It's definitely a middle ground, but PR reviews, are not perfect. So it's easy to miss a lot of things and to have a lot of extra baggage. From reviewing code it's not always easy to tell exactly what's necessary or duplicate. So I agree, this is a middle ground of using LLMs to be more productive. Removing one bad line of code is worth adding a hundred good lines of code.
The difference between a government and a corporation is the ability to use violence. A government is just a corporation with a monopoly on violence (police, military, jails...). The structure of how people are organized is more significant. Are we talking about a dictatorship or a functioning democracy? Are we discussing a non-profit or a publicly listed company?
Corporations have a profit motive, governments theoretically may not. Also, read about the history of the East India Company. In no way do corporations abstain from using violence, historically, and at times they have held a du jour monopoly on the use of it.
Governments have murdered over one hundred million people over the last few centuries through war and forced famines. Corporations don't even enter that conversation given the scale difference.
Napoleon's government alone murdered more people than all corporations combined have throughout all of history. And that's a revered historical figure that routinely gets fawning movies made about him, there are obviously worse examples. Mao's government murdered several times more than Napoleon did.
It's not a practical possibility. The black hole wouldn't last long and would be too small to actually absorb anything. It's the equivalent of asking if a nuke would set the atmosphere on fire.
Even a "large"ish primordial black hole would probably just pass straight through the Earth without anyone noticing.
Remember that Strange matter is only dangerous assuming a specific range of values for its surface tension, otherwise it's harmless and doesn't catalyze the conversion of normal matter into Strange matter.
I'm not sure. Somewhere around 10^12 kg of initial mass would be evaporating today (1). So perhaps there is no meaningful minimum, only a minimum initial mass. If it's just about to evaporate, it could perhaps be arbitrarily small. Earth is ~10^25 for reference.
If the court system can try kids as adults for their heinous crimes, then the "should've known better" reasoning doesn't stand up. Plus she went to fancy schools, and was highly educated. She already "knew" better than most people living in the US.
They both should have gotten longer jail sentences, their convictions should have been about the people she harmed with her machines. Instead it was all about how she and Balwani mislead/ripped off their investors (who didn't even do their own work in due diligence).
Now Balwani is serving at a Club-Fed prison. The $452 million restitution she's been slapped with? Just for investors, it seems. Can anyone find an article that states actual people being victims? Nearly all news reports say the restitution is for "victims", but then the victims are just Safeway, Rupert Murdoch, Walgreens... etc.
There is no justice here. Not in the ruling, not in the sentencing, not even for real people. "Being wiser" or "older" is just a BS made-up reasoning. Let's at least not sugar coat why she got less of a ruling than Balwani. It's enough of an insult to those who were actually affected to have seen how this all played out.
Yes, they used these employees statements to establish wrongdoings that Theranos committed... for the sole purpose of proving that the investors were defrauded. Not for people who had incorrect results, who then had to make hard life decisions based on it, not to mention the emotional trauma that this can inflict.
By "victims", I meant it in the context of the restitution. None of that half billion dollars that she owes goes to these people. All the articles I've read say she has to pay her victims in the title. But if you read the articles closely, they just say it's to pay back investors.
I understand your questioning of the situation but I think its pretty clear. She was not convicted of anything related to patients or their results so of course they are not her victims.
Programmers just move up the stack with some staying behind to manage the edge cases and optimizations in the underlying tech. Same thing happened with the move to cloud.
It's unclear which jobs with be enabled with more productivity vs replaced completely.
Many other places have solved this problem. San Francisco has relatively low population density compared even when only looking at US cities. NYC is very livable.
It's in CA best long term interest to support as many people as possible. Remote work isn't going to solve the problem that someone who works at Walgreens cannot afford to live within 20 mi of the city.
I think cryptographic AI will become a reality. The use-case I was thinking is more of immortality/digitizing human consciousness. If you could be uploaded (like the show Upload), what would that actually look like?
Well, plain text representation would just be too dangerous. Companies could mine your consciousness, duplicate it at will or whatever else they wanted. It's a scary thought. FHE provides the solution.
This is already doable with most wallets today. Most wallets enable you to create 2^64 addresses from the same seed phrase. These are hardened and can't be linked together by just creating them.
So if Alice wants to send Bob an NFT, Bob creates a new address (recoverable with the same seed phrase) and Alice sends it there. Bob can then fund the wallet with tornado cash to use the NFT.
It's a stupidly complex way to achieve privacy and Tornado Cash is illegal. That's why we need private by default chains like Aztec & Aleo
Tornado cash is illegal for US citizens. Not illegal for anyone else. And a lawsuit against the overreach of the Treasury department will likely make it legal again.
What exactly is the "overreach" argument? In terms of statutory authority, the Treasury hasn't done anything particularly unusual in adding a known money-laundering vehicle to the OFAC list.
All tornado notes generate a proof that you can use to show where it came from. It’s the same as monero, another privacy coin which is not illegal.
There is a long list of issues here but tornado is just a program. The users of that program can use it for good or bad. They sanctioned the creators and Tornado is still chugging along. It’s equivalent to banning cryptography because money launderers encrypt their messages.
Here is a good summary of the argument against Treasury by Coin Center
None of this amounts to an "overreach" argument. Again: statutorily, where has the Treasury Department mis-stepped?
You'll note that all kinds of entities, including full banks, are on the OFAC list[1]. This doesn't amount to a blanket ban on banking, and "it's just a bank, there are others" is not an argument that anyone finds convincing.
Pretty straightforward — Treasury said we couldn't use a particular
computer program rather than interact with a particular entity, and that's outside their authority.
I think you are misunderstanding the Treasury's position. You are free to run the code on your own computer on a VM for a made up Blockchain however many times you want, no problem. You can even run a permissioned version of it yourself, where you and your 40 permissioned friends mix their transactions for privacy, and everyone knows (through, let's say, off chain trust) that none of them are committing crimes, I personally don't think that would be a problem either. However, if you are running the same code on a public Blockchain and mixing your transactions with literal criminals [0], well, that is a crime now.
"Running a computer program" is too vague, and legality of it depends on the context.
[0] since everything on this Blockchain is public, you can easily see proceeds of cybercrime coming into tornado. It's not really a point of contention.
> You can even run a permissioned version of it yourself, where you and your 40 permissioned friends mix their transactions for privacy, and everyone knows (through, let's say, off chain trust) that none of them are committing crimes,
Even if you 100% knew that all of the money was legal mixing is money transmission according to the government which means you need to register in every state you operate, register with the federal government, and have a compliance program, or you will get up to 5 years in prison. Hawaladars/various ethnic equivalents especially post 9/11 have learned the rules on money transmission the hard way, even when they literally "know their customers" in a much more real way than banks do. Here's an example where I'm from https://apnews.com/article/yemen-us-news-ap-top-news-mi-stat... - fortunately these guys were spared prison though.
I think there are procedural issues not statutory ones. Procedure can undermine the statutory one, in this case there is a requirement for an entity to be able to argue on its own behalf to be removed from the sanctions list, this is not possible with the Tornado Cash contract addresses.
There is also the issue of determining how it is a Foreign Asset to begin with. Is it based on the developer they identified? They have to prove that it was not deployed by an American which probably cannot be proven by the nodes (maybe records of an API could do it, but not when running your own nodes)
This is an interesting point, but is it uniformly true? The OFAC list also includes aircraft and boats, which presumably can't argue on their own behalf.
Tornado Cash autonomous contracts cannot. They need to establish proof of who or what organization deployed it. I believe they skipped this step for incompetence or for needing it clarified in court
The previously linked article makes 4 arguments but this is the one I find most compelling:
even Treasury’s own regulations and past executive orders limit the applicability of sanction controls to transactions with persons, entities, or their property. The Tornado Cash sanction was made without statutory and also without regulatory authority. It was made contrary to law.
I've read that post a couple of times, and even wrote a response to it[1]!
TL;DR: The Treasury Department doesn't care that Tornado Cash is "just" a computer program, because a computer program is an instrument made and operated by human beings. Even an autonomous program does not escape this, for the same reason that you can't escape a murder charge by throwing a bomb into the air and claiming gravity as a defense.
I genuinely don’t see any link between a bomb going off and a privacy protocol used to move financial assets.
The government is not allowed to put a camera in my house and watch me 24/7. Sure, I might be committing crimes inside my house. But unless the government can convince a judge that they suspect me of committing crimes that justify such a camera, they cannot install said camera.
Similarly, merely using a technique to obfuscate the origin of my own money is not enough to claim I am a criminal. I can do similar with gold coins and paper cash, and in high dollar amounts.
Eventually I’ll want to use my financial assets to purchase something, and at that point the receiver should ask me where I got my money (if legally required to) and with Tornado Cash I can fully explain the origin of my legal funds.
Acting like Tornado itself is enabling crime is absurd.
> I genuinely don’t see any link between a bomb going off and a privacy protocol used to move financial assets.
The link is explained in the post: in both instances, a human is the prime mover. No court in the world draws a distinction between "Joe kills Bob" and "Joe builds a Bob-killing robot that kills Bob." Similarly, no court in the world is likely to draw a distinction between "North Korea launders money" and "North Korea uses an autonomous program to launder money." It simply isn't relevant.
> Similarly, merely using a technique to obfuscate the origin of my own money is not enough to claim I am a criminal. I can do similar with gold coins and paper cash, and in high dollar amounts.
To be clear: if attempt to obfuscate your cash transactions by structuring them beneath the limits that trigger CTR reporting, you're committing a crime. You can have reasonable opinions about whether that ought to be a crime, but it is absolutely not legal in the current regulatory scheme to intentionally avoid your reporting requirements.
> Acting like Tornado itself is enabling crime is absurd.
We have a precise, material example of Tornado enabling a specific crime. That crime is the reason it's on the OFAC list, and it's stated in clear, precise language on the Treasury's site. Again: you can claim that Tornado is an instrument, and anything can be used to commit crime, but it is a matter of fact that Tornado was both used to commit crimes and made committing those crimes easier than they otherwise would have been (by sidestepping financial regulatory frameworks).
I philosophically disagree that something known to be used for a crime, or known to make crimes easier, ipso facto means that thing should be banned. I see a lot of benefits to society with privacy solutions like Tornado Cash. I also like paper cash, gold coins, and guns for that matter, all of which have been documented to be used in crimes and all of which are legal.
I believe the law requires presumption of innocence. We shall see what the judge says. I think your arguments are unconvincing and actually, when analyzed, see them as dangerous and given to statist authoritarian tendencies.
We are not in meaningful disagreement about these things: the question is not whether the government is justified in banning anything that can be used to do crime (which is everything), but whether the government is justified in banning something that have an efficient cause in crime. That's what Tornado Cash is, and no amount of hemming and hawing around other potential uses meaningfully changes this.
Correct - we are debating the merits and demerits of Tornado Cash for society. My position is it’s helpful and all negatives already have laws that solve them.
Furthermore once the software is no longer gray, it could be embedded via API in many other entities to enable privacy, just as encryption was once taboo and now is everywhere. It’s only the gray nature of this privacy solution that prevents its normalization.
The discussion you are participating in does not make any philosophical claims, but just states how the law works. A libertarian disagreeing with this on a philosophical is not just obvious, it's also uninteresting.
I linked to several legal arguments as to why the person I’m speaking to is wrong. They are not a lawyer as their blog states. And my philosophical arguments go to the heart of the law, which is how much authority Treasury claims they have vs. what their actual authority is as written.
I don’t even know what your comment adds to the discussion, it is very boring and also uninteresting and perhaps you should exit this thread before you degrade it further.
Bitcoin from silk road was seized as proceeds of crime. Those btc were actually used in crime. Government later cleaned those coins and auctioned them off.
In this curious land of the free, government can take criminal proceeds and clean and resell it while also claiming the freedom-taxpayers may not express themselves with others in computer code.
I expect Tornado Cash will be found to have the same protections as PGP in the 90s.
regurgitating anti encryption talking points to justify regulating other people’s wallets, I guess it’s only natural to oppose financial privacy when your economic policies depend on having the right to other people’s money.
I'm very pro-encryption. I'm not convinced that sanctions against Tornado Cash pose a serious risk to E2EE or other civically important (necessary!) applications of encryption.
I don’t need to justify my right to privacy to prevent you from violating it. Come up with a better defence than the redistribution of consequences, this not the EU.
Our banking system nearly collapsed in 2008. Lots of people got hurt. Financialization of the US economy is a larger, delayed version of what happened to General Electric.
> Our banking system nearly collapsed in 2008. Lots of people got hurt.
Yes, plenty of people got hurt because they made shitty investments.
How many people got hurt due to their bank running off with their money to the Bahamas/betting it all on red?
Because that's the degree of 'hurt' that the various crypto exchanges have been inflicting on their customers. Can you find me one American who lost money from their savings account in 2008? Or just had it go poof from their stock brokerage?
I responded to: "Name a financial firm that had a significant negative impact on consumers?" I didn't respond to which financial firms stole money from customers. What SBF did was more like Bernie Madoff.
The only reason we didn't have bank runs and frozen accounts is because the Fed stepped in to provide liquidity to the whole market. The banking system would've collapsed similar to the Great Depression without such action. Lots of people lost their savings in the Great Depression.
Retail investors used FTX, retail was not heavily exposed to Bernie. His marks were mostly institutional and accredited investors, for whom the expectations are far closer to the 'buyer-beware' side of the spectrum.
> because the Fed stepped in to provide liquidity to the whole market.
That's the Fed's job. Everything worked... Pretty much as intended.
And there's a reason it's not stepping in to provide liquidity for the various crypto scams. Liquidity injections can save a situation where value exists, but can't be immediately realized - as in the case of a bank run. In this case, though, there's no value worth saving.
> Lots of people lost their savings in the Great Depression.
Which is precisely why we built systems to prevent that failure mode from happening again. They worked.
I agree that the Fed was right in letting these crypto scams fail. The problem inherent to the system is inflation. As the Fed expands its powers, it can avoid significant recessions/depressions but one day it won't work and the dollar will fail like every other fiat currency in the world has eventually failed. This system "working" isn't eliminating risk, it's polarizing it.
I wrote a longer comment a year ago but here's a piece: "The price of gold was $45/oz in 1970. 52 years later it's $1,800/ounce. That's roughly 7.6% a year or 45x increase. If you use the inflation provided by the government, CPI, (1), they say inflation is only 3.6%/year or roughly 7x since 1970. Obviously we have a discrepancy. Is the dollar worth 45x less than 1970 or 7x times?
When we look at prices of things like education, housing, and healthcare, the 45x number makes a lot more sense. Education has 30x in price over the same time period (2). If you're comparing prices in dollars, it feels like education got really expensive compared to the basket of goods the BEA tracks but in reality, education requires less gold than it did in 1970. Our incredible supply chains and manufacturing automation have lowered most consumer prices such that we don't really notice inflation but when you look at things that can't get much cheaper like housing, healthcare, education, asset prices of all sorts, you can't miss the fact that they correlate more closely with gold than the USD."
>
I wrote a longer comment a year ago but here's a piece: "The price of gold was $45/oz in 1970. 52 years later it's $1,800/ounce. That's roughly 7.6% a year or 45x increase. If you use the inflation provided by the government, CPI, (1), they say inflation is only 3.6%/year or roughly 7x since 1970. Obviously we have a discrepancy. Is the dollar worth 45x less than 1970 or 7x times?
The main[1] answer to your riddle is that the economy grew about ~6x faster than we have been mining gold. The dollar is closer to being worth 7x less than 45x less.
> When we look at prices of things like education, housing, and healthcare, the 45x number makes a lot more sense. Education has 30x in price over the same time period (2).
The same amount of education isn't actually 30x more expensive.
Because you're not getting the same services in exchange for your money today, as you were 50 years ago.
If you drop the money-pit sports programs, the entirety of the administrative sector, the nice new dorm buildings, and account for reduction in public funding, you'll find that the growth in the cost of education is much closer to the cost of inflation.
It's not all that expensive, even in 2022, to stuff a group of young adults into a lecture hall and have an underpaid adjunct who doesn't even get health insurance read off Powerpoint slides to them for 15 hours a week. It's the everything else, most of which has nothing to do with education that costs money.
[1] The secondary answer to your riddle is that late-night-infomercial-manufactured demand from goldbugs and other morons can easily raise the price of gold significantly above where it 'ought' to be. Beanie babies, baseball cards, NFTs, shitcoins, etc.
College education is ~30x more expensive (1). Home prices (2) & Health care (3) are ~22x more expensive. Farm land is up 20x (4)
> The main[1] answer to your riddle is that the economy grew about ~6x faster than we have been mining gold. The dollar is closer to being worth 7x less than 45x less.
How are you measuring it? It's a circular argument if you measure it in dollars. If it measure it in anything that can't be made more efficient due to automation & offshoring, it's no where near a 7x decrease.
> [1] The secondary answer to your riddle is that late-night-infomercial-manufactured demand from goldbugs and other morons can easily raise the price of gold significantly above where it 'ought' to be. Beanie babies, baseball cards, etc.
Gold is simply a good that's impossible to mass produce with technology. Use land, housing, healthcare, education or whatever you feel is most representative. Using toothpaste and tv's for CPI is a bad measurement in the last 50 years, our technology for mass producing them has lowered the true cost.
> How are you measuring it? It's a circular argument if you measure it in dollars.
Measure it in houses built, cars sold, concrete poured, steel refined, restaurant visits, number of people working in service industries. Measure it in color televisions and washing machines and computers sold and movies made, and the mountains of disposable crap that everyone fills their homes with. Or by looking at the skyline in Beijing in 1970, and today. The dollar is the currency of global trade, you have to print more of it to keep track with the global economy, just to prevent it from becoming a deflationary currency.
It may not less obvious if you live in the United States, but we make and consume more useful goods and services, much faster than we mine gold. That's why the cost of an ounce of gold can grow 50 times, while the cost of a loaf of bread can grow 5 times in the past 50 years.
> If it measure it in anything that can't be made more efficient due to automation & offshoring, it's no where near a 7x decrease.
Why not? The world's economy has grown by around that much in real value (Denominated in goods[1], not dollars) added in 50 years. [2]
> Use land, housing, healthcare, education or whatever you feel is most representative.
Land is speculative, you don't make more of it when the economy grows, and its price trends towards 1 divided by the interest rate. In a world of zero-interest, it trends towards infinity. A modern house requires a lot more economic inputs to go into it than a 1970s house. Likewise, the amount of waste and work that goes into healthcare, education, etc, has significantly increased over that same time period.
A better metric would be median wages[3], compared to productivity growth. Median family income in the US in 1970 was $9,870/year. Median family income today is ~$78,000. If there was zero productivity gain, and zero quality-of-life increases/decreases, this will tell us that a dollar today is worth ~8x less than a dollar back then.
But we have had productivity and quality of life increases. And you have to divide that 8x by whatever those multipliers were.
Gold is the weird outlier when it comes to the value of things, not the gold standard.
[1] 50 years ago, there were 200 million cars in the world. Today, there are ~1.4 billion. You can't tell me that the real product of the economy hasn't grown by something resembling that factor. Or that billions of people haven't been born, without economic growth. Or that billions of people haven't been lifted out of complete poverty, without real, per-capita economic growth.
[2] It's grown about 35x, when denominated in dollars. If we actually used gold for money, it would have been deflationary, to the tune of... Whatever real economic growth the world would have had. That amount of deflation would have been utterly horrifying.
[3] At the end of the day, the costs of all things are largely determined by wages. Plus a bit of profit margin for speculators, rentiers, and capitalists, but they take a much smaller slice of the pie.
