merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Anon gives up on Bitcoin in 2010 2 weeks ago:
Also slow compared to actual payment processing networks for real money.
- Comment on Anon gives up on Bitcoin in 2010 2 weeks ago:
You don’t need to hold it on an exchange, but you need an exchange. You need some place where you can find people who want to buy Argentine Pesos and sell Bitcoin so that you can buy Bitcoin and sell your Argentine Pesos.
cheap & fast international settlement
You think Bitcoin is cheap and fast?
- Comment on Anon cheats through college 2 weeks ago:
Basically, I use it as a rudimentary search engine
The other day I had a very obscure query where the web page results were very few and completely useless. Reluctantly I looked at the Google LLM-generated “AI Overview” or whatever it’s called. What it came up with was completely plausible, but utter bullshit. After a quick look I could see that it had taken text that answered a similar question, and just weaved some words I was looking for into the answer in a plausible way. Utterly useless, and just ended up wasting my time checking that it was useless.
Another thing I can think of, is that it might be quite useful if you want to learn and practice another language
No, it’s terrible at that. Google’s translation tool uses an LLM-based design. It’s terrible because it doesn’t understand the context of a word or phrase.
For instance, a guy might say to his mate: “Hey, you mad cunt!”. Plug that into an LLM translation and it you don’t know what it might come up with. In some languages it actually translates to something that will translate back to “Hey, you mad cunt”. In Spanish it goes for “Oye, maldita sea”, which is basically “Hey, dammit” Which is not the sense it was used at all. Shorten that to “Hey, you mad?” and you get the problem that “mad” could be crazy or it could be angry, depending on the context and the dialect. If you were talking with a human, they might ask you for context cues before translating, but the LLMs just pick the most probable translation and go with that.
If you use long conversational interface, it will get more context, but then you run into the problem that there’s no intelligence there. You’re basically conversing with the equivalent of a zombie. Something’s animating the body, but the spark of life is gone. It is also designed never to be angry, never to be sad, never to be jealous, it’s always perky and pleasant. So, it might help you learn a language a bit, but you’re learning the zombified version of the language.
Basically DnD.
D&D by the world’s worst DM. The key thing a DM brings to a game is that they’re telling a story. They’ve thought about a plot. They have interesting characters that advance that plot. They get to know the players so they know how to subvert their expectations. The hardest things for a DM to deal with is a player doing something unexpected. When that happens they need to adjust everything so that what happens still fits in with the world they’re imagining, and try to nudge the players back to the story they’ve built. An LLM will just happily continue generating text that meets the heuristics of a story. But, that basically means that the players have no real agency. Nothing they do has real consequences because you can’t affect the plot of the story when there’s no plot to begin with.
And, what if you just use an LLM for dialogue in a game where the story/plot was written by a human. That’s fine until the LLM generates a plausible dialogue that’s “wrong”. Like, say the player is investigating a murder and talks to a guard. In a proper game, the guard might not know the answer, or might know the answer and lie, or might know the answer but not be willing / able to tell the player. But, if you put an LLM in there, it can generate a plausible response from a guard, and that plausible response might match one of those scenarios, but it doesn’t have a concept that this guard is “an honest but dumb guard” or “a manipulative guard who was part of the plot”. If the player comes and talks to the guard again, will they still be that same character, or will the LLM generate more plausible dialogue from a guard, that goes against the previous “personality” of that guard?
- Comment on Anon cheats through college 2 weeks ago:
Because the tools are here and not going anyway
Swiss army knives have had awls for ages. I’ve never used one. The fact that the tool exists doesn’t mean that anybody has to use it.
The actually useful shit LLMs can do
Which is?
- Comment on Anon cheats through college 2 weeks ago:
And also possibly checking in code with subtle logic flaws that won’t be discovered until it’s too late.
- Comment on Anon gives up on Bitcoin in 2010 2 weeks ago:
it holds value better than their local currency.
Sure, if your local currency is badly mismanaged, then any alternatives look good. But, you still have to change back to your local currency when it’s time to pay taxes.
I wonder how many of those people who are buying Bitcoin with Argentine Pesos are buying it as a store of value, vs. gambling on it going up. If you can buy Bitcoin, you can probably buy dollars, or buy index funds. It could also be that cryptocurrency exchanges are willing to break laws and operate in places where they’re not legally allowed to operate. It’s hard to keep up with all the crypto exchanges that broke the law that way. OTOH, traditional financial businesses tend to follow local laws. Of course, if you’re relying on being able to access your bitcoins when you relied on a crypto exchange operating illegally, you might be in for a rude shock.
- Comment on Anon gives up on Bitcoin in 2010 2 weeks ago:
Sure, occasionally Bitcoin is useful for paying for illegal things, or for paying ransom after a ransomware attack. The thing is, that that basically makes it a payment gateway. You convert your dollars into bitcoin and make the payment. There’s no reason to hold onto bitcoin. You get it and then you use it. For that purpose, it doesn’t matter if the exchange rate is $100k per bitcoin, or $1 per 100 k bitcoins. Since you’re spending it as soon as you get it, you don’t care.
The dollar value of bitcoin only matters to people who are holding it as some kind of “investment”. If those people become convinced that the next sucker is about to cash out, they might cash out before that sucker, and the price of bitcoin could plunge to zero.
Bitcoin might always exist, but it might always exist like old Italian Lira coins. They’re cool collectors items, but have almost no real value anymore.
- Comment on Anon gives up on Bitcoin in 2010 2 weeks ago:
Sure, in the past people had gold for the same purpose. The difference is that gold has at least some intrinsic value. It can be made into beautiful jewelry. It has industrial uses. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, so if people lose confidence it could drop to 0.
- Comment on Anon gives up on Bitcoin in 2010 2 weeks ago:
Because actual money has sources and sinks. If you look at MMT for example, they talk about government spending not as being a way for the government to distribute money, but actually as a way the government creates money. When the government taxes money, it doesn’t just collect it, it destroys it.
So, based on how much a government is spending and taxing, it’s adjusting the supply of money in the economy. The fact that government spending is roughly the same year-to-year, and that taxes are roughly the same year-to-year gives a stability and flow to actual money. There’s a constant demand for it because every year the US government requires that people and businesses submit $4.5 trillion in taxes. There’s a constant supply because the US government spends more than $6 trillion.
Bitcoin doesn’t have those sources and sinks. There’s no constant demand for bitcoin every year to pay taxes. There’s no constant supply as a government spends bitcoin into the economy. The “realness” of money is intimately tied to taxes and government spending.
- Comment on Anon gives up on Bitcoin in 2010 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think the belief in its value is going to collapse on its own. It is already accepted to have value by enough people, to sustain that belief.
These things change. People once believed that diamonds were a valuable rock and essential for proposing marriage, but now people are starting to think that’s BS. There was massive social pressure, plus expensive propaganda from deBeers trying to keep people buying diamonds. But, people woke up.
So much of crypto’s promise is that there will always be another sucker who will buy your bitcoin for more than you paid for it. But, if actual real currencies that people pay taxes with can collapse, crypto could collapse a whole lot faster than that.
- Comment on Anon gives up on Bitcoin in 2010 2 weeks ago:
bitcoin has value because people perceive it to have value.
Bitcoin has value because they think other people perceive it to have value. Same with dollars, euros, pesos, etc. It’s not like art where the value is in the eye of the beholder. It’s something where you have to be confident that other people will perceive it to have value too, so when you want to exchange it, there will be other people who will accept it.
Dollars, euros, pesos, etc. have value because they’re accepted in thousands of stores, and because you need them to pay your taxes. Even if you, personally, don’t think you’ll need to hold onto any pesos to pay your own taxes, you know that there are likely to be millions of other people who will need them for their taxes.
With bitcoin, there are essentially no places you can use it to pay taxes, except maybe El Salvador (I don’t know if they’re still doing that). You can’t use it to pay in many stores. Just about the only thing that keeps creating demand for bitcoin is that there aren’t many other ways to pay off ransomware demands. Unlike traditional currencies, Bitcoin really relies on the belief that someone else will continue to believe that Bitcoin is still valuable.
Will the bubble eventually burst? I think so. I just think it could stagger on for a few more decades before the belief it has value eventually collapses.
- Comment on Anon watches The Terminator 3 weeks ago:
Meanwhile, in Germany, they have to dub him, even if he speaks German, because he sounds like a country bumpkin.
- Comment on ____ 3 weeks ago:
“No problem What’s the name of the song that goes dududududu dededede do dududududu”
- Comment on AI Traning 3 weeks ago:
Ha! You think AI is “keeping up with technology”? It’s not, it’s a diversion. Technology continues to advance, but this sideshow has nothing to do with it. You keep on drinking that kool-aid. Surely there will be a use for the bullshit fountain, any day now!
- Comment on AI Traning 3 weeks ago:
you don’t have significant experience with AI
I have enough experience to know it’s utterly useless. If you keep looking for more experience once you’ve realized that, you’re in a cult.
- Comment on AI Traning 3 weeks ago:
Wow, you really have your head deep in something. I’m not sure if it’s deep in the sand, or deep up Sam Altman’s ass.
You think people have “talking points” against bullshit fountains, as if they’re needed? You think it’s a struggle to come up with reasons why they’re bad? The truth is that they’re absolutely useless at best, and actively harmful at worst. And no, this isn’t about the monstrous amounts of energy they use. It’s that they offer nothing of value.
“Gee whiz, thanks to this bullshit fountain I can research legal cases much more efficiently!” Oops, turns out the bullshit fountain just made up those precedents and now the judge is furious at me.
“Apple Intelligence will just summarize my texts for me!” Oops, the summaries were so wrong that they were actively harmful, and now Apple has been forced to turn off that feature.
“I’ll just have the LLM generate code for me!” Oops, now I have to spend a week debugging because the perfectly plausible code that was generated has a subtle logic error.
“Let me just search the web for something. Aha, I won’t be taken in by that AI summary at the top because I know that’s unreliable bullshit from the bullshit fountain. I’ll just scroll past that and click on the actual web pages.” Oops. Those actual web pages are now LLM-generated and filled with bullshit. I guess now I have to stop using the web and rely on printed encyclopedias from the time before LLMs to actually get verifiable facts. Winning!
- Comment on I don't see the problem. It's A tree. It's not THE tree. 3 weeks ago:
Right, so it presumably isn’t Google.
- Comment on I don't see the problem. It's A tree. It's not THE tree. 3 weeks ago:
To me it looks like a genuine book with an instant “Google Translate using Camera” type layer overtop, that tries to translate the words into another language while matching the look and feel of the original.
- Comment on I don't see the problem. It's A tree. It's not THE tree. 3 weeks ago:
Ok, so assume it’s French. The words now make sense. But, look at the pictures.
Does that look anything like a helicopter / hélicoptère? What does that pink round thing have to do with snow / neige? Why does the image for a tail / queue look like a radish? And what’s with the letter for Y? Common Y words in french for kids are things like “yak”, “yaourt” (yogurt), “yeux” (eyes), “yeti”, “yacht”, “yoga”, “yo-yo”. They seem to have chosen “yole”, which in english is “yawl”, defined as “a two-masted fore-and-aft-rigged sailboat with the mizzenmast stepped far aft so that the mizzen boom overhangs the stern.” And yet, although the image appears to be a sailboat (voilier), it’s a one-masted sailboat.
- Comment on I don't see the problem. It's A tree. It's not THE tree. 3 weeks ago:
Arbre
- Comment on Amish virus 3 weeks ago:
This would be better on lined paper with cursive writing.
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 4 weeks ago:
There’s a difference between an “audit” and a basic sanity check. You wouldn’t do an audit unless there was strong evidence there is something worth auditing.
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 4 weeks ago:
How do you know that the people in charge didn’t check? Just because there wasn’t a big announcement doesn’t mean that there weren’t sanity checks done on the process. It’s likely that was done and that the results seemed to be legit, so there was no need to do more.
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 4 weeks ago:
I mean, I think they’d have considered a civil war less than 100 years after the founding of the country to be a pretty good indication of failure.
As for the modern world, they explicitly talk about trying to design a system so that a tyrant doesn’t become president. All the supposed checks and balances that were supposed to prevent that turned out to be as effective as wet tissue paper. The founders also cared a lot about the president not being corrupt, and drafted the emoluments clause(s) to prevent that, and Trump has just completely ignored those clauses. I think they’d have been pretty upset about that, and wondering why the law of the land was just being ignored.
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 4 weeks ago:
The Don who lies constantly about everything? Who didn’t even say “we stole the money” but more, “Elmo is good with bank stuff, and we have lots of money”? The same guy who wouldn’t know how to read a blueprint, and would probably just post a picture of the blueprint on social media to generate controversy and traffic? The Don who, if he actually had broken into the bank, wouldn’t be able to shut up about it, and would be bragging about it non-stop, probably by doing live-streams from within the bank vault?
You don’t assume that he hit the bank. You follow your normal security procedures, and check that what you expect to see in the vault is what you actually see in the vault. Then you just ignore the blowhard.
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 4 weeks ago:
The civil war was due to the fact that the disputes over what should and shouldn’t be allowed couldn’t be resolved within the framework the government provided.
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 4 weeks ago:
That’s not what that letter says. It says that operatives may have gained access to the software used to count votes, and if that happened they may have been able to probe that software for weaknesses.
What it doesn’t say is that there was a subsequent, second breach of the voting machines in which doctored software was then installed.
It’s like someone gaining access to blueprints for a bank vault. Yes, that theoretically lowers the security of the vault, but it doesn’t prove that a bank heist has taken place, just that a heist is more likely to be possible now.
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 4 weeks ago:
The funny thing is that so much of it is based on the idea that everyone involved is going to be on their best behaviour, working for the good of the country, compromising with their opponents, and so-on. And, then it all falls apart as soon as one person realizes that they get an advantage as soon as they simply ignore the norms.
Also, don’t forget that there was less than a century between the revolution and the civil war. If your brand new form of government is so poor that a significant fraction of your population thinks a civil war is preferable to resolving things through that system, your system isn’t very good.
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 4 weeks ago:
Where would ancient Greek democracy
They had slaves, so it wasn’t particularly democratic.
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 4 weeks ago:
Trump has said that Elon “knows those computers better than anybody … And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide”.
First of all, we know that to be false because we know Elon doesn’t know shit about computers. But, aside from that, there are multiple possible interpretations of what he meant, anything from “Elon rigged the election” to “Elon ensured the integrity of the election”.
My policy is “Don’t believe anything Trump says about anything”. I don’t change that policy when he says something that I want to believe is true.