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> I don't know, do you? Nope. Just a subscriber and see thousands of others using it on Discord. You pay to get access to their awesome models, it works incred

> I don't know, do you? Nope. Just a subscriber and see thousands of others using it on Discord. You pay to get access to their awesome models, it works incredibly well. It's mind boggling. > Bitcoin's growth as an "asset" is not very interesting to me. What is it for? Go back to 2013 and read what they predicted, and try to fathom how something like this happened. Fastest growing asset ever and you don't understand it, and it's in your (presumably) computer science realm. > Back when it was conceived, it was for digital payments. What's the first message in the first block of Bitcoin? "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." ................................................ some serious dunning kruger going on here.... "failure of that first narrative, that I just made up"

sanderjd 4y ago
> it works incredibly well. It's mind boggling. Yeah I find all the AI stuff really amazing and mind boggling. But that's not the point I made. My point is that I'm not sure it's going to be sustainable. I think it's currently being subsidized by investors, but I'm curious whether the marginal revenue will ever be able to exceed the marginal cost by enough to justify many businesses. Things can't just be cool, they also have to be cost effective. (I wish we hadn't gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, it's boring while the midjourney discussion is interesting, but oh well.) I don't have to go back in time, I remember what the idea of Bitcoin was, and it had nothing to do with speculation on its price. There were two ideas: 1. That it would be useful for digital payments; a secure and anonymous way to pay for things on the Internet, and 2. That it would be an inflation and banking crisis hedge (as your second paragraph alludes to). It's been a laughable failure at both of those things and now all anyone talks about is price speculation.
- __pache__ 4y ago
  Man if only computing got cheaper year to year, oh well!
  - sanderjd 4y ago
    It doesn't, really, for these big ML models. Most of the cost savings, and thus progress, in recent years has come from innovations in the algorithms. It remains very expensive to run ML systems at huge scale. Everyone is betting (for example, Microsoft through its billions subsidizing OpenAI) that either hardware or software breakthroughs will make this all cost effective over time. That bet may well be right. All I'm saying is that it isn't obvious to me that it will be, and there's this entire mini-boom of companies is dependent on how that gamble turns out.
    - __pache__ 4y ago
      > It doesn't, really, for these big ML models. Hard to take this seriously, sorry man.
      - sanderjd 4y ago
        Why? Because you just blindly assume computing power is always cheap and have trouble with that assumption being challenged? The whole reason chatgpt burst on the scene years after the techniques it is based on were developed is that the incumbents were unwilling to take the hit to their margins by releasing a fundamentally more expensive product category. OpenAI and Microsoft decided to take the gamble on that. Maybe it will pan out, maybe it won't. That's how gambles work.

sanderjd 4y ago

> it works incredibly well. It's mind boggling. Yeah I find all the AI stuff really amazing and mind boggling. But that's not the point I made. My point is that I'm not sure it's going to be sustainable. I think it's currently being subsidized by investors, but I'm curious whether the marginal revenue will ever be able to exceed the marginal cost by enough to justify many businesses. Things can't just be cool, they also have to be cost effective. (I wish we hadn't gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, it's boring while the midjourney discussion is interesting, but oh well.) I don't have to go back in time, I remember what the idea of Bitcoin was, and it had nothing to do with speculation on its price. There were two ideas: 1. That it would be useful for digital payments; a secure and anonymous way to pay for things on the Internet, and 2. That it would be an inflation and banking crisis hedge (as your second paragraph alludes to). It's been a laughable failure at both of those things and now all anyone talks about is price speculation.

__pache__ 4y ago
Man if only computing got cheaper year to year, oh well!
- sanderjd 4y ago
  It doesn't, really, for these big ML models. Most of the cost savings, and thus progress, in recent years has come from innovations in the algorithms. It remains very expensive to run ML systems at huge scale. Everyone is betting (for example, Microsoft through its billions subsidizing OpenAI) that either hardware or software breakthroughs will make this all cost effective over time. That bet may well be right. All I'm saying is that it isn't obvious to me that it will be, and there's this entire mini-boom of companies is dependent on how that gamble turns out.
  - __pache__ 4y ago
    > It doesn't, really, for these big ML models. Hard to take this seriously, sorry man.
    - sanderjd 4y ago
      Why? Because you just blindly assume computing power is always cheap and have trouble with that assumption being challenged? The whole reason chatgpt burst on the scene years after the techniques it is based on were developed is that the incumbents were unwilling to take the hit to their margins by releasing a fundamentally more expensive product category. OpenAI and Microsoft decided to take the gamble on that. Maybe it will pan out, maybe it won't. That's how gambles work.