I have a hard time believing that a particular encryption will remain unbreakable, quantum computers or not. At the moment, we have Shor's algorithm for factoring numbers on QCs, so we should avoid relying on the hardness of factorization. How can we be sure that there won't be new algorithms in the future that break the current "post-quantum" encryption?

During my advanced math studies, I only took a rather introductory course on encryption, including stuff like Galois fields and elliptic curves. I recall my professor saying that none of the current encryption methods (besides something like the one-time pad) are proven to be safe; we just don't know any efficient methods of breaking them at the moment.

It's easy to keep making new highs when the value of USD itself is in a free fall. Look at USD vs. EUR charts, for example.

Why not? It's originally a quotient of two numbers multiplied by 100, just like any other percentage.

"Originally, IQ was a score obtained by dividing a person's mental age score, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person's chronological age, both expressed in terms of years and months. The resulting fraction (quotient) was multiplied by 100 to obtain the IQ score." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Thank you for putting this so clearly. I said basically the same thing in the first post, and I was soon modded as flamebait.

You paid for a closed-source service where you're at the mercy of the publisher's whims. What did you expect?

Practically zero, just like the thickness of the atmosphere relative to the size of Earth.

Fair point, but there are a lot of large and influential companies that don't pay any dividends, because they invest their profits directly into growth and development. For example Nvidia.... well, they seem to pay 0.03 % of the current stock price, so essentially zero. The only economically sensible reason to invest in them is speculation; if there's some "useful economic activity" involved, the only way you'll get a piece of it is by buying low and selling high.

Cryptocurrencies have the same utility as banks, and many banks have been working on their own blockchains for years, for example JP Morgan: https://fintechmagazine.com/ar...

The stock market comparison is really just a side effect of what cryptocurrencies are all about, which is transferring money in ways that traditional banks can't do -- pseudonymously and independent of governments or businesses. Store of value and speculation is one thing, but you can't send NVDA shares (or gold, or tulips) across the globe with this kind of speed and freedom. Cryptocurrencies have value because they provide this service, you don't really pay just for the store of value.

Inductive heating of gold nanoparticles is a thing in cancer research, e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...

So it's just like the regular stock market.

Math and science geeks know this, and that's why we use proper formatting tools such as LaTeX, not a glorified Paint.

You axolotl questions.

The history of AI is all about modeling human intelligence, just like the models we have in natural sciences. If the model happens to be a very good match with reality, we may sometimes mistake one for the other. OTOH, they may be the same thing for all practical purposes.

I'm not sure if I have any deeper intelligence than a fancy language model. When we say that LLMs don't really understand things, then what exactly do we mean by understanding? In my personal definition, the meaning of something is simply the graph of its associated things. I consider something very meaningful if the graph has a lot of nodes and edges, and this also explains why simple things gain more meaning as we age.

Well, if it's OK for a business to freely use copyrighted material for their commercial, for-profit purposes, then it throws out all arguments against non-commercial, non-profit "piracy". In other words, the court cases make a great test for the whole idea of copyright — they can't have their cake and eat it too.

How would an AI mine Bitcoin? Two extremes come to mind:

(a) It uses a language model to compute SHA2-256 hashes "by hand", and starts demanding more data centers to make a decent buck.

(b) It figures out a vulnerability in SHA2-256 and takes over the network.

you were told not to (a) copy that floppy and (b) waste precious energy on cryptocurrency mining. But when big companies are building data centers for industrial-scale copyright infringement, it's suddenly OK. Because it's "busyness" done by white men in uncomfortable suits, not by idealistic young hobbyists.