Now if only we could get LLMs to this sort of size! I don't know much about how TTS works under the hood, why is it so much easier?
Readit Newsakrymski commented on Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model github.com/KittenML/Kitte... · Posted by u/divamgupta
But how would you eventually reconcile and settle balances?
Would all payments be just non-fungible bilateral agreements? So if I paid the milkman for some milk, but there was no good or service I could later provide to him, he would be unable to take my payment to the butcher to buy some meat (unless the butcher was also willing to enter into a new bilateral agreement with me)?
Double spending & verifying identities isn't really an issue in a mutual credit system because credit lines are set between trusted parties. You’re replacing an algorithmic double‑spend check with a social credit check.
The butcher would have to trust the milkman in the real world to extend credit to him. At some point the butcher would go to a lender and borrow USD against the IOUs from the milkman. The lender knows the butcher, but can also evaluate the IOUs from the milkman by evaluating who owes the milkman, etc etc. Based on the level of trust the lender has in the butcher (and his IOUs) the lender can lend some hard USD to the butcher, and sell IOUs in exchange for USD to people wanting to join the network.
USD is also not backed by anything, and relies on trust. The important thing is that someone would be prepared to exchange IOU promises for USD/BTC/GLD - market makers. Demand for IOUs comes from people wanting to access the network.
How do you solve double spending?
You don't really need to. In IOU systems you extend credit to someone you know, based on ones reputation or credit score. How back in the day your local milk man would just keep a tab of what you owe.
In a way everyone has something to barter: you owe the milk man, your employer owes you. Identities form a web of trust in the physical world.
I’ve been toying with a concept inspired by Apple’s Find My network:
Imagine a decentralized, delay-tolerant messaging system where messages hop device-to-device (e.g., via Bluetooth, UWB, Wi-Fi Direct), similar to how “Find My” relays location via nearby iPhones.
Now add a twist: • Senders pay a small fee to send a message. • Relaying devices earn a micro-payment (could be tokens, sats, etc.) for carrying the message one hop further. • End-to-end encrypted, fully decentralized, optionally anonymous.
Basically, a “postal network” built on people’s phones, without needing a traditional internet connection. Works best in areas with patchy or no internet, or under censorship.
Obvious challenges: • Latency and reliability (it’s not real-time). • Abuse/spam prevention. • Power consumption and user opt-in. • Viable incentive structures.
What do you think? Is this viable? Any real-world use cases where this might be actually useful — or is it just a neat academic toy?
I've been toying with a concept for a cryptocurrency that works without internet access (like physical money) - peer to peer credit. I believe it is the only real use case for this technology.
akrymski commented on CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) behind.pretix.eu/2025/05/... · Posted by u/pabs3
That's a circular self-justification.
How are concert tickets different to airplane tickets?
Allocation of scarce resources is based on demand for them, expressed in monetary terms. "Deserving" has nothing to do with it. I may deserve a ticket, but not even want to go.
akrymski commented on CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) behind.pretix.eu/2025/05/... · Posted by u/pabs3
Nothing in theory, but ticket sellers probably don’t want to get into the means-testing business.
You can't hand out money (which you're doing if you're giving away something of market value for nothing) without taking on the responsibility of deciding who gets it. Even charities have to put in the work.
akrymski commented on CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) behind.pretix.eu/2025/05/... · Posted by u/pabs3
The answer is mentioned in the article. Not all concerts want only people with means to attend. The venue might want to be accessible to low-income members of the community, or it might be a benefit concert, with free tickets and a donation drive.
What's wrong with giving out some free tickets to low income members of the community?
akrymski commented on CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) behind.pretix.eu/2025/05/... · Posted by u/pabs3
That's only "fair" in a certain, academic sense, which claims that willingness to pay more money makes someone more "deserving" - completely ignoring socioeconomic status.
That also offends a lot of people who oppose the above reasoning.
It's "fair" in any society that has capitalism. Going down the rabbit hole of deciding who deserves money is playing God.
It's clear to me that the tech just isn't there yet. The information density of a web page with standard representations (DOM, screenshot, etc) is an order of magnitude lower than that of, say, a document or piece of code, which is where LLMs shine. So we either need much better web page representations, or much more capable models, for this to work robustly. Having LLMs book flights by interacting with the DOM is sort of like having them code a web app using assembly. Dia, Comet, Browser Use, Gemini, etc are all attacking this and have big incentives to crack it, so we should expect decent progress here.
A funny observation was that some models have been clearly fine tuned for web browsing tasks, as they have memorized specific selectors (e.g. "the selector for the search input in google search is `.gLFyf`").
[1] https://github.com/parsaghaffari/browserbee