Yes, if there's one thing I reproach Mark Zuckerberg, it's not that his company will occasionally enable genocides [0], but his crimes against fashion and good taste.
Have you ever met human beings that constantly reuse a certain idiom/figure of speech/linguistic pattern?
The valley girl using "like" every other word, for example?
Or I had a colleague who would use the expression "we can say" (in French, because we were speaking in French) basically every couple sentences for a bit.
Humans also repeat speech/linguistic patterns, therefore "repetition of the same pattern" is not sufficient to mark text as produced by AI :)
Yes but there are a lot more "idiom personalities" in humans (you just mentioned several) than there is in AI. Basically every English-language interaction with AI anywhere in the world produces more or less the same argot and style. Its like (heh) we're all talking to the same valley girl stereotype.
err... how Bitcoin works, or how the speculative bubble around cryptocurrencies circa 2019-2021 worked?
Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example), and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.
The Bitcoin bubble, like all bubbles since the Dutch tulip bubble in the 1600s, did follow a somewhat similar "well everyone things this thing is much more valuable than it is worth, if I buy some now the price will keep going on and I can dump it on some sucker" path, however.
> Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example),
For the record - the illegal transactions were thought to be advantaged by crypto like BTC because it was assumed to be impossible to trace the people engaged in the transaction, however the opposite is true, public blockchains register every transaction a given wallet has made, which has been used by Law Enforcement Agencies(LEA) to prosecute people (and made it easier in some cases).
> and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.
There are remittance companies that deal in local currencies that tend to make this "easier" - crypto works for this WHEN you can exchange the crypto for the currencies you have and want, which is, in effect, the same.
Anonymity/untraceability was not the primary reason for using BTC towards black/grey markets. Bitcoin can be used pseudo anonymously , and the fact is you simply cannot send money to your grey market counterparty via any method but cash without it being flagged/canceled, and if you can't send cash (which has its own problems), bitcoin is the only option.
Online drug markets existed before BTC, and today there is a problem with "mules" being used (people who have legitimate bank accounts that are used to transfer money for groups that engage in illegal activities)
Sending money to a "grey market counterparty" has had workarounds for some time, and continues to have workarounds.
People were fooled into thinking crypto offered anonymity, and were surprised when they realised every single one of their transactions was sitting in the public chain available for anyone to read.
Digital wallets provide LEA's with clear evidence of transactions with a given party when that party's anonymity is unmasked, and it's there in perpetuity.
Had Epstein being using BTC to do business, every single one of his clients would be known.
Your last line is incorrect (by your own earlier descrdption of BTC):
> had Epstein used BTC every single one of his clients would be known
Had Epstein used BTC And we discovered his BTC address(es) we would know what BTC addresses he sent BTC to. Simply by knowing his BTC address(es) alone we would not know anything about who he sent BTC to except the addresses he sent to. And if we know only one of Epstein's addresses and only one of the people associated with one of the recipient addresses, this would not necessarily give us any information about any of the other parties involved. With opsec BTC retains the quality of pseudoanonymity (a technical term). Epstein, who is known for laundering money, likely could have converted cash to BTC without connecting his identity to the addresses many times over.
I would be very surprised to learn that pre-BTC online black markets had equivalent volume as modern cryptocurrency markets.
Mining rigs have a finite lifespan & the places that make them in large enough quantities will stop making new ones if a more profitable product line, e.g. AI accelerators, becomes available. I'm sure making mining rigs will remain profitable for a while longer but the memory shortages are making it obvious that most production capacity is now going towards AI data centers & if that trend continues then hashing capacity will continue diminishing b/c the electricity cost & hardware replenishment will outpace mining rewards.
Bitcoin was always a dead end. It might survive for a while longer but its demise is inevitable.
On top of that, I don't think the common Venezuelan laborer was getting much benefit out of the Maduro regime capturing the oil wealth. From the point of view of the less fortunate, there isn't much difference between a Venezuelan elite enriching themselves off the local oil vs an American elite enriching themselves off the local oil.
Claims of sovereignty are meaningless, what happens is whether those claims hold up in real life, and in this case they clearly don't.
A country is either powerful enough to enforce sovereignty, or it is not actually sovereign; so this hand-wringing about "Venezuela's sovereignty" is meaningless. It's already been proven false, to some extent.
The US is free to do what it wants with Venezuela, or virtually any non-nuclear country in the world. Always has been, really. It simply doesn't exercise said power very often.
Is this then a call to assassinate local politicians you don't agree with? Some might makes right thing? We're all at least momentarily able to overpower or mortally harm one another, but often don't choose to. Why do you think that is?
You seem to be mistaking my comment for a moral stance.
I am not making a call to do anything, I am simply describing the nature of international relations throughout the vast majority of human history (including the current day), in a framework most commonly defined as realism.
Superpowers act in their self interest, ignoring "international law" when the benefit meaningfully exceeds the cost. They can do this because there is no one to stop them. They will do this because it is in their self interest.
Americans will probably benefit from this action, or at least that is the administration's thesis. Is it moral? No, but discussions of morality are irrelevant on the world stage, which is a zero-sum game defined only by leverage.
I think I assumed you're commenting for a reason because it doesn't make sense to make these comments otherwise - they're more or less vacuously true, and there's no value to them outside of an assertion of some sort.
> the world stage, which is a zero-sum game
I'm not at all convinced this is true.
You should think about the question posed in my first comment - why do you think we don't choose to overpower one another regularly to take what we want?
svnt and HN's misunderstanding of international relations and the concept of "sovereignty" is what my comment is directed at: in discussions about superpowers on the world stage,
(a) moralizing is simply irrelevant, discussions about whether this is "good" or "bad" are childishly naive and have no place - only whether it was advantageous or not; and
(b) sovereignty is meaningless if a nation does not have the hard/soft power (and the will) to back it, just as if you declare your house a "sovereign nation" it will not be respected unless you are able to back it up.
Perhaps this is an obvious/vacuous truth to you, but most HN'ers are clearly failing to grasp this.
> why do you think we don't choose to overpower one another regularly to take what we want?
Because it is not always advantageous to do so. When it is clearly advantageous, nations tend to do so (as evidenced by virtually all of human history, including the current era.)
So much of the past decade has been the internet infecting the population with 19th century thinking like this. Alliances are a thing, and might makes right is something we have told ourselves for generations that we oppose. I am so tired of this nihilism dressed as edge.
Please leave a substantive comment instead of just calling something a "redditism" and "appalling."
You may not like the framework of realism but it is the reality of international relations today (and throughout most of history.)
Rules-based international order has always been a thin veneer over the fact that nations will always act in their self-interest regardless of what they say.
Finally, game theory tells us that as long as one superpower behaves according to the principles of realism, the rest must as well, or risk getting outmaneuvered.
People don't like to see difficult to accept facts stated plainly. And sometimes equate a statement of unfortunate fact with endorsement of status quo.
More on topic, I hoped there would be some support from Colombia, Russia, and China in place to help with this situation. Instead it seems like Maduro took an exit deal and left the country at the hands of the GOP who openly promulgate the idea that the US should lord over all other countries in the western hemisphere.
There's nothing substantive to the comment I'm replying to.
It's explaining in too many words that might makes right. We all know that.
On the other hand I believe, but I could be wrong, that the many comments of the sort in this thread are a way for some people to cheer these sort of actions without being too obvious about it because they know it's not a good look in some circles, hn being one. So rather than chanting usa usa usa like their gut tells them too, they resort to such emotionally distanced statements, obvious to everyone, pretending to simply constate the gap in military capabilities of the US versus other powers.
There's a massive difference, and that difference is that American oil companies, unlike the Venezuelan state run industry, are actually very competent at extracting oil. This means more good paying jobs, more state revenue, and massive economic growth. Contrary to the claims of most of the economically illiterate morons commenting here, having a functional local oil industry run by foreign companies will actually be great for Venezuela.
your comment sounds alot like nationalist chest thumping, the reason they were unable to do much with their oil is much more related to the usa deciding they would sanction the country meaning basically worldwide they can't sell the oil
Definitely not, but the furthest away the ones profiting from something are, the worse it can get.
It is definitely not a guarantee that a local enriching elite will at some point lead to something better, but most examples that come to mind about "colonies" (places very far from a center of power), resulted in said places to develop much harder.
But neither the Venezuelan elite nor the American elite will tolerate any hint of democracy. And neither elite will be satisfied with merely exploiting the oil.
Location: Lyon, France
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Hello ^_^
I'm open to a new job. My main goal is learning, so I'm particularly interested in roles that would let me learn more about technologies and topics I am interested in.
I have a Master's in Mathematics, with a specialization in Discrete Maths and Theoretical Computer Science. I really enjoy Logic and Number Theory, so I'd be very keen to work on things like formal verification or cryptography. You can find my master's thesis on my website. I'm also interested in compilers and applications of graph theory to computer networks and operating systems.
I have ample professional experience with Go, and have dabbled a fair amount with Rust, a somewhat smaller amount with Elixir, Clojure and ClojureScript in my spare time. I'd be very interested in continuing my exploration of Clojure and ClojureScript, or building more with Elixir or Rust.
I use the FreeBSD operating system as my daily driver, and would be thrilled to use it professionally as well. I also have ample experience with Linux, having used Ubuntu and Debian as daily drivers, and Debian in a professional context for years.
In terms of what I can offer, I'm honest, I'm kind, I'm motivated, rigorous and curious. I'm a good writer, and I enjoy writing documentation, and technical texts. I have over five years of experience as a professional developer, I have written a LOT of Go code, and I'm comfortable debugging complex systems.
I can collaborate on large projects, having worked full time at a large tech company for several years and made a few open-source contributions.
I can work well with clients - I spent over a year working as a salesperson in a very busy Paris H&M. While there, my then manager gave me what is, over 7 years later, still my favorite professional feedback: "you get along with everyone".
I'd argue that expressing one's contempt openly is probably a sign of optimism more than anything - it shows you believe that your words might actually affect the direction of the organization rather than just getting you fired for disagreeing with your pointy-haired boss.
attempt at humor:Okay so, would you rather your beloved great aunt's pacemaker fail because the software in it was written in C, and there's a use-after-free memory error, or because the software in it was written in JavaScript, and because someone used `==` instead of `===` a boolean that should have been `false` is `true`?
[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
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