Altman has to be a 3-letter front-man at this point, can’t be any other way.
Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse
271–280 of 370 posts
Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse
#272Any decentralized system that uses biometrics for authentication rather than just identification is doomed to fail spectacularly. Biometrics are like a username NOT like a password. When a piece of wolrdcoin is inevitably compromised, people have no means of rolling a new iris. The whole thing will come crashing down. There are so many stupid decisions this team is making. Like, users can opt into the orbs retaining…
As much as I think Worldcoin is dumb they do get this part right in that they only use the iris scan as a unique identifier to prevent multiple sign ups from the same physical bag of meat^H^H^H^H^H person.
Huh, I don't understand the intended security benefit of the iris scans at all then.
If the system has value inside of it, inevitably people will figure out how to make synthetic irises that fool the orb, nullifying the sybil attack prevention benefit. Surely someone could get a handful of real iris scans (using the same open source hardware) and generate a huge number of plausible synthetic iris datas.
Is the idea that in the current moment of the tech arms race, if someone steals an iris scan, the capability to synthesize an artificial iris that encodes that scan has not yet been developed?
Have they published a 'solution' to what happens if you are holding worldcoin in an iris-associated account and then:
- your scan data is stolen, ex. fake orb scans you and publishes your iris data on the internet for anyone to use
- someone throws acid in your face, your irises don't scan the same anymore. how does this affect the user's ability to access their wallet?
(is there additional private key management needed to use worldcoin securely? is the iris scanning thing really nothing more than a temporary sybil countermeasure..?)
Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse
#273I am seeing a pattern here and I am starting to believe that Sam Altman is an Accelerationist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism A lot of his actions, investments and marketing strategy seem to point in that direction.
He's just "hack[ing] something to [his] advantage." And pg was his enthusiastic Palpatine. Egging on and fawning over sama was already uncomfortable back in 2010. http://paulgraham.com/founders.html
Luckily, YC is experiencing a cultural shift. The likes of PG and Marc Andrewessen, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel were not frowned upon in 2010, not to mention Elon Musk or Zuckerberg.
Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keybase was sort of trying to do this with social proof, though it's reliance on a centralized provider (keybase itself) made it brittle. I think you can get there with something like Urbit IDs that are easy to ban. If IDs are not infinite you can some protection against abuse - pairing that with some proof-of-humanity and you can get closer, but there are still issues of someone doing the proof and then selling thei…
> Keybase was sort of trying to do this with social proof, though it's reliance on a centralized provider (keybase itself) made it brittle. I think something like this could've worked, which is why I was so sad over its demise. I think Keybase (like the MIT PGP keyring, which it is sort of a fancier version of) was predicated on the idea that it's much easier to build a centralized keyring and then decentralize it on…
That did seem to be the direction Keybase was exploring. Their merkle trees weren't properly decentralized but hinted at ways that they could be.
I'm curious where Keybase would have gone if they were better incentivized to explore that before its demise.
Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse
#275Worldcoin is simply another pre-mined, VC backed shitcoin - albeit worst because they’re building a biometrics database. - VCs dump money in (SBF, a16z, etc) - 25% of the coins are kept for the founders + investors How many times do people have to get burned on these scams? Obviously Sam has some street cred with the govt else they would have pulled him infront of congress like when zuck tried to launch Libre.
WC isn’t doing any of the traditional shitcoin behavior. They ban discussion about price speculation. There’s no pre-sales. There’s no sales at all until the coin actually launches. One of the major premises of worldcoin is UBI - literally giving money away. I genuinely believe Sam Altman started WC with others for altruistic reasons
It’s a privately minted coin where the founders control the issuance and hold a large majority. It runs on a proof of stake network. The private company has complete control over the coin.
This is absolutely a traditional shitcoin.
Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse
#276I think you should instead just read what Worldcoin wrote. It's quite short, and I think easy to consider false. https://worldcoin.org/cofounder-letter There are a few words about economic opportunity but little explanation, so you can discount that part. They don't seem to believe it beyond UBI distribution, which has the same problems as any distribution today[1] Their main sell: > scale a reliable solution for dis…
It's honestly the craziest thing I've heard in a while. Talk about solving problems that dont exist
Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse
#277I am seeing a pattern here and I am starting to believe that Sam Altman is an Accelerationist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism A lot of his actions, investments and marketing strategy seem to point in that direction.
It's weird how much of that wiki article (and others I just looked up) trends towards right/alt-right extremism as I have never thought of accelerationism as something fascists would take to. My original understanding of it was that ai/tech will become so advanced that it will take over a lot of the production and labor we currently do to feed, build, and supply the world with resources and when that part is automate…
It's not weird at all if you're familiar with the history of the term, and the currents in mass politics of the 20th century. Everything from the German SDP's (left wing) acceptance of Hitler's rise to power with their quasi-accelerationist "first Hitler, then us" strategy, to the (right wing) OSS/CIA/fascist Strategy of Tension in Italy, to (right wing) boogaloo boys trying to incite race war, to (right wing) evangelical millenarianism around sparking war in Jerusalem to prompt coming of the antichrist.
It does have its beginnings as a concept in Marxist writings. In a way, Marx himself was the first accelerationist (but he seems to have mostly abandoned that thinking towards the end of his life).
Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse
#278I'm glad that while hollywood seems to be completely out of entertaining ideas, real life is producing scenarios where millionaires are having their eyes removed by international criminal organizations to cash in on a one world centrally governed currency. Oh boy.
Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://generalsemantics.org/resources/documents/gsb-65-wils...
Can you provide a synopsis of this lecture transcript?
Words are tools of communication, but they are also tools of deception and obfuscation. They never represent reality correctly, but they can be useful.
There is a chain of complexity where subatomic wavicles assemble into atoms, molecules, self-reproducing molecules, cells, multicellular life, specialized multicellular life, different clades of life, and on up to forms of intelligence and self-awareness.
It is not possible for a human-equivalent intelligence to maintain continuous awareness of all these levels of complexity, and so we operate, much of the time, in abstractions and metaphors that we mistake for being real. We code-switch, consciously and not, through sets of behaviors that pretend that various abstractions are real.
Among these abstractions: a town is a group of buildings and people, but different social abstractions don't have to agree about the contents. So the post office, the street maps, the police and the real estate agents can all be simultaneously in disagreement about the house where the author lives in terms of their mappings of "towns" and "jurisdictions", yet all agree on the street address and which building they mean.
When you can't do something because it's illegal, you can do it, but you know that various social institutions will attempt to inflict various consequences on you if they become aware of your action in the appropriate ways. But most of the time you just say "I can't" and fall back on "I shouldn't".
There's a lot more, but it's about the same: we build lots of maps, we don't agree on them, but we keep acting as though they were real even though we know that they aren't. When someone is invested enough in their current map, they can become very upset with someone who points out that it's fictional.
Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn’t seem like a good faith argument
Why not? Worldcoin is a shitcoin until you prove it has value.
Currently, you can sell it for a nonzero amount so it has value.
Whether it will continue to have value is a very different question. I suspect that it won't.