The interesting thing is that these days the maps people most use are digital ones. They can be updated instantly for everyone who uses them. But, even in that world you have problems.

In many countries it’s a legal requirement that the maps reflect the country’s definition of its borders. That means that in some cases Google Maps has 3 versions of a map, the one shown to users in country X (say India), the one shown to users in country Y (say China) and the one shown to users in the rest of the world, where the border is marked as disputed.

Even just the map of the world is outdated pretty much by the time it’s taught.

In 2023 Micronesia made a fairly minor change from the former name, “Federated States of Micronesia”. But, in 2022 Turkey now wants you to use its metal name: Türkiye.

Then there’s the new country of South Sudan, Bougainville on its way to splitting from Papua New Guinea. And Kosovo shows another problem – whether its an independent country or not depends on who you ask. That includes regions like South Ossetia, Transnistria, Catalonia and Taiwan.

Then there are things that students are taught that we’ve known are wrong for over a century, but the fully correct version is too complex for anything below a university course. Like, Newton’s laws are appropriate for high school, but they’re known to be incorrect and are simplifications of Einstein’s refinements. But, they’re close enough for most purposes, and understanding Einstein’s stuff is pretty hard. Same with models of the atom.

And, history is another subject where the deeper you dig, the more the generalizations you’re taught are shown to be wrong. The names and dates might be the same, but the reason X happened is often a whole lot more complex than the simple reasons given in high school.

So, it’s not really a good use case of an LLM.

The slippery slope thing is definitely an issue. If you have a dishonest, biased moderator (say someone from Fox News) they could really twist things. Even if you have a moderator who is trying as hard as possible to be unbiased, they’re bound to have some unconscious biases. On the other hand, fact checking is a pretty solved problem in reputable media. Not everything can be fact-checked, but even when facts are in dispute, they can often say what the source of the claim is. The problem is that they’re not used to doing it in real time. Proper fact checking often takes hours, not seconds.

Maybe one idea would be to have a rule at the debate saying that if you were planning to cite any statistic at all, you had to provide a source ahead of time to the moderator. They could then pre-emptively fact check all those statistics, and if they came up during the debate, the moderator could instantly fact-check them. If the candidate used a statistic they hadn’t had pre-approved the moderator would interrupt them, just like a judge in a case where a lawyer was trying to talk about something they hadn’t entered into evidence.

The modern debate format is pretty much useless. It’s too bad that the TV networks need the debate more than the candidates need it. Otherwise, the TV networks could impose restrictions like real-time fact checking, moderators who could (and would) mute candidates, tough questions that candidates didn’t like, following up and asking a question again if a candidate dodged a question, and so-on.

Backed by $1 in the legacy banking system

Yes, other memecoins used to also be pegged to the dollar, but they lost their peg, like TerraUSD and Tether.

which represents exactly $1.

Until it doesn’t.

It’s no different than a number in your banks database, except it’s in your custody, like cash.

And it’s not a real currency, it’s a memecoin.

Is your bank’s database a currency?

No, my bank’s database is a database, it refers to a currency that is real because it is accepted for paying taxes, fines, etc.

but I’m happy to teach you about the industry if you’re interested

There’s nothing you could teach that would be valuable to learn. You seem to be in on the grift, looking for another person to get in on the pyramid scheme. Good luck with that, but I’m not interested.

Like a number in the database at your bank. No different than that.

Except that my bank stores dollars, not memecoins.

Are you saying that is a different concept than usdc

Yes, because “USDC” isn’t a currency.

USDC is absolutely a token on many different ledgers that represents a currency.

No, it is a speculative investment. If it were a currency it would be something people were using to buy things, accepting for selling things, using to pay taxes and fines, using to invest in something else, etc.

It’s not a currency, it’s at best some kind of intermediate thing used to buy even more speculative “investments”.

The customer was using cloudflare IP addresses, which is causing a knock-on effect for the rest of cloudflare’s customers and putting cloudflare as a business themselves at risk.

Right, so sales should not be involved in any way.

The alternative was for the customer to use their own IP addresses as cloudflare advised .

Again, sales should not have been involved in any way.

I’m not sure what you think ‘Business development’ teams do but I certainly wouldn’t be expecting engineering advice from them.

They are at least not identical to sales. They work with sales, but there’s at least some engineering component of the job. In this case if you were told you were meeting with the business development team, you’d expect that there would be talk about an engineering solution to the problem. Not just paying cloudflare more money.

I’m 100% on the side of CF.

100%?

We scheduled a call with their “Business Development” department. Turns out the meeting was with their Sales team,

…

So we scheduled another call, now with their “Trust and Safety” team. But it turns out, we were actually talking to Sales again.

This is the part that’s ridiculous to me. If CloudFlare thinks they’re violating TOS that’s fine. If they’re willing to let them continue with their business as-is as long as they pay more? That’s fine. But, scheduling calls with one group and it turns out it’s actually CloudFlare’s sales team on the phone, that’s ridiculous.

And most of that history tells us why it’s a good idea to democratize currency.

No… that history tells us that currency only exists when there’s a state / religion in control. There’s no reason for currency without a state / religion. Not only would it not work, it’s also unnecessary.

Decentralized currencies were in place

Uh huh… like when?

The difference is that medicine, as a concept, is useful.

Interestingly, for a currency to actually be useful, there needs to be a demand for it, something that you can only pay for in that currency. For real currencies that is normally taxes. England only accepts taxes paid in pounds, so there’s a demand for pounds from every person who has to pay taxes in England. For crypto, extortion is basically the only source of demand.

Sure, occasionally there are places that accept both real currencies and crypto currencies, but for legit businesses almost none of the revenue comes from the crypto side. But, for ransomware, etc. the hackers only accept crypto. That means there’s a demand for crypto, which means that it has some value.

I actually considered a non-governmental, community regulated currency as a pretty good idea.

That goes against the entire history of currencies. Every successful currency in history has been controlled by either the state or a religion (which was effectively state-like).

I don’t know what their motivation is, but I definitely hope they protect the identity of the voice actress. If her name gets out, it’s basically guaranteed her life would suck for a while.

If she’s like 99% of actors, she’s someone just struggling to get work, who’s lucky if she can afford to rent an apartment without roommates. If her name got out, she’s almost certainly have to deal with death threats, stalkers, etc. Rich celebrities can deal with that kind of attention because they have the money to hire security people, PR people, lawyers, etc. Some random voice actor is not going to have those resources.

Can you imagine how happy this makes China?

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit

So, if Stack Overflow generates text based on any answer (or question) in Stack Overflow’s DB, it must credit the person whose text it adapted.

Good luck with that…

Chat GPT generates plausible auto-complete text. If it has been trained on saying “this case was reported to your local law enforcement agency”, those are the kinds of words it might spit out.