clippablematt

I had an email from openai last night saying I now have to credit up front for api usage, rather than paying at the end of the month. Thought it was a bit odd for user paying like $3 a month for embeddings. Then looked at the news.

I think they have cash issues. Can’t get more uses due to lack of gpu, and current users are costing too much.

The Dutch flower markets are still a big tourist attraction, on the top lists of things to do in Amsterdam.

People say “bubble” with their mind so focused on what they think is dumb ways of spending money, and they miss the lasting cultural impact, which is actually what matters.

I’m not a fan of the apes(there’s more interesting tighter communities in the nft space), but I see more and more ape-branded stuff appearing here in China. That’s probably not making the nft holders any direct money as they’re unlikely to be paying for taking the images, but these waves are unpredictable.

Mona Lisa wasn’t that famous till it was stolen…

The more complete quote from Brand is: “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.”

People often only remember the first bit…

—— “ On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other”

All of your examples, bible etc, have all been repeatedly edited for different cultures and age groups.

People act like this is the end of Dahls legacy, yet his stories have probably been discussed more in the past 24 hours than the past few years combined.

I recommend the book Graveyard clay on the death on languages, and how the dead are still as chatty as the living- in many ways the dead are harder to silence.

Capitalism. It’s paperclip maximisers all the way down.

Harberger taxes on ip could be neat

This is absolute nonsense conspiracy I keep seeing repeated.

TikTok/Douyin is just as cringe over here in China too.

The idea of “official” is intentionally being rejected. There is no official version of anything, just community consensus of the spec, from which anyone can implement a client.

In the past the ethereum foundation has made their own wallets/browsers/clients but they’d rather focus energy in other places and instead have grants and donations to others to help them get started and to operate their own companies.

The reason is to break away from being an authority, over time the EF should become less powerful. They are making decisions to reduce their importance and the reliance the ecosystem has on one group. Ethereum users were never ethereum foundation users.

The other listed organisations and their clients are all excellent. This is a much more healthy approach.

Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering rather than going after the people actually committing crimes. Sounds about right.

Privacy is not a crime, it’s a human right! Sorry that it makes the polices job harder, but our rights are more important.

And didn’t we go through all this already in the 90s? Are we now gonna start arresting all cryptographers?

This is because they don’t like money that is independent from state control. They hate the idea of bitcoin and eth not being $ or €. The large majority of money laundering happens through banks, who just pay a fine and sweep it under the rug.

You should understand that this is a very USA centred opinion. There’s a whole big world of different cultures and politics, and it is possible to believe there are other approaches where we reject violence and authority.

It’s the usual “you’re helping drug dealers/terrorists/North Korea, but what about the children?!” state simping that ignores the violence of the existing systems, and ignores the billions of people in the world who aren’t any of the above and are also benefiting from our attempts to design systems that respect liberty.

I think we absolutely should build infrastructure that allows people within oppressive regimes options with which they can resist, escape, coordinate. For example, we shouldn’t accept that Iranian devs get booted off GitHub.

You are posting on hacker news.

Hacker.

The defining thing of hackers is taking things apart, understanding them, modifying, breaking, rebuilding, improving, dreaming!

What a sad ideology of “don’t touch, leave it to the authorities”