No, the “at conception” part is super important because it’s doing a double whammy of also sneaking in “personhood-at-conception” to further undermine abortion rights.

“We fired our content moderation team because we believe in free speach… Wait, no, not like that!”

Do you also burst into astrophysics conferences and tell people that the sun is a burning ball of gas?

Please read what I wrote again, very carefully, and ask yourself “Am I actually contributing anything new to this person’s understanding of the topic?” Because everything you’re throwing out here is basically baby’s first blockchain, and none of it comes even remotely close to addressing my actual argument, which seems to have been a few steps beyond your grasp of the subject.

I actually have to disagree with the notion that blockchain (meaning distributed public ledger blockchain for these purposes) solves the trust problem. I’ve yet to see an example where this is actually true.

What public ledger blockchains do is move trust to somewhere off-chain. Consider a common example that’s used by advocates; tracking a banana from source to sale. The blockchain is supposed to create a completely untamperable record that proves the banana in your hands was ethically sourced. But in order for that to actually work, there has to be some way to prove that the banana in your hands corresponds to the record on the chain. And that proof can only come from human verification at each step of the process. So the trust is still there, it’s just in the humans verifying the accuracy of the records rather than in the records themselves. Which is basically how the current system works.

And you’ll find this same problem with basically any and every application of public ledger blockchains as a solution to problems of trust. In the vast majority of cases, sooner or later these trustless, decentralized systems will ultimately defer to trust in a central authority. How do you know your Bored Ape NFT is the real one, and not a copy minted by someone else on the same chain against the same image? You check it with BAYC through OpenSea or whatever platform they’re using. Ethereum has been forked multiple times. How do we know the current “Ethereum” is the true and real version of the ledger? Because the Ethereum Foundation says so.

These systems only solve trust in the same way that sweeping all your trash under the rug “solves” cleaning your apartment.

If AI cost peanuts to run, this would be a very reasonable point. But it doesn’t. It’s staggeringly expensive to operate something like ChatGPT.

So any use of genAI has to consider the question “Do the benefits provided actually justify the cost?”

Obviously, in a capitalist society this turns into “How can we monetize this?”, but even in a fully socialist society it would still be necessary to ask if this technology is actually providing sufficient societal benefit to actually justify the material resource cost of running it.

This is exactly the problem. There are plenty of people who will crawl out of the woodwork to tell you how they’ve found a way to make AI “useful”, but very, very few could put their hand on their heart and say that it was “essential” to their workflow or their own happiness and wellbeing in any meaningful way.

Which is fine in theory, but “expected” based on what?

They haven’t demonstrated any ability to meaningfully improve their models (“meaningfully” meaning "sufficient to actually address the very serious concerns about their practical usability), they haven’t shown any ability to meaningfully capture enterprise sales for their API, and their conversion rate on free users to paid users is abysmal. Their only stated plan to increase revenues is doubling their prices, which given their already terrible user retention doesn’t actually seem like a reliable way to bring revenue up. Jacking up prices only works when your users find you indespensible, and everything OpenAI offers can be found elsewhere for less.

Well done for being a victim of their bullshit.

Mercedes says “ten years” instead of “two” for exactly this reason. Compared to the “loudmouth Americans” it makes their claim look restrained, realistic, reasonable. It’s still bullshit, but it’s a flavour of bullshit designed to appeal to investors who imagine themselves as more discerning, smarter, less gullible.

The best cons work on people who think they aren’t gullible.

“According to what Mercedes wants shareholders to believe” is, I think, what you meant to say.

Remember, every company working on making self-driving cars has a strong incentive to constantly claim that results are “just around the corner”. Because shareholders are fucking idiots, and they’ll put their money into whoever bullshits them the most confidently.

Here’s the basic problem with this solution as far as I can see: assuming we’re talking about a distributed public ledger blockchain, you haven’t described how the chain is secured.

The existence of systems like “proof of work” and “proof of stake” is based on the need to have some sort of proving mechanism for validator nodes. You have to solve the sibyl problem, or else someone can just run 10,000 copies of the validator software on one computer, submit enough votes for a false record that it overwhelms any competing votes, and thus create their own version of the chain - now authorized as the definitive and true version - where they get free energy for life because they’re so staggeringly wealthy in your new currency.

Distributed public ledgers only work if you insert a real world cost to validation. Basically, something of value must be committed or destroyed in order to authorize a validator node. Otherwise you have to authorize the nodes yourself, and now you’ve just reinserted a central authority.

So what is destroyed or committed to secure your chain? Assuming proof of work, it would be hardware and energy. People would be burning power solving increasingly complex and entirely meaningless math problems in order to be allowed to act as a validator. So now we run into the problem of incentive; why would they do this? In basically every public ledger blockchain that exists, the answer is that they get paid. Newly created tokens are given out to validators as a reward for their work. And, inherently, those tokens must be worth more than the cost of doing that garbage work in order for validators to actually benefit in any way. Without that, the incentives don’t work, and the validator nodes all shut down, destroying your blockchain.

This is why speculation and rampant deflation are inherent to cryptocurrencies; because in order for the validator system to not be overwhelmed by a single bad actor buying a tonne of computer hardware, the complexity of the validation (hence, the cost of the work in spent energy) must scale with the amount of hardware in the network, and that means that the cost of being a validator scales with the amount of hardware in the network. So as your network grows, the value of the token grows, or else the network dies.

But you’ve decided that people will also be rewarded with a token for the actual physical act of generating solar power and feeding it to the grid. And they’ll pay for power with those tokens. So your system is unbalanced. You pay people to generate power with newly created tokens, and then destroy those tokens when they’re spent to buy power. But you, presumably, also pay people to run validator nodes (because how else is your network secured?) using newly generated tokens, so you’re giving out more tokens than the actual amount of generated power in the system. That means you have too many tokens chasing a limited supply of goods.

So now you either have to allow people to overbid for power, creating rampant runaway inflation, or you have to keep the cost per kwh fixed, and create a situation where people go to get power but there’s none in the system, because you’ve got floating, “empty” tokens that don’t actually reflect a unit of power generated. And since you’re paying for power going into the system with these tokens, either way you’re destroying their perceived value and that means you’ve destroyed any incentive to sell power to your network in the first place. They’ll just sell to the grid instead.

And moving to Proof of Stake or Proof of Storage or any other proving mechanism doesn’t solve this problem, because ultimately they all rely on the validator committing something of value. If they don’t, it’s by definition no longer a proving mechanism, because the cost of sibyl attack becomes zero (or close enough to zero as to be meaningless). And if every validator must offer something of value, they must get something of value. Which means you have to generate tokens and give them out to the validators, and you have to ensure that those tokens have a real-world worth that is commensurate to the value that the validators commit.

I’m sorry but this is absolute nonsense.

A reasonable energy cost for a single transaction on a modern database is about 0.1J. Even factoring in redudancy and backups, if we’re incredibly generous to your argument and multiply that cost by ten, that puts us at 1J. In fact, I’ll be ludicrously generous, I’ll multiply by 100, so 10J per transaction. That’s an absolutely insane cost, but we’ll imagine that we’re doing this as inefficiently as it is humanly possible to do.

The cost per transaction of Bitcoin sits at around 1,000,000,000J per transaction. Yes, 1 billion joules per transaction. To claim that these are comparable energy costs is like me claiming to be as rich as Elon Musk. Even looking at something like Ethereum, you’re still at about 1,000 joules per transaction. Stacked up against our hilariously overestimated energy costs for our traditional database, you’re still 100 times over.

(Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x)

Also, you can’t just blindly ascribe the energy cost of “everything else in the same datacentre” to a standard database driven solution and act as if that’s a reasonable comparison. That would be like me adding the total energy cost of every single building where a validator node for your blockchain is running, even if it’s just someone’s laptop sitting in the corner of a forty story office.

Look, I came into this thread to seriously engage your question, but I cannot let an obvious falsehood like this slide by unchallenged. It is such a gross distortion of the truth that I’m actually struggling to decide if you really believe this, or if you’re straight up trolling.

The content isn’t the problem. It’s the delivery system. No one else has the storage and network capacity that Youtube has. And as a result of that, no one else has the built-in audience Youtube has. Putting your videos on YT is simply the best way to get views.