And also an inflationary currency is a very bad thing.

For one, it screws over debtholders (aka, most people), as the value of the debt owed grows instead of declining. If you work for a company making lumber, and a given board sells for $10 now, but 20 years from now sells for $5, and you sell the same number of boards per unit labour with the same relative margin, then all else being equal, your salary must be half in 20 years what it is today. But that mortgage that you took out today for $200k is still $200k (adjusted for interest and payment of principal). Which you have to pay on with a salary that is half what it is in dollars. That person is totally screwed.

Secondly, it discourages spending. The more you delay purchases, the more you'll be able to buy in the future. So everyone is encouraged to not spend. Which screws over your economy. It also screws over your tax base when taxation is based on taxing spending. Meaning you have to raise your spending-related taxes, which further discourages spending.

Third, it worsens wealth inequality. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you have no savings. If you're a billionaire, you have a lot of savings. The billionaires see their assets grow and grow, and it comes at the cost of the working class. Also, said billionaires are encouraged to keep their money as cash rather than investment, which further ruins your economy.

This is no way to run an economy.

Another thing you REALLY don't want in an economy is instability. Aka, Bitcoin's fundamental nature, because it has no fundamentals and no attempt at monetary policy. Economies are fundamentally unstable. If you do not regulate them, they swing wildly. The faster an economy moves - and economies keep moving faster as technology advances, it no longer takes half a year for goods to arrive on a sailing ship or weeks to communicate with the other side of your country - the more unstable it is. This is terrible for both individuals and businesses.

What you want in an economiy is:

* Stability
* Low and steady inflation - a couple percent, to encourage spending, slowly devalue debts, and encourage investment. Too much is bad. Too little is bad.

Yet, silver is valuable as both a monetary metal and industrial metal.

Unlike bitcoin. You summed it up nicely right there.

Right now, I want to buy tin-silver alloy, to use in casting. But the prices of both tin and silver are insanely expensive right now. So I'm not buying now. If the prices go down? I'll buy. If they go down a lot? I'll buy a lot, perhaps even to sell on my sales website. And this buying is to *use* it. Which takes it off the market. There are fundamentals behind silver.

There are no fundamentals behind bitcoin.

401ks have fundamentals behind them (comprised of companies that make products and services that people want to buy, generally as repeat-buys)

Governments have fundamentals (the ability to levy taxes, backed by the full force of the courts, the police, and ultimately, the military)

Bitcoin has no fundamentals. It's a collectible. Its value is based purely how much people want that collectible. The only reason, as was stated, that people were buying it was as a lottery ticket. But there is no reason to "own" it beyond that. It's not generating dividends or doing stock buybacks based on profits. It's just there for those who want to collect it. And its value depends on how much people want to collect it.

(Arguably its greatest power is that its holders stand to lose so much if regulation goes against them that they tend to be very politically active, with large donations to pro-crypto candidates)

Eh... I think the "used for all kind of dangerous things" started with GPT-3. I used GPT-2 a good bit back in the day, and it couldn't pass as a person, let alone reason out as a cyberattack.

Since it wasn't instruction fine-tuned, you couldn't trust that GPT-2 would ever do what you wanted. The best you could do is "cute it" with leading text and hoping that it doesn't go off on a tangent. That said, you could kinda use it for things with decent reliability. For example, you could write a long paragraph, then write: "Or, to sum up everything above in one sentence" - and then (hopefully) get a one-sentence summary.

It could sort of try to write recipes ("Here is a recipe for [X]. INGREDIENTS:"), but far from usable (I remember that one contained vermiculite ;) ). You could write plays by starting out a play format, though the plotting was fairly incoherent. You could set it up to write a joke and it'd end up writing long anti-jokes where the punch-line never actually comes (in one, I set it up with "A nun, a priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar...", and it ended up with the bartender saying something antisemitic, everyone getting uncomfortable, and leaving, and priest turning to camera and talking about how antisemitism is bad). Etc.

It was this tantalizing glimpse of what was to come - not YET useful, but hinting at what could come if the models improved sufficiently. I don't think many people expected how quickly it would improve.

When GPT-3 came out (but not yet 3.5, aka ChatGPT), the writing quality was clearly dramatically improved. People were writing articles about GPT-3 using GPT-3, and only copyediting to piece the (small) chunks together. For me the big "Nothing Will Be The Same Again" moment was the "TheGentleMetre" scandal on Reddit, where it was discovered that someone had connected GPT-3 to their Reddit account... but it took like a month for them to get caught, and even then only because they were posting 24/7 at a regular pacing. And it was the fact that they weren't just writing arbitrary nonsense, but that there was logic to what they were writing. For example, one person asked something like "Would you rather have a psychopath or a Nazi as a roomate?" and it made a reasoned argument about how with a psychopath, there's something mentally broken with them, whereas with the Nazi, it's an ideology and there's still the possibility of changing that ideology. Back in that era, the notion that an AI model could do this was pretty staggering.

I mean, it is a pretty impressive model. And not just from the benchmarks. Relentlessly proactive and resourceful. It's a shame it's cut off.

Reduction != None. Cities approve them because that even with any incentives offered they'll be raking in the cash, because the value of a datacentre is so high (even if you're in an area that only counts building + cooling + power interconnects + etc, but not the servers within, toward the property tax base)

You cannot simultaneously complain about consumer electricity prices and datacentres being bad neighbors due to having power plants on-site. Take your pick.

Datacentres buying power ALSO equals tax revenue, en masse, because electricity is taxed. And all of the jobs associated with providing that electricity.

A datacentre means a huge amount of income to the locality where it's at, plain and simple.

You know what property taxes are, right?

I mean, not surprising really. The military is less white than the general US population, and lower income than the US average.

I can also understand how the current administration's actions may be... less than popular.

No reactions yet? My main question is which AI was used for so many attacks in such a short time.

Think of all the criminal hackers who lost their jobs!

(But I'm not actually curious enough to research which AI was used. I'd have to ask an AI, and I'm sure it would just say "It wasn't me!")

You're picking nits on an imaginary solution for a mostly imaginary, dare I say fake, problem. Even if they're large and interesting nits.

So my imaginary solution approach to the dimensional collapse on the profit dimension would be a progressive profits tax related to market share. Main area of overlap with your ideas is probably the third one, where one of the ways to detect monopoly status is the lack of freedom of employees to switch to a competing company.

Parent should have been the FP and I'm glad to see it spanned about half the discussion. But I'm just judging by the scrollbar. Mostly I only check the longer discussions on Slashdot for Funny these days. Saves vast amounts of time while producing the same amounts of disappointment.

However on the verbosity topic, I actually ran the obvious test past a number of genAIs. "Can you answer any question as briefly as possible?" Rather to my surprise, about half of them managed to answer "Yes" and then shut up.

But the genAIs are still too stupid to make good recursive jokes. At least one of them should have answered "No."

My latest AI experiments have been AI-supported programming with Claude. I'm rather sorry to report that I'm quite impressed in spite of myself. We "discuss" the problems and function points for a while, and Claude often manages to ask and answer useful questions. It doesn't spew reams of random code and wild guesses at me. After we have reached agreement on what to do and how to do it, then it takes about a minute or three to generate the next version of the system. (Currently a new front end for an ancient database. I would estimate that the PERL functionality was surpassed in about 10% of my programming time. But probably less. (However I was learning PERL at the same time, whereas Claude always codes (or at least seems to code) like a fluent native speaker of the language. Mostly JavaScript in my current project.))

Feeding the trolls never works. And you don't have to propagate a vacuous Subject.

Trust is dead in America, but it wasn't of old age or natural causes. It was murdered. I actually think Reagan may deserve the largest slice of personal blame, but by market segment, it was probably the advertisers that did it. Can you remember the last ad that you trusted?

Hey, here's a really crazy idea. Why if I could ask to see trustworthy information from trustworthy companies that are honestly selling the goods and services I want to buy without any fake needs created by marketing departments? The non-ads would help me answer my questions and decide on the best value.

Naw. It's much cheaper and vastly more profitable to produce and sell unwanted and useless garbage disguised with ads. LOTS of ads. (And of course that includes garbage politicians sold to voters on Election Day.)

The joke of the day explaining why nothing gets done is Rumplicans versus Dumbocrats. The orange-nosers can't see or smell any problems because their noses are firmly inserted and the other side is too busy running around and hunting for flying elephants.But betwixt and between the two of them the country is going to heck in the proverbial handbasket.

It's not just that America has become unable to change and solve real problems. Sometimes the Constitution needs to be amended. But now it's reached the point where the "powers that be" can't even maintain the fake solutions for the fake problems.But not to worry. The fake stock market is booming. (The stock market has also become a recursive joke where the fastest growing and biggest companies join the DOW precisely because the DOW caused them to be big and fast. Laughing all the way?)

But trust didn't die of natural causes. It was murdered. Apparently while sleeping.

What to do but laugh?

so called LLM's

LOL

likely use the same backend technology

LOL

differences may be the weight

LOL

of the database'ed responses

LOL

Just asking for a friend in the business. But if you ask, I insist it was just a joke and there is no such friend.

Actually, I think the corruption is the most communist aspect of the story--but we Westerners are catching up fast.

Now about the AI part of it. The best new scam I've seen recently was actually almost a year ago and involved impersonating a celebrity. But from the tone of the scam at that time I considered it most likely to be using DeepSeek or possibly ChatGPT rather than Gemini or Copilot or Claude...

The "humanized" local versions are linked to remote-control crime with disposable human part-timers. Suggestive that the third-level crook they were chasing apparently fled through China? However, they're pretty sure he quickly left China for parts still unknown.

Returning to the suggested Subject and fantasizing about solutions, I actually think it would be possible to get Xi to pass some suitable laws, though it might be harder to get them enforced.