Earlier quoted context omitted.
> including the open-source models by Meta "open-source"
Freely readable and mutable weights doesn’t have the same ring to it.
"Open access"?
Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
231–240 of 379 posts
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People will soon be able to use their iriscodes to reclaim credentials that they sold, and once people start doing that, the market for re-sold credentials will drop to approximately zero. Is the obvious related problem this solution brings forth supposed to go unsaid? (Criminals don't buy something they can steal.)
Okay, so what's the attack scenario here? Imagine we live in a future where Worldcoin is ubiquitous, all the hardware/software is open source. Several orb operators exist in every city in the world, and operators have a non-trivial amount of WLD tokens staked to ensure good behavior. Misbehaving orbs have their keys and subkeys revoked at the first sign of illicit usage. Maybe a criminal kidnaps 10 people, then steal…
> a criminal kidnaps 10 people, then steals an orb, and uses those 10 iriscodes to register 10 new credentials on the network
This is a lot of work. Just steal the iriscodes. If they're used for re-issuance, they're being stored and transferred. If they are not directly used, there is a hash-like reduction that can be exploited.
For sake of argument, though, let's assume perfect security. Infallible security. All the way through. Congratulations, you've turned every pair of eyeballs into an oil spigot. When the Taliban or ISIS carves through a town, instead of beheading the leaders and taking their treasures, they take everyones' irises. Every authoritarian state would require scans of its citizens so payment could be routed through (read: stolen by) it, a requirement they would back up with violence.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me. You are supposed to preface it with how Altman is making AI services, selling them as AGI, and also painting AGI as a danger to the survival of humanity. Then, when they are baffled at why someone would sell something while describing it that way, you can walk them through r…
Citation requested re: Altman saying current offerings are AGI. When I search, I see things like “there may be a path to AGI”.
the current 'normie' understanding of ChatGPT and other current LLMs like Bard is not that they are stochastic parrots that can complete sentences by probabilities, it's that they are 'stupid AGI.' And if we give them more funding and more training, eventually they will become 'smart AGI.'
OpenAI markets their product exactly this way, focusing on how ChatGPT can 'write code' (it cannot) or 'write poetry' (it cannot) or do any number of things that lean in hard on the 'stupid AGI' angle, never clarifying that their actual product is a spicy autocomplete. You'll never hear OpenAI say 'ChatGPT is a stupid AGI' out loud, but they'll never correct any mainstream misunderstandings that it is.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds neat. I like the ultra-local approach. The important thing that I think your argument is missing is that everything here is additive. I'm sure the whole Worldcoin team would love it if governance organizations of all sizes, from tiny villages to billion+ population nation states would run UBI programs to take care of their people. The thing is, today, that's not really happening, so there are a number of…
> Do you think there are better global scale UBI projects and ideas out there, or do you think we should just stop trying to solve this problem? To the degree Worldcoin is doing anything to UBI, it's in tarnishing its brand. (Identity verification is not what's holding it back.) If they were serious about this as anything but another crypto pump-and-dump, they'd focus on direct foreign aid.
Sybil resistance is important in any sort of UBI system that preserves privacy, which may or may not be important. I like the idea of a privacy preserving UBI, and feel like it's definitely a lot more equitable than having it based on existing passports, or bank account numbers, or something like that.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#235I really don't want to have anything to do with crypto, and the fact that Sam Altman is pushing it in 2023 makes both him and OpenAI look sketchy. Especially crypto with a weird biometric eye scanner.
[dead]
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Governments already exist. To try and upend them by replacing their system of personhood and currency is in effect the tech-bro version of a mutiny. It may seem ridiculous but that's precisely what crypto is. An attempt to replace central banks and governments. Tech companies have grown very powerful, and they see an opportunity to create a world-wide "private government" and they're going for it. This won't be the l…
Um, "personhood" and currency aren't anything like the main functions of a government. If you had everything Worldcoin wants to do, it still wouldn't replace any governments.
Try and think what else the government has. Police, military? All those are second order effects. Think how the government controls those institutions. Money & the ability to spend it as a person or an organization. If you control people's legal existence in your own monetary system without alternatives, means all the government has will become yours.
This is how the USD works by the way (in systems like the petro-dollar), and why so many are trying to replace it. It's not easy. But they'll keep trying. And when they succeed, the American hegemony is over.
In Mexico there's technically a government. But really there are the vast networks of drug cartels. They have their own military, they control politicians, they choose who is and who isn't. It all started by them making a ton of money. The rest followed. If you control the money and who can spend it, you control the economy. If you control the economy, you control everything.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the usual theory for this that they're pulling up the ladder? They get billions in funding which they can use to absorb regulatory overhead, then the regulations come which price out early stage competitors and make it harder for anyone else to raise the kind of funding they've already secured.
> Isn't the usual theory for this that they're pulling up the ladder? Actual capture involves industry coöpting existing regulators through revolving doors and burdensome rules that reduce the threat of new entrants. It happens quietly. The only times industry proposes new frameworks in public is when they're cornered. The "regulatory capture" playbook OpenAI purported to follow has zero actual precedent. It is only…
Isn't the lack of recent precedent because most industries already have existing regulators? A new industry coming into existence isn't that common, and when it does happen, I don't think this is actually unprecedented. AT&T was one of the big proponents of new regulation back when telephone companies were a recent development.
> that would simultaneously be less-burdensome than the status quo yet also cement incumbents' advantages
But that's classic regulatory capture. The industry gets the government to impose regulations that are wasteful and bureaucratic but can be navigated by a large organization with economies of scale, which allows regulators to appear as if they're doing something, but the rules don't prevent the incumbents from making a mint by consolidating the industry and charging monopoly rents or avoiding taxes paid by the middle class and smaller competitors etc.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you think there are better global scale UBI projects and ideas out there, or do you think we should just stop trying to solve this problem? To the degree Worldcoin is doing anything to UBI, it's in tarnishing its brand. (Identity verification is not what's holding it back.) If they were serious about this as anything but another crypto pump-and-dump, they'd focus on direct foreign aid.
Sybil resistance is important in any sort of UBI system that preserves privacy, which may or may not be important. I like the idea of a privacy preserving UBI, and feel like it's definitely a lot more equitable than having it based on existing passports, or bank account numbers, or something like that.
> I like the idea of a privacy preserving UBI
This is valid. But even if we reduce scope to a privacy-preserving UBI, nothing Worldcoin solves the core hurdles thereto. It's solving a side problem tangentially related to those involved with a privacy-preserving UBI, but entirely germane to an a16z-style crypto pump-and-dump.
Adjunct: how is Worldcoin privacy preserving? At least with Bitcoin you can plausibly deny ownership of a wallet. In a world on Worldcoin, every traffic stop lets the cops inspect your bank account.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Isn't the usual theory for this that they're pulling up the ladder? Actual capture involves industry coöpting existing regulators through revolving doors and burdensome rules that reduce the threat of new entrants. It happens quietly. The only times industry proposes new frameworks in public is when they're cornered. The "regulatory capture" playbook OpenAI purported to follow has zero actual precedent. It is only…
Isn't the lack of recent precedent because most industries already have existing regulators? A new industry coming into existence isn't that common, and when it does happen, I don't think this is actually unprecedented. AT&T was one of the big proponents of new regulation back when telephone companies were a recent development. > that would simultaneously be less-burdensome than the status quo yet also cement incumbe…
> AT&T was one of the big proponents of new regulation back when telephone companies were a recent development
AT&T wanted a regulator so it could scale like the railroads. The regulator wasn't to regulate AT&T, if I remember correctly, it was to regulate the states. (It backfired in the long run.)
Broadly speaking, if you’re weak enough to need a regulator to guard your moat, you’re weak enough to be overpowered by the regulator. Regulatory capture, successful examples, at least, begin from a position of strength. Altman pitched doom and gloom and then, when the EU began reacting, seemed surprised that they weren’t permissive.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would come down to devaluation by whom right? If everybody wants the war to end and both sides see you as somebody that is working towards a reasonable plan of ending it, then I expect your tokens would go pretty far. And even if you're not the magical mediator who ends the war, what matters is not some global market evaluation, what matters is your tokens' evaluation by the people who grow the food that you eat a…
> devaluation by whom right This isn't how currencies lose value in wars. If the amount of money doesn't change, but half the factories are bombed, the output of the remaining factories rises in value relative to that currency. ( Ceteris paribus .) The only way around this is to backstop production with unbombed factories. Something a blockchain does jack squat about.
Yes, and not only the factories, but the entierty of the supply chain, combined with war profiteers driving prices artificially even higher.
Contrary to the freshwater meme Inflation is rarely primarily a monetary phenomenon, but it's even less the case during a war.