In short: we have seen no real evidence it will work, we don’t believe it will work, but we’re definitely going to hire fewer people because of it
It’s like the New York Jewish joke about the terrible food and the too small portions.
GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
101–110 of 155 posts
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> has exactly one purpose: prevent any single entity from controlling the contents. I'd like to propose a different characterization: "Blockchain" is when you want unrestricted membership and participation. Allowing anybody to spin up any number of new nodes they desire us the fundamental requirement which causes a cascade of other design decisions and feedback systems. (Mining, proof-of-X, etc.) In contrast, deterri…
Sure, blockchain development has always been deeply tied to ideas of open membership and participation. I like those ideas too. But that's a poor definition of a blockchain. A blockchain is merely a distributed ledger with certain properties from cryptography. If you spin up a private bitcoin network, it's a blockchain even if nobody else knows or cares about it. Now, are non-open blockchains at all useful? I suspect…
> A blockchain is merely a distributed ledger with certain properties from cryptography.
If we charitably assume "blockchain" has some engineering meaning (and it isn't purely a word for marketing/scamming) then there's some new aspect which sets it apart from the distributed-databases we've been able to make just fine for decades.
Uncontrolled participation is that key aspect. Without that linchpin, almost all the other new stuff becomes weirdly moot or actively detrimental.
> If you spin up a private bitcoin network, it's a blockchain even if nobody else knows or cares about it.
That's practically a contradiction in terms. It may describe the ancestry of the project, but it doesn't describe what/how it's being used.
Compare: "If you make a version of Napster/Gnutella with all the networking code disabled, it's still a Peer-to-Peer file sharing client even when only one person uses it."
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> has exactly one purpose: prevent any single entity from controlling the contents. I'd like to propose a different characterization: "Blockchain" is when you want unrestricted membership and participation. Allowing anybody to spin up any number of new nodes they desire us the fundamental requirement which causes a cascade of other design decisions and feedback systems. (Mining, proof-of-X, etc.) In contrast, deterri…
Sure, blockchain development has always been deeply tied to ideas of open membership and participation. I like those ideas too. But that's a poor definition of a blockchain. A blockchain is merely a distributed ledger with certain properties from cryptography. If you spin up a private bitcoin network, it's a blockchain even if nobody else knows or cares about it. Now, are non-open blockchains at all useful? I suspect…
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Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#104Feels like 2000 all over again. The arms race to throw money at anything has "AI" in their business name is the same thing I saw back in 2000. No business plan, just some idea to somehow monetize the internet and VC's were doing the exact same thing. Throwing tons of good money after bad. Although you can make an argument this is different, in a lot of ways, its just feels the same thing. The same energy, the same ha…
I imagine it is the same, but 2000 was hardly a dead end. So there will be lots burned but keep on at it as the tech will revolutionize the world.
Yeah the market of 2000 crashed and burned but we were left with a bunch of dark fiber and developed tech that laid the foundation for the next decade.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can't without destroying every subsequent commits' digest, unless you find a way to generate commits with identical SHA digests.
There is no such a thing as «subsequent commits» in git. Commits in git are non-linear and form a tree [0][1]. A commit can be easily deleted without affecting the rest of the tree. If the git commit represent a subtree with branches dangling off it, deleting such a commit will delete the entire subtree. Commits can also be moved around, detached and re-attached to other commits. [0] https://www.baeldung.com/ops/git-…
True but irrelevant. You can't remove a commit in a way that someone else with a copy of the repo can't detect, in exactly the same way and for the same reason that you can't remove a blockchain entry without making instantly obviously to later items.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#106Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, blockchain development has always been deeply tied to ideas of open membership and participation. I like those ideas too. But that's a poor definition of a blockchain. A blockchain is merely a distributed ledger with certain properties from cryptography. If you spin up a private bitcoin network, it's a blockchain even if nobody else knows or cares about it. Now, are non-open blockchains at all useful? I suspect…
> A blockchain is merely a distributed ledger with certain properties from cryptography. If we charitably assume "blockchain" has some engineering meaning (and it isn't purely a word for marketing/scamming) then there's some new aspect which sets it apart from the distributed-databases we've been able to make just fine for decades. Uncontrolled participation is that key aspect. Without that linchpin, almost all the o…
I interpreted "private" from the comment above yours to mean membership determined by some authority. So your example doesn't hold well, because networking would still be enabled in the file sharing fork, but on a private network rather than the open internet.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Smug dismissal of new ideas is such a lazy shortcut to trying to look smart. I'd much rather talk to someone enthusiastic about something than someone who does nothing but sit there and say "this thing sucks" every time something happens even if person #2 is incidentally right a lot of the time.
While I agree in principle, someone has to make decisions about resource allocation and decide that some ideas are better than others. This takes a finely tuned sense of BS detector and technical feasibility estimation, which I would argue is a real skill. It thus becomes subtly different to be an accurate predictor of success vs default cynic if 95% of ideas aren’t going to work.
> if 95% of ideas aren’t going to work
Well, if only 95% of our ideas don't work, with a little hard work and sacrifice, we are livin' in an optimish paradise.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#109Well run large companies often waste a lot, in order to (1) hedge risks of being left behind, (2) ensure they have options in the future in possible growth or new efficiency areas, and (3) to start on long learning curves for skills and capabilities that appear likely to be a baseline necessity in the long run. Bonfires of money. Predictably. Because all three of those concerns require highly speculative action to pr…
Similarly, VC sets barrels of money on fire. And depending on how you look at it, science itself is experimentation, but at least it mostly results in publications in the end, that may or may not be read, but at least serve as records of areas explored.
I think your take covers science too.
Scientists and mathematicians often burn barrels of time and unpublished ideas, not to mention following their curiosities into random pursuits, that give their subconscious the free space to crystalize slippery insights.
With their publishable work somehow gelling out of all that.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no such a thing as «subsequent commits» in git. Commits in git are non-linear and form a tree [0][1]. A commit can be easily deleted without affecting the rest of the tree. If the git commit represent a subtree with branches dangling off it, deleting such a commit will delete the entire subtree. Commits can also be moved around, detached and re-attached to other commits. [0] https://www.baeldung.com/ops/git-…
True but irrelevant. You can't remove a commit in a way that someone else with a copy of the repo can't detect, in exactly the same way and for the same reason that you can't remove a blockchain entry without making instantly obviously to later items.
Very much relevant. The definition of the ledger database includes immutability of datasets as a hard constraint[0][1]. The mere fact that the git commit history can be altered automatically disqualifies git from being an acceptable alternative to the ledger database in highly regulated environments.
If strict compliance is not a hard requirement (open source project are the prime example), git can be used to prove provenance, provided you trust the signer’s public key or allowed signers file.
[0] https://www.techtarget.com/searchCIO/definition/ledger-datab...