I would expect that lighter motor components would potentially allow weight reduction in load bearing components. Not an advantage for SUV-type cars, but for light and ultralight vehicles it could add up to more weight saving and longer ranges.
I think we’ll start to see a bunch of fintech companies use stablecoins for things, but as more of an implementation detail and not really a speculative market like it was before.
Well stablecoins by design cannot really fluctuate a lot in value (unless they collapse), so speculation on them is pretty much out.
It's still pretty unclear to me why you'd actually want a blockchain for managing it though, rather than a traditional database hosted by the central bank that is responsible for the currency that the stablecoin is following. You'd get vastly more throughput at much lower costs, and it's not like you really need decentralization for such a system anyway. The stablecoin is backed by something the central bank already has authority over.
Depends. Several central banks are working on exactly that, see for example the recent speech by the FED and the whole GENIUS act regulation framework.
But to be honest where I am (northwest Europe) we already have subsecond person-to-person transactions via the normal banking system, no matter which bank the sender and receiver use. So stablecoin-ifying the Euro wouldn't make a huge difference. There might be more to gain if the region doesn't have that kind of payment infrastructure yet.
I don't know about NFT, but blockains allows to me to send money to my Family in usdt/usdc for cents on the dollars, and for example in countries like Venezuela besides using it for receiving and sending money some people use it to save money because you cannot trust in the government and banks
That’s because organized crime provides the demand and liquidity needed for cryptocurrency. Without cartels and the like trying to bypass money laundering and capital control laws you would not easily transfer bitcoin to and from Venezuela.
I agree that this is an odd comparison— blockchain and especially NFTs really are a scam and a pyramid scheme, whereas modern generative AI has dozens of real applications where it's already been massively disruptive.
Maybe compare with something the development of motion pictures, with dozens of small studios trying different approaches to storytelling, different formats, etc, with live performances being the legacy thing getting disrupted. And then the market rapidly maturing and being consolidated down to a few winners that lasted for decades.
The valid use cases for blockchain are relatively few
The use cases where it gets applied are far more than the valid ones
As for NFTs ... there never was (and never will be) a valid use case - it does not matter if you "own" a digital asset (like an image): a screenshot of it is good enough for 99.99999...% of people, so why pay for the "real" thing?
I agree with this as well. I started my career at the height of ORMs. Most software developers were only learning the ORM APIs (which of course all differed significantly) and very few were learning SQL outside of the bare basics.
ORMs, like all abstractions, are a leaky abstraction. But I would argue because of the ubiquity and utility of SQL itself they are a very leaky one where eventually you are going to need to work around them.
After switching to just using SQL in all situations I found my life got a lot simpler. Performance also improved as most ORMs (Rails in particular) are not very well implemented from a performance standpoint, even for very simple use cases.
I can not recommend enough that people skip the ORM entirely.
In fact the current trends suggest its impact hasn't fully played out yet. We're only just seeing the internet-native generation start to move into politics where communication and organisation has the biggest impact on society. It seems the power of traditional propaganda centres in the corporate media has been, if not broken, badly degraded by the internet too.
My favourite example of not "fast" right now is any kind of Salesforce report. Not only are they slow but you can't make any changes to the criteria more often than once a minute. Massively changes your behaviour.
100% agreed. I think, in fact, that "intelligence" itself is a near-meaningless term, let alone AGI.
The evidence for this is that nobody can agree on what actually requires intelligence, other than there is seemingly broad belief among people that if a computer can do it, then it doesn't.
If you can't point at some activity and say: "There, this absolutely requires intelligence, let there be zero doubt that this entity possesses it", then it's not measurable and probably doesn't exist.
"The desert ants in my backyard have minuscule brains, but far exceed human navigational capacities, in principle, not just performance. There is no Great Chain of Being with humans at the top."
This quote brought to mind the very different technological development path of the spider species in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. They used pheromones to 'program' a race of ants to do computation.
Arbitrary markings on the terrain? Why not GPS, satellite photo etc? All of those are human inventions and we can navigate much better and in a broader set of environments than ants thanks to them.
Because I was making a stronger argument (strict vs relaxed requirements on humans) to preempt another nature mumbo-jumbo argument that GPS is not the same/cheating.
