OpenAI's chatbot doesn't have much experience in the material world Don't let OpenAI's chatbot take care of your pets

OpenAI chat has some trouble with the whole 'age' concept Also doesn't understand even basic formulas

Good morning everyone. Today's rant will be about analog audio and some truly maddening myths in that field (thread) There's a persistent myth that as soon as any step in audio processing is digital the entire thing has been reduced to a lower digital quality and that's what you're stuck with. This is wrong.

There's a myth in the general public that Know Your Customer programs are important for banking. This is incorrect (thread) KYC has nothing to do with bank auditing and solvency. It is a relatively recent program which is solely for helping law enforcement. To that end it is extremely expensive and ineffective

Something which offends me about SBF is that he's a finance bro's notion of a charmingly autistic founder. He plays that role well because he's a finance bro himself (thread) Here's the chart of SBF's corporate empire. Nobody sets up something like this without damn well knowing that they're up to something shady

Someone who has not made major charitable contributions, either through money or deeds, can't claim to be an 'effective altruist' any more than they can claim to be a philanthropist Someone who's starting out their career and plans to do it can claim that they aspire to be an effective altruist some day, or even have direct plans for it, and if they haven't yet made lots of money that's a reasonable claim

Good morning everyone. Some thoughts today on El Salvador's failed Bitcoin experiment, which might not be the total failure some are claiming. Here's what remittances have cost in El Salvador over time (thread) Rates have been falling over time, but there's a particularly big drop right around when the government was setting up lightning accounts for everybody. It isn't too much of a stretch that these might be directly linked

Been thinking about neural networks a bit. There's an interesting question of how well they can be approximated with 'simple' functions to show limits on what they can do (thread) Since neural networks typically involve a lot of bespoke functions the details of which don't seem to matter too much we have a lot of room to maneuver with approximating them

There's someone claiming to have a 'much better' plotter and trying to get people to use their pool. We believe these people are scam artists and recommend everybody stay away. Red flags include, but aren't limited to: (thread) Making claims about plot compression which are mathematically impossible. Making claims about plot speed improvements which are very implausible after many great engineers have already optimized it a lot \

Something bio people have said about viruses lately has been bugging me: DNA viruses adapt less rapidly because DNA is copied with fewer errors (thread) This theory seems designed specifically to insult Stephen Jay Gould who insisted that organisms are always perfectly adapted to their environment and only change when the environment changes

My latest thoughts on playing Poker on Chia (thread) It would obviously be completely impractical to play out every move of every game on chain. That would be way too slow and the fees would be way too high, so you have to use state channels.

Something which I've been wondering about lately: With the population vastly larger than it was in the past, why are we not seeing vastly more pandemics than previously? (thread) This will of course be completely speculative and not backed by any actual data. Consider it a series of hypotheses

Chesa Boudin's recall is being portrayed as a debate about approaches to criminal justice. It isn't. It's liberal San Franciscans recalling a liberal DA because he sucks at his job (thread) San Francisco has truly gone downhill, and in worse ways than other cities. Retail stores shutting down because people openly loot all the inventory off of shelves and drug dealing being completely open in broad daylight are not normal.

This letter from some crypto skeptics is going around today. I have a nuanced take so it needs a thread concerned.tech Here is the main point which is technically wrong: "Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither."

People sometimes ask what are the real use cases of cryptocurrencies. This is an honest question. I used to ask it myself. When they say the answers they're getting are bad they're being honest. Here are some better answers (thread) First something which is not an answer: 'Getting rich'. Everybody knows some people have gotten rich off of crypto. The challenge is to justify that with actual value.

Holders of stablecoins take on no upside for supposedly no downside. When they get wiped out it's a bad thing happening to a conservative investor who did nothing wrong (thread) Even worse than that, there can be cascading effects as conservative well-run businesses go under taking down even more conservative well-run businesses which they owed money to. It's very easy for this to take down the entire system

Things that suck on twitter (thread) First, that thread thing. Twitter is actively hostile towards long form content, even threads, disallowing them from being scheduled in advance.

There's a weird phenomenon where new cryptocurrencies are often betting the farm on sidechains while noone building anything real is interested in them (thread) For practical purposes this is simply because sidechains have no benefit over bridges. The different side chains simply don't interoperate except in the same ways that any two chains can interoperate (sha256 preimage reveals and bridges)

An engineering question I like to ask people is: What are the ultimate sources of the power we the human race use? (thread) The challenge is both to understand the second law of thermodynamics ('gravity' is not a source of energy) and to get all of them. The last one is a doozy. See if you can name them all before reading on.

A/V sync and latency issues are as usual driving me insane. There's an opening for an amazing mobile app to be rewritten for dealing with this which apparently doesn't exist yet, here's how it would work: (thread) The app has three modes: tick, tock, and calibrate. When it's in tick mode once a second it flashes a specific color light on its screen and makes a ticking sound. The tick sound should be high pitched and should be specific and the color should \

Now a few highly speculative thoughts on better ways of getting things into space (thread) The most important thing to understand about getting things into space is the role of the atmosphere. It both slows things down with air resistance and provides propellant which can be conveniently grabbed onto and flung backwards