The comments here demonstrate a lot of AI Effect, to the point that most of it is clearly wishful thinking plus lack of experience with current-generation LLMs.

This whole debate is a little weird to me, because unassisted suicide is very easy, and cheap. Out of an abundance of caution I'll refrain from describing common cheap, painless, easy methods, but the information is very easy to obtain online. So it seems to me that the issue really only arises if the patient is already severely debilitated by their illness, such that they lack either physical capacity to carry it out. Those situations occur, of course, but they're far less common that the scope of the debate would seem to imply.

Thus, I think the first step any regulation should apply is to ask the question "Is the patient physically capable of unassisted suicide"? If the answer is yes, then no one may assist, except to provide information. This alone should filter out nearly all of the "greedy relatives" cases. If there's a case of an individual who says they want to die, and is physically capable of doing it but just can't bring themselves to... IMO that's a case of someone who hasn't really decided they want to.

Happy to: It has NO VALUE.

The problem here is that your definition of "value" is invalid. Your claim is equivalent to saying that shares of Apple stock have value because we have built systems to ensure that ownership of them is unique and non-duplicable, and that the supply is finite. But that is not what makes shares of Apple stock valuable. What makes them valuable is that they represent partial ownership of a company that produces and sells hundreds of millions of useful devices every year, among other things, and generates hundreds of billions in profits.

Shares of stock, dollars and bitcoins are all non-duplicable, finite-quantity tokens, but the shares of stock and dollars are tokens that represent something in the real world, while bitcoins represent nothing beyond proof that some electricity and some hardware was diverted to create them and transact them, rather than put to a productive purpose.

Yes, it's true that the guarantees of the non-duplicability and finite quantity are stronger for the coins than the others, which could theoretically make bookkeeping easier and reduce the need for auditing of transactions, but it turns out that the cryptoasset guarantees are hugely more expensive than the old way of bookkeeping and auditing, and the non-reversibility of crypto transactions is a fatal flaw for serious real-world use (though it's a boon for scams). If cryptoassets were easier and cheaper to exchange than traditional methods, and if there were a good way to address the reversibility gap, it would make sense for countries and companies to switch to using crypto-tokens rather than audited database entries. Maybe someday someone will invent a crypto-token design that achieves that, and then we'll trade shares of Apple stock by exchanging tokens on a blockchain (or similar). But even if we do that, it will still be the case that it's the ownership of a productive enterprise that provides value, not the token, no matter how elegant the cryptography.

Note that I'm not saying this because I don't understand the cryptography behind cryptoassets. I'm a mathematician and a professional cryptographic security engineer; this stuff is literally my day job, and has been for most of my 35-year career. I deeply understand the (actually quite simple, though cleverly assembled) cryptography and precisely what it does and doesn't do. It strongly ensures that there is a limited supply and that coins cannot be double-spent, and it does this in a decentralized way. That's it. The limited supply and non-duplicability are properties required of any asset, but aren't what give an asset value.

Most people fundamentally don't believe in markets. Look at how they react when prices rise due to a supply bottleneck or similar. They shout "Greed, we're being gouged!", even when there's plenty of competition to keep prices down and rising prices is actually the optimal solution to suppress demand in the short term and encourage increases in supply in the long term. Conservatives are worse than liberals these days, since conservatism/liberalism has evolved to be divided in large part by education level, and market mechanics are really non-obvious and counterintuitive unless you've had at least some level of formal (even if auto-didactic) education in basic economics.

I think markets are, to a first approximation, the ideal solution for every problem that involves optimization of large-group human behavior. Only when markets clearly don't or can't work should you even start to think about non-market alternatives, such as direct regulation, or even subsidies.

But shockingly few people agree. Carbon pricing immediately makes them want to know who's getting the money and why they should get it, even though that question is irrelevant to the primary goal.

I have great confidence in market-based solutions to rapidly move us toward optimal solutions to the climate problem. I have near-zero confidence that it's what we'll do. Heavy-handed, imprecise and mildly counter-productive regulation is the strategy we'll take, if anything.

More like 80% for me. I use Rust.

(In Rust, an expression without a semi-colon at the end of a block -- including at the end of a function -- is the return value for that block. This is used heavily in idiomatic Rust, which means there are lots of lines that do not end with semi-colons. The more you use short, single-purpose functions and the more you program in a functional style, the fewer semi-colons you use.)

I'm also a fan of market solutions. Most people aren't, though, and they're especially challenging with an international problem, so I don't think carbon taxes or warming fees is how we'll do it.

I think you present a false dichotomy. Several of the proposed geoengineering schemes are relatively inexpensive, though of course a lot of investment will be needed to demonstrate their practicality and effectiveness. I expect that geoengineering will be much cheaper than getting to net zero.

However, that doesn't mean we don't also need to get to net zero, because the geoengineering proposals only address warming, not the other effects of high atmospheric CO2. Ocean acidification and whatever is downstream of that is probably the biggest one, but there are others.

Geoengineering should be viewed as a short-term mitigation strategy, not a long-term solution. I think we'll need that mitigation, though. Assuming AI doesn't kill us all and render the whole question moot :-).

OK, then who will make the content that feeds the LLM?

Most the content that has been even lightly copy-edited, much less reviewed for clarity or coherence, comes from content creators who are making enough money to cover hosting, have a few editorial employees, and maybe pay a little to contributors. Those may be news sites (don't think CNN, think of Ratchet and Wrench or Tom's Hardware) or they may be Substacks, or YouTubers or even influencers, but somehow they're making enough money to make it worth their time.

The current business model and monopolism sucks in too many ways to, but there is money going to content creation and also allowing merchants to try to reach audiences.

It's really hard to see how "AI" stands up anything comparable, and that's before the bastards at OpenAI start paying for the content they stole from the rest of us.

Perhaps be careful what you wish for.

The web's current advertising business model has a couple parts. A search engine shows an ad next to organic results and directs traffic to content creators who show ads (most of which happen to also be offered by the search engine company... what monopoly?).

The basic business model is that advertisers pay content producers and the platform takes a cut.

The search + display business model, together with the web making much easier ability to switch between content producers (primarily magazines and newspapers) blew apart the old print media model which was subscriptions + ads. Because of this, many publications struggled to get enough subscription revenue to keep the doors open and/or greatly consolidated. People don't want to pay for what they feel they can get for free. That's made advertising revenue paramount for most content producers, and leads to the nasty ad farms that I also detest.

The thing is that LLM search engines require content that is reasonably fresh, and the content producers have to make money somehow or they'll stop making content. Right now, LLM search engines are showing no ads whatsoever, and their responses are based on uhhh "uncompensated" content. They're also all operating at enormous losses right now, with "awesomeness" or "AGI" as the answer for how they will make money.

To replace the existing business model, the LLM search engines need to find a way to direct payments to content producers so that these people keep making content. And that's before the content producers win back payments for their "uncompensated" content. Maybe OpenAI and Claude think their fancy "reasoning agents" can synthesize the content and cut out the content producers. There may be some modest opportunities to do that, but I have a hard time believing they can cut out content producers altogether - nothing I've seen suggests that LLMs can translate meatspace into digital content in any way that makes sense, much less is interesting or compelling to a human audience.

That means that LLM search engines either need to get the advertisers to pay them directly and send the money downstream to content producers (e.g. through some form of licensing). Maybe they embed the display ads into the LLM results (a la paid search). Alternately - more realistically - they need vastly larger subscription revenues to license content and still make money. That in turn requires a large proportion of the people who used to be the free users in a freemium model to become paid subscribers.

Let's make the absolutely heroic assumption that OpenAI manages to capture paid subscribers at the same rate as Netflix (~75%). Netflix's revenues are ~$40B, while Google's are $350B - an order of magnitude difference. To get anywhere near the revenues that Google makes, the average OpenAI/Claude subscriber would need to pay some 10x what a Netflix subscriber does. I find it awfully hard to see who all those people paying $100+ a month are. 85% of Prime Video subscribers are ad-supported, and Prime Video is just an extension of Amazon's modestly profitable sales business and highly profitable cloud infrastructure business.

And that's without DeepSeek, LLaMa and everything else on HuggingFace competing with what OpenAI and Claude are producing.

It also means you should expect LLM search engines start inserting ads or even monetizing placement into responses pretty soon. But as long as the LLM response is the end of the query, it's hard to see how anyone wants to pay to be placed, or how paid content doesn't erode the idea the LLM "summarized what the internet says".

I find it hard to see an economic path forward for what OpenAI seems to want to do, much less plausible revenues to justify the hype and valuation.

Well, yes -- the lies and the exaggerations are a problem. But even if you *discount* the lies and exaggerations, they're not *all of the problem*.

I have no reason to believe this particular individual is a liar, so I'm inclined to entertain his argument as being offered in good faith. That doesn't mean I necessarily have to buy into it. I'm also allowed to have *degrees* of belief; while the gentleman has *a* point, that doesn't mean there aren't other points to make.

That's where I am on his point. I think he's absolutely right, that LLMs don't have to be a stepping stone to AGI to be useful. Nor do I doubt they *are* useful. But I don't think we fully understand the consequences of embracing them and replacing so many people with them. The dangers of thoughtless AI adoption arise in that very gap between what LLMs do and what a sound step toward AGI ought to do.

LLMs, as I understand them, generate plausible sounding responses to prompts; in fact with the enormous datasets they have been trained on, they sound plausible to a *superhuman* degree. The gap between "accurately reasoned" and "looks really plausible" is a big, serious gap. To be fair, *humans* do this too -- satisfy their bosses with plausible-sounding but not reasoned responses -- but the fact that these systems are better at bullshitting than humans isn't a good thing.

On top of this, the organizations developing these things aren't in the business of making the world a better place -- or if they are in that business, they'd rather not be. They're making a product, and to make that product attractive their models *clearly* strive to give the user an answer that he will find acceptable, which is also dangerous in a system that generates plausible but not-properly-reasoned responses. Most of them rather transparently flatter their users, which sets my teeth on edge, precisely because it is designed to manipulate my faith in responses which aren't necessarily defensible.

In the hands of people increasingly working in isolation from other humans with differing points of view, systems which don't actually reason but are superhumanly believable are extremely dangaerous in my opinion. LLMs may be the most potent agent of confirmation bias ever devised. Now I do think these dangers can be addressed and mitigated to some degree, but the question is, will they be in a race to capture a new and incalculably value market where decision-makers, both vendors and consumers, aren't necessarily focused on the welfare of humanity?

Yeah, I figured that. My point was just that "fixed" is just an accurate description of my income/budget (and probably yours) as it is of hers. I knew what you meant, I was just pointing out that the terminology we use doesn't make sense.

The price of a cryptocurrency reflects those things. It's value is zero. Period. There is nothing behind it.

No, fiat currencies are backed by debt, meaning that real people and companies have made enforceable legal commitments to do real work to generate the value backing the dollars or whatever. Without getting into the details, every time a dollar is created, that creation is balanced by the creation of a dollar of debt, the commitment of some productive entity to produce value to repay that debt (and thereby destroy that dollar). As a common example, when you borrow money to buy a house, the bank doesn't lend you money [*] that other people deposited, it creates that money out of thin air at the same instant you sign an enforceable contract to repay it, meaning you commit to do some sort of value-producing work to generate the value of those dollars.

Derivatives represent specific legal contracts to perform some action, e.g. buy a fixed amount of stock from the derivative seller on or by a specific date for a specific price, and those contracts get their value from the underlying security. That underlying security can also be some sort of contractual obligation rather than a hard asset, but if you keep digging down the layers you always get to something real. It's always possible, of course, that the layers of repackaging make the actual value hard enough to see that its price becomes divorced from that value (and stock pricing also gets divorced from underlying value to various degrees), but at bottom there must be something of actual substance. Further, if markets were perfectly efficient, it would not be possible for the price to move away from the value.

None of this is true with cryptoassets. Their true value is zero (arguably, negative, since proof of work is a pure sink that generates no utility), so any price above zero represents market inefficiency/insanity.

[*] It used to be that the bank created most of the money under the fractional reserve system, but for quite a while now most of the developed world has abandoned the reserve lending requirements, enabling banks to effectively create all of the money they lend. This might seem like a crazy system, but it's actually pure genius because it allows the money supply to expand and contract with the economy, which along with Keynsian fiscal policy massively reduces the boom and bust cycles we regularly experienced before we switched from metallic to fiat currency.

Aside: That phrase "fixed budget" and its twin "fixed income" always strike me as curious. I mean, short of changing jobs, most of us have a fixed income and therefore a fixed budget... and changing jobs isn't necessarily an option.

I guess maybe it's just a euphemism for "small income" or "small budget".

That would be very risky. It's more likely the court would order the administration to enforce it immediately. The administration would appeal that up to SCOTUS, but SCOTUS has already made its opinion very clear and would almost certainly uphold the order. At most they might slow walk it. Trump might simply refuse to obey the court order, but that's a very big step with a lot of risk for him, and while he might well take that step in some context he cares enough about, this isn't it. Not without a really big payoff, anyway.

No, the status quo is the best outcome for ByteDance. AFAICT, no one other than ByteDance and Congress has standing to sue over enforcement, and Congress isn't going to, so if ByteDance doesn't the courts can't intervene. ByteDance can just keep slipping cash to Trump and he can just keep extending. That's a win for ByteDance and a win for Trump. If you believe TikTok's influence over young Americans and the data it can collect is a national security risk, then it's a loss for the American people, but no one cares about that. Even if you don't believe that, it's a loss for Congress, whose authority is being flouted -- but the current Congress seems fine with that in a hundred other situations, so why not this one? ByteDance has no motive to rock this boat.

Very well put.

Crypto bros think what they'll get from regulation is respect and trust, and they're right. But that respect and trust will arise from transparency, and that transparency will also show that the emperor has no clothes. Proper regulation of cryptocurrencies will spell the eventual end of cryptocurrencies, at least as they exist today. It'll take a while, but it will happen.

Perhaps along the way someone will come up with a cryptocurrency design that actually works as a currency, providing convenient, fast, low-cost transactions that somehow manage to be cheaper than moving numbers in an audited bank database. But unless that happens, real scrutiny and regulation of cryptocurrencies will just end them.