b1daly

the world is incredibly filled with risk to humans—people in the AI doomer camp are making a claim that AI potentially is a new kind of uncontrollable risk that warrants extraordinary regulation

the basis of this claim seems to be a confusion of logical or deductive reasoning with inductive or observational reasoning

argument comes down to

- it’s possible to imagine a super intelligent machine that has properties that will kill everyone (this is an exercise in logical reasoning)

- since it’s possible to imagine it, this means it will come into existence — this is an error because things that exist in the real, physical world do so based on physical processes governed by inductive reasoning

generally, there is a long series of steps between the imagining of some constructed, complex machine and its realization, along with its conceptual foundations it requires sustained effort, trial and error, maintenance, generally a serious fight against entropy to make it function and keep it functioning

the sort of out of control AI imagined by AI doomers is not something we’ve seen before

so we shouldn’t make costly decisions based upon this confusion of reasoning

doesn’t your example make clear the existence and nature of free will?

it’s obvious in its absence

this is my pet peeve with discussions of ‘free will’ they have an implicit definition—everything being exactly the same at a different time or place—that is non-sensical as far as we know.

I’m still disturbed by peoples confidence in a deterministic universe—I suppose such confidence is based on the success of inductive reasoning but inductive reasoning is a phenomenon based on how our minds work.

As far as I know the philosophical problem of causation is not considered solved?

In any case, elements of randomness seem likely to play a role in human intelligence but what that role is, who knows?

I’ve never understood his crankiness on this subject: the concept of ‘right to repair’ is entirely synthetic.

Government intervention in markets is usually predicated on some kind of ‘market failure’ and I don’t see how that is the case here. There is plenty of competition in the phone market and if the option to have a phone repaired by third parties was really desired by consumers then someone would sell such a phone.

It seems more like Rossmann is angry there is not a product-market fit for his services. Something like that.

Really? Like in the next 200 years? That’s ridiculous. The scenarios from IPCC envision a future of prosperity, albeit at a reduced level than if we could somehow drastically cut carbon emissions.

In the US landlords do have some liability for criminal conduct on their property whether committed by tenants or others.

Most web services do have strict restrictions on conduct. This is a far cry from vigilantism.

It’s messed up for Cloudfare to wash their hands of any responsibility here.

When have ‘the media’ ever not published lies and ideology? Serious question...

I agree with the thrust of your comment in general. I thought that Trump’s China travel ban was a choice of common sense and the Democrats labeling it as xenophobic was counterproductive.

While it certainly was xenophobic in Trump’s hands, it was practically a decision that made him happy as a China hater, the motivation of the decision is independent of its utility.

Trump certainly made a mess of it after that.

All of the politicians got fooled by the relative stability and rareness of the pandemic. Most of the time telling people not to panic it won’t be as bad as you fear works OK as a strategy in a country like the US.

Isn’t this a problem of efficiency and optimization? Running the system lean leads to lower costs, but with risk of occasional shortfalls due to exogenous effects. But to optimize for those relatively infrequent events would increase the cost of the frequent events (the everyday shipping).

Given the challenge of finding an optimum it seems like the world hasn’t done too badly.

This argument about code inspection does not make sense to me. The number of people who are going to even have the ability to inspect the code of the applications they use is infitesimal and of that small number the people who have time and inclination to do so is microscopic. Given that applications are complex, written by groups of programmers over extended time what is the chance of meaningful code review by an individual? It could take years for a single application.

I don’t know if Free software makes software less secure but I don’t see how it makes it more secure? Especially given that security might not be a high priority for the authors.

I’m not a programmer so it’s hard for me to understand the arguments, but from what I gather is that any popular software could be a vector for threats and that users themselves remain the biggest vector.

The author suggests greater use of code signing could help. It also seems to me that progress towards computer security needs to be the province of large, well resourced organizations.

Our own (US) government seems to not be prioritizing this correctly, preferring to maintain their own exploits at the cost of defense. This is a political problem. It is of a piece with the historical arrogance of the US security-military apparatus that is being badly outplayed, mistaking pure military superiority as the most important type of security.

We need protection from which government? All of them? I think that is probably impossible.

This article is an example of the pure propaganda that 'mainstream financial media' participates in on-the-regular. Why that is I don't know. Symbiotic business interests I guess.

It's not that the information is incorrect. It probably is and it does tell us something about some of the big players around Coinbase.

But the whole bitcoin 'ecosystem' is essentially a collective criminal organization, with some players being closer to the dirty parts than others. (I'm leaving out everyday holders of bitcoin, just talking about insider types.) These big Coinbase players might not 'touch the poo' directly, but their hands still get stinky.

The price action in bitcoin is determined across a network of exchanges, most of which do not use real dollars (or other govt currency). They use crypto only for trading, including the fake 'stable-coin' tether.

Tether (the company who issues the currency tether) has been shown definitively to be running a scam and are completely dishonest.) They have issued $35Billion worth of their fake dollars. Until recently they were issuing on the order of $1B per week!

Tether is a sister company to the exchange Bitfinex with the same owners and management. So essentially the same company. They just signed an agreement with the New York Attorney General where they paid a fine of $18.5M (notice difference in scale). The agreement spells out exactly how they have been scamming people. This is based on information coming from the company itself. This is not FUD, just FACT. (interestingly since they signed this agreement ~10 days ago, they stopped issuing tether.)

One of the central players in this ongoing criminal operation who has been taken out is Crypto Capital Corp. They ran a shadow banking system for many of the big exchanges, including Bitfinex and Binance. The Feds seized $850M from CCC for money laundering, which precipitated a crisis for these entities and intensified the criminal activity of the many industry insiders connected through this shadow bank.

My guess is that Tether issued $35B in fake USDT (tether) almost exclusively without dollar collateral backing. (the original premise of tether was each would only be issued on receipt of a true USD by tether, and therefor each USDT was pegged to a USD, the peg holds for now but the dollar backing is not there, that's another story.)

Most of this $35B was issued over the last year when we have seen a huge rise in bitcoin price. The tether currency only has one purpose, to buy cryptocurrency. So this is a huge amount of liquidity introduced into the market. (Compare to the hype around Tesla's $1.5B bitcoin purchase.)

It is the price appreciation that drives this whole market, including the business of Coinbase, even though they do not deal with tether.

The OP article mentions none of this! Sure, it reveals some insiders, perhaps on the more legit side, but ignores the real engine of this speculative bubble/fraud.

It has the effect of 'white-washing' this dirty game.

It's really gross.

The difference is the moon landing or ‘who shot JFK’ are about subjects that are low stakes, very low. Having millions people believe the Presidential election was corrupt is corrosive to the basic civic foundations of the political process.