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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#421

Post by spopejoy »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #70
lekevicius wrote: post #28

I do disagree that some of these were not inevitable. Let me deconstruct a couple: > Tiktok is not inevitable. TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in…

The point is that regulation could have made Bitcoin and NFTs never cause the harm they have inflicted and will inflict, but the political will is not there.

> the political will is not there

The SEC was decently anti-crypto for quite a while, basically until Trump 2. It was following an established strategy of going after the worst actors to establish case law to underpin rulemaking that would therefore be less vulnerable in court once made. In finance you can assume defendants will be well-funded so it's not the dumbest strategy.

It of course made nobody happy -- the anti-crypto crowd thought it was nowhere near aggressive enough, while everyone in crypto was crying a river about the "unfair" and "corrupt" SEC "doing Wall Street's bidding" by making things hard for pump-and-dumpers.

Meanwhile, in marked contrast, Bitcoin itself was more or less given a clean bill of health as long ago as 2012, when FINCEN ruled that miners were not money-transmitters. Say what you want about bitcoin, but it's not transparently a security like pretty much every NFT and most leading altcoins.

Anyway that's all ancient history now since Trump 2, although Gensler had already more or less lost once the Bitcoin ETF was approved. Tradfi seems to love crypto now, what could possibly go wrong?

Re: This is not the future

#422

Post by spopejoy »

lekevicius wrote: post #28

I do disagree that some of these were not inevitable. Let me deconstruct a couple: > Tiktok is not inevitable. TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in…

> Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable

It kind of was though. All the tech pieces were in place by 2009, between Chaum's ecash, Haber+Stornetta's merkle trees and real-world document blockchains (secured by the NY Times sunday classifieds no less!), and Back's hashcash. b-money and bit gold already had the idea and motivation. It was just waiting for a Nakamoto to make it all fault-tolerant. Someone would have figured it out eventually.

Re: This is not the future

#423

Post by tinco »

SecondHandTofu wrote: post #402
tinco wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author doesn't mean that the technologies weren't inevitable in the absolute sense. They mean that it was not inevitable that anyone should use those technologies. It's not inevitable that they will use Tiktok, and it is not inevitable for anyone, I've never used Tiktok, so the author is right in that regard. If you disavow short form video as a medium altogether, something I'm strongly considering, then you can.…

Has that ever worked at scale in history? This strikes me as the same as people who take a stand by not ordering from Amazon or not using whichever service, they make their life somewhat harder and the world doesn't notice. Even worse, the people taking a stand signal to others that they do it, but most others think that the cost outweighs the benefit, and don't like being judged. Groups in which everyone signals and…

Yeah it has on occasion, you're right in that it usually doesn't have much of an effect but every once in a while it does. If there's enough of the self-sacrificing users they'll together save a business or a way of doing things. Like running Linux on consumer hardware, or using cash in retail stores.

They don't necessarily have to coordinate, they can use a thousand different linux distro's and literally never talk to each other, and still cause PC manufacturers to keep to a standardized boot process and largely documented hardware so that Linux remains viable.

Re: This is not the future

#424

Post by gwbas1c »

Juliate wrote: post #41
gwbas1c wrote: post #19

I do think AI involvement in programming is inevitable; but at this time a lot of the resistance is because AI programming currently is not the best tool for many jobs. To better the analogy: I have a wood stove in my living room, and when it's exceptionally cold, I enjoy using it. I don't "enjoy" stacking wood in the fall, but I'm a lazy nerd, so I appreciate the exercise. That being said, my house has central heati…

If it were this inevitable, would AI be pushed down our throats, against our will, against our own laws, even, so hard?

I think some companies are making a mistake laying off employees who don't use it; because it's more important that employees have autonomy to choose the right tool for the job.

The mistake is pushing it too aggressively, instead of judging on the result of the job itself.

Re: This is not the future

#425

Post by dpedu »

the_other wrote: post #242
dpedu wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MacOs settings redesign really bothered me too. Maybe it's the 20+ years of muscle memory, or maybe the new one really is that bad, but I find myself clicking around excessively and eventually giving up and using search. I'm with you here.

It's got a bunch of problems. - some options have moved to menus which make no sense at all (e.g. all the toggles for whether a panel's menubar icon appear in the menu bar have moved off the panel for that feature and onto the Control Centre panel. But Control Centre doesn't have any options of its own, so the entire panel is a waste of time and has created a confusing UX where previously there was a sensible one - l…

These are all pretty bad! I'm not on liquid glass yet, and am not looking forward to it. I'm actually a fan of the "reduce transparency" accessibility option. Hopefully it's sill available.

The weirdest issue I've ran into is on the sound settings page. Sometimes, the first column of the list of audio devices is super narrow, and since you can't drag it bigger, you can only see the first couple characters of each audio device's name, and have to guess which is the one you want.

... but if I open system preferences normally (via spotlight or apple menu) it doesn't happen. It only happens if I use the keyboard shortcut (option + any of the 3 volume keys)! I cannot imagine what kind of spaghetti code could be behind something like this. Clicking to another section and back to the sound section fixes it but... Very weird.

Re: This is not the future

#426

Post by yanis_t »

username223 wrote: post #74
yanis_t wrote: post #67

I remember the was a guy who regularly posted tech predictions and then every year adjusted and reflected on his predictions. Can anyone help me find it?

Rodney Brooks? https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-...

That’s the guy, thank you!

Re: This is not the future

#427

Post by jobs_throwaway »

daveguy wrote: post #408
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao Please explain how bitcoin can be inflated And recognizing a movement has ideological reasons while making no claim as to the strength or rationality of those reasons has nothing to do with faith

> Please explain how bitcoin can be inflated Make up a stable coin and pretend it has real money behind it while refusing to submit to an independent audit. Any other requests, buddy?

that wouldn't be bitcoin, idiot?

Re: This is not the future

#428

Post by jobs_throwaway »

JeremyNT wrote: post #417
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These things don't have any utility otherwise and no reason to exist outside of those. Lol. Permissionless payments certainly have utility. Making it harder for governments to freeeze/seize your assets has utility. Buying stuff the government disallows, often illegitimately, has value. Currency that can't be inflated has value. Any outside of pure utility, they have tons of ideological reason to exist outside scams…

> Making it harder for governments to freeeze/seize your assets has utility Yes, doing crimes is indeed a valid use case.

Ah yes, the government famously never gets it wrong or seizes the assets of innocents

Re: This is not the future

#429

Post by hyperadvanced »

nostrademons wrote: post #303
hyperadvanced wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, game theory is not a predictive model but an explanatory/general one. Additionally not everything is a game, as in statistics, not everything has a probability curve. They can be applied speculatively to great effect, but they are ultimately abstract models.

You can use it for either predictive or explanatory purposes. In the early ('00s) years of Google it was common to diagram out the incentives of all the market participants; this led to such innovations like the use of the second-price VCG auction [1] for ad sales that now make over a third of a trillion dollars per year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%9...

This is a good point, and I’m willing to concede that I may be wrong here, that predictive power can be gained from (possibly mis-) applications of abstractions onto a real space, which is what one of the real reasons to favor abstract thinking in business in the first place.

Re: This is not the future

#430

Post by daveguy »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #427
daveguy wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please explain how bitcoin can be inflated Make up a stable coin and pretend it has real money behind it while refusing to submit to an independent audit. Any other requests, buddy?

that wouldn't be bitcoin, idiot?

You asked how to inflate Bitcoin. I told you how to inflate all cryptocurrency. That includes Bitcoin. I didn't think the "buy Bitcoin with fake currency that is scammed to be the same as real currency" needed to be explicitly stated. But, I guess I should have known I wasn't dealing with someone who could put together simple inferences on their own. Have a nice life, I won't be bothering with you again.
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