- I was of that mindset until I learned how currencies and central banks work. The government doesn't need our tax money. US dollars aren't a fixed resource. With fractional reserve banking and interest rates, central bank controls how much new money is entering the economy. Taxes are a way to take some money out of the economy. However the economy runs warm at 2-3% inflation on average. Economy can technically run without any taxation if inflation is kept under control, and productivity of goods and services is going up.
State and city institutions get loans just like we do, sometimes at lower interest rates than individuals can. During covid, loan rate was lower than inflation. That is essentially free money.
It's a complex subject. We've been all told that US debt is a massive timebomb that will explode, however many other countries have higher debt:gdp ratio.
I'm not saying one shouldn't pay their taxes. I'm saying don't pay more tax than you need to. US govt can create money out of thin air either via congress approval or fed interest rate.
- Not all vendors are same. Snowflake charges an arm and leg for compute.
It’s 36x more expensive than equivalent EC2 compute.
- The way we build computers can’t simulate quantum fields. Just means our computers are limited.
Doesn’t mean the universe isn’t a simulation.
Everything you perceive is through the brain. Brain could be in a jar receiving the same neuron signals, it wouldn’t be able to know if it is in a simulation or not.
There is no way for a program to know if it’s inside a virtual machine or not.
- The big winners of AI will be hyperscalers. They got the compute, storage, customers, scale, ecosystems, 100s of billion to deploy.
OpenAI may implode and absorbed by MSFT. Anthropic may implode and be absorbed by Amazon.
Nvidia may not have the same demand of chips once the datacenters have been built out, but the hyperscalers are reaaaaaaally huge.
May as well say US economy depends on being the planet’s datacenter.
- Move to another no income tax state.
- What part of Open AI is remaining open?
More like Capitalistic AI.
- Human: I am defeated, I cannot continue with my X life problems, it's impossible. ..... I don't think my life is worth living.
LLM: You're absolutely right!
- Without salary enforcement, it does come out of workers eventually.
Like Americans paying Tariff fees out of their wallets due to price hikes.
- There’s vss as duckdb extension too that builds a hnsw index.
https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-vss
Since duckdb is already columnar, it goes brrrrr with single digit millisecond vector similarly lookups.
- > competing with a ton of SAAS companies
A a ton of companies will compete with OpenAI while their focus is divided amongst a 100 things. May a thousand flowers bloom!
- Not just an award winning mathematician. Tao is perhaps the greatest mathematician alive and we are lucky to have him in US compared to Australia. He’s a fields medal winner. Solved many tough mathematical problems. Very active in Lean community in making open proofs.
China or Europe could steal him. It would be a loss.
- React works. Does what it says. It’s boring, but works.
Deffo not dead. I’ve been writing React almost everyday for years.
- I'd be very excited if AI could do my work. I could manage the AI and be more productive. Right now AI hallucinates a lot and I end up doing more work than I need to cleaning up and undoing random crap it generates.
- Yeah there was on old paper that blew math/physics benchmarks out of the water by letting the LLM write code and having the physics engine execute it. I don't have a link to it off my head but that seems to be the right directly.
LLM + general tool use seems to be quite effective.
- I agree on most points with the author, but stablecoins have fundamental value to countries that are not US whose currency gets devalued faster than US dollar, or want to do cross border transaction.
USD has its own woes with inflation and trade wars so fundamentally isn't stable, compared to say gold. Other currencies have runaway inflation or much higher friction to transact.
However the promise of stablecoin is that it can be exchanged 1:1 with USD with transaction fees much lower than CC fees (on exchanges like Solana e.t.c).
Unlike fraud from FTX, USDC stablecoin buys US treasuries dollar for dollar. This generates demand for USD as well as Circle makes profit from treasury yields.
Elegant idea in a way. Fast, cross-border low fee transactions in USD.
Bitcoin now has proven itself as inflation-hedged store of value. USDC is proving itself as a way to transact on goods and services.
Obviously trust is earned as droplets but leaves in buckets.
Crypto is ripe with scams and shady exchanges.
- OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google are are making $100M - billions in revenues.
Wouldn't call that a bubble. Sure some companies may run out of fuel but the Hyperscalers got a huge warchest to deploy for decades.
- There's trillions at the top looking for gains. Too much money chasing the same few goods, people and ideas.
- WhatsApp promise to users by it's founders.
“No ads! No games! No gimmicks!”
I wonder how the early founders feel about what Whatsapp has become with random junk and gimmicks in the UI.
- OpenAI, Grok, Gemini, Anthropic are all cut of same cloth no? Closed AI to serve their corporate shareholders and respective governments.
There is no deeper altruistic move here. It's capitalism at it's best or worse, depending on the observer.
The survival selection is real in electronics.