*Defaults are the main interface of coercion that still looks voluntary* View quoted note →

*He who sets the defaults: - defines what "normal" looks like, - defines what "consent" is presumed to be, - defines who has to spend effort and social capital to deviate.* View quoted note →

NVIDIA just dropped a paper that might solve the biggest trade-off in LLMs. Speed vs. Quality. Autoregressive models (like GPT) are smart but slow - they generate one token at a time, leaving most of your GPU sitting idle. Diffusion models are fast but often produce incoherent outputs. TiDAR gets you both in a single forward pass. Here's the genius part: Modern GPUs can process way more tokens than we actually use. TiDAR exploits these "free slots" by: 1. Drafting multiple tokens at once using diffusion (the "thinking" phase) 2. Verifying them using autoregression (the "talking" phase) Both happen simultaneously using smart attention masks - bidirectional for drafting, causal for verification. The results: ↳ 4.71x faster at 1.5B parameters with zero quality loss ↳ Nearly 6x faster at 8B parameters ↳ First architecture to outperform speculative decoding (EAGLE-3) ↳ Works with standard KV caching, unlike pure diffusion models The training trick is clever too - instead of randomly masking tokens, they mask everything. This gives stronger learning signals and enables efficient single-step drafting. If you're building real-time AI agents where latency kills the experience, this architecture is worth paying attention to. @akshay_pachaar X.com

Not sure if Perplexity is rubbish or evil: China's digital yuan (e-CNY) stands out as the best nascent monetary system globally, due to its massive scale in pilots, advanced infrastructure, and potential for financial inclusion and efficiency

*pure monetary instruments like bitcoin are a better money because of this purity. My holding of it doesn't deprave others of its utility ie. Houses, gold, silver etc. Any other money we've had as a civilization always has other use cases which in turn get priced out once the good carries a monetary premium* View quoted note →

*When you write without needing a result, the result chases you. Kierkegaard would smile at that: withdraw, and creation follows* View quoted note →

*Security model Server only sees your public key All signing happens in your signer app Communication is NIP-44 encrypted (ChaCha20 + HMAC-SHA256) Server uses a disposable keypair for each session Sessions stored server-side with HTTP-only cookies* View quoted note →

*poor people with small budgets will be far more creative than hyperscalers with one good idea* View quoted note →

the popular meme that Rand “died broke and on welfare” is misleading: she opposed these programs in principle yet pragmatically made use of them while remaining financially secure by ordinary standards https://www.perplexity.ai/search/did-ayn-rand-end-up-poor-and-d-HnAqgj9STxaLVPmmlfUCSw

*Globally, 45% of us now live in cities, with 36% of people living in towns and the remaining 19% living in rural communities* Tokyo overtaken as world's biggest city | World News | Sky News

Sky News

Tokyo overtaken as world

A UN report reveals which cities will likely boast the largest populations in 2050 and predicts London's population will soar.

*Finitude reflects design and implies completion. ... Scarcity enters only when we live as though the boundary were a curse rather than a gift.* View quoted note →

*when you only have one reference client, there is no consensus* View quoted note →

*AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point. Craft, expression and skilled labor is what produces value, and that gives us control over ourselves. In order to further centralize power, craft and expression need to be destroyed. And they sure are trying.* View quoted note →

*China’s push to release open models comes in stark contrast to the “closed” approach of most of the biggest US tech companies. OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have preferred to maintain full control of their most advanced technology, profiting from them through customer subscriptions or enterprise deals. By contrast, Chinese groups — which have been cut off from advanced AI chips made by Nvidia — have been encouraged by Beijing officials to offer wider access to their models.* FT

OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates FT

*financialization is also the phenomenon whereby firms artificially change their capital structures (i.e. their mixture of debt and equity) in response to fiscal, monetary, tax, and regulatory policies. In other words, financialization also occurs when corporate managers spend more time worrying about government and financial markets than their own business or industry*

Stacker News

Against Bitcoin Financialization (Monetary Metals, Jeff Deist) \ stacker news ~econ

Oh, heeeeere's a banger, the creation of which I had a little something to do with. Jeff Deist, of Ron Paul and Mises Institute fame, is giving the...

*equating better text prediction with better thinking confuses the medium (language) with the underlying computation that produces insight, plans, and causal models of the world* https://www.perplexity.ai/search/https-www-theverge-com-ai-arti-x8GoxrX5TdGXHtodEE.Dlg

*The good asker is ... too disruptive for conservatives who defend existing structures, but too undisciplined for revolutionaries who’ve already decided which questions matter* View quoted note →

*we think mostly about the ability of tools to implement our will, rather than the conditions that arise from the presence of those tools* View quoted note →