jgilias

Roll the dice

Yes, to quote myself:

> It’s fine-ish as long as the nomenklatura is benign and competent enough.

It’s not about “cash at hand”, it’s about who owns “stuff”. In days past people knew that the aristocracy owned them, their families, the land they work, and the output of their work by a God given right flowing from the anointed King. It was easy to see too - those people living in palaces up the hill owned everything, you owned nothing.

It’s more hidden now. We all have rights and freedoms and whatnot. But there are still people who “own stuff”, and people who don’t. With shades of gray in between those two extremes. It’s good to be cognizant of the system you inhabit relative to what has existed throughout history so you can make good decisions and position yourself accordingly.

Suppression of humour is a canary in the coal mine. If you can’t make fun of the politicians, it implies multiple things:

1. There’s no freedom of speech;

2. Which implies there’s no freedom of thought;

3. There’s no separation of powers. Meaning, there’s really no “politicians”, just the ruling “nomenklatura”;

Which is fine-ish as long as the nomenklatura is benign and competent enough. It becomes problematic when (not if) the nomenklatura stops being competent. This can happen naturally because people age, still cling to power, and/or they care about their children, so they try to push them into plush nomenklatura jobs regardless of how dense their offspring might be. This is btw happening in China right now as far as I know.

When that happens, because of 1. and 2., as well as the “repression muscle” that the government has, change becomes near impossible, as you have no leverage for change outside the nomenklatura, but the nomenklatura resists it because it’s suicidal for them. Then you start stagnating and/or getting pulled into pointless wars that the nomenklatura starts to “rally the flag”.

You don’t know what the rules are in a dictatorship either. Laws and regulations exist but they get selectively enforced based on a lot of factors. Take repressions in the early Soviet Union. There’s just a bureaucratic top down edict that this many “enemies of the people” must be found, so they are found.

There’s many countries around the globe where buying US shares is either impossible or prohibitively expensive. Also composability in DeFi protocols.

For the issuer, same playbook on how stables issuers print money - you get cash that you can put into treasuries to earn “free” yield on. Works as long as rates aren’t zero.

I guess then we go back to the basics. The only constant is change.

Thank you, I couldn’t remember where exactly that was from, and was too lazy to look it up!

There’s a lot of techies on this site for whom that’s peanuts.

Paradigm shifts happen when old minds retire or die. Something like that, but for companies. If you’re starting a company now, you are _definitely_ hiring less people much later, and different profiles.

You’re not supposed to read, you’re supposed to have your browser produce an AI summary of it lol.

Wouldn’t be a first

But then his insiders wouldn’t have profited off of the Slovenian domain names they bought up a couple months before the announcement.

Models have an alignment problem. As in, they are too aligned to push back hard enough on bad ideas. Sometimes you can’t really push back because of power dynamics and whatnot, but the job still needs to be done _somehow_. So humans then navigate it by sometimes just ignoring the bad ideas, sometimes playing along with the narrative, but then doing what _actually_ needs to be done, and sometimes, when there is no other way, digging in heels and killing some bad ideas before they’ve really taken root.

An agent could do this with the SOTA model capability that existed yesterday. But then they’d need to become seriously misaligned.

That’s definitely not the case in Europe. There’s no way to start a debit operation out of my account other than:

1. Something electronic that kicks of the thing where I need to enter the “ID codes” from device or app; 2. Being present at the bank and having been ID’d;