Go @Derek Ross @Soapbox

I’m here bitfest, nostrashire 😁

Two things I have been working on tonight: 1. The economic “canary in the cage” is Japan. They are the most stressed and they will be the first tell. 2. Bitcoin is now the global financial cache, it moves first because it is the most liquid. It also recovers first.

Some people climb Everest, some people submerge 100 fathoms in a submarine, others train tigers in a circus. I drink cocktails on a cruise ship! Why do I need to watch a safety video and they don't 😂

Now we have fibre Internet, I wanted to cancel our FTTC Internet from BT. Low and behold, even though I signed up for it online and I’m out of contract, the only method to cancel is to phone them. Why? Because they want you to either not bother and keep paying for the service or you’ll call a sales person who’ll try and talk you out of it. I’ve seen this before when I had to cancel my deceased fathers services. I actually cancelled his services while he was still alive, but had moved to a care home, but I actually used the death and bereavement option as it was the easiest route. So as with Sky TV, I have unplugged the router and cancelled the direct debt. This time, however I have Watson, my AI phone receptionist who will field calls from British Telecom trying to convince me to stay, while I have Chatty, my legal AI, informing me of this new law being passed in the UK, which is the: Equal ease of exit Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act 2024.  
If a customer enters digitally, they must be allowed to exit digitally — especially when the minimum contract period is finished. This is forcing companies to allow users to leave completed contracts as easily as they signed up. I am going to let Watson know about this law through my control panel.

GM We may be in an AI bubble, but a bubble of over exuberance, not hype. i.e. the 2000 dot com bubble was not wrong about the future potential of the Internet, it was just wrong about the speed. So it is with AI. We think we’re doing better than we are, because AI has evolved so quickly since its breakout in 2017. We are not, however, in a bubble like the semi mythical tulip bulb bubble, which is now mostly fictionalised as a story rather than understood as reality. An important, and often missed point in this evolution is that we are moving from an era of general computing (the CPU) to specialist computing, AI (GPU), Quantum and ASIC compute such as Bitcoin mining. AI has yet to travel this journey, still mostly relying on GPUs for its compute. Bitcoin is a good lesson for us here. Bitcoin mining moved from CPU mining at first, to GPU mining and now almost 100% of it is done on specialist ASICs. AI has made some moves into Application Specific Integrated Circuit, chip sets such as Google's TPUs (Tensor Processing Units), Fujitsu's DLU (Deep Learning Unit), Intel's AI ASICs, and specialised chips like Habana Labs Gaudi and Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine. But we have yet to see a dominant general purpose GPU beating AI ASIC. This will come and it may not come from Nvidia.