FaceDeer

Prove it

…

I don’t feel the need to prove musk was born into wealth.

I hardly need to point out the double standard here.

Certainly he was above average. But that’s not “born into wealth.” $28,000 is the price of a modest new car. There are huge numbers of people who are able to get seed money like that from friends and relatives to start a business, but clearly Elon did something more than those people to grow that to the $400 billion his current net wealth stands at.

The problem is that Musk has become such an intensely politically and culturally polarizing figure that saying even the remotely “positive” thing about him - such as “he’s actually a pretty good self-made businessman” - gets interpreted as “boy howdy do I ever love Trump and misogyny!”

This article on the company describes his funding sources, with citations for each claim.

Can you prove the contrary, that he was “born into wealth?”

The seed money he got from his father for his first business - split between him and his brother Kimbal, whom his father liked much better than him - was $28,000. After Elon and Kimbal had already raised some funds from other investors, too. Everyone seems to think Musk was born in a vast emerald-encrusted mansion. His family were by no means poor but he’s not “old money.”

Hate Elon Musk for real reasons, not made up ones.

Are we, though? Newer models almost universally perform better than older ones, adjusted for scale. What signs are you seeing?

You are speaking of “model collapse”, I take it? That doesn’t happen in the real world with properly generated and curated synthetic data. Model collapse has only been demonstrated in highly artificial circumstances where many generations of model were “bred” exclusively on the outputs of previous generations, without the sort of curation and blend of additional new data that real-world models are trained with.

There is no sign that we are at “the peak” of AI development yet.

Except it’s not denying service, so it’s just a D.

And yet the synthetic training data works, and models trained on it continue scoring higher on the benchmarks than ones trained on raw Internet data. Claim what you want about it, the results speak louder.

Yeah, AI has become good enough at this point that you can provide it with a large blob of context material - such as API documentation, source code, etc. - and then have it come up with its own questions and answers about it to create a corpus of “synthetic data” to train on. And you can fine-tune the synthetic data to fit the format and style that you want, such as telling it not to be snarky or passive-aggressive or whatever.

Stack Overflow has been toxic for a long time already. It’s one of the things that a lot of people seem pleased to see AI devour.

It’s not really ignorable, though. If it was just Trump the private citizen rambling this nonsense, sure. But it’s the President (elect) of the United States.

Elections have consequences and this is one that the US can’t wave off. They put their mad king on the world stage, they own the boos he gets.

I have little to say about this because it’s basically nonsense.

The top 100 accounts already own 35% of the network and rising … that would give Lido and Coinbase a combined 51% of the stake

These two statements are completely incompatible with each other, for example. Also, the top 100 accounts only holding 35% of the network is remarkably good. And Lido is not controlled by a single individual or organization. And holding 51% of the stake means nothing on Ethereum, it works differently from Bitcoin. And the Gini coefficient is something that applies to national economies, not to blockchains. And I could go on, but this is just nonsense and you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.

There are lots of uses that don’t depend on external data. The general “digital payments” use case, for example, just requires tokens to be transferred between two accounts on the blockchain itself. People then make use of that information externally however they like.

There are also ways to get external data onto the blockchain in a manner that is reliable enough for some particular purpose or another. A lot of game theory goes into that sort of application. Stabletokens have price oracles, there are prediction markets, “proof of personhood” protocols, etc.

The important things to consider are:

• Blockchains are not ideal for every single application, and that’s perfectly fine. Use the tool that’s best for the job.
• On the flipside, if you’re not familiar with a field then there are probably a lot of nuances and existing applications that you’ll be unaware of. So don’t be too quick to dismiss it either.

This applies to pretty much every field of technology.

Admit what? There are a huge range of possible designs that could be called “Proof of Stake”, and some of them could easily have that flaw. You can always design something poorly. Ethereum, the most widely used Proof of Stake token, doesn’t have that flaw in its design.

• Outrage fatigue is a thing. There was plenty of attention on the Uyghur genocide previously, but we can’t all be angry about everything all the time.
• It’s not something that Western nations are actively supporting, so protests and activism in the west would be less effective anyway. Nothing that protests in the West did has helped Tibet, what can be done differently about this?
• It’s China, the biggest oppressive regime on Earth with a billion citizens under its thumb. The Uyghurs just sort of fade into a general haze of “sucks over there.”

Reality desperately needs a better PR department.

Indeed. And that also applies to getting left-wing politicians to recognize reality, not just the electorate.

Modern blockchains like Ethereum don’t use ASICs and don’t consume any more energy than a normal database would. They use proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work.

There are a type of tokens called stablecoins that are specifically designed to have a consistent price over time. Use those for your store checkouts.

There is one core purpose that blockchains solve that traditional databases don’t; decentralization.

If you’re running something that can work just fine with a centralized database, go ahead and do that. Use the right tool for the job.

Blockchains are for applications where you can’t depend on a “trusted authority” to support you. When you want to be sure you’re free of any outside interference in the things you’re doing, that no server can “go down” and take all of your data or operations with it.

An example of a non-financial-related activity I can offer is the Ethereum Name Service, ENS, which is a decentralized version of the DNS system. You can register a domain name with it and never have to worry about it being “seized” or going offline due to a networking failure.

You have to solve the sibyl problem, or else someone can just run 10,000 copies of the validator software on one computer,

That’s solved on Ethereum by requiring you to stake tokens that cost money. You would need an enormous amount of money to afford to spin up 10000 validators.

submit enough votes for a false record that it overwhelms any competing votes

I’m afraid you’re not very familiar with how Ethereum works. 10,000 validators isn’t anywhere near enough to disrupt the system, all you would do is burn your stake and lose all that money if you tried that.

Even if you acquired enough stake to prevent finality - 2/3 of the total stake would be required, costing tens of billions of dollars and taking years to work your way through the entry queue - all you’d do then is cause a huge annoyance to everyone on the system while your tens of billions rapidly burned down to below the threshold and finality resumed again. You wouldn’t be able to insert “fake” transactions.

People have been working on blockchain technology for a long time, these sorts of basic attacks have long ago been accounted for.