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.

Just waiting for some vibe coder at Google to say the Gemini AI wrote it.

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.

Charter subscriber to Byte Magazine here. I built my Altair 8800 from the Popular Science article. Article left out the First Annual World Altair Computer Convention, March 1976 in Albuquerque, New Mexico,

It is Claude 4 Opus the top model publicly available.

Without credit card you can get 50 prompts.
With credit card you can get 14 day free trial of the $50 600 prompt account.

Now get the judge in the Google anti-trust trial to order Google to create this are you're done. I don't think the proposal is unreasonable, someone just needs to get it in front of the right people. Google would certainly prefer doing this instead of selling off Chrome.