Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

capitalfm.co.ke

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 379 posts

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#241

Post by vvpan »

unboxingelf wrote: post #114
vvpan wrote: post #57

I know a lot of people will use this to say that blockchain bad, and that is up to you. But really biometrics collection has little to do with blockchain. Worldcoin is firstly a company that collects biometrics and secondly they decided to use an immutable ledger to record the data (although they claim that it is only hashes). That aside if I wanted to record a bunch of hashes for perpetuity blockchain would actually…

you forgot the shitcoinery - there is a token, with a premine, unfairly distributed. the VCs that invested (SBF, a16z,etc) will benefit disproportionately. it’s a scam.

I cannot argue with bad token, premine - I have not researched but I believe it. "VC coins" in general have these issues it seems. Just trying to say that not every shitcoin is trying to get people to give them their biometrics, that is a separate issue in my opinion.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#242

Post by vvpan »

h4kor wrote: post #131
dsco wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any frameworks/platforms for this?

have you heard of txt files? If you want to proof you didn't temper with the historic data, publish a daily hash in some newspapers.

Actually I would say that that is exactly what blockchain does, except as a protocol and relying on a network rather than a newspaper. Actually I might use this to explain blockchain to people on a base level.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#243

Post by codetrotter »

shwaj wrote: post #193
dragonwriter wrote: post #175

Earlier 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”.

Landing page of OpenAI website says:

> Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity

In big letters.

They are very clearly playing the game of positioning themselves as the AGI good guys, and at the same time Sam Altman has been encouraging the view that AGI is dangerous.

Regulatory capture.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#244

Post by capableweb »

Raed667 wrote: post #124
__loam wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> including the open-source models by Meta "open-source"

Infinitely more open than the ones from "Open"-Ai

I don't think Open Source is a gradient, it's a boolean. Either something is Open Source or it's not. Neither Llama nor OpenAI is Open Source.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#245

Post by astrange »

mcpar-land wrote: post #233
shwaj wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

The problem with saying an LLM is "just a parrot" is that we don't know how parrots work, so this doesn't mean anything.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#246

Post by capableweb »

LispSporks22 wrote: post #140
mminer237 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$2.04 per token at the moment: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/worldcoin/usd You get 25 WLD for getting scanned, hence the huge queue in a developing country.

Is it easy to cash out once you have your WLD?

Seems there is a bunch of different markets for it: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/worldcoin#markets

Worst case scenario, WLD seems to be a Ethereum token, so you can the very least trade it for Ether, which is accepted pretty much anywhere cryptocurrency at all is accepted.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#247

Post by AnthonyMouse »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #239
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wasn't to regulate AT&T, if I remember correctly, it was to regulate the states.

It was to consolidate the regulation so they could focus on capturing the one federal regulator instead of 50 different state ones, sure. But you do that so that when the public starts clamoring for something to be done, you get to control what gets done, and do something that benefits the incumbents and not new entrants.

> (It backfired in the long run.)

It seems to me that it's still pretty hard to start a competing telephone company.

I might be able to get some open source VoIP software running on a VM in one day. Now I want to offer WiFi calling plans. There is some domain name in the public DNS where phone numbers are subdomains that resolve to the IP address of its associated phone company so I know where to route calls, and I just go to some free government website to have some numbers routed to me so I can assign them to customers, right? No?

> 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.

But the strength comes from the moat protected by regulations. The law inhibits competition, so you extract lots of rents from customers, so you have lots of money to influence regulators with. The regulators are the source of your power, but you and the rents you extract are the source of campaign funding, and they don't want to cut that off. Or worse, have it directed to the other party, if they can't actually bankrupt you before the next election cycle.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#249

Post by [deleted] »

codetrotter wrote: post #243
shwaj wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation requested re: Altman saying current offerings are AGI. When I search, I see things like “there may be a path to AGI”.

Landing page of OpenAI website says: > Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity In big letters. They are very clearly playing the game of positioning themselves as the AGI good guys, and at the same time Sam Altman has been encouraging the view that AGI is dangerous. Regulatory capture.

[deleted]

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#250

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #229
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #224

Earlier 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.

Sure, but that's somewhat orthogonal to the matter of how you does your accounting or who issues your tokens. That's just scarcity.

I suppose you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed (or you know, when whatever other resources that back them expire), but that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal.

Post reply on HN