No, quantum physics is not a sham. Lasers are an application of quantum physics, for example. Usage of quantum physics principles in non scientific (thoughts are entangled!) or arbitrary macroscopic contexts (since electrons can cross a barrier, a human can pass through a wall) is an entirely different thing.
> If you don't care about the user in the UI, you probably don't care about the user in the backend either.
Not necessarily. I hate frontend tasks not because I don’t care about the user, but because I don’t have decent graphic skills. I can code but I don’t have a good istinct for colors, size, font styles, or other frontend issues that feel more art than science.
I’m honest about it, and luckily my job doesn’t involve frontend tasks, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the users. In fact, you could say that I avoid frontend tasks precisely because I care about users and I don’t want them to be tormented by my awful UI choices :)
> Frontend problems are just easier to see — bad UI, confusing views, ugly design. Everyone notices. Backend problems are hidden — slow API response, bad errors, hard to manage code
That’s one way to see it. Another way is that frontend problems are subjective. The same UI could be confusing for someone and reasonable in someone else’s eyes. What’s ugly? “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, as the saying goes.
Backend problems can be hidden and random but they are objective. If an API returns 500, there is something wrong. It may do so only when a plane passes by or when a cosmic ray happen to flip a bit, but everyone can agree that a 500 is not supposed to happen (unless your API intentionally returns 500 for success…). The root cause may be obscure, but the existence of an issue is objective.
I would say privacy. No telemetry, no targeted ads, no centralized transcripts, possibly end to end encryption. Psychiatrists are bound by professional secrecy, and they touch on very sensitive topics (people’s fears, their private lives, sexual preferences, …). Privacy is a very strong concern if you want to build this kind of platform.
I can work on privacy segment well enough that both parties agrees on onboarding like only no recording is allowed in any way, no screenshots or online notes form the doctor's side.
Well, transactions in this context are business transactions, which may involve 1 or N remote calls. Imagine checks against no fly lists, fraud detection, flight delay and so on. Speed of light is also another concern. So it’s not as simple as doing 35k TPS on a local SQL database.
True, but a lot of those checks will be against a local snapshots of the data.
> But yes, you don’t always need cool technologies.
That's kinda the irony mainframes are incredibly cool piece's of tech, just not fashionable. They have insane consistency guarantee at the instruction level. Hot swapping features etc. Features you'd struggle to replicate with the dumpster fire that is modern microservice based cloud computing.
It’s not decentralized either, at least not in the Bitcoin sense of the word. Interactions between participants may be automated but they can ultimately rely on legal contracts and people. IATA is one of those participants, but everyone has to trust IATA in the airline industry because of their role. A decentralized airline system built to avoid trust in a central authority would be pretty different (actually the booking part may be the least of their problems there).
It probably doesn’t require consensus among all participants (pairwise consensus at every step should be fine), so there is very likely no voting.
It’s not even permissionless. It’s not like a random company could join this “chain” simply because they can generate a keypair.
It’s a fundamentally different problem, and it makes sense that the architecture is different.
> How can a company in current world environment where unemployment and everything bad is on the rise think that the best way is to simply raise the prices.
Economics talks about “price elasticity of demand”. A good or service is elastic if small changes in price greatly affect the demand. An inelastic good is, at its extreme, one for which people would pay literally anything.
Basically YouTube is betting that their Premium subscription is so important, or will become so important, that it will pretty much become a necessity. Likely because of discounts (invite a friend and get a discount) and network effects (YouTube Premium becomes a new video-oriented social medium like Tiktok?) or because the standard free version will become so bad that you will pay the subscription to have a somewhat decent experience.
> because the standard free version will become so bad that you will pay the subscription to have a somewhat decent experience.
I suppose the term for this is called en-shittification, correct?
I feel like this is because of Youtube being a monopoly, which is used by almost all people including here, far more than any other platform I have seen.
We kind of need more Youtube alternatives. I know bandwidth and storage is a hard problem to solve, but we probably need better alternatives if a company can seemingly just charge 8 times more. I mean, raising prices 8 times is seen as a joke by most if not all companies/products.
I personally wouldn't be impacted because I use ad-block and have given my family the same. But to imagine someone either getting so many insane ads (can we now expect ads to be 8 times more too?, I hope I am not giving someone at Youtube some ideas) or people who might be struggling financially because of so many instances to be asked to pay money or be shown X ads in Y time.
I had thought that Google had deep pockets but I genuinely feel like we are all funding the AI bubble one way or another through mechanisms like these and we are having no say in any of these things.
I feel like as the world itself is turning en-shittified and we are all having no say in all of this :-/
Yes, being a monopoly certainly helps, but that monopoly is YouTube, not YouTube Premium. Since the basic offering is free, raising the price for the Premium version only makes sense if they don’t expect a shift from Premium to free users. This suggests that they believe their Premium offering to become more important, so its users can tolerate a price increase without shifting to the free version (or a YouTube alternative).
> The price is going from $13.99 to $15.99 , that's "up $2" .
My apologies. It's a bit late here and I misread it.
And I was completely out of the loop about pricing (ad-blockers as I have mentioned) and so I had genuinely thought the tag was going from 2$ to 15.99 my apologies.
(that being said, it does say something about the society perhaps that I genuinely thought it was within the realm of possibility that google might raise the prices 8 times and people would just be forced to use it, showing the monopoly of Youtube)
You can generate transactions but ultimately transactions are validated and written in the blockchain by miners. Mining is essentially a way to select voters based on their ability to solve puzzles, ensuring that if you are selected once you have no particular advantage next time. Without miners this whole system doesn’t work.
>“It used to be the news channels were the callers,” said Kane. “They used to be the final say in big events. Like this officially happened because CNN and Fox News said so. But thanks to Polymarket, there’s a new signal.”
This is interesting because of this:
>At the moment, when there is a dispute, markets on Polymarket are settled by an anonymous group of people who hold a crypto token called UMA.
[...]
>It isn’t known who the largest UMA holders are, or what might affect how they vote. It is entirely possible that the people who finally settle a bet on UMA have large amounts of money staked on it.
So basically instead of trusting CNN and Fox News you trust an anonymous group of people who may or may not profit themselves from their own decisions. I can't see how this is any better.
No. These resolvers only deal with rules disputes, i.e. disputes over the fine print. This is only applicable if you are gambling on polymarket. The probabilities while the market is open are set by market forces.
Of course you have to read the fine print very carefully to understand what a particular market is about.
The more deceptive thing is the potential disparity between the title and the rules. Most market participants read the rules closely (although some do not), and so the title + headline probabilities may be not as they seem.
Yes but for example if I look at the current bet on “Military action against Iran ends on…” it talks about the date on which neither US nor Israel initiate a drone missile or air strike on Iranian soil. This seems pretty solid, but we know both countries have launched drone or missile strike even before the current conflict.
So if the war ends but then the US sends a drone to kill one guy in particular, maybe even a terrorist not affiliated with the government, does that count? The fine print is not always that detailed especially for some kinds of events.
This is not surprising for a betting platform, but if this betting platform positions itself as a sort of crowdfunded news outlet, ruling over the fine print essentially means ruling over the news. Obviously all news outlets decide which news they should publish, but at least with traditional outlets you tend to know their biases, the group of people controlling them and so on. Instead the fine print, and ultimately (in Polymarket’s view) the source of the truth about world news, relies on a group of anonymous people voting for what they believe to be the actual meaning of world events.
I think GP is saying that, in principle, the UMA token holders can resolve a dispute any way they see fit, even if in practice it's resolved according to the rules. At the end of the day there is someone who has to arbitrate 'truth' for the purposes of payout.
I understand that. What I'm saying is that resolution is only relevant to bettors. It doesn't affect anyone using Polymarket as a passive information source, because nobody is updating their world view based on the resolution of a market, they are updating their world view based on the price action. The price action follows the expected resolution, not the actual resolution.
Even if someone were to game resolution to make a market resolve the wrong way, it wouldn't affect how the market priced the probabilities in the time before the resolution.
it's an imperfect system, but UMA decisions can also be disputed again, up to two times iirc, which moves the dispute/decision to a different group of UMA whales. tbh, i think this is as good as it gets – unless you stay out of this completely.
Not all AI uses LLM, and for some common LLM applications like summarization and translation you can already use CPU only models. The government, or even your average employer, is not going to need a lot of AI video generation or other really GPU intensive tasks. Prompt processing is currently more GPU oriented, but I don't see it as an impossible challenge given, say, 10-15 years.
Also, CPU-only doesn't necessarily mean "on your own computer". You can easily have 100 TB RAM in a couple of racks.
reply