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

Fake Books

lcamtuf.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 371 posts

Re: Fake Books

#351

Post by Eisenstein »

amluto wrote: post #349
Eisenstein wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of currency is to use it. If you are buying a currency to hold on to it, then it is a terrible currency and there is a disincentive to use it as one, thus making it useful only for speculation. I know that there was a pivot when people realized Bitcoin and Ether are not practical for their purported use as currencies, where they are now claimed to 'hold value', but that is ridiculous. They were design…

> The whole point of currency is to use it. If you are buying a currency to hold on to it, then it is a terrible currency and there is a disincentive to use it as one, thus making it useful only for speculation. Tell that to anyone who saves money for any purpose. They may not literally hold USD in their private Fed account or as cash under a pillow, but they are nonetheless storing dollars (as bonds, money markets,…

I think you misunderstood my point. Holding on to currency and expecting it to increase in value is terrible for the economy because it stops economic activity. People don't buy dollars because they will be worth more later -- they buy them because if they need to they can use them. Also, bonds are not dollars, they are bonds.

Re: Fake Books

#352

Post by Dylan16807 »

roenxi wrote: post #337
Dylan16807 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just a few goldbugs thinking the intrinsic value is all of the value, it's tons of them that think the intrinsic value provides a solid floor. At this point the currency/speculative/prestige value is almost all of the value of gold. If you had a pile of gold and it dropped down to its intrinsic value, it'd be almost the same as a drop to zero.

> At this point the currency/speculative/prestige value is almost all of the value of gold It isn't a currency, it has no obvious potential to be a currency and if you own it you are either a government or insulted. At best, only speculative value could be a factor of these 3, and I don't think the serious money that sets the price is speculating - and gold is a terrible market to speculate in, so they probably aren'…

Scarcity does not directly cause value. Scarcity can fuel speculation and prestige.

Plenty of things are hard to mine yet don't have much value, so nobody tries to mine them. The difficulty/ease of mining can provide a cap on value, but it does not provide a floor. It is not the reason something is expensive.

Re: Fake Books

#353

Post by planetsprite »

kmeisthax wrote: post #174
smilespray wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which then outsourced itself to GPT-2...

Given the way that OpenAI sources their training corpus and the amount of people using GPT-3 I would not be surprised if GPT-4 winds up getting trained on a large amount of GPT-3 output. Think about it - the best niche GPT-3 has is generating plausible spam. If you just need a lot of text, but you don't care about what it says[0], you're going to write it using the cheapest possible tool. OpenAI's training corpus is…

Same with most AI image generating models. In 10 years 99% of images on the internet will be AI generated. Would it not regressive for the models to train on their own outputs? Should regulation require AI generated media label itself, or is it the responsibility to train detectors which can intuit the difference between the models and reality better than humans can?

Re: Fake Books

#354

Post by WalterBright »

maxbond wrote: post #324
WalterBright wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, every item has different value to every person. > market effects distort the price of something who's value doesn't seem to have changed. This is still making the mistake that value is independent of what people are freely willing to pay for it.

This is just a very narrow frame to view these concepts from. It's not per say wrong, it's a useful model much of the time, but it's silly to insist that it is the only way to look at things and will needlessly cut off useful avenues of analysis. For instance, things can have value, even if they are never a part of a transaction. My work ethic has economic value to me, and if I were to lose it my income would be redu…

> No one pays for volunteer work (by definition), but there's lots of volunteer work that, if people stopped doing it, our society would grind to a halt. One example is open source software;

I contribute every day to Open Source software. The "pay" I get is not in terms of salary, there are many other benefits.

Re: Fake Books

#355

Post by maxbond »

WalterBright wrote: post #354
maxbond wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a very narrow frame to view these concepts from. It's not per say wrong, it's a useful model much of the time, but it's silly to insist that it is the only way to look at things and will needlessly cut off useful avenues of analysis. For instance, things can have value, even if they are never a part of a transaction. My work ethic has economic value to me, and if I were to lose it my income would be redu…

> No one pays for volunteer work (by definition), but there's lots of volunteer work that, if people stopped doing it, our society would grind to a halt. One example is open source software; I contribute every day to Open Source software. The "pay" I get is not in terms of salary, there are many other benefits.

Unless you're telling me that you can quote me a price to buy those benefits off of you, then I think you've just accepted my premise.

Re: Fake Books

#356

Post by _pgln »

bawolff wrote: post #338
_pgln wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No its not. Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. The kids doodles aren't scarce because there is little demand for them. On the other hand there is demand for NFT's (whether you think there should be or not). The comparison doesn't make any sense and just makes the author look dumb.

The author wasn't responding to economists who were using the word in that sense, he was responding to bitcoin evangelists who often claim that the value in bitcoin comes from its limitted issue (without reference to demand). I have certainly heard bitcoin evangelists make such claims, so i really dont think it is a strawman argument. If you want to take the metaphor further, there is really no barrier to entry for s…

> Late last year, at the peak of the non-fungible token (NFT) craze, I purchased about a dozen highest-rated NFT books on Amazon. I did this because I wanted to publish a balanced critique of NFTs; I figured the most honest approach would to get familiar with the best-articulated arguments put forward by the proponents of this tech.

Its quite clear from the first few lines of the article that the author did not intend to debunk some silly claims but to respond to the best ones. Using a definition of scarcity that does not reference demand to write off NFT's entirely shows that the author has no idea what hes talking about.

> If you want to take the metaphor further, there is really no barrier to entry for starting a cryptocurrency and supply of cryptocurrencies in general far outstrip demand. So it is very similar to a kids doodle.

Yes, but people don't want just any cryptocurrency. They want Bitcoin, ethereum, etc whos demand is greater then the supply. So no its actually similar to a kids doodle.

Re: Fake Books

#357

Post by _pgln »

hoosieree wrote: post #290
jjkaczor wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For myself, personally - that's an easy metric... By the time I hear about something, it's too late.

I bought some cryptocurrencies on Coinbase about a year ago. Today I figured was as good a time as any to cash out. My net loss was about 70%. I'm fortunate that this was a small amount relative to my net worth to count as a fun "experiment" and not a significant chunk of the money I need to survive. Based on this N=1 experiment, I now feel justified in suggesting more profitable and environmentally friendly endeavor…

Check back at this comment in 3 years.

Re: Fake Books

#358

Post by robocat »

cwkoss wrote: post #314
bryananderson wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the previous commenter’s point, isn’t it? The crypto advocates claim that crypto has intrinsic value simply because of its scarcity (supply-side only). The commenter’s rebuttal is that if this were true, their kid’s doodles would be extremely valuable, yet they are not because only the parent treasures them (demand-side). With gold, one can come up with a plausible story for the demand side of the argument tha…

Bitcoin is the first (and most stable) theoretically unseizable currency. You can store bitcoin in your brain, get persecuted by your national government for criticizing their actions, travel across a border, get kidnapped, offer up a decoy wallet, get released 3 years later, wander into a town with an internet cafe, and theoretically, you could have access to your funds within hours, without the consent of or depend…

> Bitcoin is the first (and most stable) theoretically unseizable currency.

Bitcoin is subject to federal policy as much as anything is: as much as secret Swiss bank accounts.

You imply evasion works. But that certainly doesn't mean it is federally legal, legal with the IRS, or legal for whatever other reasons. You have the risk of serious consequences if you are caught breaking the laws that apply to you.

Your argument implies that you can break the law without getting caught, but we already have surprising crypto counterexamples against that.

Also, the market is slowly being split into legitimate trading (via centralised platforms with KYC rules) and illegitimate trading (for stolen bitcoins, or bitcoins tainted by tumbling with illegal bitcoins). As that plays out, it seems likely to become more difficult to actually trade your crypto without some laundering costs and risks.

Keeping a number in your head or hiding some gold in your secret location are the same thing.

Re: Fake Books

#359

Post by kibwen »

WalterBright wrote: post #321
kibwen wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By far the most valuable substance in the world is oxygen, without which everyone here would be dead within moments, and yet (nearly) nobody here has ever paid a single cent for it (apologies to scuba divers).

The value is determined by, as usual, the Law of Supply & Demand. The supply of oxygen far exceeds the demand, so the value is zero.

Walter, I want to believe you're a smart guy, please tell me you're not actually this obtuse.

Re: Fake Books

#360

Post by Dracophoenix »

Eisenstein wrote: post #199
colonwqbang wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what does it matter? What if a market develops for autogenerated junk literature. People can buy and read what they like best. Today a lot of literature is published that I might consider to be "junk". But there are people buying and reading it and enjoying it and that's fine. Maybe it could create a new genre of literature that is tailored to the reader's interests.

But that 'junk' literature you are describing that people like isn't inherently designed to be deceitful in the sense that people who want something else are its target. When you replace 'catering to a certain audience by being good at doing something they want' with 'catering to a certain audience by being good at selling them something they don't want' then you have created a system in which supply and demand is no…

If the product is what's desired, why does the creator or the intent of the creator behind it matter? Danielle Steele has written same erotic story for decades and still sells millions. Hallmark makes the same kind of movie every Christmas involving a city girl tired of the city and a farm boy or lumberjack who wants to settle down. I don't see what's wrong with the next big erotic hit or regurgitated romance flick being composed and directed by an AI.
Post reply on HN