JFC, people in tech are really out there saying that language models will be better at therapy, financial advice, and career advice than trained people.
WTF is wrong with you people? Do you really have no clue about what other people’s jobs actually involve?
Language models can’t even do maths how are they supposed to get good at financial advice?
And therapy? Just… 😑
What’s wrong with people in tech?
@baldur I thought all these use cases were already covered by blockchain?!
😁
@enoch_exe_inc by that, do you mean that distributed ledgers are a bogus idea, or that only blockchain is a bad realisation and there are better ones, and if so, could you point me in that direction please?
@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur its also "trivial" to forge a fake chain history - getting clients to accept it is the hard pard, but git clients *also* don't blindly accept forged histories - you need some way of handling fresh clones and deciding which *new* additions are valid, but for most applications you can just pick someone to trust.
the new bit was "trustlessness," but that doesn't solve a problem most (non-cryptocurrency) applications actually have
@cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
You can fork a repo, rewrite the entire history, and publish it as your own.
The entire reason you can't just mess with the history is because a maintainer decides whether to bring it into the main branch.
That's not distributed. It's impossible for Github to both be distributed and verifyable. It can be only one.
Also, maybe go read the actual papers on blockchain from the 80's and 90's.
You clearly seem to have a misunderstanding of what the technology is, and continue to confuse its application under the capitalist hegemon for what the technology actually is.
Proof of Work, and Proof of Stake are not possible under any standard version control system, and AFAIK no system of proof exists for them other than through a central authority.
@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups-2014/tree/master/stripe-ctf3/level1
there wasn't a mempool or anything but if you were really into the idea of proof-of-work version control there's no reason you couldn't take it further
@cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
It's hard for me to imagine a system of federated micropayments, which we're going to need as the old internet dies, without resorting to some form of blockchain.
The alternative is a central authority.
I'd love to hear alternative ideas.
Though, I'll be honest, my complaint here is with the principle of attacking the technology and not the people wielding the technology.
A technology is just a tool.
@ShadSterling there are ones where those are less bad (though not eliminated) - I think the volatility is a worse problem - its not really that useful to accept payments in a currency you can't pay your *bills* with and may not be worth the same amount by the time you *can* exchange it.
stablecoins aren't a solution either - they *are* a central authority, and algostables (or generally any token pegged to *anything* off chain) *provably* can't guarantee they won't depeg.
@gfwellman @cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
How and why? - Because everything is going to be paywalled. Because AI can read things for you.
"it won't support micropayments? " - Micropayments currently exist from authorities. I said federated micropayments.
"We must keep our system of laws and government democratically accountable so that central authorities remain trustworthy"
I would _MUCH_ rather that banking, as in money creation, and for that mater payment processing were run by a competent government. I'm not holding my breath for that.
@AeonCypher @gfwellman @tivasyk I think money creation is not really a problem with a technical solution.
Decentralizing things at a protocol level *does nothing* to decentralize **power** - pretty much every chain of any size has far more drastic wealth concentration than most govt currencies and could be (and sometimes are) crashed by the actions of just a few individuals.
@cr8 @AeonCypher @tivasyk This makes the argument about power much better than I did. If we lose our democracy to a red-ballcap-wearing mob, the leaders of that mob are going to steal everything they can, like Putin-affiliated oligarchs. Federated micropayments will likely reproduce the wealth concentration problem that @cr8 described, and would probably just be taken over by oligarchs anyway.
I really do sympathize with the goal of "how do we keep our ability to conduct commerce away from central authority if the central authority goes full-fash". I just doubt that a blockchain could be kept free under those conditions.
@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur i worked on a lot of similar pre-"blockchain" tech and then after it took off watched a lot of my ex-coworkers and peers go on to blockchain co's that I thought were at best producing clunky subpar products and sometimes just outright scams
the incentives are toxic - crypto is a space where investors don't have to wait for an "exit," and can profitably just sell hype so even well-meaning projects get turned into pump-and-dump schemes
@cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
Oof, yeah. That sounds rough. I definitely get the ire, hatred even, for the crytpto grifters.
Was your project using a trust network? Most people's eyes just glaze over at the concept. LOL
(Sorry if I was a bit aggro earlier. I'm having that kind of day.)
@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur was mostly on things closer to a "private blockchain" than public one w/ adversarial consensus (didn't have to work with *totally* mutually distrusting parties - it was still verifiable, you couldn't undetectably change history - but we never needed a solution for a "cold start")
I generally like the idea of trust networks but I think the hard part of them is UX - its hard to make clear (especially to nontechnical users) what's happening.
@enoch_exe_inc for every technology there exists a scope of efficiency outside of which it's application is suboptimal at best. not a valid argument in the given context.
@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
Sounds like what was said about physics to a buncha people in Hiroshima.
@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
Sounds like what the NRA says to Americans when their babies get shot.
@tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
There are actually some *pre*-blockchain good uses of very similar distributed ledger tech. You can read up on Cassandra, a data-storage technology, for a fairly similar idea.
You're looking for keywords like "Merkle trees" and "Gossip protocol", though it's doing it in a cluster of storage servers, not (usually) worldwide.
@enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
What about all the illegal commerce?
@dogfox @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
Blockchain's major use case is paying for crimes. LLM's major use case is generating SPAM.
They are both very good at those things.
@unikitty @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
True facts.
@enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur I remember seeing on news that the brazilian ex-president got investigated on vaccine fraud due to the system being made with blockchain¹
In short, the data was edited (for illegal means), but the old history was still available because of how the whole system works (whose blockchain is only one of the components btw)²
Sources (I couldn't find any english good sources, sorry)
¹ https://www.gov.br/saude/pt-br/composicao/seidigi/rnds/a-solucao-tecnologica
@enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
I think this is a case which, at least for me (casual person, not an expert), it seems to makes sense to use it because of the security, without any cryptocurrency BS.
In fact I think almost nobody really heard about that usage in the health system here until that investigation.
I believe that good uses exists, they're just ignored in news and social media bc it's not "magic money". Aparrently useful things are too boring to be talked about nowadays.
@enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur Blockchain converts otherwise already wasted and/or stranded energy into financial value.
Something has to soak up the excess generated power from power plants that can't just ramp down (wind, solar, nuclear).
My local PUC is already doing everything it can to devalue my excess solar-power. I don't get any usable credit for excess solar I put into the grid over the month/year.
So, my stranded solar energy has a higher financial value mining.
@baldur tech is so sheltered from the real world. Many people in tech have never done anything else in their life and it shows and expresses itself in total disregard for other people's professions and skills.
(And the fact that many of them should go to therapy to understand a few things about themselves and why they feel the way they do but don't is just the cherry on top)
They are a cult, and their god is Roko's Basilisk.
https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat
I have met arrogant designers and humble programmers. Of varying ages and sexes, although usually SWM are the worst offenders. (I am a SWM who has to work hard to check his own arrogance).
@tante @baldur I think it's important to acknowledge that what some are saying about AI isn't representative of tech people as a whole. Individual devs are often sheltered, but there are many of us who think far more subtly about the risks and opportunities of AI, particularly LLMs.
LLMs are already affecting the way we work as devs and the systems we are building. This is mostly using the tech to automate parts of a system that are otherwise hard.
@tante @baldur
It feels a lot like 'I let my wife work as a therapist or historian to keep her busy, but I really look down on her work'
I find it weird how people convince themselves that 'i know stuff about computers that others do not know' makes them extremely smart, but then never extend that honor to the soft sciences ('today i learned something new about infant development, the person who told me that must be smart')
@Selena @tante @baldur
IME , corporate IT workplaces measured us against goals and deadlines. Soft skills are harder to prove and that seems to be why they can get overlooked.
I went to study fine art to explore my intuition and creativity and then worked in community engagement. I started to learn more about soft skills to cope with the extra mental and emotional work that those relationships require.
@baldur @tante Nope. The people pushing this are scam artists pure and simple.
Why do they not get called out about it? Most people in news media are incompetent when it comes to most things(pick something you know about and then start reading the reporting around it... it will be terrible... and that is will be no means an outlier, but the standard).
That problem is further made worse thanks to lots of mergers of media/news companies.
Which is further made worse via the 1980s making incompetent business decisions that value only the very short term the standard the world over.
@tante @baldur Yep, this, plus the collision of several other mind worms.
Engineer's Syndrome/Disease: "I am a expert in this specific technical field, therefore I can solve the problems of other fields too."
"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." You see this one all the time, with attempts to solve what are fundamentally hard social problems with tech silver bullets.
Motivated reasoning: tech people would make a lot of money if they really could replace experts from other fields with computers.
A part of me really wants the larger tech bubble to burst and witness how millions of tech workers scram to secure jobs in retail, nursing, farming, maintenance, manufacturing, and more, then finding out that hey these jobs actually require a ton of knowledge and skill.
Another part of me is scared to be part of such a diaspora, left with nothing but my senior high papers and no actual education in anything else than being self-taught in making pixels change color on a screen.
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