Crypto currency uses up to 1.5% of the world's electricity, makes up 2.5% of the world's money, uses up to 0.1% of the fresh water supply, and perhaps as high as 6-10% of silicon chips produced.
And yet, as you say, there's no mass adaption (yet). All it's doing is making tech bros and speculators even richer. It's possible that wider adoption will eventually happen, but as years pass this claim gets harder and harder to make. It's not any easier for "normal" people to use than it was ten years ago, and the main use cases are still "speculation" and "paying for drugs", also just like ten years ago.
From someone who also genuinely thinks the underlying crypto tech is fascinating, it's hard not to see the "currency" part of it as a kind of cancerous growth on the world economy.
Yeah, it's definitely a huge bubble right now. I think a lot of crypto bros have marketed it more as a casino than a solution to a decentralized currency.
A hypothetical good use case: one can have a "science crypto" where the transaction fees go to funding science. By using the cryptos you want you can essentially pay taxes to causes you think are important
> a lot of crypto bros have marketed it more as a casino than a solution to a decentralized currency.
Another way of looking at this is that the main players have a vested interest in keep it as a casino. Therefore it'll never become a currency, because casinos and monetary systems have fundamentally different requirements when it comes to stability.
Instability in cryptocurrency is a feature. It'll never go away unless it gets regulated to the point that all the things that differentiate it from the fiat monetary system are gone.
True but the webdev idiom is injecting things such as mathjax from a cdn. I guess one can pre-render the page and save that, but that's kind of like a PDF already
Aren't we starting to figure out that life (self-organization) is the most likely outcome for planets with our conditions? Maybe "our conditions" are also too strong of a requirement
Check out Blaise Arcas on MLST and Nick Land on Dwarkesh. Self organization might just be the second law of thermodynamics in action
"planets with our conditions" is doing a lot of work here.
how many planets meet that criteria? most of the closest have typcially been labeled "super Earths" so their gravity will be greater than 1g. what effect will that have?
If life has adapted to the crushing pressure of deep ocean, I have hopes that it can adapt to not-so-crushing gravity. I'm sure a lot of our current life could adapt if our gavity was doubled. I'd feel sorry for birds, though.
Quick googling tells me that trees move water internally by capillarity, and suction caused by leave evaporation, both processes passive.
This puts limits on how high the column of water can be raised, yet at 1g we can have monstrous trees like sequoias, so maybe many kinds of trees would die, but the survivors would just grow shorter.
Abisal creatures, who knows how much pressure they can adapt to? They have populated our oceans as deep as they can go, the planet has nothing stronger to challenge them.
you're focusing on sea dwelling creatures. what about land based? would animals get as large? would more calories need to be consumed for the extra effort necessary to move around in what ever >1g is around? some of these are are between 1.9x and 10x the size of earth. working twice as hard every day for everything be one thing, but 10x the effort?
what would be the atmospheric pressure at >1g? what effect would that play as well? not only would you be heavier, but you'd have to work harder to breathe.
again, lots of questions about the these differences that make it a lot more complicated than the right amino acids floating around in space.
Woah, I'm not focusing on anything specific, I just tried to address the two observations of your previous comment. If you keep adding more we'll never end this tread.
It's not like I am a SuperEarther cultist or something, I just think life can adapt to a wider range of gravities. If you think about it, it's amazing that Earth life can withstand constant microgravity despite no evolutionary pressure in that direction. If microgravity is survivable, why not some degree of macrogravity?
I know the problem the AI solved wasn't that hard but one should consider math toast within the next 10-15 years.
Software engineering is more subtle since you actually care about the performance and semantics of a program. Unless you get really good at program specification, it would be difficult to fully automate.
But with math the only thing you care about is whether the moves you made were right.
The paper I linked is the problem I solved for my thesis, which was published in JEMS (upper echelon journal). I spent 8 hours a day for one and a half years working on it. 75% of mathematicians don't have a theorem that good, but the Terry Taos of the world get a theorem like that every year.
My claim is that in 15 years an AI system will be able to prove it from first principles for under 100 dollars. That would render us normal mathematicians toast.
That computers can be used to perform long calculations is nothing novel. That is literally what they were designed to do.
The 4 color theorem was proven because humans actually did the math and discovered a way to simplify the problem enough for them to write a program that proves it. The proof wasn't discovered by a computer. The proof was discovered by the people who wrote that program. There was no machine learning involved.
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