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110 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 24 Apr \ on: AI Book Discussions AI
It's an amazing augmentation of what it means to read a book. You can drastically increase what you get out of the process, and take on books that would otherwise be beyond you.
They give a tiny bit of context here.
Tether has been deeply involved in btc since the beginning. Few companies stand to benefit more than they from btc appreciation.
This sounds like what I hoped Saylor would do - instead of just hovering up everything possible, spend some resources to attend to the actual ecosystem. Build capacity in ways the raw market won't or can't.
Yeah this is on my mind too, ever since they denied Custodia's application. It's like they're invoking an analogue of Gresham's law: if they allow narrow banks, people will prefer them because they want the "good" banks, and good banks will drive out bad. So they can't allow any good.
It would sound too conspiratorial except that seems to be literally what they're saying.
Seven bucks for a hamburger seems really high in a country w economic problems of this magnitude, esp when denominated in dollars. Is that a typical price level for such things? Or is it a place where principally foreigners would go?
In tension with this btc triumphalism is that shitcoins are comparably booming. Hard to feel like the narrative has changed when XRP is pumping.
Something weirder and harder to understand has possessed markets.
I was thinking of a related thing lately, about the times when I've felt like I was doing stuff that was fully me, wholly for the right reasons, out of joy and curiosity and passion, defined by nobody else's concerns.
It's staggering how good that feels, how a whole class of worries just evaporates, bc who can compete with you being you? You are the best and only you. You can put down a rock you didn't know you were carrying.
Then I think: is there a way to go about more of life in this mode?
If you wait long enough, everything ends.
A useful question is how long you're willing to wait, and what you're willing to endure in the interim.
Yeah, they should use those tools. Back in the day, DoD procurement worked kind of like that, and the stuff they bought was egregiously expensive, just bonkers expensive. They eventually rescinded the rule because it wasn't viable in the face of competition for all the reasons that Libertarians love competition. We'd be flying planes made out of calculators and Speak and Spells.
Chip Wars talks about some of this; may be worth a re-read. That guy should write a sequel, that's for sure.
Could semiconductor manufacturing be re-shored in a reasonable timeframe? I don't know. I don't understand why Taiwan's comparative advantage in this is so strong that it's worth perennially saber rattling towards China and making outlandish security guarantees.
Knowing as little about the industry as I do, it doesn't seem like something America would be particularly ill-equipped to do.
It just Takes A Long Time to build complicated shit in the real world.
You're talking about literally the most sophisticated and technologically ornate industry on the planet, with the highest tech inputs, the highest expertise (including all the tacit knowledge that comes with it) swimming upstream against the forces of globalization that have encouraged all of that expertise and infra to accrue elsewhere.
If you want it to re-shore all that for security reasons (which seems like a no-brainer, and has for a while) then you need to do something to countervail all those forces and all that comparative advantage. But you can't just snap your fingers and expect it to happen tomorrow.
Point taken re: jobs vs manufacturing as an industry. However:
Not only can manufacturing easily return, it's not clear that it ever left.
I guess this is where talking in generalities is unhelpful. It's clear that certain crucial kinds of manufacturing did in fact leave -- I'm thinking of almost everything pertaining to the semiconductor industry, to pick a current very important darling. Building capacity to do normal semi manufacturing at scale, let alone the frontier-level work that TSMC is doing, is something that did leave, and would take a long time to come back.
You seem to have a different point of view. Care to expand on it?