> “Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,” the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde said at the conclusion of a recent lecture. “Everything else is noise."
And the climate crisis. Why does it seem like everyone has forgotten about the climate crisis recently? AI isn't going to fix it.
I recently joined a civil service organisation as a software developer. The organisation is currently going through an intense hiring process to replace the army of contractors they've had for years. This has been made possible by applying a 'market uplift' to the usual civil service salary bands to make the roles competitive in the tech industry. It seems to be going pretty well, although the organisation was already quite tech focused and has a well established engineering culture. Hopefully it will be seen as a success and replicated by other departments as seems like the sensible way to get stuff done to me.
As someone who has recently joined the civil service as a software developer I have to say the working environment in the organisation I joined is pretty great. Salary is not high, but pension, holidays, working hours and flexibility are all very good.
> This is, to be clear, a bad solution. MaxMind’s free database is not particularly precise, and in general IP lookup tables are chasing a moving target. I know for a fact that there are people in non-UK countries (like Ireland!) who have been inadvertently blocked by these lookup tables. Making those people use Tor or a VPN sucks, but I don’t know what else to do in the current regulatory environment.
It's not blocked By the UK, he's put a country filter on it
Like all the US sites that decided to block.the EU over gdpr because turning off tracking was too much effort
Work fine in Spain, so lets not jump on the all to typical EU-made-the-internet-suck bandwagon all too quickly. Seems this is a UK problem. But what do I know, I actually read the error message.
It's the author's problem with the UK (and the UK's Online Safety Act, which establishes requirements on hosts that can't be avoided by merely not being in the UK), rather than the UK's problem with the author.
But as much as I dislike the OSA: if you're not subject to UK law, why do you (website author) care what our government thinks of your website? It's not like they can do anything to you.
Most likely it's a protest. Badplace passed Badlaw, so residents of Badplace can't see my content, so nyah!
But, topics of a sexual nature—nothing really NSFW, just mentions of various fetishes that online people have developed and popularized, and the possibilities for AI to realize those fetishes and potentially spawn new ones—are discussed in the blog post, so it may be illegal to present to minors under the OSA.
Hype would not cause a price increase in this case. The value of bitcoin is partly due to scarcity. 1.1m previously inaccessible bitcoins suddenly becoming liquid would cause a drop in price, even if they were sold slowly. It could also cause panic selling as it might indicate the wallets have been brute force cracked.
As a weaker point: I would expect an increase in the market capitalisation of the bitcoin float. Ie if you multiply the price of bitcoin by the amount of movable bitcoin right now and after the first Satoshi is sold, you compare with the new price of bitcoin multiplied by the newly enlarged amount of movable bitcoin.
The strong claim is that the price per bitcoin would go up, too. Not just the market cap of the float.
> It could also cause panic selling as it might indicate the wallets have been brute force cracked.
Suppose I brute force cracked it to get access to the bitcoins. I would:
Quietly amass a large offsetting position in the bitcoin futures market (and wherever else you can do this), before I make any moves. Then (assuming I couldn't hedge my whole exposure at decent prices) I would use all means available to pretend that Satoshi had woken up again. Eg use specially fine-tuned LLMs to mimic his style to post on the usual mailing list etc. Some people will believe you, some won't.
I'd say post a bit in Satoshi's name to build interest. Then skeptics will say: prove it. And you 'prove' it by selling moving a few Satoshis between your own wallets back and forth. (Don't sell anything yet.) The hype will build, and you sell into it on the futures market.
The last step is important, because you can get rid of your bitcoin exposure this way, without any trace on the blockchain. So you can even vow to never release any of the stash on the market and other shenanigans. That should help the price.
Well, the futures will come due eventually, and then you can move the stash. The price might or might not crash, but you don't care, because you already locked in your profits on the derivatives.
> Partially due to scarcity, but also due to hype.
I agree with you, but isn't the value of gold also almost entirely due to hype? Sure, there are some industrial applications, but those are minor components of demand for gold.
Hype is just another way of saying "people obtain pleasure from owning this thing" and that's pretty much what sets demand for most goods. Don't even get me started on diamonds. The whole wedding ring having a diamond is hype.
Bitcoin just makes this explicit and impossible to deny.
Well, there's pleasure from directly owning the thing: you can look at gold in your vault and appreciate it for itself.
But a bitcoin in your vault by itself is indistinguishable from a shitcoin I just made by forking bitcoin with the same code but a new genesis block. Or even more pointed: the alternative futures of bitcoins after any route not taken by the community after any hard fork.
In any case, I agree that much of the value of gold comes from social conventions, too, yes.
You are very lucky to have a strong circadian rhythm that doesn't require light in the morning then. Not all of us work that way. If there is no light in the morning I find it very hard to get up and function. Where I live, if we adopted permanent summer time the sun wouldn't rise until 9:45 in the dead of winter. I couldn't handle that many hours of complete darkness at the start of the day.
