just eat the occasional fraudulent chargeback from the customer. They put up with all this hassle because “That’s just how it’s always been if you want to do business.”

And, yet people say crypto can’t work because the fees are too high (they’re lower) and the settlement times are too slow (they’re faster).

Dealing with merchant fraud is a legit call-out though. I don’t know what a good crypto solution to that is. I can imagine replacing that department with a smart contract. But, I’ve haven’t looked around to see what’s been tried.

Visa/Mastercard have settlement times of over 24 hours.

Meanwhile, for over a decade now, Litecoin has had a settlement time of 2.5 minutes. And, for tiny (sub $100) transactions, it’s totally reasonable to just look up the wallet’s holdings in an instant.

For online transactions, you can always let the customer go immediately. Just wait 3 minutes before you ship :P