People seem to believe that cryptocurrencies are either a scam/waste/bubble or that they are an amazing technology that the future of financial tech will be built upon. And there is this battle between the sides.
I think that both are equally true! Prices are obviously driven by speculation, there is tonnes of fraud, and no regulation. It is a wild wild west goldrush situation right now. Maybe this is unfortunate but I'm also not surprised by it. Isn't this how all markets get started? I don't have great sources but I think the situation was similar for the securities markets for many years.
I also think the blockchain is an incredibly remarkable piece of technology that it will be put to use in increasingly important and useful roles and that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. Both can be true.
Sure there's lots of fraud, excitement, and ignorance right now in cryotocurrencies, but there are also fundamental problems with the current attempts. Distributed consensus means eventual consistency and/or slow unreliable transactions, I'm not convinced that's a good idea for a payments network.
The article makes the point that many people putting money into these schemes know nothing about the tech involved or the possible applications/drawbacks, they're gambling based on hearsay.
As with most bubbles, what comes after probably won't resemble what got everyone excited, and early investors will lose their money. So it's understandable many are sceptical.
I wonder if a sacrifice is always necessary for certain types of improvement. (e.g. the titantic had to crash for safer boats, WWII had to happen for less war, etc...)
How is this possibly true? I've increased my vertical jump by nearly two entire feet through years of training in volleyball. Everyone can increase their vertical just like they can increase their squat. It's a full body compound movement.
I think he is referring to method NBA teams select newcomers. They take well trained young person and they have them do vertical jump. Because they are well trained, their vertical jump will not improve much because there is genetic component to it. But if you are average then of course it will improve with time as you do training, for example if you lose weight you can jump higher or if you practice and improve nerve-muscle connection that will increase your power output it will also improve your jump. But at the end of the day there is genetic limit for the most part, but just like with everything there are probably exceptions...
Kinda like IQ test, if you train specifically for it, you can get better. Vertical jump is a good measure of power, same as a IQ test is a good test of intelligence.
The great advantage of volleyball is that it actually teaches how to jump.
I played volleyball recreationally for years and the jumping with arm swing became muscle memory. Last week I was teaching my 10 yo son some volleyball basics and I realized how a few extra movements can impove one's jump (specifically the singing and its timing).
What it can enable/improve upon according to Goldman Sachs [0]:
Assorted banking use cases, trade settlements, payments to notaries, voting systems, vehicle registrations, wire fees, gun checks, academic records, cataloging ownership of works of art.
The Ethereum alliance contains many big name companies such as Mastercard as Cisco [1]. They all believe there is real use in Ethereum
It is tough, if not impossible to know for sure in cases like these. The most effective way is the use of controlled studies. The population is split such that the only difference between the groups is one variable. The very simplified version is that sometimes you find that there is only evidence for a correlation (between say relationships and good health), and other times you can find evidence for causation.
The quality of social interaction is very important. None of the relationships you described seemed overly healthy. The study shows that it was good, warm, reciprocal relationships that factored into improved mental health. I work on a trading floor as well, and while I do enjoy it, I put in lots of work to have healthy social relationships outside of work.
This approach has always interested me. I can train an decent Cats Vs. Dogs classifier in a few minutes. But real human intelligence takes many years of continuous and varied input to develop.
Are there systems out there that are taking influence from newborns being exposed to the world? An unsupervised learning system with a huge array of inputs running for years?
All these current examples of AI and ML are just a very small fraction of what we mean by intelligence so I'm not surprised by the pessimistic posts that hit HN from time to time.
Training systems with rich real world experiences sounds something that Open AI should be developing. It's probably not something that you can do over a weekend plus it takes serious of funding and wetware so it's probably the reason it's not there yet.
Has anyone been able to do this? Is anyone working on it?
I only follow the field as a hobby, but as far as I can tell we are nowhere near getting to this point. I think the ability to combine all these parts in a way that the sum is greater than it's parts is going to require many many breakthroughs still.
The thing is that it's most likely not something anyone does per se but something that happens with enough complexity.
If you happen to believe evolutionary theory is the most convincing then we weren't built either but a byproduct of emergent complexity.
It is my belief that humans are pattern recognizing feedback loops and carriers of information. We externalized some of that into books and built libraries to be able to keep even more than humans can remember as individuals and now have technology to save even more information and even manipulate it in ways impossible up until 80 years ago or so.
I am fairly certain that a technology is part of nature and that technology based conscience is nothing like our limited conscience but something rather different. The end result will not be like humans just better but nothing like humans at all but much better at the carrying of information part.
And so with that (my personal belief) perspective in mind no one is going to be able to do it it will happen as a by-product.
Please keep in mind that I saying "we exeternalized" in the same way we say "selfish genes" it's not a conscious effort as such but rather something which happen to be favorized in the game of life.
Why that is I have no idea but I am fairly certain humans aren't the last species. But yes it's all very speculative I just haven't been able to find better explanations for now.
The problem is that we don't really know for sure. We kind of predict things by extrapolating what we know and what we have, but we can never be sure there won't be any sudden breakthroughs.
As an owner of an iPhone 7 and a Pixel I'd say there are not many. Google Assistant is way ahead of Siri at pretty much every imaginable task, and Google Photos can do a lot more than iOS Photos.
That said, none of those features interest me much. And I'm not sure how many average consumers they do interest. It's more of a 'oh, that's cool I guess'. I prefer my iPhone 7 still.
Yeah, most people I know do use their 'assistant' to some degree, but it's not even close to crucial for any of them. That said, Siri is a running joke among many of us, so if/when assistants become more important, Apple might have a problem if they don't make some big improvements.
This might not be a useful answer for you, but are you sure any of that is necessary? You can spend months pre-validating an idea and never get anywhere.
Go talk to potential customers now. Find people who are willing to pay for what your are going to build. Once you know they exist, then you can start worrying about market size and the rest. At this point having real life people who want to pay you is infinitely more valuable than any hypothetical data and analysis.
Yes, I totally agree that the best investment of my time would be to talk with customers.
But maybe I am doing the process wrong. I read a lot about how to start by choosing a group and discovering their ideas.
Currently I have some kind of Idea Journal (actually a .md file in a cloud) where I write ideas, needs, problems, possibilities. It might not be the best way to do this.
I was looking for an easy way (from sitting on my desk) to filter them. Initially I get enthusiastic about all of them remembering the context where I wrote them and I think I am a type of person optimistic so I catch myself finding a lot of reasons why most of them are good.
So I read some books about startups, ideas, lean, ... and I got some questions to ask myself about them. This made the filtering process better.
The reason I asked this question was that I wanted to know also more practical examples of what do you - HN - do before taking the first actions (first investments of your time) in the project you want to build.
> However, a human prodigy can apply their genius to many domains
I'm not sure how true this is. It's pretty rare to find someone who is a genius in more than one domain. Einstein was famously offered the presidency of Israel. Sure, he could probably do well in other sciences, but he was smart enough to know he could not apply his genius to unrelated domains.
Of course there is domain knowledge that needs to be learned, along with non intelligence related characteristics, such as personality. But general intelligence appears to be widely applicable.
I think that both are equally true! Prices are obviously driven by speculation, there is tonnes of fraud, and no regulation. It is a wild wild west goldrush situation right now. Maybe this is unfortunate but I'm also not surprised by it. Isn't this how all markets get started? I don't have great sources but I think the situation was similar for the securities markets for many years.
I also think the blockchain is an incredibly remarkable piece of technology that it will be put to use in increasingly important and useful roles and that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. Both can be true.