I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to. The three possibilities:

1) The training is distilling their own model? Yes, I guess you could argue that. It's even dumber than the argument about distilling other peoples' models though.

2) The contractor using a third party model to evaluate the output of the contracting company's model: yeah, you could argue that's distilling. That's on the contractor who's not doing what they're supposed to be though.

3) Or did you mean you're distilling the contractors' brains? You are doing that yes. That's explicitly what they're getting paid for.

A Merkle Tree is not a tree of hashes. Unless you want to say, hashkeys are sorted in a Merkle Tree as a set of hashes.

I have no idea what you're trying to say with this.

I did reread your original message and, minus the bullshit at the beginning, if your point is that Bitcoin's transaction tracking is novel, it's not. It was proposed by Hal Finney in 2004. Satoshi neglects to reference it.

I was also incorrect. Bitcoin didn't come up with the hash based proof of work concept either. That's reference 6.

They probably never dreamed big companies would put these cheap boards in everything.

I'd be surprised if they didn't. Industrial computers were stupidly priced before the Raspberry Pi. Lots of them still are. And industrial customers care much more about whether the drivers work than whether they're open source.

"Word-guessing?" How does this naive notion persist?

It's true. Kind of. Just enough to make a catchy false premise.

Also, the human brain is barely comfortable with binary. It does not like probability, much less distributions. It especially doesn't like conditional distributions.

They don't need contractors for that

They do need contractors for that. That's what the contractors are doing. The model produces a couple of outputs and a human chooses which one they think is better. That goes in the training data. You can also ask the same or another model which is better, but that defeats the purpose.

Police generally don't need a warrant to request security camera footage or obtain it voluntarily. They need a warrant to compel the owner to give it to them.

Whether the owner volunteers footage and under what conditions they do so is pretty much up to them. Ring used to be pretty free about it but clamped down when it became controversial. Public sources like traffic cameras are likewise up to the public agency or government that owns them and they often have privacy laws or policies that might require warrants.

Flock is obviously motivated to cooperate with police requests since that's the service they're providing. It isn't "the way it's always been" but the OP's suggestion of requiring warrants could be easily implemented. Tapping phones without a warrant was perfectly legal in the US until it became a problem and a law was passed.

Like this one?

Your weird unfounded claim isn't really worthy of much of a reply. But for any innocent who's reading and is tempted by the bitcoin bro nonsense, here's Satoshi's whitepaper:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pd...

Quoting:

transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5],

There's a diagram too. Those references are:

[7] R.C. Merkle, "Protocols for public key cryptosystems," In Proc. 1980 Symposium on Security and
Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, pages 122-133, April 1980.

[2] H. Massias, X.S. Avila, and J.-J. Quisquater, "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimal
trust requirements," In 20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, May 1999.

[5] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Secure names for bit-strings," In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference
on Computer and Communications Security, pages 28-35, April 1997.

As you might guess, the paper by Merkle is the one that proposed the cryptographic hash tree arrangement that we now call "Merkle trees." Here it is:

https://www.ralphmerkle.com/pa...

Or the Wikipedia article about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Whether hunt/gathering can be sustainable depends entirely on circumstances

Uh, yes?

Nomadic peoples could move about psuedorandomly due to chance, or move in circles with purpose.

Also yes? Are you sure you're replying to the right post?

Uh huh. Sure it doesn't.

When you consider the electoral collage, gerrymandering, corporate lobbying and PACs, billionaires literally writing million-dollar checks to people to get them to vote (for "any candidate", wink wink), and now the Federal Executive trying to put its thumb on the scales by controlling which and how people are allowed to vote, it's really hard to feel like one person voting makes a damn bit of difference.

One person voting doesn't make a difference. That's called democracy. When it does, you've got some type of oligarchy. One person's vote does, however, count. Your complaints are that each of those votes doesn't count equally, and that's valid. "Counts less" still counts though. And the way to fix all that is by voting for people who will fix it. Even if they're not approved by one of two corporations. Once you've lost the ability to do that, which you are heading towards, then you've only got one option left, and it's not a good one.

The US is operating on something like democracy version 0.7 and you guys have refused to install any significant patches for the last fifty years or so. Meanwhile you've let yourselves be propagandized into believing in things like "coequal branches" and election funding as free speech. You're not going to overturn all that with one vote. But if you don't like being responsible for killing kids, and let's be clear, it's a hell of a lot more than 123, you vote whenever you can. Unless you're okay with it, in which case you also vote.

Do antelope face the tragedy of the commons?

Absolutely they do. Nomadic animals, humans included, use up resources faster then they're replenished. They move because if they don't they'll die. The tragedy of the commons is the natural state of the simplest game theory. It's overcome by the ability to cooperate, which a few species have evolved, and a few more have refined into complex societies, i.e. civilization.

I don't understand why this would boost Bitcoin

I suspect the reason is exactly the one you mentioned: "[you don't] bother with the differences between them and just lump them all together in [your] mind."

Someone says "blockchain" and people think Bitcoin. In truth, the concept of a "blockchain" existed long before Bitcoin and today when someone says it they almost certainly don't mean anything much like Bitcoin's particular implementation, much less Bitcoin itself.

I asked chatGPT. It basically recommended all of the things they've already done: using strategic reserves, easing import restrictions and reducing refinery bottlenecks. Then I asked if it was aware that the US is at war with Iran. So it searched the web, presumably read some recent news and recommended reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

So maybe they did ask chatGPT.

it isn't faced by nomadic hunter-gatherers

Hunter-gatherers are generally nomadic because of the tragedy of the commons. They show up, hunt and gather out the area they're in with no motivation to manage it sustainably, then move elsewhere to do the same thing again. Nomads don't "face" tragedy of the commons, they pack up and leave. It becomes a problem that needs to be solved for civilizations because they give up that option.