I looked up some stuff about Argentina’s financial crisis since you mentioned it before, and it looks like they actually did something a bit like what I’m talking about, directly appropriating the valuable assets they could in an effort to keep being able to function:

In addition to the corralito, the Ministry of Economy dictated the pesificación; all bank accounts denominated in dollars would be converted to pesos at an official rate. Deposits would be converted at 1.40 ARS per dollar and debt was converted on 1 to 1 basis.[69]

There’s some indication that this also applied to financial products:

As noted above, a number of U.S. investors have filed ICSID arbitration claims against the government of Argentina. Most of these investors consider the January 2002 pesification of dollar-denominated contracts, and/or the ex post facto prohibition on contracts linked to foreign inflation indices, to be an effective expropriation of their investments

I can’t specifically confirm this included gold held on paper, but I think it probably would have.

As for the plausibility of this sort of thing happening in the US, in addition to the actions of Roosevelt mentioned by @diablexical@sh.itjust.works, the main trigger for Nixon abandoning the gold convertibility of US dollars was France attempting to physically withdraw the gold they had stored in US banks, which they didn’t want to allow.

Well at least harming Amazon is a net good

I think what they’re saying is that in a hyperinflation scenario, it is an option for the government to seize the physical gold backing the financial products people hold in order to continue paying to run the government now that fiat is worthless and they are having trouble with that.

Gold you have buried in your basement, they will have to work a little harder to get.

the developers write that “our studio was mistakenly accused of using AI-generated art in our games, and every attempt to clarify our work only escalated the situation”. They say they’ve received a lot of insults and threats as a consequence.

This is a bad thing.

AI witch hunt strikes again

I’ve read that there are more effective ways to deanonymize tor traffic that goes through exit nodes, as opposed to accessing onion services which is more secure

They targeted gamers.

Gamers.

I don’t hate this article, but I’d rather have read a blog post grounded in the author’s personal experience engaging with a personalized AI assistant. She clearly has her own opinions about how they should work, but instead of being about that there’s this attempt to make it sound like there’s a lot of objective certainty to it that falls flat because of failing to draw a strong connection.

Like this part:

Research in cognitive and developmental psychology shows that stepping outside one’s comfort zone is essential for growth, resilience, and adaptation. Yet, infinite-memory LLM systems, much like personalization algorithms, are engineered explicitly for comfort. They wrap users in a cocoon of sameness by continuously repeating familiar conversational patterns, reinforcing existing user preferences and biases, and avoiding content or ideas that might challenge or discomfort the user.

While this engineered comfort may boost short-term satisfaction, its long-term effects are troubling. It replaces the discomfort necessary for cognitive growth with repetitive familiarity, effectively transforming your cognitive gym into a lazy river. Rather than stretching cognitive and emotional capacities, infinite-memory systems risk stagnating them, creating a psychological landscape devoid of intellectual curiosity and resilience.

So, how do we break free from this? If the risks of infinite memory are clear, the path forward must be just as intentional.

Some hard evidence that stepping out of your comfort zone is good, but not really any that preventing stepping out of their comfort zone is in practice the effect that “infinite memory” features of personal AI assistants has on people, just rhetorical speculation.

Which is a shame because how that affects people is pretty interesting to me. The idea of using a LLM with these features always freaked me out a bit and I quit using ChatGPT before they were implemented, but I want to know how it’s going for the people that didn’t, and who use it for stuff like the given example of picking a restaurant to eat at.

There’s at least some difference between “have been” and “this is currently likely to happen”, since if it’s known then it would have been fixed. I’ve gotten viruses before from just visiting websites but it was decades ago and there’s no way the same method would work now.

Ramble about something for long enough that people should be able to tell is how I do it.

It’s possible, but I’ve followed some public comment processes for regulatory stuff before and large volumes of comments make it take way longer, because there is manual work involved. If a politician wants to still have actual people manually consider the contents of their inbox (which they absolutely should), using AI instead of a form letter will make that much harder for them to do. AI talking to AI to determine what the public thinks and wants is probably going to lose a lot in translation, and if it’s using service-based AI will give the companies running it another rather direct way to influence political outcomes.

Given all that, I’m not sure what the advantage is to balance against it either. As opposed to sending a copy of the form letter, where you can assume they will at least count how many people have done that, what’s even the benefit of having a LLM rewrite it first?

Well, the person you responded to above was talking about sending more than one, which is the worst part. But even if you are only using AI to rephrase the canned response for your singular comment, that creates a situation where it is more difficult for them to actually read and consider different points people might be bringing up, because now there’s lots of messages that are basically just the canned response in content and intent but more effort to group together. Also the people going through them will probably be able to tell AI is being used, which could call into question whether someone was sending more than one even if you were not.

I don’t hate AI and think it’s fine to use for a bunch of things, but using it to falsify the level of public engagement on a political issue is a clear misuse, it’s easy to see how that could make democracy not work as well, or backfire and be used as an argument that all the public sentiment about the issue is astroturfed.

Sounds like an additional reason to be doing it in a way where participants can’t be debanked by payments middlemen

Part of the headache here is that this situation inherently props up a few monopolistic platforms, rather than allowing people to use whatever payment system is available in their own countries. Some of this can be worked around using cryptocurrencies – famously, the Mitra project leverages Monero for this very purpose, although I’m told it now can accept other forms of payment as well.

Hell yeah, I didn’t know about Mitra. It sounds like it’s a Patreon esque kind of deal with what the payments part is for.

Well, at least the advertising companies will lose money this way

That kind of painting seems more likely to come alive

Sniffs

Nope, still good

I think for some people the only way they can think of to help is attempting to bully someone over the internet, and it ends up applying to whoever happens to be around that disagrees with them, even though that makes zero sense as a strategy.

If there’s one person who knows their applied zk proofs, it’s that guy.