Travels are over and retiring this npub. See you around Nostr under my other nym, anon!

If you’re concerned about excessive government surveillance and targeting individuals with AI then check out this paper describing a benchmark authoritarians can use to refine their models: “CrowdTrack: A Benchmark for Difficult Multiple Pedestrian Tracking in Real Scenarios”

arXiv.org

CrowdTrack: A Benchmark for Difficult Multiple Pedestrian Tracking in Real Scenarios

Multi-object tracking is a classic field in computer vision. Among them, pedestrian tracking has extremely high application value and has become th...

When you’re young you have time and energy but no money. You get a little older and you have money and energy but no free time. When you get old you have money and free time but no energy. Plan accordingly.

Building on this line of thinking, imagine a world where it’s easy for Americans with dollars to buy bitcoin but harder for everyone else who wants to do the same. Over time we may expect to see more demand for USD in order to exchange for BTC. The USD could be the conduit. If we see the BTC-USD exchange rate stabilize while the other currencies fall to the dollar again it might be for that reason. Or a million other reasons… who knows anymore. View quoted note →

Some people claim the recent ATH of BTC-USD is proves that the dollar is being debased faster than, say, the AUD or EUR but that on its own means very little. What it shows is that the market is generally preferring BTC to USD more every day. Why? And why don’t we see that with the other currencies? For one the US government itself has acknowledged that sats are worth stacking. They’ve started to remove barriers to adoption and even promoting it to some extent. What are we seeing from Europe and Australia? Ever more capital controls restricting the use of cash, demonizing bitcoin, stealing money from the population’s bank accounts and putting towards funding equities (Europe), stealing money over some limit in retirement accounts (Australia), etc. Imagine having a fiat currency that’s even harder to trade for bitcoin right now? Does that sound fun? If you think the USD is cooked because of the recent exchange rates you’ve got it backwards. Yes, the USD is cooked long term but relative to the other currencies it’s actually looking brighter for Americans.

If you build an economy that depends on a handful of AI data centers, then what happens if/when those go offline for an extended period? The AI economy right now is fragile and we’re becoming more dependent on it by the day. It’s becoming clear we need a decentralized option that competes with the centralized solutions.

Oh this looks fun

Reachy Mini - The Open-Source Robot for Today's and Tomorrow's AI Builders

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At a hotel and needed an extra room key so I went to the front desk. The guy behind the counter was nice and struck up a conversation when suddenly one of his teeth fell out and bounced on the counter. Without acknowledging it at all he clapped his hand over it and kept chatting. It was so unexpected and random that I almost fell over laughing and had to quickly change the subject to keep my composure. He was a normal 30-something year old guy too and if you had asked me what condition his teeth were in just a minute before I would’ve said they looked healthy. Great conversation otherwise. He had lots of stories to tell about his trips to various Asian countries.

Network effects in QM: Network effects are an interesting phenomena: the more nodes in the network the more “valuable” it is by some metric. A language is more useful the more people that speak it. A currency has more purchasing power the more people that use it. But I also wonder if the same holds true for particles. A small network of particles is called a molecule and has its own distinct properties like binding affinity. And if you have a very large amount of particles together you can get a fusion reaction (like in the core of stars). Networks can be sticky too. We see that readily in monetary networks like the USD and Bitcoin. There’s a sort of gravity there. An attraction that exists only at the network level but not at the individual node/particle level. Makes me wonder if “quantum gravity” is somehow a network effect due to entanglement?