A Japanese innovation which I expect to see in the US before long: video conferencing kiosks at bank branches for relatively low-volume transactions which, for regulatory or customer-comfort reasons, require a bank officer to meet with the client.
This lets you centrally provision the bank officer at a call center in a market where bank officers are abundant and inexpensive and increase their utilization, rather than having to have relatively expensive bank officers constantly underutilized at your most expensive branches.
A sample transaction, which takes about an hour of an officer's time at my local bank, is onboarding a new deposit account customer. This combines a bit of data gathering, a bit of salesmanship, and a bit of regulatory compliance / KYC.
(The question is almost literally:
Select which of the following you will use your new bank account for:
a) Daily life
b) Operating your business
c) Nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons development
d) Terrorism
e) Operating an anti-social group
f) International wires
)
A shadow implication of this is further deskilling of the retail bank branch employee base, since traditionally the people doing this sort of work have to be able to handle the (fairly expansive) set of things that anyone in the neighborhood could want a banker to do.
The telephone booth services are going to be provided by a computer and call center rep symbiosis, though, and while the system has to know how to handle anything, the call center rep only needs to know how to handle whatever queue they're assigned to.
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I think the so-called Bitcoin treasury companies have just reinvented exchange tokens: there is an asset with X real world utility but not naturally leverageable. It should flow to place in world where most leverage is bolted onto it; immediately incentive compatible. Repeat 100x
And then “Holy %}*]^ how did so much of it end up in a place with grossly deficient risk management?!”
(I understand that MicroStrategy is the opposite of leveraged exposure from the common shareholder’s perspective but if someone with hands on keyboard believes they are allowed leverage if they hold more exchange tokens then the model happens regardless of whether that is true.)
(n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than authorization or authentication.)
As I've mentioned previously, solemnization is a sociolegal tripwire to say "There are many situations in society and in business where you're Just Talking and up until this exact moment we have been Just Talking *and after this point* We Were Not Just Talking. Do you get it?"
People who are unsophisticated about this think that the signature is somehow preventing someone from retroactively changing the terms of the contract. People who are unsophisticated say thinks like "Oh use digital signatures to PROVE that that has not happened. Sounds great."
Apparently Japan Post is debuting the most obvious improvement in addressing for last two decades: address virtualization.
You sign up with them and get a short alphanumeric code. Their DB holds a pointer to physical address. If you move, you tell them, pointer changes.
And then when dealing with an e-commerce merchant instead of doing the traditional laborious address entry (which in Japanese usually requires redundantly providing the pronunciation of the address as well) you just give them the code.
This follows some more limited experiments with address virtualization, like the double blinding of addresses used in e.g. P2P marketplaces, where neither buyer nor seller strictly need to know where other lives if packages can move between them expeditiously.
Listening to @_rossry ‘s new podcast about drug development and the first episode about operational competence issues in clinical trials is giving me flashbacks.
Ross and Meri discuss how clinical research organizations, who are essentially GCs sitting between pharma labs and sites which actually have clinical staff that can see patients, often are other than competent at meat and potatoes execution.
Interesting article about falling backwards into founding a non-profit and then doing policy advocacy work, which had a number of points which resonated with me:
There is another paragraph about feeling turbocharged imposter syndrome when talking to subject matter experts and then realizing they’ve spent 0.01% of their career on *exactly* your new problem and so you understood it better than they do as of about day four or so.
In today's very surprising example of things an LLM could be good at:
I had a print failure while running a resin print in the wee hours of the morning.
Debugging these is a bit maddening. They arise from a combination of software, math, chemistry, and unpredictable chaos.
They're also very underdocumented. (In what is surely a first in the history of manufacturing.)
The community is spread between various Facebook groups and Discords, and writes little down formally. Most recorded lore is in YouTube videos, and aimed at low-skill enthusiasts.
And when a print failure happens, all you have to go on is the symptom to figure out where to start investigating. You'll see e.g. a sheer within a print or a melted rump instead of a dragon or, as happened with me yesterday, a build plate wrenched to 30 degrees off level.