NYTimes.com: Artificial Intelligence Gives Weather Forecasters a New Edge

[John Clark]

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription.

Artificial Intelligence Gives Weather Forecasters a New Edge

The brainy machines are predicting global weather patterns with new speed and precision, doing in minutes and seconds what once took hours.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/science/ai-weather-forecast-hurricane.html?unlocked_article_code=1._E0.dLi6.mwB4Tkx1UuS3&smid=em-share

[Will Steinberg]

Good.

I’m mostly curious about systems where AI decisions affect the system itself, like financial markets.  What is the equilibrium?  Is there one?  What about as the AIs that make the models are themselves updated?

I guess my main question would be: is the set of equilibrium strategies something ‘real’?  Or wholly an artifact of the models?  Will financial markets, brinksmanship, etc start to resemble the inscrutable chess/go moves made by AI thinking hundreds of

moves ahead?  And what happens when all the agents are thinking like that?

It makes me want to study matches between chess programs, I feel like there is probably some insight there.

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 4:14 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Good. I’m mostly curious about systems where AI decisions affect the system itself, like financial markets.  What is the equilibrium?  Is there one?  What about as the AIs that make the models are themselves updated?

I think AI will have more difficulty predicting financial markets than the weather because the weather doesn't get any smarter, but both buyers and sellers will have their own competing AIs, one trying to sell things at the highest possible price and the other trying to buy things at the lowest possible price.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

hlp

 

[Will Steinberg]

That is an unreasonably simplistic view of the economy

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[Will Steinberg]

Sorry that came out maybe ruder than I would have liked (still seething from talking in circles about Trump) but yeah it’s like so much more complicated than that, everyone will have an AI trying to do everything, and the higher-order-beliefs of the agents will go higher than humans can comprehend, and the strange actions will take place in the real world.  Or perhaps as agents ALL become closer to perfect strategists, the best strategy is just to be really normal.  Idk but it’s an experiment we’re all about to be part of

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 7:09 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Sorry that came out maybe ruder than I would have liked (still seething from talking in circles about Trump) but yeah it’s like so much more complicated than that,

Nothing is more complicated than the economy because it is the  product of billions of minds. And now that we've entered the age of artificial intelligence, the smarter an AI gets the more complicated the economy will become. 

 

> everyone will have an AI trying to do everything,

Yes but those AI's will have competing interests, one AI will try to buy a thing as cheaply as possible from another AI that is trying to sell it for the highest price possible. 

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

tyt

[Will Steinberg]

I suppose yes that’s an example of what kind of weird shit might happen.  I am most curious about speculative finance because when it goes wrong it can ruin the economy for a decade.  I’m imagining a kind of grey goo/paperclips scenario except with endlessly buying or selling speculative assets.  Would only take a few minutes for some really wacky stuff to play out.  I guess that’s kind of the whole thing with AI doom though 

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 11:11 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

 >  I’m imagining a kind of grey goo/paperclips scenario except with endlessly buying or selling speculative assets. 

We have something like that right now, it's called Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto mined the very first bitcoin on January 3 2009, and today Bitcoin mining consumes 0.5% of the world's electrical energy which is about as much as Sweden does, a country of 10.5 million people.  And yet more than 15 years after its invention Bitcoin has never done anything that is economically useful except for two areas, money laundering and providing a convenient way to pay off blackmailers and kidnappers.

 John K Clark    

[Keith Henson]

And hiding assets.

Keith

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[Will Steinberg]

You guys are right, every financial transaction MUST be tracked, preferably by a powerful overseer state, preferably in a currency that they alone have the power to issue, and in whatever numbers they deem acceptable.

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 10:22 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> You guys are right, every financial transaction MUST be tracked, preferably by a powerful overseer state, preferably in a currency that they alone have the power to issue, and in whatever numbers they deem acceptable.

When Bitcoin first came out I was as excited as anybody, I thought it was great and would change things for the better. But it's been over 15 years now and I think it's time for me to face reality and admit I was wrong. Bitcoin is a failure, it has achieved none of the lofty goals that it claimed it would. There is one thing that Bitcoin has achieved: it has managed to use up 1200 kWh of electricity per transaction, about 100,000 times more energy than VISA uses for a transaction.

 John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

There are consensus mechanisms that aren’t proof-of-work

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[Brent Allsop]

Correct.  Ether doesn't use proof of waste.  And you can program ether (i.e. smart contracts).

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[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 7:22 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You guys are right, every financial transaction MUST be tracked, preferably by a powerful overseer state, preferably in a currency that they alone have the power to issue, and in whatever numbers they deem acceptable.

I didn't say that or even intend to imply it.

The question was about what bitcoin is useful for and my comment was
in addition to those listed by John. I think the value of bitcoins
would be a lot lower if they were mainly used for laundering money and
much, much lower if the only use was paying ransom. But I don't have
numbers.

It's not hard to understand why people want to hide assets, and states
are not the only reason.

Of course, you have to *have* assets in excess of immediate need and
that rules out the vast majority of the population. Including me.

Keith

> On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 10:19 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> And hiding assets.
>>
>> Keith
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 4:30 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > On Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 11:11 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> > I’m imagining a kind of grey goo/paperclips scenario except with endlessly buying or selling speculative assets.
>> >
>> >
>> > We have something like that right now, it's called Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto mined the very first bitcoin on January 3 2009, and today Bitcoin mining consumes 0.5% of the world's electrical energy which is about as much as Sweden does, a country of 10.5 million people. And yet more than 15 years after its invention Bitcoin has never done anything that is economically useful except for two areas, money laundering and providing a convenient way to pay off blackmailers and kidnappers.
>> >
>> > John K Clark
>> >
>> > --
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>>
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>
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[Will Steinberg]

Never a bad time to start saving up!  The best part about crypto is being able to take money anywhere in the world with just your mind and not needing a centralized authority to verify your credentials.  

Crypto is apocalypse-proof too.  As long as we have signal transmission (mesh networks, pigeons, &c.) it works

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[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 2:15 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Never a bad time to start saving up! The best part about crypto is being able to take money anywhere in the world with just your mind and not needing a centralized authority to verify your credentials.

The worst part is that it takes a lot of computer infrastructure to
carry your bitcoins.

> Crypto is apocalypse-proof too. As long as we have signal transmission (mesh networks, pigeons, &c.) it works

I really doubt this.

You might have a billion bitcoins, but if nobody will take bitcoins
for eggs, what good does that do?

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[Will Steinberg]

It might not be BTC and the value would tank for current coins and proof of work is bad for an apocalypse, but there’s no reason that systems using distributed ledgers and consensus mechanisms can’t work.  The whole point is that it works that way.  Would be a lot slower probably and there would be bit batch transactions kind of like arabic hawala trading.

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[Stuart LaForge]

I also think one of the advantages to proof of work (PoW) crypto is that even AGI will respect its value because an AGI, no matter how smart it is, will be able to mine crypto any faster than an ASIC mining rig. Fiat largely has value because people needed to put in time and effort in order to earn it via wages and salary. A $10 bill has value because there are some individuals who needed to work for a whole hour to earn it. PoW crypto is similar and an AGI would likely respect the huge number of CPU cycles it requires to generate a correct hash to mine a block. As opposed to fiat currency that, in the US, a loan officer at a bank can create in vast amounts with a few keystrokes and some borrowers signature. Of course all this is premised on P<>NP. 

Stuart LaForge

[Will Steinberg]

Furthermore I think things with current value and finite supplies will continue to have value in the SHTF scenario.  Cash for example—it already is disbursed according to work people have done, and it’s in the best interest of many to continue honoring that.  Prices could be all over the place and certain hyper rich people could potentially have their cash cursed or stolen, or other funky stuff.  But I believe that assets with no use value will keep their value post apocalypse.  A currency always emerges, and we won’t need to make one, they will already exist—including crypto

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 6:40 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course all this is premised on P<>NP. 

Most likely P≠ NP (although I wouldn't bet my life on it, mathematicians have been surprised before) but even so Bitcoin would still be dead if somebody makes a Quantum Computer that has about 1500 logical Qubits. A machine like that could break the elliptical encryption used by bitcoin in just a few minutes even if P≠ NP.

John K Clark

[Stuart LaForge]

Well if robust quantum computing comes of age, then traditional banks are just as dead as bitcoin. After all, Mr. Loan Officer's password protected account that lets him create fiat will compromised also. And any quantum cryptography that banks use to save their skins will be able to be implemented by the bitcoin community also.

Stuart

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 8:33 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> if robust quantum computing comes of age, then traditional banks are just as dead as bitcoin.

Bitcoin couldn't exist without modern encryption techniques, but for many centuries banks have gotten along just fine without it. And there's something else to consider, cryptocurrency is rapidly running out of time to be relevant. Once Drexler style nanotechnology is developed then, in just a few minutes, you'll be able to make anything you want yourself. That would even be true for real estate, after all the surface of a planet is not the only place where space exists. And once you reach that point what use would you have for money?

John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

Ok now that’s an insanely facile oversimplification.  There is no such thing as magic creation machines.  Everything uses resources, and whether it’s rare elements, electricity, computing power, or access to the technology itself, uneven distribution of resources is not going to miraculously disappear.

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[Brent Allsop]

In my mind, there is a HUGE difference between proof of waste and a proof of a human, or computer, doing real work that benefits someone to earn fiat.

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[John Clark]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 12:11 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok now that’s an insanely facile oversimplification.  There is no such thing as magic creation machines. 

That's true, there are no magical machines like that, however there are machines like that, and for those machines to become a reality absolutely NO scientific breakthroughs are required, all that is needed is improved engineering, all that is needed is atomically precise manufacturing. Not nuclearly precise, or infinitely precise, just atomically precise. I strongly suggest you educate yourself and read one of K Eric Drexler's books, such as "Engines Of Creation" or "Radical Abundance" and above all "Nanosystems".     

 

> Everything uses resources, and whether it’s rare elements,

It turns out that as far as nanotechnology is concerned, the most useful elements are also among the most common, such as carbon, silicon, oxygen and hydrogen. And the so-called "rare earth" elements are not really rare, some are more common than copper. They're expensive because in their natural ores they are all mixed up together and the chemical properties of the rare earths are all very similar to each other, so they're difficult and expensive to separate out,  but that would be easy to do with nanotechnology. The name is really bad because not only are they not rare, they are not earths, they are metals.  

> electricity,

With nanotechnology it's easy and cheap to crank out solar cells by the square mile and build them on earth or in outer space, whichever you want.     

> computing power,

With nanotechnology a computer smaller than a sugar cube could easily produce more computational power than every computer on earth (as of 2024) put together. As Richard Feynman said way back in 1959, "There's plenty of room at the bottom". 

There's plenty of room at the bottom

 

> uneven distribution of resources is not going to miraculously disappear.

Once again you are correct, an insufficiency of resources will not disappear because of a miracle, a lack of resources will disappear because of improved engineering.  

John K Clark

 

Bitcoin couldn't exist without modern encryption techniques, but for many centuries banks have gotten along just fine without it. And there's something else to consider, cryptocurrency is rapidly running out of time to be relevant. Once Drexler style nanotechnology is developed then, in just a few minutes, you'll be able to make anything you want yourself. That would even be true for real estate, after all the surface of a planet is not the only place where space exists. And once you reach that point what use would you have for money?

John K Clark

 

 

On Wednesday, July 31, 2024 at 4:11:23 PM UTC-7 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 6:40 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course all this is premised on P<>NP. 

Most likely P≠ NP (although I wouldn't bet my life on it, mathematicians have been surprised before) but even so Bitcoin would still be dead if somebody makes a Quantum Computer that has about 1500 logical Qubits. A machine like that could break the elliptical encryption used by bitcoin in just a few minutes even if P≠ NP.

John K Clark

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[Stuart LaForge]

Can you explain what the difference is? First off, the primary purpose of the PoW is to ensure that thousands or millions of independent nodes all agree on a specific ledger of transactions. The mining of bitcoins is just an incentive to have a lot of active nodes, set industry standards, and build up the infrastructure for transactions. It is built into the system that the rewards for mining get smaller and smaller over time such that eventually, the only incentive to hash blocks onto the blockchain will be transaction fees. At that point, the nodes that don't drop out due to the lack of easy money from mining, will become more energy efficient and fewer in number. There are a lot of bureaucratic government jobs where people get paid to maintain a cycle of paperwork where they have people fill out and sign forms, file the forms for a specified period like 5 years, and then shred the expired paperwork. There are thousands of clerical jobs like that out there across all manner of government agencies.

PoS (Proof-of-Specialness? Proof-of-Sloth?) on the other hand relies on the assumption that the nodes that already have money are the only ones that deserve to make more money. It is similar to rent seeking in economics, and not that different to the way privileged bankers create money with hardly any effort because they already have most of the money.

So what is more wasteful? Millions of pencil pushing bureaucrats keeping track of transaction ledgers or a handful of bankers that pay themselves bonuses for printing money so that they can snort cocaine out prostitute's navels?

Stuart LaForge

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[Will Steinberg]

I was also going to mention that traditional finance is equally wasteful, yeah.

Though I think computing power is essentially equal to wealth anyway.  It’s almost impossible, or maybe just impossible, to create a consensus mechanism that doesn’t allow you to get more sway for more money

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[Keith Henson]

"There is no such thing as magic creation machines. "

If you are uploaded, you can have a simulation of anything you want at
essentially no cost beyond whatever it takes to run an upload. That's
close to a "magic creation machine."

Keith

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[Will Steinberg]

At some point it will get old and people will want something new and scarce, imo.

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[John Clark]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 4:18 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If you are uploaded, you can have a simulation of anything you want at
essentially no cost beyond whatever it takes to run an upload.  That's
close to a "magic creation machine."

And in your uploaded world you're not even limited by the laws of physics, your only limit is the laws of logic. If you don't like the law of conservation of energy or momentum just change it to something you do like, but if you don't like the fact that 2+2 =4, well sorry nothing can be done about that.  

John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

Everything has limits and they will always be approached.  

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[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 1:21 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> At some point it will get old and people will want something new and scarce, imo.

If you are living as an upload, can you think of anything that would
be scarce? New is expected, but there is no reason for "things" to be
limited. Think of a world entirely of open source. Is that scarce?

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[Will Steinberg]

It will *literally* have physical limits.  They may be large, but people will always expand to the borders.  You can’t comprehend reaching those limits, but a being one trillion+ times as complex as you can.  The difference between a single celled organism and a human, except far greater differences in magnitude.  What comprises a self will always expand to take advantage of resources, which ARE finite.  

A jupiter brain isn’t infinitely large.  It is jupiter-sized.  

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[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 3:34 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 4:18 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > If you are uploaded, you can have a simulation of anything you want at
>> essentially no cost beyond whatever it takes to run an upload. That's
>> close to a "magic creation machine."
>
> And in your uploaded world you're not even limited by the laws of physics,

Right. In "The Clinic Seed" the village people lived in as uploads
stayed much the same, but Suskulan allowed the inside of houses to be
as large as people wanted. I doubt I had any influence, but the same
inside larger than outside was used in one of the Harry Potter movies.

> your only limit is the laws of logic. If you don't like the law of conservation of energy or momentum just change it to something you do like, but if you don't like the fact that 2+2 =4, well sorry nothing can be done about that.

I wonder how much you could twist things? If you checkpoint the
simulation from time to time, then a kind of time travel is possible
by reentering a copy of the simulation at an earlier time. That along
with FTL is something that is probably not possible in the base
reality.

Keith

> John K Clark
>
>
>
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 9:11 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Ok now that’s an insanely facile oversimplification. There is no such thing as magic creation machines. Everything uses resources, and whether it’s rare elements, electricity, computing power, or access to the technology itself, uneven distribution of resources is not going to miraculously disappear.
>> >
>> > On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 6:21 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 8:33 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> > if robust quantum computing comes of age, then traditional banks are just as dead as bitcoin.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Bitcoin couldn't exist without modern encryption techniques, but for many centuries banks have gotten along just fine without it. And there's something else to consider, cryptocurrency is rapidly running out of time to be relevant. Once Drexler style nanotechnology is developed then, in just a few minutes, you'll be able to make anything you want yourself. That would even be true for real estate, after all the surface of a planet is not the only place where space exists. And once you reach that point what use would you have for money?
>> >>
>> >> John K Clark
>

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[Stuart LaForge]

On Thursday, August 1, 2024 at 3:21:26 AM UTC-7 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 8:33 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> if robust quantum computing comes of age, then traditional banks are just as dead as bitcoin.

Bitcoin couldn't exist without modern encryption techniques, but for many centuries banks have gotten along just fine without it. And there's something else to consider, cryptocurrency is rapidly running out of time to be relevant. Once Drexler style nanotechnology is developed then, in just a few minutes, you'll be able to make anything you want yourself. That would even be true for real estate, after all the surface of a planet is not the only place where space exists. And once you reach that point what use would you have for money?

I don't know. Maybe money, in all of its forms, is nature's ultimate expression of entropy. It does seem like the total money in the economy is always increasing like the 2nd law of thermodynamics says for entropy. "Dead labor" is what Marx called capital. Isn't physical entropy something like work that is already done or expended energy? Maybe in the distant future money will be used to keep track of how much energy intelligent beings use to shape their local reality according to their preferences?

Stuart LaForge

[Will Steinberg]

 But what you’re imagining, the novelty of having a dream world to create with wild abandon, is only the first moment of upload-world.  People with endless time get endlessly bored.  And eventually they become beings that can innately comprehend thousands of dimensions and higher-order math that we literally cannot grasp right now.  And of those beings, some will be swifter and more adept in that environment.  And then the jupiter brain or whatever will run out of processing power to accommodate those beings, and they will have to go back into reality to get more raw materials. 

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[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 4:26 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It will *literally* have physical limits.

One of those is the speed of light. I think the shadows we see at
Tabby's Star are data center located in the middle of the
"computational zone." From the timing of the light dips, we might be
looking at a data center over 400 times the area of the Earth out at
7AU and operating at 65K. Edge to edge about 2.5 light seconds.

> They may be large, but people will always expand to the borders.

That's a reasonable assumption and the fact that 24 stars out in that
direction show similar light dips might indicate a spreading alien
civilization. That is what makes me think we are seeing the works of
aliens.

> You can’t comprehend reaching those limits, but a being one trillion+ times as complex as you can. The difference between a single celled organism and a human, except far greater differences in magnitude. What comprises a self will always expand to take advantage of resources, which ARE finite.

Maybe. I have written on this subject. If you are experiencing time
faster, resources at Neptune or even the far side of Earth's orbit are
not very useful.
https://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

> A jupiter brain isn’t infinitely large. It is jupiter-sized.

And the speed of light limits makes it think much slower than we do.

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[Will Steinberg]

Well no it still thinks much much faster than we do at any particular locus.  It may be slower for information to travel from one end to another but I’m sure they will figure out what can and can’t wait and batch signal.  Also maybe they’ll just figure out how to get around it anyway.

@Stuart: I believe money is a physical representation of consciousness/willpower

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[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 4:50 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But what you’re imagining, the novelty of having a dream world to create with wild abandon, is only the first moment of upload-world. People with endless time get endlessly bored.

It could be they have control over boredom Or who knows, they may
spend a million years watching soap operas or acting in them.

> And eventually, they become beings that can innately comprehend thousands of dimensions and higher-order math that we literally cannot grasp right now. And of those beings, some will be swifter and more adept in that environment.

That's the reason I proposed that uploads will run as fast as the
hardware and the network permit.

> And then the jupiter brain or whatever will run out of processing power to accommodate those beings, and they will have to go back into reality to get more raw materials.

As important as materials are, energy and heat sinks to get rid of the
waste heat from computation. I worked out that Vista was a lot more
than you needed for a 400-Earth-sized data center.

But you are right. if they are aliens, they have spread out to at
least 24 stars. The closest one is 511 lightyears from here.

Keith

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[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 5:17 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well no it still thinks much much faster than we do at any particular locus.

Right. The article analyses a million-to-one subjective speed-up
community with a subjective communication delay about the same as we
have currently. This shrinks the community size to 300 meters.

> It may be slower for information to travel from one end to another but I’m sure they will figure out what can and can’t wait and batch signal. Also maybe they’ll just figure out how to get around it anyway.

I don't think they have (and the universe may not permit it) FTL. If
they did, they would be here.

How much power do they have? luminosity is 4.68, so at 1 au 6388
W/m^2, this power is divided by
7.8^2 to get 105 W/m^2, ~0.1 GW/square km. At one alien per square
meter, they would have about the same power available as a human
brain, and at a first guess, they would have about the same cycle rate
(around 200 HZ) . That might give them a similar subjective sense of
time, so they can probably tolerate about one sec delay in
communications. (The communication and shared infrastructure might
take from one to ten times as much hardware and computation.)

How many aliens are we talking about? The area of Tabby's star is D/2
squared x pi. 22% blocked would be
208 771 274 655 square km, 409 times the area of the earth. At a
million uploaded aliens per square km, 209 x 10^15. Our world
population is around 10^10, so only ~10,000 times larger. As a
square, 456914. km on one side. Light speed signal delay edge to edge
is about 1.5 seconds. The structure (if it is that) is in thermal
equilibrium at 65 K. That requires about 50 times as much radiator
area as light interception, so I would expect it to be a deep V shape
with the radiators facing local north and south.

I may be entirely wrong and there could be a natural explanation for
this patch of stars. I hope so, we don't need the competition. On
the other hand, the physics makes sense and we may be looking at our
own fate in a few thousand years (or perhaps less).

Keith

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[Brent Allsop]

It is interesting to hear you fight for PoW, as I have a hard time understanding why people value PoW.  It seems to me it will be the downfall of Bitcoin, so I don't understand the draw everyone has for it.

To me, a big difference is all the money that pays for so much energy, and the high amount of coins created for each block, to pay for all that, decreasing the value of everyone's bitcoin.  It's a basic tax on anyone holding bitcoin to run the very expensive network costs.

Ether is more or less deflating (see https://ultrasound.money/), and it is far cheaper to run Ether nodes.  And with what the Ether core devs are working on, it will be far easier to run an Ether node than to do mining on Bitcoin.  It seems to me that the only people who can afford to do bitcoin mining are the giant companies that use huge economies of scale.  Individuals can't compete with that.  I have tried, and it doesn't work.  Bitcoin is not decentralized while Ether continues to get more decentralized, and more able to scale.

Scale is what is all important.  How many transactions can the network process?  At some point Ether will be able to process more transactions than Visa.  And Ether transactions will be smart.  It seems to me, with that it will be game over for all other financial methods including any on PoW.

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[Keith Henson]

BTW, there is another bit to the extended clinic seed story.

https://htyp.org/mw/index.php?title=Standard_gauge&action=info

Keith

[John Clark]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 7:50 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

 > But what you’re imagining, the novelty of having a dream world to create with wild abandon, is only the first moment of upload-world.  People with endless time get endlessly bored.  And eventually they become beings that can innately comprehend thousands of dimensions and higher-order math that we literally cannot grasp right now.  And of those beings, some will be swifter and more adept in that environment.  And then the jupiter brain or whatever will run out of processing power to accommodate those beings, and they will have to go back into reality to get more raw materials. 

Yes and that's the reason I think we are probably the only intelligent species in the observable universe, with intelligence being operationally defined as being able to make a radio transmitter and telescope. If ET existed it should be easy to detect him (or her or it) with just a glance into the night sky. But we see nothing.

 As for Tabby's Star, there was a lot of excitement when it was first discovered back in 2015, but after more detailed analysis that excitement dimmed considerably.  Today the overwhelming consensus among astronomers is that the dimming pattern is almost certainly the result of dust clouds orbiting the star, probably the result of a collision between planets. Even the SETI Institute now says that Tabby's Star is no longer a prime candidate for ET and is most likely the result of natural astrophysical processes, rather than extraterrestrial activity.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 8:17 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> it still thinks much much faster than we do at any particular locus.  It may be slower for information to travel from one end to another but I’m sure they will figure out what can and can’t wait and batch signal. 

I agree. For some very simple problems, such as finding the perfect chess move, Mr. Jupiter Brain wouldn't need to use his entire brain; the matter could be treated as a reflex. I mean, when your hand accidentally touches a red hot stove you don't need to use your entire brain to figure out what you should order your hand to do next.

I sent the following to the Extropian list in 2019:

"It's true Jupiter Brain engineers would have to be careful with the heat but it would not represent an insurmountable problem. As far as speed is concerned the fastest signals in the human brain move at a couple of hundred meters a second, many are far slower, light moves at 300 million meters per second. If you insist that the 2 most distant parts of the Jupiter Brain communicate no slower than they do in a human brain (and it's not immediately clear to me why you should insist on that) then parts in the brain of an AI could be at least one million times more distant. The human brain is about half a foot in diameter so the AI could have a brain about a hundred miles in diameter. Another problem is the outside surface where heat is radiated away only increases with the square of the radius while the volume increases with the cube, so the density of the heat producing logic components would have to decrease with 1/r.

So OK, "Jupiter Brain" may be a bit of an exaggeration, perhaps "Asteroid Brain" would be a more accurate (but less poetic) name, although the mind such a brain could produce would be more Jupiter size than  Asteroid size because the components of the AI's brain would be much smaller than the components of our human brain.

And a hundred miles across is still pretty big for a brain. The volume increases by the cube of the distance, our brains are about half a foot in diameter so such a brain would physically be a million trillion times larger than a human brain. Even if 99.9% of that space were used just to get rid of waste heat you'd still have a thousand trillion times as much volume for logic and memory components as humans have room for inside their heads. And Mr. Jupiter brains data processing components would be much smaller and more densely packed then they are in human brains. 

Helium would be the ideal substance to fill those cooling pipes. Helium liquefies at 4.2 K but when it gets below 2.17 K it becomes a super-fluid called Helium-2 that has zero viscosity (provided the pipe the helium is flowing through does not have a diameter smaller than 10^-9 meters) so you can pump a lot of Helium through a narrow pipe very quickly. And Helium-2 is also by far the best conductor of heat known, it conducts heat so fast (well over 20 meters a second) that all the Helium is at the same temperature, there are no hot spots in it and thus no bubbles to interfere with the free flow of fluid."

John K Clark

 

[Keith Henson]

"It's true Jupiter Brain engineers would have to be careful with the
heat but it would not represent an insurmountable problem."

I have worked on radiators since Eric and I wrote the dust-filled
radiator paper in 1979. They are difficult because they take a huge
shaded N/S area to radiate. You are stuck with the physical laws
involved.

If you do want to build a large data center in space, out where it
operates at 65 k, you need about 50 times the light input area to get
rid of the waste heat.

A dust cloud would be much warmer than the observed IR temperature.

Keith

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[John Clark]

On Fri, Aug 2, 2024 at 1:49 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> A dust cloud would be much warmer than the observed IR temperature.

I don't understand,  you think the radiators on a Dyson sphere that is giving off its waste heat would be colder than a dust cloud?!  The radiator would be heated by the star and by the waste heat of the Dyson Sphere, but a dust cloud would just be heated by the star. And the Boomerang Nebula is a dust cloud and it's interior is the coldest place astronomers have ever found, it's at 0.928K, it's the only place that astronomers have ever found that is colder than the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation which is at 2.725 K.

John K Clark

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[Stuart LaForge]

You like Ether, and I am fine with that, but you never answered my question about the difference between a computer using PoW to maintain transaction ledgers and a human pencil pusher doing the same or a similar bureaucratic job. Another thing that I dislike about PoS is that even if you can afford to stake crypto to generate wealth, it is illegal to do so in the United States, Canada, and several other countries. Mining blockchains for PoW might be energy intensive, but at least it is not a crime in the USA.

Stuart LaForge

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[Brent Allsop]

Hi Stuart,

On Sun, Aug 4, 2024 at 6:59 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

You like Ether, and I am fine with that, but you never answered my question about the difference between a computer using PoW to maintain transaction ledgers and a human pencil pusher doing the same or a similar bureaucratic job.

Oh, I misunderstood, I thought you were asking about the difference between Bitcoin PoW and Ether PoS.  I would agree that both POW and work to maintain transaction ledgers are both terribly wasteful, or not too much different.

 

Another thing that I dislike about PoS is that even if you can afford to stake crypto to generate wealth, it is illegal to do so in the United States, Canada, and several other countries. Mining blockchains for PoW might be energy intensive, but at least it is not a crime in the USA.

Do you have a source for this shocking news to me?  If it is illegal to stake Ether in the US, I'm very surprised I didn't know about it.  It has always been something I've wanted to do, I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

 

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[Stuart LaForge]

On Sun, Aug 4, 2024 at 6:58 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Stuart,

On Sun, Aug 4, 2024 at 6:59 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

You like Ether, and I am fine with that, but you never answered my question about the difference between a computer using PoW to maintain transaction ledgers and a human pencil pusher doing the same or a similar bureaucratic job.

Oh, I misunderstood, I thought you were asking about the difference between Bitcoin PoW and Ether PoS.  I would agree that both POW and work to maintain transaction ledgers are both terribly wasteful, or not too much different.

 

Another thing that I dislike about PoS is that even if you can afford to stake crypto to generate wealth, it is illegal to do so in the United States, Canada, and several other countries. Mining blockchains for PoW might be energy intensive, but at least it is not a crime in the USA.

Do you have a source for this shocking news to me?  If it is illegal to stake Ether in the US, I'm very surprised I didn't know about it.  It has always been something I've wanted to do, I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

Hi Brent. I spoke too soon. It is not technically illegal to stake Ether on the blockchain for Americans. It is just that no crypto exchanges will allow Americans to do so, because the Exchange would need to register with the SEC as a securities broker if they did and comply with a ton of new requirements. So I guess if you can set up your own node somewhere, you can do it, but the licensed exchanges won't do it for you, even though they will do it for customers from most other countries.

https://bitcompare.net/post/crypto-staking-is-it-banned-learn

https://help.crypto.com/en/articles/6800043-on-chain-staking-guide

6. On-Chain Staking Geo-Restrictions

Persons from the following locations and all sanctioned nations are prohibited from participating in on-chain Staking.

Country	Country Code
American Samoa	AS/ ASM
Canada	CA / CAN
Guam	GU/ GUM
Hong Kong	HK/ HKG
Kazakhstan	KZ / KAZ
Malta	MT/ MLT
Marshall Islands	MH/ MHL
Puerto Rico	PR/ PRI
Seychelles	SC/ SYC
Singapore	SG/ SGP
South Korea	KR/ KOR
Thailand	TH/ THA
United States	US/ USA
US Virgin Islands	VI/ VIR

Stuart LaForge

 

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[Brent Allsop]

Oh yes.  I was getting ready to stake a whole heap of Ether on my favorite exchange, Kraken, when they turned staking off for US customers for exactly that reason.  I was totally pissed.

But, I still do have a LOT of Ether staked with coinbase, as they have gone through the requirements to register as an exchange.  I also expect Kraken to get registered in the US, also, someday, and believe they will offer staking to US customers again.  

Or maybe the next president will make it legal, or something.

Here's to hoping.

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[Stathis Papaioannou]

Stathis Papaioannou

On Mon, Aug 5, 2024 at 13:33 Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Oh yes.  I was getting ready to stake a whole heap of Ether on my favorite exchange, Kraken, when they turned staking off for US customers for exactly that reason.  I was totally pissed.

But, I still do have a LOT of Ether staked with coinbase, as they have gone through the requirements to register as an exchange.  I also expect Kraken to get registered in the US, also, someday, and believe they will offer staking to US customers again.  

Or maybe the next president will make it legal, or something.

Here's to hoping.

Is solo staking too difficult?

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[Brent Allsop]

My understanding is that solo staking is getting esear (an important goal for Vitalic and others), and there are even companies that offer staking as a service (run the hardware for you).

While I'd like to do this someday, I just haven't ever prioritized it yet.  Always seem to have more important things to do.

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Aug 4, 2024 at 8:59 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> you never answered my question about the difference between a computer using PoW to maintain transaction ledgers and a human pencil pusher doing the same or a similar bureaucratic job. 

I'm no expert on Bitcoin but I would humbly suggest that human bureaucracy is not mathematically guaranteed to become more complex and inefficient about every two weeks for eternity.

John K Clark 

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Aug 4, 2024 at 4:21 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Aug 2, 2024 at 1:49 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > A dust cloud would be much warmer than the observed IR temperature.
>
> I don't understand, you think the radiators on a Dyson sphere that is giving off its waste heat would be colder than a dust cloud?! The radiator would be heated by the star and by the waste heat of the Dyson Sphere, but a dust cloud would just be heated by the star.

The observed IR from Tabby's star is equal to 65 K. At the distance
of the blocking object, the light input is 105 W/m^2. To be in
equilibrium, the temperature of the cloud would need to be 210 degree
K assuming one side radiation.

In any case, dust or object, it's all limited by the energy from the star.

> And the Boomerang Nebula is a dust cloud and it's interior is the coldest place astronomers have ever found, it's at 0.928K, it's the only place that astronomers have ever found that is colder than the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation which is at 2.725 K.

I need to look this up. It would seem to be a natural example of a
perpetual motion machine since you could tap the difference for
energy.

Keith

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAJPayv1EpLCwbidomAV3_i8mURUnik4A5hJN4WZH-zOUMmW_zw%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 1:11 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> I don't understand,  you think the radiators on a Dyson sphere that is giving off its waste heat would be colder than a dust cloud?!  The radiator would be heated by the star and by the waste heat of the Dyson Sphere, but a dust cloud would just be heated by the star.

> The observed IR from Tabby's star is equal to 65 K.  At the distance of the blocking object, the light input is 105 W/m^2.  To be in equilibrium, thetemperature of the cloud would need to be 210 degree K assuming one side radiation.

In any case, dust or object, it's all limited by the energy from the star.

That is true, and exactly the same thing would be true for a Dyson Sphere. I don't understand why you believe a Dyson Sphere explains the IR observations better than dust can.  

 

>> the Boomerang Nebula is a dust cloud and it's interior is the coldest place astronomers have ever found, it's at 0.928K, it's the only place that astronomers have ever found that is colder than the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation which is at 2.725 K.

> I need to look this up.  It would seem to be a natural example of a
perpetual motion machine since you could tap the difference for energy.

Yes, you could turn the Boomerang Nebula into a heat engine and get a finite amount of energy out of it, but you couldn't do it perpetually, it's not perpetual motion. The longer you run your heat engine the warmer the interior of the Boomerang Nebula will get, until eventually it will come into thermodynamic equilibrium with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. 

 

  John K Clark

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 4:31 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 1:11 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> >> I don't understand, you think the radiators on a Dyson sphere that is giving off its waste heat would be colder than a dust cloud?! The radiator would be heated by the star and by the waste heat of the Dyson Sphere, but a dust cloud would just be heated by the star.
>>

>> > The observed IR from Tabby's star is equal to 65 K. At the distance of the blocking object, the light input is 105 W/m^2. To be in equilibrium, the temperature of the cloud would need to be 210 degree K assuming one side radiation.

>> In any case, dust or object, it's all limited by the energy from the star.
>
> That is true, and exactly the same thing would be true for a Dyson Sphere. I don't understand why you believe a Dyson Sphere explains the IR observations better than dust can.

Dust would be quite a bit hotter. What we seem to be looking at is a
Dyson patch in orbit out at about 7.8 AU. It is my experience
designing directional radiators for thermal power satellites that
leads me to think we are looking at alien artifacts. If I am right,
they are radiating the waste heat local north/south where we can't see
it.

>>> >> the Boomerang Nebula is a dust cloud and it's interior is the coldest place astronomers have ever found, it's at 0.928K, it's the only place that astronomers have ever found that is colder than the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation which is at 2.725 K.
>>
>> > I need to look this up. It would seem to be a natural example of a
>> perpetual motion machine since you could tap the difference for energy.
>
> Yes, you could turn the Boomerang Nebula into a heat engine and get a finite amount of energy out of it, but you couldn't do it perpetually, it's not perpetual motion. The longer you run your heat engine the warmer the interior of the Boomerang Nebula will get, until eventually it will come into thermodynamic equilibrium with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

How did the interior of the cloud get so cold? Is it an ongoing process?

Keith

> John K Clark
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>> >> >
>> >> > I agree. For some very simple problems, such as finding the perfect chess move, Mr. Jupiter Brain wouldn't need to use his entire brain; the matter could be treated as a reflex. I mean, when your hand accidentally touches a red hot stove you don't need to use your entire brain to figure out what you should order your hand to do next.
>> >> >
>> >> > I sent the following to the Extropian list in 2019:
>> >> >
>> >> > "It's true Jupiter Brain engineers would have to be careful with the heat but it would not represent an insurmountable problem. As far as speed is concerned the fastest signals in the human brain move at a couple of hundred meters a second, many are far slower, light moves at 300 million meters per second. If you insist that the 2 most distant parts of the Jupiter Brain communicate no slower than they do in a human brain (and it's not immediately clear to me why you should insist on that) then parts in the brain of an AI could be at least one million times more distant. The human brain is about half a foot in diameter so the AI could have a brain about a hundred miles in diameter. Another problem is the outside surface where heat is radiated away only increases with the square of the radius while the volume increases with the cube, so the density of the heat producing logic components would have to decrease with 1/r.
>> >> >
>> >> > So OK, "Jupiter Brain" may be a bit of an exaggeration, perhaps "Asteroid Brain" would be a more accurate (but less poetic) name, although the mind such a brain could produce would be more Jupiter size than Asteroid size because the components of the AI's brain would be much smaller than the components of our human brain.
>> >> >
>> >> > And a hundred miles across is still pretty big for a brain. The volume increases by the cube of the distance, our brains are about half a foot in diameter so such a brain would physically be a million trillion times larger than a human brain. Even if 99.9% of that space were used just to get rid of waste heat you'd still have a thousand trillion times as much volume for logic and memory components as humans have room for inside their heads. And Mr. Jupiter brains data processing components would be much smaller and more densely packed then they are in human brains.
>> >> >
>> >> > Helium would be the ideal substance to fill those cooling pipes. Helium liquefies at 4.2 K but when it gets below 2.17 K it becomes a super-fluid called Helium-2 that has zero viscosity (provided the pipe the helium is flowing through does not have a diameter smaller than 10^-9 meters) so you can pump a lot of Helium through a narrow pipe very quickly. And Helium-2 is also by far the best conductor of heat known, it conducts heat so fast (well over 20 meters a second) that all the Helium is at the same temperature, there are no hot spots in it and thus no bubbles to interfere with the free flow of fluid."
>> >> >
>> >> > John K Clark
>> >
>

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 1:53 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> In any case, dust or object, it's all limited by the energy from the star.

>> That is true, and exactly the same thing would be true for a Dyson Sphere. I don't understand why you believe a Dyson Sphere explains the IR observations better than dust can.

> Dust would be quite a bit hotter. 

Depending on local conditions dust can be any temperature, in some places dust can be very hot and other places very cold, but what I don't understand is in the case of Tabby's star is if it didn't come from the star then where did the energy to heat up that dust come from?

>> Yes, you could turn the Boomerang Nebula into a heat engine and get a finite amount of energy out of it, but you couldn't do it perpetually, it's not perpetual motion. The longer you run your heat engine the warmer the interior of the Boomerang Nebula will get, until eventually it will come into thermodynamic equilibrium with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

> How did the interior of the cloud get so cold?   Is it an ongoing process?

 

I don't know if there's a consensus on the cause but the most popular theory is that a cool red giant star and another star are in a very tight orbitaround each other causing the red giant star to admit an extremely intense solar wind which makes the gas surrounding it expand very rapidly, and rapidly expanding gas cools down if it is required to do work, such as pushing more gas out of the way. The result is a sort of cosmic refrigerator.  Eventually that red giant will turn into a white dwarf about the size of the Earth but very dense, and the boomerang nebula will come into thermal equilibrium with the rest of the cosmos. 

 John K Clark

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 11:48 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 1:53 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> >>> In any case, dust or object, it's all limited by the energy from the star.
>>
>> >> That is true, and exactly the same thing would be true for a Dyson Sphere. I don't understand why you believe a Dyson Sphere explains the IR observations better than dust can.
>>
>> > Dust would be quite a bit hotter.
>
> Depending on local conditions dust can be any temperature, in some places dust can be very hot and other places very cold, but what I don't understand is in the case of Tabby's star is if it didn't come from the star then where did the energy to heat up that dust come from?

The dust or anything else has to be in a heat equlibrium. That is, it
has to radiate the same energy as it gets. Now, high tech stuff can
radiate directionally. While the whole thing is in equilibrium, it
can look colder than it should from directions at right angles to the
thermal radiation. This is how I expect a thermal power satellite to
operate.

Keith

>> >> Yes, you could turn the Boomerang Nebula into a heat engine and get a finite amount of energy out of it, but you couldn't do it perpetually, it's not perpetual motion. The longer you run your heat engine the warmer the interior of the Boomerang Nebula will get, until eventually it will come into thermodynamic equilibrium with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
>>
>> > How did the interior of the cloud get so cold? Is it an ongoing process?
>
>
> I don't know if there's a consensus on the cause but the most popular theory is that a cool red giant star and another star are in a very tight orbitaround each other causing the red giant star to admit an extremely intense solar wind which makes the gas surrounding it expand very rapidly, and rapidly expanding gas cools down if it is required to do work, such as pushing more gas out of the way. The result is a sort of cosmic refrigerator. Eventually that red giant will turn into a white dwarf about the size of the Earth but very dense, and the boomerang nebula will come into thermal equilibrium with the rest of the cosmos.
>
> John K Clark
>

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