It's an interesting puzzle, isn't it. On the one hand, the AIs are no good at playing Chess.
However, on the other hand, if you ask an AI to win a game of chess it has all the tools on hand to compete at the same level as Stockfish - it can re-implement an engine and even probably has a GPU on hand to train its own neural nets.
So should we say that the AI can play chess well, or that it cannot?
That sounds implausible. For a premium brand the marginal unit should be comfortably profitable, so they will have the resources to saturate the market at exponential speed purely from their unit economics. The somewhat theatrical lines outside the store aside, Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.
It seems a lot more likely that you get executives who come in and believe that narratives beat reality, there are a lot of people like that in the world. They are the sort who will abandon the reality of quality because that costs money then get confused when the narrative catches up. Or you get an idiot who is data-driven and detects that there is no immediate change in sales when they compromise on quality so they conclude that quality isn't valued by consumers. No malice, just a lack of strategic thinking.
For many, the most constraining resource is time. And you can't buy that. It takes years to spin up a new factory and production line and then transfer the implicit knowledge from your initial production line that provides the quality in the first place.
lmao, not everything is quickly scalable. Take quality lace which is still a very manual process, the highest quality brands most people working on these products are well past the age of 50. There's no one learning to make it and it takes many many years to get skilled enough to do it quickly. Also including apple in premium brand? They make cheap computers.
It is a bit of a leap, but quite possibly an oblique reference to Voltaire's Candide. He spent some time dismantling the idea that this was the best of all possible worlds (the phrase apparently started with Leibniz) and the Lisbon earthquake featured prominently.
Yeah but their strategy on that seems kinda dumb to me because it either does nothing or has a negative effect on the ecosystem. If someone wants to mine bitcoin on their own CPU they can, and if my PC has enough hash power to find a coin on a blockchain then let me tell you, that chain has real problems and is not a serious player. That amount of computing power doesn't justify paying any interesting amount of money.
It isn't the biggest technical concern and at least they have principles, but I expect something that looks like Monero + easy to mine will eventually appear and turn out to have an advantage in the real world. Although it is hard to predict because it isn't completely clear what (if any) impact the algorithm difficulty has in practice. But if there are big datacentre mining a cryptocurrency with dedicated hardware then that means there are people with skin in the game who want it to succeed. Seems like a better equilibrium than whatever the Monero people are aiming for.
> Like Monero but easy to mine is Monero. A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.
That is the "does nothing" argument. But compared to Bitcoin, having a general-purpose [0] ASIC seems like it'd make the network less secure - if someone wants to run something like a 51% attack against Bitcoin they first have to buy a ridiculous amount of specialist Bitcoin-only hardware that will potentially lose all its value after a successful attack. Also probably be a lot easier to track who did it.
Monero the equilibriums are less obvious. Does that matter? No, I don't think so, I still own a certain amount. But it isn't a helpful axis to experiment on and I don't see where the upside is meant to come from vs just going with sha.
Do you understand why Monero's mining algorithm is designed the way it is? If you design a chip to be optimal for mining Monero, you create a shitty CPU that performs 2% better than an ordinary CPU at mining Monero. You may as well use an ordinary CPU to mine Monero, because it can do other things too.
Well, yes. I do. Why do you want to consider mining Monero with a shitty custom CPU? That's a bit of a non-sequitur and I don't see the relevance to the thread. We've been in furious agreement on that point for about 4 posts now and I'm not sure where you're trying to go with it.
I'm going to reiterate that you are the one who started calling a CPU an ASIC, I'm was just trying to match your language to be friendly. A CPU is technically as ASIC for a certain class of computable functions, so if you want to call it that I'm happy to as well. If you don't want to call it an ASIC we don't have to, we can just call it a CPU.
To repeat what apparently caused you to start this stupid argument:
> A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.
This is true. If you make a Monero mining ASIC, then you have made a shitty CPU. Off-the-shelf CPUs are the best possible chips for mining Monero with, and this is by design.
The Monero hash function works by generating random programs and then running them, so that you need to have a CPU to generate hashes, and all of the optimisations in a CPU benefit Monero hashing. If you build a chip that does this, you have built a CPU. It's even built so that the instruction set is irrelevant, because the same program is run thousands of times before a new one is generated, making the overhead of translating it to any needed instruction set negligible.
The article is exploring a broad topic but one area that seems to be overlooked is governments making privacy illegal or actively working to undermine it. The major privacy risk right now is things like social media age verification laws which, in principle, probably make pseudonymous sites like HN illegal or on the path to being illegal in many jurisdictions.
It is hard to maintain privacy when a law enforcement body insists that it isn't allowed. There are also indications that companies quickly become too enmeshed with intelligence services to be able to create properly private options even if tactically they might have an interest. Companies like Telegram stand out as looking difficult to run in practice because of the pressure from various snoops.
If it is legal to create private options then they will always exist because the people who care about specific aspects of privacy can self-serve.
> The point being: humans seem to me to be the weak link here.
I tend to agree but it is hard to shake the feeling that there is a larger system in play that the humans are just a component of. And that system is making the decisions.
Historically that whole thought was just a philosophical curio because the decision making parts of the system had to be powered by humans. But what we're discovering as AI improves is either we've hit AGI or humans are actually incapable of performing any act that demonstrates intelligence or autonomy.
As we build systems where the drive and decision making stems from computers, it does seem that we will have to revisit the concept of humans being the problem.
"I tend to agree but it is hard to shake the feeling that there is a larger system in play that the humans are just a component of. And that system is making the decisions."
That system is "the economy". Which, clearly, doesn't have humanity's best interests in mind.
> The double standards are evident when we consider that all of this would sound ludicrous if aimed at a man who had been proclaimed king...
I don't know about that, the quoted criticisms sound a lot like those that would be levelled at a king too. The issue is more that nobody expects a man to care, even a little bit, if someone accuses him of being crude and arbitrary in his search for power. Obviously it is gendered, but the actual complaints are generic. Anyone with serious power has to bat through things like that.
I can give an example by swapping in Trump. The criticism holds up with a gender swap, adjusted for the fact that by default we expect a man to be in the office so it isn't explicitly gendered. This sounds like stock criticism of him that might turn up in any political conversation.
[Donald Trump] at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to --the gentle sex-- [his office], began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and haughtily than [he] had been wont … [he] arranged everything as [he himself] thought fit and according to [his] own arbitrary will.
No, the gender role stuff is absolutely critical and you can't just handwave it away. Married women couldn't own their own property independently in England until 1870.
In particular, the belief that a married woman had no agency separate from her husband, who would then be de facto king, continued all the way up to Elisabeth II. Much reduced and not ultimately a problem, but it was still discussed at the time of her coronation.
What is more interesting in all this is the reminder of the succession crisis. Monarchy is "supposed to" reduce chaotic power struggles like this by making it unambiguous, but quite often the English succession was disputed or passed down through a second degree relationship.
It's not a handwave - the article doesn't offer anything to handwave away. The article says that she was offered specifically gendered criticism, then quotes generic criticism.
I'm sure being a woman counted against her, bit if the article is going to put up a quote as evidence of sexism then it shouldn't be a passage that can be realistically adapted to any politician ever. If the article had a passage that says "we can't let this woman be king, she can't even own property!" that would be different. But the quote in the article doesn't sound ludicrous when applied to a man. It sounds like something that is routinely said of men in positions of power.
It could even keep the superficial gendering if you wanted it to, there is a lot of argument that men in positions of power should be exhibiting positive masculine bearing (stoicism, accountability, honour, etc, etc) that politicians routinely fail at to great public outcry.
I’m struggling to follow your point. The article isn’t giving a major thesis on why medieval people thought Matilda couldn’t rule England. From the perspective of the barons at the time, Matilda couldn’t be queen in her own right because women can’t rule. They didn’t think any deeper than that.
Is is true that they believed women couldn’t rule? England was not the first European country to have a female monarch. By the time all this was going on there had been a female monarch elsewhere in Europe a few decades earlier.
Would be interesting if there were any texts at the time discussing this.
I’m asking out of genuine curiosity not to start an argument.
I do think it’s fair to point out that both of these postage Matilda by a few hundred years. I’m actually struggling to think of many Christian European kingdoms that would have at this point.
France only had kings at that point (in fact, Matilda’s son Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Acquitaine comes about because she didn’t give the king of France a son!)
Germany (HRE) selected their emperor so didn’t have succession problems in that sense.
Italy was a collection of city states, Naples was yet to form a kingdom.
Maybe Poland had an earlier queen? But then I don’t know if English nobles paid much attention to Poland, to be honest!
it seems like the rest of the world (India, China, Thailand, Egypt, ...) had female monarchs of various sorts ('queen regnant' seems like a relevant terminology here, I'm not sure).
The closest ones to Europe (discounting ancient Egypt?) might be:
So there were some texts later discussing the problems of Elizabeth I being Queen Regnant when all laws and customs referred to a “King.” We also see a lot of her father’s behaviour (Henry VIII) being driven by his need for a male heir. It’s why he tries to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Further, there were specific reasons why Elizabeth I was treated differently to her father. For example, Henry VIII used to meet with counsellors when he woke up in the morning, still in bed. For obvious reasons, this was not done when his daughter reigned.
I don't think that's why it's called a "Privy Council". Just because the only meaning for privy that you know, today, is a toilet, does not mean that the word in another context means toilet, any more than the fact you know the verb "do" in English can be slang for sexual intercourse means that when Marlo says "Do it or don't" in The Wire he means for his soldiers to have sex. He's indicating that he doesn't care whether they murder Bubbles.
"Privy" more generally means private or personal, which explains its use for a group which advises specifically the monarch alone.
> According to the Oxford dictionary the definition of the word "privy" in Privy Council is an obsolete one meaning "Of or pertaining exclusively to a particular person or persons; one's own",[3] insofar as the council is personal to the sovereign.
My point is the article claimed it would show evidence of something when in fact it did not. It should either not have bothered to include evidence or found better evidence
Er… no it didn’t? It just said the criticism being based on her womanhood was evident because of <reason>, it never promised to prove it, it was just a rhetorical device and they expect the reader to know the information already.
If you want to learn more about early medieval attitudes to women and power in England, it’s on you to learn, not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.
> not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.
Yes but that is my point. They're making the article longer by including evidence that undermines its claims. They should have either made the claim and let it stand without evidence, or they should have aligned what they said to the evidence they felt was worth including.
If they're going to claim gendered criticism then hold up generic criticism as the best example of criticism it confuses the picture. Assuming that there was gendered criticism happening somewhere off to the side out of sight, was that the decisive criticism? Or was it the criticisms that the article writer felt were important enough to include in the article?
Because the impression the article is giving is that people weren't complaining about her gender, but the fact she was behaving arbitrarily and arrogantly. That is good reason not to put a man in charge too - if you see a man acting arbitrarily and arrogantly it is also a mistake to put him in charge of anything and he would be criticised for it. I do that all the time, there are a lot of unprincipled men in politics who should be called out for their hubris. And they are.
Now it may be that what she was doing wouldn't be considered arrogance and hubris in a man (we don't know exactly because the article is short) but "double standards" and "sound ludicrous if aimed at a man" are simply not true. We hold men to the same standard and make the same criticisms of them.
The substance of your objection is “these criticisms are regularly levelled at men today,” and you skip the part that 900 years have passed since they were levelled at Matilda. You then demand the article provide evidence to overcome this comparison you have been 12th century norms and 21st century norms? Really?
Let me repeat: this is not intended as a thesis. It’s a small historical tale to explain the background of a period of time in early mediaeval England. It assumes you know how women were viewed during that time period and the example provides flavour. If you want to contradict its claims, just post the articles that shows differently.
That's not sexist though, it is just equivalent to noting she's a woman (like calling her "her" and "she") because we can reasonably offer the same criticism about a man. A man can have an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the controlled gait and bearing proper to the stronger sex. And adjusting for language drift people do make that sort of complaint of men, I remember one criticism of Biden being that he walked in a frail way and fell over a lot - literally complaints about his gait and bearing giving a bad impression. Not a very strong criticism but he was male and it was made.
We might reasonably infer that she got called arrogant for doing something that wouldn't be considered arrogance in a man, the article has unhelpfully elided that detail (maybe the original author did as well). But we've also got to admit she might have actually been unusually arrogant, that does happen from time to time. If I were in charge of a military I'd be standing around even more arrogant than I already am.
pjc50 offered a good example of something that was actually gendered - women not being able to own property in their own right for whatever unfair reason. The quote isn't that sort of out-and-obvious sexism. Said quote could almost be modern political whinging.
PS I'll add in an acknowledgement that words did mean different things back then so possibly at the time the only reasonable reading was with an "[as with all women]" on the end, but the fact is that as written this quote is making specific accusations of arrogance and arbitraryness that are not contained to either gender and are bad in all leaders, female or otherwise. He didn't write "women are all arrogant" or "women are all arbitrary". If anything the thrust of the quote is most women weren't either of those things. It doesn't support the idea of double standards or ludicrous criticism that would never be made of a man.
Ok, I suppose I understand but I really do not agree. Modern criticism of the US president is so far removed from medieval criticism of a female monarch as to be nearly irrelevant.
To address your question, though, yes I absolutely read "proper to the gentler sex" to be a statement about how Queen Mathilda _ought_ to have behaved. Also I have strong doubts that men (especially male rulers) at the time would have had the same standard set for arrogance. Of course a King could be in fact arrogant and then critics might point that out, but I do not see why they would bring his sex into it.
One thing we might agree on is that all political criticism can be false, and whether or not she was _actually_ arrogant is difficult to say. In the context of a bitter civil war, any record of events will have the strong bias of the author. The modern world did not invent fake news.
Arguing that a criticism focusing on her behaviour allegedly not being "proper to her sex" isn't gendered whilst handwaving away all the well established historical context about how women were treated to invent new context where she deserved everything she got is bold, I'll give you that...
A whataboutism that makes a legitimate point. It isn't reasonable to dismiss something just because a person makes a comparison. It's valid to consider that Apple might have been applying inconsistent standards and unfairly targeting Zoom for some reason.
I doubt they were being unfair but it is a bad practice to dismiss an argument because someone has the temerity to expect consistent standards. The threat of Apple arbitrarily removing apps based on unreliable reasoning is concerning.
> It absolutely is. Similar to the way banks create money [1]. The commitments support credit that wouldn't exist without it.
Making a loan/offering credit isn't automatically money creation - the amount of money in the system before and after the loan might be the same. Haven't been following Nvidia all that closely, but it seems a little bit unlikely that they're a commercial bank. Financial chicanery they may be doing but offering deposit accounts would be new territory. The loan has to be made in a very particular way for it to be money creation (notably, in a way that creates new money), and it should be illegal for most people to do that otherwise we'd all be printing our own money instead of the printing being directed to wealthy asset owners first and foremost.
> Making a loan/offering credit isn't automatically money creation
The Fed can limitlessly increase monetary base (MB) to increase M1. Non-bank lenders create M4 which turns into M2 through the money markets which turns into M1 through the banks. More convoluted and more limited, by design. But the net effect is the same–more M1.
More broadly: when you open a bar tab, you're literally creating money, even if it never hits M1.
Credit is always money creation. When it's done at scale it's almost always creating M1.
No, its not! Its a swap on the active/left side of the balance sheet: If my mum borrows me 1 USD for icecream, she did not create money, instead she swapped her positions in her assets/left side of her balance sheet.
If we attempted to pay our taxes by creating this new money, do you think we would succeed? Because I suspect that when we get to the tax office we will discover that what you're calling money is not actually money in the practical sense.
Or I suppose I should spend more time with an open bar tab come tax time.
The monetary aggregates are things that are theoretically equivalent to creating money, but I'm going to challenge whether it is proper to compare M4 activity to the fed balance sheet. One of those entities is involved in actual money creation. One of them is hyper-privileged money creation that is more impactful and less comparable to other forms.
> If we attempted to pay our taxes by creating this new money, do you think we would succeed?
Yes.
Nvidia issues a commitment to a firm that lets an SPV raise money. Some of that is just M1 being transferred from one account to another. A lot, however, will be created through loans (new M1), commercial paper (new M3) and the like. Some of that will be pledged as collateral. On the other side of the equation, when the SPV signs e.g. a construction contract, you'll have builders taking out bank loans and issuing commercial paper, et cetera.
You can pay your taxes out of a checking account using money a bank created out of thin air that morning that the Fed won't even learn about until the evening.
> monetary aggregates are things that are theoretically equivalent to creating money, but I'm going to challenge whether it is proper to compare M4 activity to the fed balance sheet
You're absolutely correct in M4 being unequal to the monetary base and deposits at the Federal Reserve. But the moment you say the Fed balance sheet, you're conflating two things. The Fed has lent, in the past, against non-Treasury collateral (most famoulsy, mortgage bonds).
And if we're talking about money in relation to the real economy, you can't spend reserves at the Fed. There is debate on what the most "real" money is, but pretty much everyone agrees that a deposit in a checking account is more relevant to the economy than unspendable reserves at the Fed.
How? And what is your theory why people pay taxes from their labour earnings instead of just creating new money to pay Just-In-Time?
> A lot, however, will be created through loans (new M1)
Isn't M1 is currency and overnight deposits? I'm pretty sure you're just making things up here; it sounds highly illegal for Nvidia to create new M1. Unless they've taken out a banking license when I wasn't looking.
> You can pay your taxes out of a checking account using money a bank created out of thin air that morning that the Fed won't even learn about until the evening.
...from a checking account. Banks thoughtlessly lend against investment-grade commercial paper. The kind the SPVs Nvidia is commiting to are borrowing with. Nvidia's promises are creating debt that money markets and banks transmit into M1.
Note that the Fed doesn't directly create M1. It moderates it through the interbank lending market to manipulate the monetary base, M0 plus deposits at the Fed. That, in turn, influences banks' lending patterns which is what manipulates M1 and MZM. Underwriting M4 to drive up collateral that in turn increases M1 is the same mechanism, different channel.
> what is your theory why people pay taxes from their labour earnings instead of just creating new money to pay Just-In-Time?
I'm not Nvidia. I did just sign a purchase order with a builder for my deck that their local bank called me to confirm before issuing a loan that will appear as new money in their checking account. My signature, in that case, enabled the bank to create a tiny amount of money. It's not monetarily significant, however, because my deck isn't that fancy.
At the end of the day, all credit is money. If you can create credit, you can create money. Most of us can't, at least not in significant quantities.
> Isn't M1 is currency and overnight deposits?
M0 + demand deposits at commercial banks, yes.
> sounds highly illegal for Nvidia to create new M1
Nvidia causes the creation of new M1 through banks. Nvidia's commitments directly create money of a quantifiable amount that wouldn't have existed if Huang hadn't flicked his pen.
> unless they've taken out a banking license
Fun fact, you don't need a banking license to issue traveler's checks. And traveler's checks are counted in M1 in the U.S.
> pretty sure you're just making things up here
If that's your reaction to encountering new information, godspeed.
We've got Schrodinger's money here! One minute I can go down to the bar and create as much money as I like with the bartender. Then the next we suddenly discover that yes we need a bank and yes there all of a sudden a checking account is involved and no a bar tab isn't a legally recognised form of money.
> I'm not Nvidia. I did just sign a purchase order with a builder...
Again though, we discover that in fact the person in control of the part where the actual money was created was a bank. You can't just head off with your builder and create money - otherwise you'd be stupid to stop until you unseat whoever was the richest fellow in the world this morning.
> Nvidia causes the creation of new M1 through banks.
And the banks make another appearance!
---
I put it to you that Nvidia can't, in fact, create new money. You'd never get that line of argument past a tax collector.
> Fun fact, you don't need a banking license to issue traveler's checks. And traveler's checks are counted in M1 in the U.S.
And I'll add in postcript that I know nothing about travellers checks in the US, but I'm quietly confident it'd turn out to be illegal to go around creating vast amounts of new money there too, on the basis that people tend to work for a living.
> Nestled in the lush green mountains of Central Mexico, next to a sparsely traveled gravel road...
The economics of this are deliciously surreal and in many ways slightly romantic. You have this dingy little shack-like construction out in the "lush green mountains", run by these lunatics of a Mexican persuasion, coordinating billions of dollars of international financial data in a reliable high-trust manner. I encourage everyone to look at the photo in the article and imagine a fat dude in a singlet sleeping on a hammock because that seems to be the vibe of the place.
This is a real case of the truth being stranger than fiction. If I were reading about this sort of thing in a novel in the pre-crypto era it'd be a big building in a city or something. Maybe some dudes in suits. Sealed roads.
Turns out it's going to be closer to an unwashed hermit sitting in their mountain cave spending the days meditating, fighting off snakes and tending to the server racks. Voila, high finance.
This type of thing always strikes me. I remember as a kid thinking that it was weird in Star Wars that people are living in the desert with draft animals and primitive conditions, while there are literal interstellar spaceships.
But… at the end of the day tech is just tooling. Your crypto money laundering information could well be in a building that once housed a donkey with some sort of keeper checking the blinking lights.
However, on the other hand, if you ask an AI to win a game of chess it has all the tools on hand to compete at the same level as Stockfish - it can re-implement an engine and even probably has a GPU on hand to train its own neural nets.
So should we say that the AI can play chess well, or that it cannot?
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