This is pretty similar to the argument for why humanoid robots will be a big deal. The physical world is also built mostly for humans, so having an autonomous agent that can interact with it is huge.
Just got the latest Apple Watch, so also glad to hear they perform better on HRV. It seems they get a lot of the little details better than competitors in the wearables space. I read previously about how they likely had the most accurate sleep tracking and also had some special sauce in their GPS handling code that made it outperform Garmin.
Yes, I think you're spot on. They showed a video of a robot arm cleaning the car's inside, and it appears the vertical opening doors make that kind of access easier. The car will also have wireless charging, which makes that easier to automate as well.
A similar thing happens with stock and crypto traders. They do a ton of trading during a bull market and feel like a genius, because they bagged a few big wins, but they downplay all their big losses. At the end of the year and once short term capital gains are factored in, they end up making less than the total market index, but due to poor record keeping are convinced they’re some kind of trading savant. Once the market turns down they’ll likely lose it all and be forced to become a social media influencer selling bullshit trading courses to unsuspecting victims.
I can’t imagine how naive you have to be to not see account selling as a massive problem. Especially when your plan is to first onboard users in poor countries. Why would these people do anything other than signup and immediately sell their accounts, for what may amount to a month or two of normal pay, just for waiting in line and getting scanned. I find it crazy that they claimed their system is Sybil resistant when it had this most obvious flaw. Maybe they don’t really give a crap and just wanted to collect that sweet sweet VC money.
Sure, yeah, maybe that's all it is, a scam that's totally transparent and obvious to every random internet commenter but totally non-obvious to the simple and gullible marks on Sand Hill Road.
Or maybe, just possibly, there might be more to it.
Perhaps it takes a little more effort to understand than just piling on to the reflexive groupthink cynicism which passes for conventional wisdom around here.
(Disclaimer: I have no association with this project, haven't gotten my irises scanned, don't own the token, haven't invested any effort to understand it. But I've been around long enough to recognize the smell of reflexive groupthink cynicism, and to profit by betting against it.)
> but totally non-obvious to the simple and gullible marks on Sand Hill Road
You mean the ones who also invested in Theranos, WeWork, and FTX? They don’t always make the wisest investment decisions. They’re not complete idiots, but they’re sucsceptible to same biases and misjudgements as the rest of us. And I’m sure they‘re aware of some or all of WC’s flaws, and are just investing b/c Sam Altman, or because they invested back in the 2018-2021 crypto bubble. There’s also some time pressure, they’ve gotta put that money somewhere within a year (standard VC LP contract), or give it back.
> Perhaps it takes a little more effort to understand than just piling on to the reflexive groupthink cynicism which passes for conventional wisdom around here.
Molly already put extensive effort into just that in the OP, as did several other folks she references and links to. If you have any critiques of her critiques and why she may be wrong, love to hear it. But without that, it’s not her or us that’s being reflexive here.
> Sure, yeah, maybe that's all it is, a scam that's totally transparent and obvious to every random internet commenter but totally non-obvious to the simple and gullible marks on Sand Hill Road.
You write this like it's an absurd notion, but we've already been through Juicero, WeWork, Theranos, Nikola, and FTX among others.
I’m not saying it’s a scam, just that it seems their system isn’t really Sybil resistant due to the issue of account selling. And if that’s the case they either didn’t think this would be an issue, or they expected it but don’t really care, and the claim of Sybil resistance is just marketing. Is this wrong in some way you’d like to explain?
I can't explain anything about this project because I haven't invested the effort to understand it.
Maybe I'll spend the 20 minutes to read the 5000 words in Molly White's article, and then another couple hours to read the whitepaper, then another who knows how many hours researching the claims and counterclaims to make my own judgment.
But probably I'll never do any of those things, and I'll still have high confidence that the project probably isn't simply a scam for sweet, sweet VC money, or unimaginably naive, or full of fatal flaws that every rando can identify instantly.
Because in the past, when anonymous internet commenters are of one mind that a new thing is a scam or fatally flawed, while the team behind the new thing are highly capable, with good reputations for not being scammers or unimaginably naive, usually the anonymous internet commenters don't understand what's really happening.
And then I'll ctrl-f the whitepaper to search for 'sybil' and discover that the arguments in this thread are already discussed in the whitepaper, which gives me even more confidence that the hivemind conclusions of scamminess or naivete are most likely uninformed.
Once again, I never claimed this was a scam. I'm simply pointing out that the system has an inherent flaw regarding account selling, which makes it not sybil resistant, as claimed by the founders. I usually give projects the benefit of the doubt, but I've never heard Sam or the other founder talk about this major issue with their system design.
> Perhaps it takes a little more effort to understand
If that's the case, then isn't it on WorldCoin to educate us? Their communications so far have apparently been insufficient, if people are rejecting the scheme merely because they don't understand it.
Remember, Sam Altman is the guy who made open AI into closed AI, and he’s the cofounder of this. If you think he has any intent of making this an open decentralized system that benefits people you’re likely mistaken.
He's said that he doesn't take any stock. I don't know why so many people thing this is strange. He's already immensely rich. While this role might not make him richer, but it does give him huge amounts of power and influence.
I think fake iris scanning is the least of the concerns here. The big problem, and likely reason this will fail, is there’s nothing preventing you from selling your account for a small fee after getting your initial scan to set it up. And that’s likely exactly what will happen, because they’re onboarding users in poor countries first. These users don’t give a shit about world coin, they’re simply lining up and being scanned to make a bit of easy money.
The premise is that you can make spam filtering and bot filtering and circles of trust work if you have a finite amount of accounts. Currently on the internet there are infinite accounts. If there's only a billion accounts, filtering becomes much easier.
No idea how world coin is supposed to work.. but couldn’t they get their account back by scanning their iris again? Like, I’m guessing you’re not supposed to have to scan your iris every time you use your account. But can’t the iris be like a “I forgot my password” mechanism?
AFAIK, nope. If that was the case there would be no point in buying anyone's account. If you stored value in it they could always use their iris to get into it.
And these people don’t give two shits about world coin, they just want the free money the company is throwing at them. This things is doomed to fail, because the biometrics are only authenticated when you setup your account initially like in this photo. So these people can collect the sign up fee and the then turn around and sell their account to a someone else, thereby nullifying the sybil resistance of the system.
Interesting how Worldcoin chooses to start in countries where this demand exists, almost by definition the poorest countries in the world, where the infrastructure is not only barely needed, but also most likely to be abused by the same governments that created the poverty in the first place.
I think this type of course should come very early in a CS program. Yes, many students learn these things on their own, but many don’t, and it’s a good idea to put them on equal footing.
Being able to efficiently use common software tools allows students to learn more effectively in other courses, so a class like this provides a leverage to the other classes. Yes a lot of CS is theory, but it’s pretty hard to learn about that without having a solid grasp of the tools.
Agreed. At my undergraduate we didn't have an equivalent, and a common complaint amongst the TA's was how little concrete devops skills the students had. One of my friends TAing a second year course even went so far as to say almost all of his time in office hours was (watching students fail to do, and then) showing students the basics.
