iabacu

One thing that you overlook is something that even Xi points out as an issue: right now, China needs more quality than quantity.

For example, in semiconductors, Taiwan, with a much smaller population (and arriving late in the game) beat the US, Japan and Korea. China, with 600k STEM graduates per year, is still trying to catch up.

On covid vaccines, even Russia has their own vaccine that reach mRNA levels of protection, but China is still stuck with the Covid Zero policy.

Quantity was definitively an asset for Chinese growth based on cheap labor. That source of growth is almost running dry (to the point where they are resorting to labor camps). But at some point, quantity becomes more of a liability.

An animal sample from the wet market that was shut down. (I spooned they were all bagged).

If they were all destroyed, then go get a sample from their natural reservoir (wherever those animals came from)

This is not about children, though, it's about investors.

If Nike makes a material claim to investors (e.g. that children labor is not used), but the claim is revealed to be knowingly false, then that's securities fraud.

Even if the guess is reasonable and is eventually true, like "we'll need to scale, so might as well prepare for 100x capacity now", it's still frequently a mistake to over engineer.

The architecture to support something that is not needed tends to introduce rigidity into the codebase, adding a tax to future changes in order to maintain those features.

If the over-engineering is in the wrong dimension (one that the project doesn't need), then the cost will be double: adding the over-engineering and then detangling from it.

The problem is there are too many dimensions a given project can be over-engineered if the future is uncertain. So even an educated guess has a good chance of being wrong.

Why stop at scanning photos in your phone?

With lower power sensors, head-mounted devices with always-on-sensors, and whatnot, why not sample real-time hashes that can tip LEO about potential crimes happening?

Then why sacrifice recall in order to achieve high accuracy?

Err on the side of uploading more hashes. Then feed it all into a ML so it can use other data to filter out potential false positives.

Then if in a distance future, any LEO wants to investigate you for whatever reason, the set of potential hashes associated with your account will provide sufficient evidence for any court to authorize further non-hashed data access (it doesn't matter if they were all false positives)

The argument about POW energy is overblown.

There's an exponential decay of rewards of mining BTC (50% every 4 years).

Do you think the price of BTC will increase exponentially, faster than the decay over the long term? I don't think so.

This implies that the energy consumption of bitcoin mining will eventually decay exponentially too.

This is bizarre.

If the intern did steal code, the CEO only wants the project to be taken down?

Any IP agreement worth their salt would require Replit to send a formal/legal request asking the intern to destroy and return any stolen IP.

So I call bullshit on the CEO, and the intern should probably sue Replit for slander.

The difference between what Amjad tweets publicly and what Amjad threatens the ex-intern privately is jarring.

That makes me think that either the tweets are empty virtue signaling; or Amjad is legit worried that an intern open-source project can accidentally outcompete his company!

Last year people would jokingly say that the headline this year would be "bitcoin crashes to 30k", and that was dismissed as stupidly bullish.

It's amazing to me that the real answer on how to make renewable energy economical (while avoiding the ecological toxicity of building utility-scale batteries) are getting downvoted.

By the way.

If one thinks about tracking the carbon cost of a mined BTC (based on the energy source used to mine it) such that a carbon tax can be accurately exacted, the usage of blockchain to track carbon offsets and cost is a pretty obvious thing that comes to mind.

> This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof of work cryptocurrencies.

That's not only radical, but a grotesque knee jerk reaction.

If you think about renewable energy, there's a problem of mismatched production with consumption and transmission. This causes wasted energy (or energy that is very low value), which makes renewable energy projects less viable.

Sure, one obvious way to address that is to add batteries to store such energy. Now, go mine (and refine) enough lithium to build utility-scale batteries. That's a huge environmental issue that no one wants to talk about, specially Tesla/Elon.

What's a competitor to energy batteries? Proof-of-work mining of bitcoin: it make renewable energy projects economically viable, because the energy of low-usage times can be used to mine bitcoin, which can pay for energy of high-usage times.

If there's an environmental/carbon cost to BTC mining, then attach a carbon tax to it (or something like that).

I think you’re making cash a bigger deal than it is.

If you have collateral that can also be transferred in real-time, can’t that back a cash loan immediately with extremely low interest costs?