Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.
You could do worse than building crappy blockchains
Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.
You could do worse than building crappy blockchains
So you're back to square one
The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.
Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.
That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.
It doesn't take a lot to figure out that hard currencies with some supply cap tend to hold value better. BTC might not be it - it might be gold or silver - but you really can't ignore the inflation issues inherent in fiat currencies anymore.
If a corrupt third world government is scared of a piece of tech, it is, imo, good tech
After I got laid off in late 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work (despite having AI experience) to the point my unemployment ran out -
And I was 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, (never had trouble finding work) including stints as a leading EM and CTO, I’ve been an industry award winning innovation lead,a digital studio director, switching tech stacks and cloud certs all my career..mentoring juniors and doing podcasts and writing white papers etc, but peanuts - nothing
Getting ghosted by 25 year olds in interviews and doing rounds and rounds and leetcode and all that but no success- for example I had a 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023 and then got ghosted (I probably doged a bullet since they had subsequent layoffs)
a 12 month stint with nothing - we lost our savings as my wife got laid off too
Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- joining incubators and finally got some work or at least cofounded some AI startups- now money is tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job… it sucks as a over 45 year old as I have so much experience but no one cares.. still dont have much grey hair so I can pass for 40 to get noticed
No one stable is hiring or your resume just goes to a dead letter queue or is lost in ether or lost amid all the ai generated resumes out there - young ML and PHds and people under 40 seem to be getting work in Gen AI but thats about it
networking is the only game left and most good recruiters I know got laid off too
At least I’ve built up production experience in agents and context engineering RL, pytorch, langchain/LangGraph, RAG, KGa, etc python, BAML, LLM and LLMops to add to my years of full stack work
He has an engineering degree from one of the top 5 engineering colleges in India, a Master's from one of the top 5 engineering schools in the US. He built some of the systems that form the foundation of the entire call center industry.
And now he pivoted to GenAI and has dozens of very impressive public projects including some heavily starred open source repos
And yet...nothing.
Ageism in the tech industry has never been worse
https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing
It scored slightly higher than BFL's Kontext model, coming in around the middle of the pack at 6 / 12 points.
I’ll also be introducing an additional numerical metric soon, so we can add more nuance to how we evaluate model quality as they continue to improve.
If you're solely interested in seeing how Flux 2 Pro stacks up against the Nano Banana Pro, and another Black Forest model (Kontext), see here:
https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing?models=km,nbp...
Note: It should be called out that BFL seems to support a more formalized JSON structure for more granular edits so I'm wondering if accuracy would improve using it.
Seedream is also very good and makes me think the next version will challenge Google for SOTA image gen
Increasingly feels like image gen is a solved problem
The inline verification of images following the prompt is awesome, and you can do some _amazing_ stuff with it.
It's probably not as fun anymore though (in the early access program, it doesn't have censoring!)
You touch upon an important point: the entire foundation of our current economic system is built on high velocity of money. You are incentivized to spend rather than hold because without it, there's no mindless conspicuous consumption. A deflationary currency will grind this system to a halt
But the question you need to ask is: has all this mindless consumption really done us any real good? For the handful of genuinely useful things to come out of excessive consumption, there are a gazillion pieces of wasteful crap that clogs homes first, then landfills
A deflationary currency is bad for the current economic system. But that doesn't mean it's bad by itself.