Can't be done. The state is the one that produces the chips (Intel is just another branch of the government). Software is just a layer on top that can always be subverted with hardware by someone who knows the sequence of operations that will give them access.
> We can solve these problems because "Either a given technology is possible, or else there must be some reason (say, of physics or logic) why it isn’t possible". Knowledge is what allows us to develop solutions to all our problems.
This is very much like the law of excluded middle, (there is a solution) ∨ (there is no solution). The point here I think is that there is no reason to not try to solve problems because either the problem is solvable and we make progress or it isn't and we figure out why which is again a kind of progress. This is certainly a reasonable perspective but Hamming and Heisenberg have quotes that provide more nuanced perspectives.
Hamming: Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think,” surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.
Heisenberg: What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
These are good citations. Specially Heisenberg's: it is now obvious to me that in noticing nature and trying to understand it, you subject it to a particular line of reasoning. Physicists particulary enjoy subjecting it to maths. I do too :)
> Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste.
This is comparing ourselves with dogs lol. We are much more than that. We can build scientific instruments to smell what dogs smell or hear what they hear etc. See: https://publicism.info/science/infinity/7.html
This is interesting. Recently had the idea of making up an instruction set for bit-strings so that I could generate a bunch of programs w/ the instruction set to compress bit-strings where short instruction sequences would get high scores and longer ones would get low scores.
The tricky part is designing the feedback loop to properly train the instruction generator and like in this paper I needed to also include some non-differentiable stack operations. It's surprisingly hard to find work that combines neural networks and compression algorithms even though they seem like an obvious fit. This also allows for downstream tasks that are not possible with just vector spaces because the network that can compress bit-strings must be encoding some non-trivial features of the data set and can be used to augment downstream tasks with differentiable compression.
Kinda like warning about a fire literally as it's occurring, the residents already evacuated, and already having made front page news. "More crypto exchanges are more than likely going to collapse shortly." There is my prediction. Feel free to link back to this comment as it occurs.
Yeah. The titanic has hit the iceberg, water is flooding the lower decks, people are fighting to get on the lifeboats, PG tweets "A person I have known for more than ten years, who I consider trustworthy, is convinced the titanic isn't all that seaworthy. I don’t know anything concrete, but if I were exposed, I would be concerned."
Also, anyone who thinks they aren't exposed is significantly underestimating the potential for contagion in the wider economy. As crypto-exposed funds have to make margin calls and take losses, they will need to liquidate assets in the normal economy, driving asset prices down across the board. It's not going to be as big an impact of 2008 but the economy is in a worse position to withstand shocks right now, with inflation high and years of QE overhang still to unwind.
Based on how my brother and his gf got sucked into it, a majority of my cousins, and a ton of friends of my brother and cousins, I agree there may be a correction that is needed and felt. Hell, I even managed to lose $1200 to a pig butchering crypto romance scam. Despite that, the day I stop getting interview requests for web3 companies and seeing them in the headlines every day is the day I will breathe a sigh of relief.
For now it’s just a bear market - not a collapse of the crypto system (which is coming). Dogecoin has a market cap of 10B ! We can start talking about the real storm when it’s 0.
Just curious how the dominoes will fall but it does seem like the people that invested in cryptocurrencies underestimated the risks of corruption. It looks like programmable money and clever financial engineering makes embezzling money a lot easier.
> Just curious how the dominoes will fall but it does seem like the people that invested in cryptocurrencies underestimated the risks of corruption. It looks like programmable money and clever financial engineering makes embezzling money a lot easier.
There is nothing of these failures that involves the programmable money part. DCG and Grayscale live in the traditional finance world, they are asset managers in traditional finance. Their accounting books are not a public, decentralized, cryptographically verifiable ledger . When you buy a stock of their fund, this is not settled on-chain in any way. If they are fraudulent, it's again the traditional finance controls that are failing.
That's a good point but that's the case with all fraud because the digital tokens have to be converted back into fiat at some point. FTT was created without much oversight because no one had enough experience to properly audit anomalous activity. Presumably someone can trace all the fraudulent FTT transactions because it's all public but it doesn't seem like anyone has actually managed to do that. Everyone knows the money is gone but no one knows how that happened and through which FTT transactions.
