Comment Re: Nothing backs it (Score 1) 88
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.
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
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
Rich people don't liquidate assets when they want to buy something.
They get a loan against their assets. At extremely good rates. And no, they never pay them back. The strategy is called "buy, borrow, die".
First, you need to understand that if the stock price goes up more than their (low) interest rate, they're still making money.
Second, the whole thing is rolled up only when the ultra-rich person dies. The assets are revalued to their current market price at the time of death, wiping out decades of built-in capital gains tax liability. The estate can then sell a portion of the tax-free assets to pay off the outstanding loans.
tl;dr: They don't liquidate assets, if they did they'd have to pay taxes.
The reason for that isn't socialism, though. It's incompetence and corruption. Politics attracts the most incompetent and the most corrupt of people, always has and always will. Basically: If you're shit at everything else, you can always try making a career of telling other people what to do.
The whole point of stock markets and such is that you have hard core rational investors ensuring valuations are accurate.
In theory. In reality, that has always been bullshit. The various bubbles, crashes and other events prove that. Valuations on the stock market are based on expectations, and expectations always include an element that is not rational.
The result is the two most overvalued companies in history (Tesla and SpaceX).
True, though both of these companies do have an actual business and actual assets. There's plenty of companies on the stock market whose entire business can just pack up and leave tomorrow. Many of those are extremely highly valued. All the middle-men companies (ride sharing, food delivery, etc.) all work on the principle of outsourcing EVERYTHING. They hold no actual assets and their entire business model can be copied in a lazy weekend. Each and every one of them survives due to brand recognition, habit and by being just a little bit better in some way than alternatives. All of which can disappear in a week.
Tesla and SpaceX are overvalued. But they have factories and a workforce and produce things.Their value is not entirely made up.
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's like deja vu all over again." -- Yogi Berra