- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Grumbles about generative AI’s shortcomings are coalescing into a “trough of disillusionment” after a year and a half of hype about ChatGPT and other bots.
Why it matters: AI is still changing the world — but improving and integrating the technology is raising harder and more complex questions than first envisioned, and no chatbot has the magic answers.
Driving the news: The hurdles are everything from embarrassing errors, such as extra fingers or Black founding fathers in generated images, to significant concerns about intellectual property infringement, cost, environmental impact and other issues.
They are, though. The total market cap across cryptocurrencies right now is about $2.75 trillion.
You misspelled “Unlicensed Securities”, and taking crypto scammers at their word when they tell you how much their bits are worth is an easy way to lose actual money. XD
I’m just pointing out that they’re still there. If it’s a scam then at this point it’s one of history’s biggest and longest-running.
And whether any particular cryptocurrency qualifies as a security in any particular jurisdiction is a complicated question, some do and some don’t. This is about cryptocurrency as a whole so calling them an unlicensed security would not be accurate.
Calling them a “currency” wouldn’t be accurate either.
And the fact that they still exist as a fraction of a shadow of their former hype doesn’t perish the fact that they have accomplished none of their stated goals.
Not as an untracable currency, not as a store of value, not as a medium of exchange, and most especially not as a thing to make government-issued money obsolete.
Cryptocurrency as a whole isn’t worth the disk space it occupies.
It isn’t a “shadow”, its current market cap is near its historical high point right now.
If you have no use for it then by all means ignore it. But calling it a bubble that has popped is simply factually inaccurate. Other people evidently find value in it.
And that’s their problem. The price is up because anybody with sense and no morals wants to sell off their holdings for as much as possible before the next “market adjustment” leaves them hodling the bag.
I have no interest in the specifics of why the price is up or down, I’m not a speculator. That’s not the point of all this. The only point is it’s still there. Which it is.
But it isn’t. It was never there in the first place. Even the tulip bubble still had tulips at the end, but crypto is just creaking along like a zombie on the inertia of hardware investments.
By “hardware investments” I take it you mean mining rigs? You’re two years out of date, Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022. It doesn’t depend on special-purpose hardware any more, or any hardware of particularly significant quantity. Bitcoin still does does but it’s a shrinking share of the total cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Again, if you aren’t interested in cryptocurrencies then feel free to ignore them. But making confident pronouncements about them when you’re not familiar with how they work or are used is not that. Poetic and emotional language is no substitute for knowledge.
@FaceDeer
Kind of an overstatement. It hasn’t even been 20 years. If it were a scam it’d be nowhere near the scale and timeframe of, say, Papal Indulgences.
This isn’t anything to do with your wider argument btw, just me nitpicking. Didn’t know you’d relocated to fedia.io, was that during the downtime?
Heh, I suppose I can grant papal indulgence as a scam. Were I feeling edgy I could one up that and label the church as a whole as a scam. But since the usual accusation leveled against cryptocurrency is “ponzi scheme” I looked that up and noted that Madoff’s the current record holder for one of those at a mere $65 billion.
Yeah, the kbin.social week of downtime was the final nudge I needed to set up an alternative account here. But honestly I was getting very frustrated with kbin.social’s flakeiness already before then. I appreciate Ernest’s work, but something like kbin can’t be a single-person show in the long run. I hope he does well but now I don’t have to reload the page every time I want to vote or comment.
Heh love your wording there. I actually started that train of thought with various “relics” like the vial of Christ’s blood, statues weeping tears etc some of which were eventually debunked iirc.
Ponzi schemes are quite possibly as old as granaries (or the pyramids), but I think a better contender for scope is something like the Mississipi Bubble which was absolute madness…
Kbin really is a work in progress. I’m sticking with it, but I have backup accounts for the times when it’s too buggy.