FaceDeer

The Terra stablecoin wasn’t a ponzi. Even the Luna token that was used to back it wasn’t exactly a ponzi. It may have been a scam, and it was certainly a bad idea, but the word “ponzi” means something specific and not just “I don’t like that thing.”

So, bearing in mind the actual meaning of “ponzi scheme,” how exactly idoes PayPal’s stabletoken fit it?

How is a stabletoken pegged to the US dollar a “ponzi scheme?” You don’t earn anything by holding it.

Stablecoins seem like one of the least likely token types to count as a security. To be a security it has to pass the “Howey test”, which requires three criteria:

• An investment of money
• In a common enterprise
• With an expectation of profit, derived from the efforts of others

Buying a stabletoken could be argued to be “an investment of money in an common enterprise”, but I don’t see how there’s an expectation of profit derived from the efforts of others - stabletokens are specifically intended to not rise in value. If I buy a stabletoken and its value goes up it’s a failure as a stabletoken.

A better motivation for robot firefighters is that it’s very dangerous work. And robots could fight fires that humans simply can’t.

As I said:

It’s true that ChatGPT isn’t intelligent in the same way that human brains are intelligent.

There isn’t just one kind of intelligence.

Based on its abilities. Based on studies that researchers have done on it. It has learned to do more than just regurgitate bits of its training material. It has learned from the patterns in it and can extrapolate new information.

Do you think this is not possible?

A lot of people are deeply invested in the notion that human intelligence is unique and special and impossible to replicate. Either their personal sense of worth is bound up in that notion (see for example many of the artists who get very angry when people call AI generated images “art”) or it’s simply a threat to their jobs and economic wellbeing. The result is a powerful need to convince themselves that there’s a special something that’s missing from ChatGPT and its ilk that will “never” be replicated by machines.

It’s true that ChatGPT isn’t intelligent in the same way that human brains are intelligent. But it is intelligent, in ways that are useful. And “never” is a bad bet to make for the rest of those capabilities.

None of my Internet disputes have ever been pointless. They’ve all served to provide training material upon which the minds of our AI descendants have been built.

This particular replication attempt appears to be Chinese, yes. But it makes no sense for Chinese researchers to be deliberately faking the replication of some unrelated Korean scientists’ supposed fraud (which makes no sense to be fraud in the first place). What could they possibly gain from it aside from the ruination of their own reputations as well?

I could believe that LK-99 is not actually truly classically superconductive, but instead has a bunch of weird properties that suckered its creators into thinking it was. It seems unlikely but eh, maybe. Weird things pop out of the universe sometimes. But it’s really implausible that this is all a deliberate fraud. If you’re going to make fraudulent claims about inventing a new kind of superconductor the last thing you’d make up is something that anyone can make for themselves with a few basic ingredients and a pottery kiln. That ultra-high-pressure room temperature superconductor is the perfect counterpoint - it was so hard to replicate that it took ages to show it was fake.

The price of a drug treatment like this would also go down over time. Everything starts out expensive.

Indeed. You have to start somewhere with these things.

Indeed. They were planning to rip out and replace the pad anyway, and believed that they’d at least get one launch out of the existing one, so they saw no reason to delay. If they’d waited for the new pad to be installed they would only just be gearing up for their first test flight right now. They’ve had four months to refine the rocket’s design based on the data they got from the first test launch.

They misjudged the robustness of the original launch pad, but only somewhat. IMO the much more serious misjudgement was their flight termination system, they blew holes in the ship’s tanks when it started tumbling out of control and it took something like 40 seconds for the ship to finally disintegrate after that. That was a situation where they underestimated the robustness of their systems. The new flight termination system is much more powerful.

He also drove it to be created in the first place.

Musk is a complete asshole - I have to mention this in every comment where I say something even remotely positive about Musk or the downvote brigade is even bigger than it otherwise will be - but his “just try this new thing and see what happens” approach to engineering is the secret sauce that has made SpaceX into the behemoth pushing spaceflight where it is today. Sure, it means they screw up a lot. But otherwise they’d be just another Blue Origin.

“Huge chunks” were not projected 6.5 miles away, that’s ridiculous. Pulverized concrete, aka dust, got thrown that far away.

“The technology is currently flawed. Therefore we should not invest resources in making it better.” Odd approach.

Frankly, even if the “quality” is poor, the quantity is actually a significant boon. I can have content that actually caters to my interests rather than just whatever the big studios decide I’m going to get to pick from. I can make it myself, if I want. Even with the relatively crude tools we already have.

For example, I do game-mastering for TTRPGs, and ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion have vastly improved the quality and quantity of material I’m able to present to my players. I can lavishly illustrate my adventures. The images aren’t as good as a professional artist would make, but given that I would never have hired a professional artist in the first place and even if I did they wouldn’t have been able to churn those images out in time for tomorrow’s session, that’s still a huge improvement.