The unfortunate thing is that, while their academic position sounds plausible on paper, just like with most crypto things it's just a money grab.
How many crypto people (with legitimate backgrounds just like the founders of Polymarket and Kalshi) stood up and said big things about freedom and the unbanked etc., turns out they were literally just scamming people- there are so many examples besides FTX.
Letting people bet on any random thing is not at all related to this "price everything" theory. If that was their real goal they wouldn't behave so much like a normal sports betting company. I have yet to actually hear anyone defend their actual actions in a plausible way.
Did you ever consider that the crypto scammers might not be the same people as the crypto freedom folks? It wasn't one grand trick by a collective of genius con artists... Much like the cashier at the store isn't to blame for that guy calling your grandma and trying to trick her into sending money from her bank account.
Crypto is a speculative investment vehicle, its basically a lottery machine - why would people who are so invested in a lottery machine that you can avoid taxes or buy drugs with be surprised they are considered part of the con artists doing the pump and dumps?
> And why exactly are we "hoping for a global currency revolution"
So that Visa and MasterCard can't censor things they don't like. So that PayPal can't block creators from withdrawing money because they made a Japanese style game
When institutional investors and yolo 'get rich' people sell their coins it will drop to (in case of Bitcoin) 2,000 USD again, it would be closer to a currency then. However people would go crazy, because it's only very, very rarely used as a currency. Most just use it as a speculative asset.
Don't forget about regimes like Iran and North Korea using crypto to receive bribes, ransomware payments, and launder money. Crypto is a cesspool. Just wait for the bank runs when everyone tries to bail out. There's a reason we have banking regulations.
I think it's clear that crypto has real market-based utility as an exchange of value. It's just that much of that utility is illegal, for a spectrum of meanings of that word. Paying crypto to murder people is not the same as wanting to get out from under your shitty government's currency into another more stable one.
The whole Epstein thing (the money, I mean) just shows that money has always wanted to be moved around, and a certain class of people don't care how it gets done- I mean the arms dealers, but also the billionaires hiding money in their charities. A libertarian would say that crypto democratizes that for everyone. I don't think it can last forever though.
In the age of AI and npm supply chain attacks I feel like there are more reasons than ever to roll your own.
One other possible title of this article could just be, don’t break UI conventions. Which is not the same thing.
Instead of trying to download and configure a date time thing (for something app specific like domain specific date ranges) rather than having to rely on the configuration of a larger library, then having to manage all future major version upgrades (and some of these npm libraries have major versions every year!) why not just create your own smaller surface area component? It’ll be literally zero maintenance compared to managing an npm dependency in your app.
Counterpoint: all of these things are built right into the user's browser, and browser vendors independently work to avoid attacks across the userbase without any intervention from web designers. In fact, if the browser itself is compromised, we probably have bigger problems anyway. By just letting the browser handle these tools, we do not need to spend any resources at all.
Harvey was never very good, or useful. It mostly exists so large law firms can say they do AI. AFAICT. I hope it dies and something useful takes over, but i doubt it :)
Keep in mind harvey starts at like 50-100k, and is well out of the cost range of the vast majority of law firms.
This will help random people dealing with small claims, people cosplaying lawyers to avoid costs, etc.
It will have no effect on the legal startups that are actually good (Eve, et al), because what this stuff does is nowhere close to what most lawyers outside of commercial contract legal counsel spend their time on. I considered doing some AI legal consulting/startups myself, and so have spent tons of time literally sitting down with lawyers in various areas outside of my own and seeing where they spend their time for real.
Let's take one area: personal injury attorneys who aren't in the volume game (which is owned by a fairly small number of large national firms) spend lots of time on case valuation, getting data, and exhibit prep.
None of this is going to help deal with getting missing medical records from places that require that you literally fax random stuff to them, and then call to followup 18 times. I wish i was kidding. Even getting electronic medical records is still a serious pain in the ass, human wise.
Or analyze the past 1000 cases you have (100-1000 documents per case), including what county, what opposing lawyer, counsel, plus the 1000 documents in this case, and give you a sense of how valuable this case is or not.
Or if you are a family lawyer, actually mediating a divorce.
Things like this are what actually useful specialized AI legal products do or at least help with.
Claude is very far away from being able to handle most of these things. It is a jack of all trades tool. Will it be able to do this someday? Maybe.
Additionally, keep in mind most legal startups i've run into are based on caricatures of what lawyers do (IE startups who think that most personal injury lawyers are running around after auto cases and trying to be high volume, etc).
Any lawyer who has deal with legal startups could very quickly tell you which will make it or not, because it's pretty consistent which solve real problems that will be hard to commoditize through things like claude for legal.
While i agree for the most part, they can only cut the middle man so many times before they get themselves in antitrust trouble.
I suspect that will happen faster than they'd like, because regulators (at least outside the US) are not interested in a repeat of Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc.
Not sure why this was downvoted, I came to read more about it. I have a friend that runs a firm and uses Legora and can’t stand it. We have conversations all of the time about pain points. I sent him the Claude Law docs, and while he’s not technical he was intrigued because he envisions his workflows to eventually be similar to mine as a developer.
Of course they know, their same governments have signed some kind of five eyes intelligence treaties before. Palantir will probably have new customers now that Europe is re-arming.
In any case these same governments are probably also approving the purchase of Huawei cell tower equipment.
It's extremely hard for me to separate where we are now from the way that Moore's law dictates a pretty insane level of planned obsolescence for chips and therefore everything with a chip in it.
If we make batteries replaceable or whatever other thing, how much do we change this fundamental dynamic? I feel like it's not very much.
People are kidding themselves if they think somehow recycling ewaste or reusing your last-model iPhone is some kind of sea-change that will fix the environmental impacts of tech.
It also doesn't seem defensible to say we should just slow progress down- isn't that a world where we never get iPhones and AI? How could a computing field that moves slower than Moore's law even work?
I dislike a lot of these wasteful dynamics but I also don't know what the alternative is. Consumer tech and computing is still the poster child for the proponents of global free market economics for good reason. It's one of the least extractive, least wasteful, highest profit margin sectors of the economy.
It's just saying a lot about how wasteful the other sectors are that tech is so wasteful.
> How could a computing field that moves slower than Moore's law even work?
Moore's Law has been breaking down for years already (to the point that people shift the goalposts as to what the actual quantity is that improves exponentially), so it's strange to ask. There are known physical limits that will prevent it from continuing indefinitely; and we aren't even that far away, to my understanding.
Moore's law is ending but the power laws of increased capacity and capability of computing in general continues at a similar rate- so this isn't a question of the specific technology of how many transistors you can fit in a given area.
Moore's law is just a stand-in for the planned obsolescence of all computing related things almost since computers were invented, and the fundamental tech question is always, when thing x gets 10x cheaper/faster, what new use case gets unlocked? Right now it's AI model capability. Maybe also battery tech.
The idea of the slow growth of computing smells to me like the Bill Gates quote about 640k of RAM being enough for anyone.
We can argue about the magnitude and the details, but the basic fact remains.
There are ways of dealing with negative externalities. Some work better than others. The details do matter a lot. And we definitely need better ways of tackling problems like this, especially when the cost is less immediate. The more diffuse, temporally removed, downstream, hidden, or controversial it is, the harder it is to get people to take the problem seriously. Let alone actually do anything about it.
We can take on these challenges. Or we can largely ignore them / throw our hands in the air, and watch the consequences unfold.
As much as we are able to, I’d like to try the former. Computing can still move forward and innovate at a rapid rate.
We should definitely be doing better, and it's also clear that these negative externalities are not being priced in at all.
I do and would want to buy tech that I'm not coerced into to throwing away after a year. It's insane to be how many objects today have batteries that are sealed inside and are meant to be thrown away after- that should be regulated.
But that seems to me to be an implementation detail rather than aspect that's worthy of an entire manifesto.
I do think the political aspects of things like Ring and Flock cameras and Palantir are super important (the reenforcing of existing power structures part).
But I don't get the folding in of this idea that not consuming computing devices is part of the solution- Like I said, it feels like the planned obsolescence of all computing devices and software is fundamental to the field.
PINE64 were trying with the PineNote[0], sort of. It's quite a large device (10.3"), in the same size class as reMarkable/Boox devices. It's cost-competitive with those products, but it's way too big and too expensive to compare to traditional ~7" e-readers.
Seed studio sells some. reTerminal is the more polished one, it has a metal case, nice buttons, and a 2Ah battery. The Xiao screen is more diy, but also has more potential options
I used a reTerminal as a bedside weather station UI recently, works rather nice
Not exactly reading devices, yes, but they are open hardware
supernote's tablets are designed to have replaceable motherboards/batteries although it's still to be seen whether they will actually be able to support that long-term.
At the beginning of the internet we were promised the free flow of digital information between computers, peer-to-peer. What we got was silos of content each fighting each other to make sure that the silos stay intact with DRM.
I could imagine an AI future where agentic shopping companies who promise me the best deal are pitted against Walmart and Amazon, trying to algorithmically squeeze me for $2 more- just two bots playing a cat and mouse game to save me a few bucks.
For some reason a lot of tech ends up in these antagonistic monopolies- Apple wants to sell privacy aware devices as a product feature, Google wants give you mail and maps, but sell your data. Despite any appearances neither give a shit about you, even if you benefit from the dynamic.
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