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spaceman_2020 commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto   twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84
troupo · 6 days ago
Deflationary "currencies" like crypto are significantly worse (why spend when you can HODL). Regular crypto "currencies" will have the exact same effects.
spaceman_2020 · 6 days ago
> why spend when you can HODL

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.

spaceman_2020 commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto   twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84
originalvichy · 6 days ago
I respectfully disagree. Even if you told me that you felt like working at the UN was a waste of time, I’d still tell you that at least you contributed to a historically unique global institution which at least strives to bring people across the world together.

Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.

spaceman_2020 · 6 days ago
Half the people here work for random SaaS and socially corrosive companies like Meta that have literally helped install dictators into power

You could do worse than building crappy blockchains

spaceman_2020 commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto   twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84
wmf · 6 days ago
They could have worked for Stripe/Ramp/Brex/Mercury for example. They'd still be rich but with non-speculative impact.
spaceman_2020 · 6 days ago
And Stripe ironically is making a blockchain itself to facilitate stablecoin settlements globally

So you're back to square one

spaceman_2020 commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto   twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84
spicyusername · 7 days ago
I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.

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.

spaceman_2020 · 6 days ago
You say this right when your central banks went on a massive money printing spree, shot up inflation beyond their own baseline for years, and have created a frankenstenian K-shaped economy where everyone who is not in the top 10-20% is getting actively poorer

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.

spaceman_2020 commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto   twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84
ranguna · 6 days ago
Good luck finding someone who will accept btc for literal bread and milk
spaceman_2020 · 6 days ago
There are massive P2P economies already built in most third world nations that work on crypto. They prefer stablecoins but will happily accept BTC as well. It's a serious enough problem that they've started using code words to refer to crypto currencies ("goat" for USDT, "chicken" for ETH, etc.)

If a corrupt third world government is scared of a piece of tech, it is, imo, good tech

spaceman_2020 commented on India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app   reuters.com/sustainabilit... · Posted by u/jmsflknr
spaceman_2020 · 13 days ago
the good news is that I'm personally on my last few years online. I don't think there's anything really worthwhile in this space to do as a contributor or even as a consumer
spaceman_2020 commented on Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?   economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/harambae
AIorNot · 13 days ago
Well as a single datum:

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

spaceman_2020 · 13 days ago
My brother who is nearly 50 and has worked in tech since the dot com boom, got laid off in January and couldn't find a job until last week. This job, too, was just a contractual position at his old Fortune 50 firm.

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

spaceman_2020 commented on FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence   bfl.ai/blog/flux-2... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
vunderba · 19 days ago
Updating the GenAI comparison website is starting to feel a bit Sisyphean with all the new models coming out lately, but the results are in for the Flux 2 Pro Editing model!

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.

spaceman_2020 · 18 days ago
Clearly Google is winning this by some margin

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

spaceman_2020 commented on Nano Banana Pro   blog.google/technology/ai... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
dangoodmanUT · 24 days ago
I've had nano banana pro for a few weeks now, and it's the most impressive AI model I've ever seen

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!)

spaceman_2020 · 24 days ago
Genuinely believe that images are 99.5% solved now and unless you’re extremely keen eyed, you won’t be able to tell AI images from real images now
spaceman_2020 commented on Nano Banana Pro   blog.google/technology/ai... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
sarbajitsaha · 24 days ago
Slightly off topic, but how are people creating long videos like 30 second videos that I often see on Instagram? It I try to use Veo to make split videos, it simply cannot maintain the style or weird quirks get into the subsequent videos. Is there anything else that's the best video generation model currently other than Veo?
spaceman_2020 · 24 days ago
Longer videos without cuts are usually made from the first/last frame feature available in Veo 3.1 and other video models like Kling 2.5

u/spaceman_2020

KarmaCake day17889October 14, 2011View Original