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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#531

Post by thedevilslawyer »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #523
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that's going to happen (outsourcing), what's wrong with that? If you're a nationalist, your worry is obvious enough, but if you're a humanist, then it's wonderful that the more downtrodden are going to improve their station, while the better off wait for them.

That's not humanism, that sounds closer to utilitarianism. Humanism is about each person reaching their full potentil. I don't think the outsourcees are reaching their full potential being paid $2/hr to make American corporations billions. They are simply going to survive and up themselves to a liveable standard.

Which is good right.. a lot of the world is unable to live!

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#532

Post by moritzwarhier »

amiga386 wrote: post #503
moritzwarhier wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use the a similar protocol with better properties (less energy consumption, better transaction usability) and start from zero. Also, I'm not sure if a radical lack of regulation / full decentralization is a good thing when we are talking about money. In my opinion, money should be regulated by governments. But this discussion tends to escalate and the arguments have been made ad nauseam, so I'm tuning out here, sorry…

> money should be regulated by governments It should, but nobody can quite agree on exactly what should and shouldn't be allowed. Fraud, everyone agrees no. Porn, drugs, guns, gambling, foreign work, etc. everyone has a different opinion; governments abuse their power to prohibit transacting "harmless" goods/services, the people who transact those things reject the prohubition and turn to grey and black markets, then…

My point was not primarily money from illegal activities. While you are probably right about most of the liquidity in BTC coming from illegal activities (with the type of illegality often being secondary, by means of being almost universally agreed on).

I was getting at the valuation and the value extraction that is derived solely from the sigmoid-like climb of value in cryptocurrency, which is driven by speculation on BTC as an asset, not just by increasing adoption for regular economic transactions backed by external value.

Sure, the more traction and trust this system gains, the last part of my sentence (BTC backing "real value") might increasingly become true, making my argument moot. But the almost feudalistic problems of "initial" allocation are not unimportant, in my view.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#533

Post by m0wer »

immibis wrote: post #530
m0wer wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchains don't scale. But that's a feature, not a bug. Great protocols are built in layers. You have decentralized instant settlement for an average of 0.005% even for micropayments with the Lightning Network (another protocol built on top of Bitcoin). That's orders of magnitude away from the settlement time and resilience of the current payment networks.

This might be the first time I've heard the argument "it's great that my project is shit because a lot of great things are layers on top of shit"

You missed the point. The IP protocol doesn't scale! Ethernet MTU is just 1500 bytes how are we ever going to transfer a movie over the Internet!

Ethernet does not need to carry the whole movie in one packet. If it does the job of delivering the MTU to the host on the other side of the cable, it's good. Websockets can be figured out somewhere else. The IP stack is not shit because each layer does just one thing, it's good because of that.

But hey, time will tell.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#534

Post by dalemhurley »

layer8 wrote: post #411
dalemhurley wrote: post #111

> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal." I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our bankin…

In the EU, the value proposition of PayPal is (1) that it it hello instantaneous instead of taking one or two days like a regular bank transfer, and (2) it doesn’t disclose your banking info to the other party. The first one is now finally being obsoleted by SEPA instant payments.

Banks in Australia on the NPP have 16 seconds to complete the transaction.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#535

Post by dalemhurley »

martin-t wrote: post #500
dalemhurley wrote: post #111

> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal." I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our bankin…

I hate that companies try this. They should pay massive fines and execs should go to prison for this. This is not rhetorical - if you (try to) make the life of literally millions of people worse in a small way, the amount of time and money wasted by them should be calculated and used to determine the punishment.

Unfortunately this is a by-product of capitalism and lobbying

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#536

Post by kenny239 »

raincole wrote: post #44
gyomu wrote: post #10

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline. > There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge th…

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invente…

Yeah at least at its current stage it still is. but a calculator boosts productivity just like a microwave. A lot of experiments and boilerplate code with low entropy is made a lot easier with LLMs.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#537

Post by LoveMortuus »

thasso wrote: post #237
tehnub wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pair programming with coworkers over the years, many seem to have trouble with the keyboard, to the point where pressing right parenthesis is a significant burden and they don’t use right or down arrow to get out of the span but actually move their hand to their mouse and click out.

I'm shocked every time I go to City Hall and wait while the clerk types my name letter by letter with two fingers. Doesn't he do that every day?! How as it never occurred to him or anyone else that maybe, just maybe, they would benefit from a typing course. It’s just one example of a pattern I’ve noticed with a lot of office workers.

The answer to most of this question is just this: "Because it's good enough."

It's good enough, it gets the job done and does not cause enough friction for the person to feel the need to improve. Complacency.

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