Having a diversified portfolio has a positive expected return. Gambling has a negative expected return. There’s a long history of stock investing resulting in positive average returns, and there’s a long history of slots resulting in negative average returns.

If you’re buying good companies (or buying an index) and holding long-term, you are expected to get positive returns, therefore it’s not gambling. Any investment can have a negative return, it’s the mathematical expectation that separates it from gambling.

Right, but it can be used privately, which is my point.

But yeah, I think Monero is the better option for the reasons you mentioned, as well as the development focus being on private transactions, whereas Lightning is about fast, cheap transactions. So Monero is absolutely my preference for purchase transactions.

The Trump token

This is 100% BS, don’t buy that crap. If you want cryptocurrency, buy one of the established coins, like BTC, XMR, or ETH.

Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, is “based on thin air.” It is a “scam.” It can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” These are Public Citizen positions. But they are also direct comments from then President Donald J. Trump.

I don’t see how one relates to the two. In both cases and as stated by others here, those statements also apply to the US Dollar, which is one of the most respected and certainly one of the most used currencies in the world. BTC itself is not great for illegal activity because every transaction is traceable, so you’re better off using the Lightning network or a privacy coin (e.g. XMR) to approximate the privacy features that the USD provides. But even then, if you lose your device, law enforcement could figure out all of your transactions, whereas cash transactions are completely untraceable.

This article just looks like a dig at Trump, and cryptocurrencies got caught in the crossfire. I’m 100% on board with calling the Trump token a scam because the intent there is really clear: to raise funding for Trump. There’s no expectation that this coin will meaningfully exist in 5 years, and probably not even 1.

So call a spade a spade, Trump’s cryptocurrency is a scam. But that doesn’t mean all cryptocurrencies are scams, it just means you need to make sure you trust those in control of the currency before using it. That’s true for national currencies, and I wouldn’t recommend buying Venezuelan Bolivares because the government backing it isn’t trustworthy.

Eh, if you use the Lightning network, Bitcoin is quite private, provided you don’t close the channels you use.

That said, I agree that Monero is a lot more reasonable than Bitcoin for actual transactions. I don’t see a point in holding Bitcoin, Monero is much better suited to making everyday purchases because transaction costs are low and privacy features are solid. Yeah, it can be used for crime, but so can cash, so I don’t think that has any bearing on whether a currency has value.

OpenAI needs to raise capital at a valuation far higher than any other startup in history

The only difference is the concentration of wealth. Whether you spread the eggs across a dozen baskets or put them all in one doesn’t matter if the farm producing the eggs has a salmonella outbreak. It’s the same underlying problem whether it impacts a handful of companies or hundreds, investors are investing way too much in the same thing.

That said, the investment is still somewhat spread out among OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon (leaving Nvidia out intentionally here since their risk is limited). Each of those is investing a ton into AI, so if there’s a problem in management instead of the underlying tech, then there will be winners and losers among that bunch, but if there’s a problem with the underlying tech, all of them are going to get hit.

It’s hard for me to imagine investors that don’t understand the technology now but getting burned by it being enthusiastic about investing in a new technology they don’t understand that promises the same things

But that’s just it, they’ll market it differently. Apple has the “Apple intelligence” brand they’re going for, and they’re trying to distance themselves a bit from the rest of the pack. Amazon is largely betting on AI processing hardware, so they’re a bit less exposed if consumers shift from one incarnation to another, provided they still use similar hardware for whatever that replacement is. One of those players will capitalize on the hysteria going the other direction and rebrand successfully to attract investors.

So if LLMs end up being a liability, we’ll see a bunch of rebranding of similar tech (say, “real intelligence” or “intelligent digital assistant” or whatever). Some companies will transition successfully, others won’t, but tech companies will find a way to keep the funding flowing.

losing a decade plus of progress is significant

But it’s not real progress, it’s inflated progress. If you look at average, inflation-adjust returns (CAGR, not simple average) over the past 30 years, from the start of the dotcom (1993 -> 2023), average returns are 7.5%/year. 20 years (1993 -> 2013) is 6.7%.

If you look at innovations, smartphones started coming out right after the dotcom bust, “Web 2.0” was coined in 1999 (peak of the dotcom bubble) and became a thing in the early 2000s, etc. There was a lot of innovation in tech, which seemed largely unaffected by the dotcom bubble.

So I’m really not worried about it. We had a massive tech correction in 2000, yet the decade following had some of the biggest changes in tech, a lot of it coming from the companies that survived the dotcom bubble. Likewise after the 2008 crash, the financial sector had a massive run. I don’t see any reason for the AI bubble to be any different.

What does that have to do with the French newspaper Le Monde?

They’ve had the “this app might be malware” or whatever nonsense for ages, and I think they’ve stepped it up a bit. That won’t stop power users, but it does chill average users and was a big reason Epic Games sued despite having the ability already to offer a sideloadable app.

And yeah, it’s all about precedent. Microsoft has been trying to go this route for a while as well, and every time they do, it’s always “security” as the excuse for why it needs to be that way.

Why would they let bodyguards use tracking apps? Are we really that bad at opsec?

Cool!

I’m not going to use it (screw you Meta), but more competition for Google is a good thing. Hopefully this shakes up the search market a bit.

Not sure, I’m not a lawyer and haven’t investigated either party to know for sure. But what I do see is both the App Store and Play Store using “security” as an excuse to lock apps to their respective ecosystems. So whether there’s overt collusion is anyone’s guess, but they both seem to be playing with a similar set of cards.

The problem is that there’s only really two ecosystems: Google and Apple. If there was more competition, maybe it would be fine if users opt-in to a closed ecosystem, but if there’s only two options, there’s a strong incentive from both parties to collude to prevent new competitors.

That said, I’m similar to you, I use GrapheneOS as well and have only owned the one Apple device (also iPod touch), and I largely avoid both ecosystems. However, going a third way definitely has significant repurcussions, as in I can’t use many apps because they require Google’s ecosystem to function.

Yeah, I think it’s fantastic as well. The SimpleFIN syncinc works fantastically, and I’m happy enough that I cancelled my TillerHQ subscription, which lapses this month. There’s still a little work to do to clean up some of my older data, but once I get it all rolling nicely, I’ll definitely send the developers a substantial portion of what I was paying for Tiller (like $100/year). I’ve only used it for a couple months, and I plan to play with it a bit in the next month or two as I’m preparing EOY stuff.

Nope, which honestly annoys me but is pretty par for the course. That said, when it comes to budgeting, I mostly care about where money is going and care less about the “whole financial picture.” If I need to estimate what retirement looks like, I want more than a simple budgeting tool.

I personally use Fidelity for investment tracking. My main “checking” is their Cash Management Account, my “savings” is a brokerage account (invested in t-bills and money market funds), and I can link all of my other accounts and it pulls in specific investments and shows a consolidated view. It’s awesome because it shows all kinds of stuff, like morningstar-style factor weights, sector exposure, etc. It’s not self-hosted, but I trust them with my banking anyway, so it’s not like I’m opening myself up to some new exploit (oh, and Fidelity also has proper MFA; Symantic VIP, which kinda sucks, but it’s way better than any other financial institution).

I used to track this stuff via a Google spreadsheet (couldn’t find a way to get stock quotes in LibreOffice), but this seems to be good enough for me.

In this case, the mobile UI doesn’t even work properly.

That said, I find value in it because it makes it so much easier for my SO and I to see the same thing. Oh, and it supports importing transactions via SimpleFIN, which is really nice.

The scale of capital being set on fire in the pursuit of LLMs is just staggering.

I’m guessing you weren’t around in the 90s then? Because the amount of money set on fire on stupid dotcom startups was also staggering. Yet here we are, the winners survived and the market is completely recovered now (took about 15 years because 2008 happened).

I just think that if the LLM bubble pops, it’s going to set things back for years because it will be much more difficult for researchers to get funded for a long time going forward

Maybe. Or if the research is promising enough, investors will dump money into it just like they did with LLMs, and we’ll be right back where we are now with ridiculous valuations.

Whether you’re leading a project or not, time will have pretty much the same impact. He’s in his mid-50s, and he looks pretty good for that age.

We should always blame manufacturers. Either it’s manufacturers helping out development by creating decent drivers, or it’s manufacturers hiding their documentation so developers have to reverse engineer their chips, which takes way longer. But the focus should always be on the manufacturers, whether for good or bad.

Agreed, and it’s really unfortunate. In many areas, Lemmy is much more of a “hive mind” than Reddit was, probably because a lot of people with similar ideas got pissed about the same thing and left around the same time.

Sure, but those are largely the big tech companies you’re talking about, and research tends to come from universities and private orgs. That funding hasn’t stopped, it just doesn’t get the headlines like massive investments into LLMs currently do. The market goes in cycles, and once it finds something new and promising, it’ll dump money into it until the next hot thing comes along.

There will be massive market consequences if AI fails to deliver on its promises (and I think it will, because the promises are ridiculous), and we get those every so often. If we look back about 25 years, we saw the same thing w/ the dotcom craze, where anything with a website got obscene amounts of funding, even if they didn’t have a viable business model, and we had a massive crash. But important websites survived that bubble bursting, and the market recovered pretty quickly and within a decade we had yet another massive market correction due to another bubble (the housing market, mostly due to corruption in the financial sector).

That’s how the market goes. I think AI will crash, and I think it’ll likely crash in the next 5 years or so, but the underlying technologies will absolutely be a core part of our day-to-day life in the same way the Internet is after the dotcom burst. It’ll also look quite a bit different IMO than what we’re seeing today, and within 10 years of that crash, we’ll likely be beyond where we were just before the crash, at least in terms of overall market capitalization.

It’s a messy cycle, but it seems to work pretty well in aggregate.

demonstrate knowledge of trivia

Government structure isn’t trivia, it’s a pretty foundational part of an election and part of K-12 education. You need to know which promises a candidate can and cannot deliver to make an informed decision IMO. This doesn’t apply to anyone 18+ because the Constitution (at least here in the US) guarantees a right to vote, so this would merely be a metric to separate interested underage individuals from those w/ crazy parents who want to try to stuff ballot boxes. We should also probably require anyone under 18 who votes to do so at a private ballot booth (as opposed to mail voting, for example), without their parents present, so they can’t be coerced into voting a particular way. If you have a legal guardian, there’s always the possibility of that guardian manipulating you to serve their own interests, and that needs to be accounted for in any broad-reaching policy like extending voting access.

We don’t really understand how a lot of brain function works

Fair, but that’s like saying “we don’t know the exact terrain of Mars so we can’t build a rover.” We know a lot about how brains develop, what parts of the brain do what, and so on. We use it in developing treatments for the brain, and those treatments work, and we’re learning more about why those treatments work every day.

Yes, there’s no magical cutoff for brain development because everyone is different. But there is a range, and AFAIK the consensus is that the brain is largely completed developing (however you define that) by your early 20s. Some people are ready sooner than that, some aren’t ready until later, but in general, most people can be considered “fully developed” around 20-25 yo. There’s little to no scientific evidence that 18 is a reasonable number for much of anything, and that number seems to be largely driven by culture (i.e. you’re strong enough to work on your own, so go work on your own).

I’m not suggesting any change in official or unofficial policy WRT age, and I think we largely agree that we should have more consideration for maturity (again, however we define that) rather than age. An 18yo dating a 17yo is a lot different than a 17yo dating a 14yo, yet the former is technically illegal in many areas while the latter is fine. But that doesn’t mean any discussion about age is unproductive, and having some age ranges makes a lot of sense when reasoning about a problem.

the entire field absolutely reeks of phrenology

That’s a bit reductionist.