The real problem is that cryptocurrencies are a shitty technology. Ledger transactions are 4-5 orders of magnitude more expensive than traditional monetary transactions – they aren't "currencies" at all. They are long-hold assets at best.

Exchanges like FTX/Binance came along to paper over that shittiness with off-ledger transactions. But it's a scammer's paradise and moreover it violates the whole point of crypto which is to not have to trust a central authority.

The board apparently decided that no progress was the safest kind of progress. So they nuked the company. Threat eliminated.

At the risk of stating the obvious, most users don't care about app store choice, and never will. The only app store they'll ever use is the one that came with the device. Most people don't have an ideological axe to grind on things like this. They just want their $2 Candy Crush app with as little fiddling as possible.

Regulators can do whatever they want but economics wins out in the end. The app stores are natural monopolies.

I don't see this as anything more than a simple business decision. Twitch feels that certain types of content will hurt their brand, so they disallow that content. It's all just dictated by the social norms of the moment.

These rankings are predicated on a flawed idea that has been disproven empirically: That certain "selective" colleges give one a better education, and lead to better career outcomes. The data show that choice of undergraduate institution has almost no impact on a person's eventual career success; that correlates with one's choice of major, and how hard one studies in college. (The same isn't true of graduate institutions, where there is some evidence that institution does have a small impact on career outcomes.)

To be blunt, the value that a selective college provides to students is mostly as a reputation filter later on. Getting a degree from school X becomes a shorthand for "I was selected out through a highly competitive process" that sticks with you. It's a badge.

Given that, the only rankings that would make sense would be based on admissions selectivity. The schools with the lowest accept rates float to the top.

Google's position makes perfect sense to me. ChatGPT comes across as a well-informed bullshitter. Most of the time it's correct, but it often isn't, and either way it states everything with absolute confidence. From a user perspective it's both incredibly impressive and not super useful. Perhaps more narrowly-defined AIs like Github Copilot are more immediately useful as products.

People have also figured out how easy it is to prompt ChatGPT (and probably any similar large language model) to psychopathic responses of all kinds: How to exterminate race X, how to destroy civilization, and how to rape women and get away with it, to name a few that I've seen. No public company would wade into that PR nightmare.

If the iPhone costs $X in Brazil and the charger costs $Y, in Brazil only sell them as a bundle for $(X+Y). Then have a program where an unopened charger can be returned for $Y in store credit. Publicize how eco-friendly your program is by reducing e-waste. Everybody wins.

It's a false dichotomy to separate the world into criminals and non-criminals. Empirically there are quite a few people who in certain circumstances – road rage, getting into a drunken fight in a bar – will use firearms impulsively if they are easily available. Empirically there are also quite a few people who store weapons improperly which leads to accidents. Who knows, a voluntary buyback might avoid some of these cases.

There's a certain arrogance about the tech industry that's embedded in all this hand-wringing about women and minorities in tech. The implicit assumption is: These jobs, and this sector, is the pinnacle of the economy and therefore everybody must WANT these jobs. If you start with this presumption, then any lack of equal representation – in university majors, at companies – must be due to a problem somewhere in the system because those underrepresented people are being denied what we assume they all want.

People don't wring their hands over gender and racial equality in education, nursing, construction, or plumbing because we all understand that not necessarily everyone wants these jobs. Only the tech sector is arrogant enough to presume superiority over all other forms of employment.

As someone who has worked in tech my entire life, it's a good fit for me but I can 100% understand why it's a bad career choice for most people.

OP focuses on real-time language translation, which could be useful but won't impact day-to-day life very much for people in developed countries.

The real question is: What happens when these same technologies (Turing-passing chatbots, lifelike voice and facial synthesis) are put in the hands of marketers and propagandists? Eventually you flood every channel with so much shit that the only reasonable response will be to stop all interaction with unknown actors online.

As Daniel Kahneman points out, the risk here is that we humans don't even realize when we're being manipulated. So in the end, every sane person will want sophisticated systems to protect themselves from manipulation. I don't know what it looks like technologically but it will be necessary if we don't want to become mindless cogs, or tear apart our society from within.

Interestingly, Buffett has invested heavily in silver a few times in the past. Most recently in 1997 he purchased 3.5 thousand tons of silver, something like 10% of the world's stockpile at that time.

The difference being that silver has a lot of industrial uses, so by Buffett's standards it's a "productive asset".

Consider the fact, however, that the current set of crypto "currencies" are horrifically bad at being transactional currencies. (Transaction fees and transaction rates are at least 4 orders of magnitude worse than the Visa network, for example.) The price of the zero-trust model is steep. This is why they generally only see transactional use for illegal activities.

Now someone in the future may figure out a better transactional digital currency that is dramatically more efficient, and perhaps it will see broader uptake as a medium of exchange. However if that happens then today's cryptocurrencies will fall to zero usage. That's the way technology works right? Something much better comes along and replaces what came before. (Not much of a market for magnetic core memory these days. Not very many Gopher servers left.)

I agree with you that as a category there will likely always be a demand for some form of digital currency. However that doesn't say anything about the future value of any specific currency.

The author, Matthew Ginsberg, wrote a technical paper in 2014 describing the algorithms. From my quick read it looks like it solves as a constraint-satisfaction problem (CSP) using a search tree approach, with some heuristics to avoid going too far into a given branch when there are early errors ("limited discrepancy search"). The algorithm has surely evolved in the intervening years (recent collaboration with a Berkeley NLP group hinting that deep learning is now used). Not surprisingly it also relies on a very large corpus of crossword puzzles, clues, and word lists.

Forcing Google to divest its advertising business would, I think, result in a situation not much different than we have now. Google Search Inc. would get a large payment from Google Ads Inc. to include the latter's ads in the former's search results. Meanwhile Google Search Inc. would have exactly the same incentive it does now to do these kinds of access deals with gatekeepers like Apple and Mozilla. Google Search Inc. would still be using its market power to gain preferred access to customers. In effect you've just added another link in the chain of mutually-beneficial business relationships that locks in a given outcome.

If you also forced Google Search to accept ads from other ad platforms, and other ad platforms thrive, the net effect would be to drain all the value out of the ad networks (of which Google Ads is one). The value in a business process tends to concentrate where the market power is least fragmented, which would be Google Search. Again, it doesn't seem to solve any problem.

The only thing I can think of to remedy the concern here is to ban these types of preferred-access agreements. The problem THEN is that Apple would have a strong incentive to create its own search engine to use in its products, and recapture some of the $8B-12B Google annual payment it would lose (i.e., what Microsoft tried to do with Bing, but never really worked because neither Windows Mobile nor Internet Explorer had a strong market position). This outcome might have positive impacts for customers (more options for search), but it would result in more vertical integration at Apple. It wouldn't really improve the competitive landscape for the DuckDuckGos of the world.

I would be more concerned by anti-competitive issues if 100% of web searches came through these types of preferred-access agreements. As it is, a large fraction of Google searches are made via google.com on a regular web browser, and if a better rival came along, it's easy for customers to switch. This is how Google overtook Altavista. The REAL problem is that it's really hard to build a better mousetrap than Google: It's a service that is inherently expensive to build. It may be one of those situations that economists call a "natural monopoly".

I would put communication onto a list of activities that move the science enterprise forward, but tend to be undervalued compared with producing new research results. Great popularizers like Sagan, and great writers like Arthur Clarke, have done an enormous amount to inspire and motivate people.

Another group of undervalued people are the tools builders. Things like ArXiv, Mathematica, and so on improve the effectiveness of every researcher by a little bit, and their cumulative impact is enormous but we tend not to recognize them.