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Fintech dystopia

fintechdystopia.com

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Re: Fintech dystopia

#11

Post by antonvs »

willprice89 wrote: post #3

> people are either still too afraid of looking like they don’t understand, still too deferential to Silicon Valley’s supposed technological expertise, or still too busy doing other things, to voice any skepticism about blockchain-based solutions I'm not afraid of looking like I don't understand - I simply don't understand. I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full…

Try asking an LLM about it. They're good for that kind of introduction, because they can respond appropriately to your level of knowledge. Just ask it to provide references so you can verify what it's saying. But in general, hallucinations aren't a big issue with those kinds of prompts.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#12

Post by salawat »

anon-3988 wrote: post #8

The other half of technology is the people using it. If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Neither is good. And I am talking about myself here. My only excuse is that I simply don't use my money. Which is not necessarily a good thing either.

>If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them.

Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#13

Post by esseph »

salawat wrote: post #12
anon-3988 wrote: post #8

The other half of technology is the people using it. If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Neither is good. And I am talking about myself here. My only excuse is that I simply don't use my money. Which is not necessarily a good thing either.

>If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.

That should be some kind of daily reminder for everyone here

Re: Fintech dystopia

#14

Post by antonvs »

voxl wrote: post #6
Herring wrote: post #4

> Home ownership and the rest of the American dream seem out of reach for many people, and there’s very little safety net available when it comes to healthcare expenses, retirement, or just bad luck. I empathize with the author, I really do, but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves. If anyone has had the supremely unpleasant experience of trying to get loved ones to work out, they know. T…

Why do you think these two things are connected? Working out is a personal choice that should have zero barring on how we care for and help one another. For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out. Democrats losing support can be explained by several reasons that have nothing to do with tackling healthcare. It can be the fact that it ended up being a weak half m…

They're saying that convincing other people to do what's in their own interests is very difficult if they don't care. Working out is given as an example: it's obviously a beneficial activity, but that's not enough to convince many people to do it regularly.

The claim then is that people don't care enough about having public healthcare (or are actively against it) for it to be a politically popular goal.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#15

Post by ryandrake »

jongjong wrote: post #7

I was in relatively early in the web as a developer, I was in early on the crypto movement, also as a developer. These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological. Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career f…

> These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological.

> Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst. It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit?

None of this is because of regulation. It's all because of greed and unchecked grift and profit capture. Technology is making the world worse because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. The work most of us are doing is harmful because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. Everyone is living a lie because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. These uncountable scams are all because of unregulated greed and profit. People on HN are mad, but they're acting out against an imagined "regulation boogieman," not what's actually causing all of the shit.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#16

Post by Herring »

saulpw wrote: post #10
Herring wrote: post #4

> Home ownership and the rest of the American dream seem out of reach for many people, and there’s very little safety net available when it comes to healthcare expenses, retirement, or just bad luck. I empathize with the author, I really do, but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves. If anyone has had the supremely unpleasant experience of trying to get loved ones to work out, they know. T…

I don't understand how this relates to the material. Because people can't get their spouses to exercise, anyone who cares about themselves should have to pay a premium to a private insurance company so they don't lose everything if they get cancer?

You can't get your spouse to exercise, and if you try too hard they might divorce you.

You can't get most Americans to care about anything they consider "socialism", and if you try too hard you'll get Trump.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#17

Post by godelski »

A lot of tech is very weird, as the author suggests. It often seems like there's good ideas but everything must go through a hype wave. Unfortunately, the hype wave makes it difficult to distinguish good actors from bad ones. Consequently the bad ones win because it's easier. It's like we've designed everything to be a lemon market. It's like we're not trying to build tech to make life better and make money along the way but to find the most exciting looking or sounding thing and figuring out how much money we can make with it.

I mean look at something like the Rabbit R1. I'm an AI researcher and I saw my peers get fucking excited about it because it was a leap ahead of all the state of the art research we knew. Sorry, but what? It takes time for research to get into a product, sometimes years, even in tech, even in the fast pace AI world. Like you think they put what normally takes at least one $10k GPU and put that into a $200 device? That they could leverage GPT and not have a subscription fee? You're not going to beat ChatGPT by using ChatGPT lol.

Somehow stuff like this keeps happening and we never learn our lesson. Author is right, they're just chasing. And the irony is that that chase is actually preventing us from getting what we're really chasing

Re: Fintech dystopia

#19

Post by steve_adams_86 »

salawat wrote: post #12
anon-3988 wrote: post #8

The other half of technology is the people using it. If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Neither is good. And I am talking about myself here. My only excuse is that I simply don't use my money. Which is not necessarily a good thing either.

>If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.

This reminds me of something I read here the other day. There was an exchange about social implications of technology, and the idea of designing software based around our understanding of these matters more in the future.

Someone responded like "lol, sure, we can find some sociologists to start programming our apps", and I thought Damn. That's really missing the point. And it seems so arrogant. Like, not only do we laugh at the idea of people doing our jobs, we also need to laugh at the idea of the relevance of their fields.

Yet we really should depend on their insights to further our field, in my opinion. No profession truly stands alone, just like no person does.

I think we'll get better about this over time. Right now we've definitely got some growing pains.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#20

Post by lern_too_spel »

willprice89 wrote: post #3

> people are either still too afraid of looking like they don’t understand, still too deferential to Silicon Valley’s supposed technological expertise, or still too busy doing other things, to voice any skepticism about blockchain-based solutions I'm not afraid of looking like I don't understand - I simply don't understand. I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full…

The article you're commenting on will tell you everything you need to know.
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