The correllary to "use it or lose it" is that the brain isn't just going idle, it's refocusing its efforts on other things that you are "using" instead.

The average person today could hardly identify all the wild edible plants in their area, change a horseshoe, or build a proper barn, like their ancestors hundreds of years ago could.

By contrast, their ancestors hundreds of years ago probably couldn't read.

Brains don't just go idle; they just refocus on different things. A wealthy Victorian often pursued a life of a polymath, seeking varied intellectual pursuits and sometimes making great discoveries, but they could probably scarcely tell you how to mend a shoe or even change a nappy - that was their servants job.

Also, it's quite the spin to present low MRI activity as "reduced function". It's commonly literally the opposite. If you present a novice with a task they're not used to, and an expert with the same task, the expert will tend to show much less activity than the novice, as the novice has to think harder to accomplish it, whereas it's become rote for the expert. Low activation on a task is commonly a sign of cognitive efficiency.

Yes, you're the second person to point out the typo, which would have been edited within seconds of me clicking "submit" if we had an edit button.

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.

so called LLM's

LOL

likely use the same backend technology

LOL

differences may be the weight

LOL

of the database'ed responses

LOL

Switch your pension funds, if you can, from NASDAQ to S&P.

... by getting angry at a person for not knowing a definition of a word that you have to use Urban Dictionary as a reference for.

It'd be fun to be that rich,

The funny thing is that he seems to constantly be miserable, at least when he's raging online inside the anger-echo chamber he built for himself.

I think wealth taxes are fundamentally a distraction from the giant loopholes in current systems, and even if you oppose wealth taxes, you should still fix said loopholes.

First off, people like Musk just take loans against their stock. This is not a realizing event, so they get to enjoy their gains without paying taxes on them. Using stock as collateral in any way should be a realizing event. If you're doing something that lets you enjoy the gains, you should be forced to realize the gains and pay taxes on them.

Secondly, capital gains are just income. They don't deserve a special lower rate. They should be taxed the same as other income, at normal income rates.

It's fair to argue about whether we should be doing more on top of these things, but can we at least agree that we should be doing these things, and make this the standard globally?