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Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

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Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#321

Post by nhinck2 »

astrange wrote: post #245
mcpar-land wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know a parrot isnt going to impart new knowledge to the world.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#322

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #247
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Do you have a good source on the history of AT&T and the FCC?

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#323

Post by BLanen »

93po wrote: post #261
uLogMicheal wrote: post #11

This project builds a global identity database even if the crypto part disappears. Their tokenomics are a mess and their CEO openly admitted to market manipulation recently. Good on Kenya for shutting this down, I hope many more follow.

It doesn't create or track identities. It creates a unique hash of your iris and can only use it to determine if your iris has been scanned before. Nothing else.

Biometrics as private keys are an absolutely horrible idea as it is.

Proposing to use that private key as your one true interface to the digital financial world is ever more insane.

The idea that proprietary technology and information(the scanners, software and everything that the organization owns) can somehow make this safe and secure is evil.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#324

Post by sdenton4 »

kbenson wrote: post #314
sdenton4 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't starting from the assumption that UBI /has/ to be government-based, and was discussing a core problem (identifiability) that arises when a non-government entity tries to implement UBI. You've just got a different set of assumptions.

Okay, but I'm not sure they're wrong assumptions, because I don't know how UBI could not be government based, and I haven't seen any explanations challenging it. Either it needs to be government based, in which case I think some third party service explaining how they are helping to enable it by providing identifiability is subject to the criticisms I've laid out, or it doesn't need to be through the government, in w…

Expanding the comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37037606

Cryptocurrency systems proposed ways to handle the creation and management of monetary systems without government involvement. The implementation of such systems is open to definition by the designers of the system, and is extremely fluid. Most cryptocurrencies chose to go with the bitcoin model, which encouraged speculation and early buy-in, but fails like ~waves at the cryptocurrency space in 2023~.

So, here you go:

Set up a system which creates and destroys tokens programatically. Tokens are created uniformly over all user accounts, and destroyed in each account proportional to the amount already in the account.

This handles the wealth-redistribution function of taxation, and allows control of the total number of tokens to prevent inflationary spiraling over time. A prime difficulty is assigning accounts.

FWIW, AuroraCoin did /something/ like this in Iceland, using Icelandic identity cards for identifiability, but didn't destroy tokens: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/auroracoin.asp#toc-hist...

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#325

Post by AndrewKemendo »

wpietri wrote: post #313
hinkley wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are still going to have to work with people who had no qualms about working for five different breeds of charlatan. Some of them two or three breeds at once. I once was contract to hire at a place that was skeevy. The management team was horrible and abusive, the most senior developer was defensive and cagey. I said no because of the management situation, but I also wasn't happy that the putative lead had a side h…

Yeah, to me that's one of the most poisonous things about bubbles and gold rushes. A bunch of people make good money doing things that are terrible, ridiculous, or both. They don't learn the lessons they would in a normal environment, and so they may be like that forever, and may continue to do terrible/ridiculous things as long as the money holds out.

“Serial Entrepreneur”

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#326

Post by tristor »

93po wrote: post #282
tristor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably referring to the optional facial recognition based boarding systems that many airports in the US are rolling out, primarily for international flights. It uses facial recognition to match you to your passport photo based on the documents verified during check-in, to ensure the person boarding the flight is the same person who checked-in when their documents were manually verified and recorded in the c…

Last time I flew into the US, if I remember correctly, I was required to submit to a facial scan to through customs. I am American.

You are not. There are three different programs by which you can accelerate entry/re-entry to the US and all three rely on facial recognition. All are optional.

There is no facial recognition in the normal re-entry line (and all these processes are before customs as part of border control). Foreigner entry may now require facial recognition, I’m a US citizen so don’t experience the process foreigners go through.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#327

Post by nyolfen »

mcpar-land wrote: post #318
simonw wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on your statement that ChatGPT cannot write code? That doesn't match my experience with it.

When you ask ChatGPT to write a piece of code that does a thing, it is not reasoning about what the code should do, modeling the problem in its head, figuring out how to translate that into code, then writing it. The neural weights are spitting up a piece of code it determines would probably come after your prompt, based on similarity to a kajillion StackOverflow answers, GitHub repos, textbooks, etc etc. It is not c…

gpt is clearly capable of constructing and interacting with a model of the world -- there was a famous example in the microsoft bing paper where they described a complex maze and had it reason its way out. 'predicting what it thinks is most similar to stackoverflow' etc does not explain any of its behavior in a meaningful way, unless you are willing to apply this description to human intellectual labor. gpt4 is clearly not sentient, but what is shocking about it is that it demonstrates that honest-to-god cognition can be decoupled from sentience.

btw, i think i have tended to see these pessimistic takes by people who have only used 3.5, which is impressive but not reliable -- i strongly recommend using 4 in the course of your job to see how useful it is. every day in the course of interacting with it, it produces novel lines of thought which shock me.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#328

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #284
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> that's somewhat orthogonal to the matter of how you does your accounting or who issues your tokens. That's just scarcity. It's always scarcity. That's economics. The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support. > you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed How many tokens do you burn for a textile versus semiconductor factory? Ke…

> The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support.

Followed by

> Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective.

Which is it? Does value exist in real terms or is it made up?

If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on somewhere, nor does it matter what the "value" of our coins is in terms of some number, so long as they are issued to each of us at the same rate.

You only have to bother with establishing a correspondence with some allegedly valuable thing in the real world (gold, factories, whatever) if you want a globally consistent notion of value. A notion which, as you've explained, is a fiction, and which I'd argue, is a harmful one.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#329

Post by vxNsr »

twelve40 wrote: post #115
jabradoodle wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.

Here is one answer: > How Altman plans to pay for Worldcoin’s UBI, however, remains murky. “The hope is that as people want to buy this token, because they believe this is the future, there will be inflows into this economy. New token-buyers is how it gets paid for, effectively,” Altman told Coindesk recently.

He literally defined a pyramid/ponzi scheme (depending on how or if value is shared with existing users). That’s very interesting that he feels protected enough to say that out loud.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#330

Post by JumpCrisscross »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #328
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's somewhat orthogonal to the matter of how you does your accounting or who issues your tokens. That's just scarcity. It's always scarcity. That's economics. The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support. > you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed How many tokens do you burn for a textile versus semiconductor factory? Ke…

> The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support. Followed by > Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective. Which is it? Does value exist in real terms or is it made up? If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on s…

> Which is it? Does value exist in real terms or is it made up?

Yes. (It’s paradoxical because it is, though an unremarkably old paradox at that.)

> If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on somewhere

It does if that war just blockaded the barley!

> Better to just value the coins in a nonspecific way

With each area that tends to trade together having a common coin or set of coins for reference purposes, and large interchanges between them?

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