The cost is not just tokens, you need an actual human contributor looking into the issue, prompting, checking output, validating, deploying,... Difficult to compute the actual AI ROI. If $300K didn't matter without AI, it probably still doesn't matter with AI.
Crypto didn't "win", the technology is there but people are mostly gambling, or doing shady stuff. Shall I mention NFTs? It didn't change the life of the average joe, nor business. It's a niche.
Many people are still coding without AI and doing perfectly fine. When you design serious things, coding is not where most time is spent anyway. Maybe it'll become unavoidable at some point, by that time the experience will be refined and it'll be easier to learn.
Point is, it's never too late. If you don't need to be cutting edge on a new tech, it may not make sense to put the extra effort of early birds. If you put that effort, you better not do it for free.
Having you own morale and ethics is far from futile. Each individual should be able to question the law and object taking part in something they don't agree, as long as it doesn't break the law.
Killing someone is legal in certain countries for different reasons (I'm not talking about war). Not sure I would like to get involved in that business, for instance if I don't agree on how and why people are sentenced to death in my country.
Some people are built with low ethics. Sure, if it's not made illegal, they'll always find someone to do it. Looks like in that case it might be illegal, as TV makers are sued.
Assembly experts still write code that runs faster than code produced by compilers. Being slower is predictable and solved with better hardware, or just waiting. This is fine for most so we switched to easier or portable languages. Output of the program remains the same.
Impact of having 1.7x more bugs is difficult to assess and is not solved that easily. Comparison would work if that was about optimisations: code that is 1.7x slower / memory hungry.
> Assembly experts still write code that runs faster than code produced by compilers.
They sometimes can, but this is no longer a guaranteed outcome. Supercompilation optimizers can often put manual assembly to shame.
> Impact of having 1.7x more bugs is difficult to assess and is not solved that easily.
Time will tell. Arguably the number of bugs produced by AI 2 years ago was much higher than 1.7x. In 2 more years it might only be 1.2x bugs. In 4 years time it might be barely measurable. The trend over the next couple of years will judge whether this is a viable way forward.
And the stock market isn't gambling? I view it as such.
Was this more or less risky than buying $1000 in scratch offs, or lottery tickets, or spending $1000 in Vegas?
In my opinion, crypto when I bought it had a lot more "potential" than any of those more "traditional" forms of gambling which is why I was willing to give it a try with a sum of less than 1% of my yearly income...
I am not saying it was a smart choice, just that I don't think it was a particularly stupid choice.
Putting money in a company because you reviewed its business, the way it operates and add value to the society is more of an investment than gambling. Now things happens and I agree there is always a part of luck, called risk.
BTC isn't really adding value to the society, except the shady parts of it. I can't assess the part of luck in BTC gambling. Many lost money, many betted on the wrong coin. Did you bet on it because of the impact on dark economy or because you believed in unlocking the economy, blockchain everything which didn't happen?
I bet on it because in 2009 when I bought the coins for about $100 each I thought that maybe blockchain could do something unique that would cause the value to rise an appreciable amount. Or at the very least that it sounded like something that would get the tech sector excited and that alone would be enough to build enough hype around it that many more people would buy it causing the price to go up.
In my mind it seemed cheap enough to try a $1000 gamble and just hold long, long term ignoring the fluctuations and either this will be worth 0 or it will maybe be worth a boatload in the far future. That was always my idea and goal from day 1.
I mean I invest tens of thousands in the stock market and real-estate every year. This was just a tiny and wild gamble, but I don't think it was a dumb or foolish decision at the time given my financial position at the time and the amount involved.
In a casino you have
- The gamblers spending a lot on the casino
- The people coming in for the fun and spending little money
- The owners/C-levels
- The operational team
Someone from the operational team just learned that business relies only on the first group to be successful.
I worked in blockchain ("builder") for 5 years. I started 'eh, there are speculators, whatever, I build good tech' but finished 'holy crap speculators completely dominate and distort everything, nobody cares about good tech'
Yep. As much as I can see utility in some crypto, and there are some personalities in respect (e.g. Vitalik) by and large the sector in such a dumpster fire I'm not going anywhere near it. I've got some bitcoin in a Coinbase account, that's as close as I'm getting.
Indeed. For example: Chia is arguably decent tech (better than Bitcoin), built by Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame), innovative PoSpace+Time. But nobody cares, it's at #450 in market cap, way down below Doge (#10), $TRUMP (#72), Fartcoin (#144), Melania (#375).
The market cap obsession is part of the problem. Can I use it to buy things, easily? That's the only metric that should count if you're looking for practical use, not speculation.
A successful cryptocurrent probably has to start by first having a market that is dissatisfied with the available traditional currencies. If that market were to introduce on (with good tech), then it could immediately see the cryptocurrency used for its intended purpose. At that point, if it avoided the attention of speculators (not forever, just long enough for it to get its feet underneath itself) or could discourage those speculators somehow, what happens then?
Is there some other failure mode waiting, or does it take off?
It's hard to measure that directly. Market cap is a decent proxy, albeit inexact. If a coin has a market cap of $1.8 trillion, you know a lot of people are doing a lot of something with it, and it's likely that includes using it to buy and sell stuff to some extent. If it has a market cap of $200 million, then there just can't be many people buying and selling with it, and that means it's pretty likely to be difficult to use that way.
Nano is also another interesting one or litecoin etc., basically just having low gas fees I guess and being more efficient but I don't like shilling these products because I personally am a stauch believer in stablecoins and there are stablecoins like USDC's on chains like polygons which can satisfy the function "good enough" for me where they have trust etc. which I don't wish to replicate
There are still some 0 gas fees innovations happening in stablecoin marketplaces which is going to be interesting to see how that pans out.
Agreed re Chia, but here’s a counterpoint: MXE is 16,000 times faster than FHE, completely changes the concept of computing (that in order to calculate something you need to see the data) and it as a result Arcium the hottest thing in crypto right now.
The point i was trying to make was that the disillusionment faced by technologists possibly stemmed from a naivety about how the economy works and how people respond to incentives. Speculators are a "feature/bug" of pretty much any financial system. Stocks, real-estate, fiat-currencies, potatoes - The price of everything is being distorted by speculators. Done right, they bring liquidity, financial stability, and wealth creation. Left to their own devices, they cause volatility, inequity and financial destruction. (Crypto is probably more on the latter side on some of those metrics atm). The People looking to build a good crypto solution has to be clear-eyed about how to handle them.
I also wonder if the author has partly himself to blame. From his post, it looks like he worked for the seedier players in the space (because the pay was better) and is angry at the whole space. Its like a developer who worked for Oracle on MySql swearing off the entire open-source community.
edit: >nobody cares about good tech'
True. That's a big part of why you need [token-holders], "Build it and they will come" is more of a hope than a strategy.
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