Interesting Stuff
Violence, Not Argument - There are a lot of articles opining on what happened with Charlie Kirk this week, but this is the one I found most insightful. As the author notes, the progressives have had a lock on power, through the media, academia, Hollywood and many other institutions for more than a generation now. That combined with the giant benefits of power in a fiat system have led them to hold onto it as long as they can. And doing so has meant that they groom lesser proteges as to prevent competition. And those lesser proteges did the same with their proteges and so on, resulting in people that are very loyal, but terrible at making an argument. They’ve grown lazy and now that they’re losing, they’ve turned to violence as a substitute.
Failing the Vulnerable - The second biggest cultural item from the week is the murder of Iryna Zarutska. You might expect from the title that the article is about protecting people like her, but surprisingly, it’s more about how the current system has not just failed, but massively screwed people like her killer, DeCarlos Brown Jr. As the author notes, there’s a very large minority of people (~100 Million in the US alone) that are getting screwed constantly in fiat systems that exploit them. And they don’t have the intelligence, discipline or awareness to avoid getting screwed. The systems that could have helped prevent this have been regulated out of existence by giant bureaucracies. In other words, it’s a familiar fiat story.
LLM Non-Determinism - Pretty much everyone knows at this point that LLMs are non-deterministic. That is, they give different answers to the same question each time. It’s at least partially by design, so that more creative answers can be given. But it turns out that making LLMs deterministic is not simple at all, even after turning down sources of randomness and this article explores exactly where that source of randomness is. Strangely, it has to do with GPUs and how the work is split up. Complex systems are very hard to understand, even (especially?) the ones that appear to be working well.
Life on Mars - There are some interesting photos from a Mars rover that show mineral traces that are consistent with what dead microbes would leave behind. Apparently, if we had found similar stuff on earth, it would be assumed to have been left behind by some living thing, but because it’s on Mars, there’s an abundance of caution about declaring it a sign of life or anything like that. But given that Mars is remarkably preserved, having very little atmosphere and no plate tectonics, the traces are something we can presumably go study.
Dark Pattern Social Media - The article is about the tricks social media uses to get you addicted, including the many learned from the world of casinos, which are essentially hacks into your brain. In software programming, we call interfaces that ultimately manipulate the user into doing the bidding of the program dark patterns, and social media is full of them. What’s worse, these patterns are being copied by a lot of other non-social media apps, to get people just as addicted. It’s honestly a terrible incentive model as the thing that these social media companies sell is your attention.
What I'm up to
Nostr vlogs - I’ve been posting more of my thoughts on various current issues on Bitcoin, keeping them reasonably short as an exercise in learning to get to the point. I make the argument in these two vlogs that I don’t think Covenants are worth it, and that we really shouldn’t be worried about scaling to 8 billion.
Young America’s Foundation Road to Freedom - I will be speaking at this conference in Raston, VA (alongside Yeonmi Park and EJ Antoni) to a bunch of college students October 3-4. I’ll speak about the trucker protests as a launching point for embracing non-governmental, politically neutral money.
Lugano Plan B Forum - A few weeks later October 24-25, I will be in Lugano for the Plan B Forum. It looks like I may be doing a debate and running a workshop for my open source project, the family Bitcoin banking app.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Bitcoin Tech Talk to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.