In a lot of jurisdictions there’s no minimum reserve requirement anymore, in cash. It’s not really a problem, because at the big bank level money on paper is barely real. If they need more, they can almost just ask. They do have to have a certain minimum amount of capital, though, which can take a number of forms.

I mixed up my exact terms a bit earlier, sorry about that. I’m not a professional macroeconomist, I only know enough to know they’re not completely full of shit.

we are experiencing greater and greater asset bubbles and at no point in world history were things actually different.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. If things aren’t any different from before, how can we have bigger and bigger asset bubbles? I don’t know that we do, really. The niche for bear investors is very full, if something’s overvalued by the whole market you and me won’t know either.

Yeah, that’s fair. Most of the VR stuff out there has a pretty walled-garden feel.

If I could pick your brain a bit, what are the big computational bottlenecks these days?

I see. Thanks.

Edit: Holy crap, yeah that’s scummy. Literally manipulating children - openly, specifically children - into being whales without even knowing.

Somehow, none of the “think of the children people” care or talk about this.

Well, you had excellent luck with Tinder then. Most people do not have that kind of success.

Very. They’re all swipe boxes at this point, and that basically means it’s a slot machine that dispenses people. It’s designed to be addicting, not actually locate a compatible partner.

No, I don’t really have a good alternative. Date-me docs are interesting, kind of a zine-y grassroots version of the app we wish we had, but they’re a small phenomenon and I don’t know how many people actually manage to meet through them. I heard something about fediverse dating, but that’s even more niche.

Извините, я кажется плохо помню его фамилию.

There’s a lot. He’s been active in this since 2008 or so. Scott Aaronson writes about him quite often on his blog, which is the main way I know of him.

Having an internet connection, a proper AI can easily order contractors around and reproduce, secure and empower itself.

I mean, that’s the standard idea guys like Yudkowsky talk about. Having poked around a bit, it seems a couple decades of petty hackers have made that pretty impossible to do without either leaving a meatspace paper trail, or having meatspace human accomplices. Conquering the world instantly by Wifi, unless you can break encryption, is probably overblown - for now.

Otherwise, I just agree.

If you’re in the <1% of SUV users that needs to drive through unmaintained trails or similar.

You know, I actually kind of like VR. What’s your main criticism of the concept itself?

I’m worried about this one, especially from an AI safety perspective as LLMs become capable of preforming simple white-collar jobs, like those of managers and investors.

Right now a rogue AI would have trouble getting going because human contact is expected in most important business transactions. However, it’s easy to imagine a world where most people are employed by opaque apps, which are run through proprietary servers. Then, all it would take is for some server on Wall Street to calculate that it could make more money if it does buybacks until it has a majority stake in itself, and contract out whatever it needs in meatspace to apps.

I know, I know, it sounds like sci-fi, but it always does at first.

I mean, there’s all kinds of math that goes into making modern fractional reserve banking a self-correcting system with a reasonable theoretical basis, but I’m guessing you’ve made up your mind already.

Do you? I actually don’t know, haha!

It was an honest question.

According to someone else in here, it was 19th, and that sounds right to me. I’m guessing early 19th.

It’s just a neat, tidy legal fiction for some purposes.

Nespresso has ones that are fully metal, and so can be shredded and separated by mass to get scrap aluminum and prime compost fodder. They accept them back by mail.

I really hope this goes out of style eventually, and one day gets remembered alongside proprietary hardware connectors.

Eh. The nice thing about a soft keyboard is that it can be anything you want, including more display real estate. It’s not as nice to type on but it seems like an advance overall to me.

Also, why the Roblox hate? I never actually played.

Yes, but you wouldn’t be a cool forward-thinking silicon valley tech fan anymore. Only kind of /s.

“We’re glad to see you successfully advanced the state of the art in human tissue culturing. However, instead of renewing your grant, we’ve decided to immediately execute the entire research team. May god have mercy on your souls”

Hmm. What is the definition of robot, anyway? A lot of robots run on hydraulics, which in principle could be pumped and valved with no electricity. On the other hand, nobody calls a conveyor belt a robot regardless of how much stuff it moves or how many parts it has.

Quantum computers a real candidate once they get off the ground. They might help solve a few problems in chemistry and condensed matter physics, but on the other hand they definitely will make a lot of encryption we heavily rely on obsolete, and the replacements are noticeably inferior. And that’s about it, because quantum algorithms are hard to design. So, that seems like a net negative to me.

Deep neural nets are powerful, but the fact we fundamentally don’t understand how they work is a bit nerve-wracking.