Grok3 Launch [video]

This is the problem we're working on with https://freenet.org/ - a general purpose platform for building entirely decentralized services.

Our thesis is that the client-server architecture is a fundamental flaw in the world wide web's design, which inherently concentrates power in the hands of a few. Freenet aims to be a general purpose replacement for this in which all services are entirely decentralized.

The first non-trivial app we're building will be a group chat system called River[1].

[1] https://github.com/freenet/river

Richard Dawkins: "I have a very favorable impression of Elon Musk and his concern for the welfare of the world.

I have sat with [Elon] on a transatlantic plane and had a very, very long conversation with him. He's undoubtedly highly intelligent and knowledgeable.

I've had lunch with him on two or three occasions, and so I know him a little bit.

I have formed a very favorable impression of his intelligence, his knowledge and his concern for the welfare of the world."

The Poetry of Reality, November 17, 2024

I use them as an alternative to search engines for topics where I have some specific question where traditional search engines fail to find the needle in the haystack.

As a concrete example, I was recently playing with simulating the wave equation, and I wanted to try to use a higher-order approximation as I had never done that before. I'm quite rusty as I haven't done any numerical work since university some decades ago.

I still recalled how to deal with the Neumann boundary conditions when using the traditional lower-order approximation, but I was uncertain how to do it while keeping the higher-order approximation.

Searching for "higher-order neumann boundary conditions wave equation" or similar got me pages upon pages of irrelevant hits, most of them dealing with the traditional approximation scheme.

So I turned to ChatGPT which right away provided a decent answer[1], and along with a follow-up question gave me what I needed to implement it successfully.

[1]: https://chatgpt.com/share/67b4ab43-6128-8013-8e5a-3d13a74bf6...

The brains that run and made SpaceX are anonymous engineers working long hours and passionately applying their expertise to a project they believe in. Elon is a man-child tweeting an average of 50 times a day (number not made up), pretending to reach max level in a popular video game and then bragging about it, constantly flying between Mar-a-Lago and the White House in his private jets. He has no time to actually manage "his" companies, of which he puts no work in whatsoever.

You have to finally break free of this myth of the billionaire self-made man, building his fortune at the sweat of his brows. At some point, you're simply so rich that however stupid you are, competent people will still manage your capital well and make you even richer. You can only fail upward.

Do not mistake the current events for anything but an acceleration of the theft of your country by billionaire oligarchs (or rather the people managing their wealth).

> Fixing the deficit is the opposite of looting, actually.

I think this has two errors.

First, I don't agree that he's fixing the deficit. I think that's an assumption not in evidence. We'll see in a few years time, though. I'd be willing to bet in 4 years the deficit is > 0, and likely larger than it is today.

But let's assume arguendo that he is fixing the deficit. It's still possible to loot the treasury while fixing the deficit, which shows that they aren't actually the opposite.

Consider this example with completely made up numbers:

Before

- Revenue: $1T

- Defense Spending: $500B

- Benefits Spending: $1T

- Public Services Spending: $499.9B

- Government Contracts with Musk's Companies: $100M

The before scenario has $1T in revenue, and $2T in spending, for a deficit of $1T. Now, let's allow hypothetical Musk to have free-reign to "fix the deficit"

After

- Revenue: $800B

- Defense Spending: $300B

- Benefits Spending: $300B

- Public Services Spending: $100B

- Government Contracts with Musk's Companies: $100B

In this scenario the deficit has been reduced to $0, while Musk has enriched himself and his companies with $99.9B in government funds. This would be an extreme example of Musk looting the treasury, while still completely resolving the deficit.