Lithuania is considered, along with Latvia and Estonia, to be a developed country now. It really took a step forward after being freed from the chains of Russian subjugation.
As somebody who fell into the deep end of a pool when I was younger of my own accord and took a decade or so to learn how to swim after that, I can say that's the sort of thing that's gonna fuck that kid up badly. Even today, I'm not entirely comfortable in the water.
I think the PRC lacks something in the soft power stakes; they've created some degree of good will outside the West, but they suck at projecting cultural output that doesn't stem from the imperial Chinese era.
You hang it out the side of the plane when you want to get out and taunt your enemy face-to-face. Well, face-to-face with a separation of a few miles, that is.
Given the propensity for LLMs to make profound mistakes by design due to their inability to discern context - something which the chucklefucks at OpenAI, Facebook, Google, etc. are not going to solve any time soon - it'd be pretty humiliating to only be as thorough as they are. Might I suggest paying more attention to what you're doing?
I wonder if they're counting on nobody in the mainstream press paying attention or even understanding how that stuff is embarrassing and just going for the zinger.
I'm of the opinion that the gold standard was obsolete around the time when the railroad and the telegraph were being rolled out on a wide scale and that shiny metal fetishism was heavily responsible for the longer and deeper economic crises of the 1800s and early 1900s.
Edward Snowden has struck me for a very long time as one of the most prominent cases of stopped-clock theory. It doesn't surprise me at all that he's a coiner.
Meanwhile, I'm treating this as some of the most cathartic news I've heard in a long time. Good on whoever lit the fire.
Not saying it's causation, but there seems to be a strong correlation between "[insert West Coast US city here] is bad now" and the techbros setting up shop around there.
EDIT: Also, those comments on the Verge article are disproportionately licking the boot themselves.
You know, one of the things I resent the most about shits like Thiel and Andreessen and Altman going around with ideas like supervillains from a Saturday morning cartoon is that whenever I try to talk to other people that aren't familiar with them about their ideas, those ideas are so excessive and ridiculous that I end up looking like a crank and conspiracy theorist just talking about them.
The day just isn’t complete without a tiresome retread of freeze peach rhetorical tropes. Oh, it’s “important to engage with and understand” white supremacy. That’s why we need to boost the voices of white supremacists! And give them money!
That and the gentry that made a lot of the officer class also had brothers who, going into the clergy, parliament or administrative roles, would be university-educated.
It absolutely is our war; do you think Russia will stop with Ukraine? Do you think it sets a good precedent to once again allow states to annex territories that aren't legally theirs with impunity?
It is a moral imperative to ensure that Russia can no longer engage an offensive war within our lifetimes.
That'd be the same Lightning Network with NP-hard issues with routing and a whole host of problems right down to the fundamentals, right? (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
And even beyond that, having to stack another layer on there is a technical non-starter to begin with. For one thing, adoption of the Lightning Network is fundamentally bottlenecked by Bitcoin itself - if the entire Bitcoin network was dedicated entirely to onboarding people onto the Lightning Network, it'd take 28 months to onboard all of the people in the US alone, let alone the rest of the world's population.
There's a saying by Antoine de Saint-Éxupery that's rather relevant here: « Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher. » Roughly paraphrased, it means, "It appears that perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away." Trying to stack extra layers on top of a precarious base goes against any sound engineering principles. In this circumstance, Bitcoin would be the thing to take away - it offers nothing and is in fact detrimental to an efficient system of exchange.
The Lightning Network can only do the much-vaunted transactions-per-second number that it claims in theory; in practice, the number is a lot lower and even once you get past the onboarding stage takes something in the order of a couple of magnitudes of times the energy cost of a Visa transaction. Even the Lightning Network developers admit that for the LN to work as advertised even in theory, with a given case of two channels a year (naïve, when considering the only way to actually consolidate a LN transaction is to close a channel) for 7 billion people, block sizes on the Bitcoin network would have to be increased to 133 MB.
So this is basically a bunch of chancers selling a Heath Robinson machine built onto another, much worse Heath Robinson machine with no practical way to scale to the numbers they want.
You're disingenuously ignoring the opportunity cost of having to build additional power plants - resources required not being usable elsewhere; environmental impact of those resources or, especially in the case of hydroelectric power, of building the power plants themselves, since cement has significant carbon dioxide emissions, along with the fact that proof-of-work algorithms have a tendency to expand in a grey-goo style and suck up as many resources as possible.
The former is a reason why energy conservation efforts and regulations have been put in place. The fewer power plants you require to run everything, even if they're renewable energy, the better. Proof-of-work mining threatens that, because when your incentive to mine is more money, that encourages people taking more than their fair share of energy. It also encourages power theft.
Proof-of-work mining doesn't do a thing to solve the issue of green energy, since there's no sort of quality-of-service system in place which bumps cryptocurrency miners down to the bottom of the pile when it comes to prioritising power usage and even if there was, it'd create an arms race between power plant operators and people trying to subvert those controls so that they can use more power for mining, cf. Nvidia's graphics card limiters versus Ethereum miners. You're either naïve or disingenuous if you're expecting cryptocurrency miners to just cede power when there's money on the line if they keep their operations going at top priority.
Furthermore, even if every single watt that Bitcoin requires to mine was generated by 100% clean energy, the network would still be creating nation-state levels of e-waste.
This is just another one of those techno-libertarian pipe dreams about an efficient free market which don't bear fruit in the real world, just like the "why do we need emissions regulations anyway? Surely, the free market will sort that out, brah" bullshit. It's the fallacy of the broken window writ large.
At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” …...
I agree, the article is way too credulous about the people working with and associated with OpenAI and doesn't delve enough early enough into the dangerous weirdness of the organisation or the EA/rationalist crowd that have been leading it.
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F-35 was more the high-profile failure. The F-22 was just produced in lower numbers than planned because there was no perceived need for a specialised air superiority fighter in the expected numbers after the Soviet collapse.
Anon can’t have a factual argument ( sh.itjust.works )
My Dinner With Andreessen ( prospect.org )
Historian sneers at billionaire while HN trip over each other to lick boot.
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 21 April 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!...
And so it begins... ( sh.itjust.works )
What's the ladder for? Wrong answers only ( lemm.ee )
Gunners loading 40mm and 105mm aboard an AC-130
you guys, OpenAI and Facebook have *totally* invented your plastic pal who's fun to be with *this* time ( www.ft.com )
archive: https://archive.ph/Oz69t
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 31 March 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!...
Somehow even worse than construction work in Qatar ( sh.itjust.works )
(source)
OpenAI vs. Elon Musk 2 - Whoever wins, we lose ( openai.com )
Follow up to https://awful.systems/post/1109610 (which I need to go read now because I completely overlooked this)...
The ‘halvening’ is coming — what this means for bitcoin ( amycastor.com )
Reminder that doing something extremely cool and good once doesn't make you immune to posting cringe ( x.com )
Edward Snowden [blue checkmark] @snowden...
you just hate me because my IQ is sooo high
https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/96ff8357-2acc-40c9-a93a-95e7e580a95f.png
a self driving car burns in San Francisco. the orange site can’t decide which racist trope to blame ( news.ycombinator.com )
(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)...
“I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” Thiel wrote in an online libertarian journal in 2019 ( awful.systems )
Bwahahahaha get fucked you unbearable scumsucking dork...
Warm Water Port Envy... ( lemmy.ca )
US Moon mission has no chance of soft lunar landing ( www.bbc.com )
A US lunar lander has "no chance" of making a soft landing on the Moon due to a fuel leak, the company behind the mission says....
Substack co-founder: "What if we kissed at the Nazi bar?" ( substack.com )
The day just isn’t complete without a tiresome retread of freeze peach rhetorical tropes. Oh, it’s “important to engage with and understand” white supremacy. That’s why we need to boost the voices of white supremacists! And give them money!
Holy shit, it could not be getting any dumber, Effective altruist philosopher defends longtermism from critics who deny utilitarian principles.... With utilitarian principles. ( globalprioritiesinstitute.org )
WOOOOOOO MORE AXE GRINDING LETS GO!...
It's time to throw in the towel everyone. We're never going to be able to top the Russian army ( sh.itjust.works )
Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages ( www.tomshardware.com )
Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement? ( www.forbes.com )
At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” …...
The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI ( archive.is )
Most of the article is well-trodden ground if you’ve been following OpenAI at all, but I thought this part was noteworthy:...
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You may not like it, but this is what peak rationality looks like ( twitter.com )
Let’s build a tower of nonsense on top of numbers we vibe with and pulled out of our ass
Rationalist saturated prediction market site Manifold has launched a dating app. "Even @aella_girl has signed up 😎💖" ( nitter.net )