But I'm for unprincipled optimism.

One example of subjectivity is if, and this happens, a bug is found which can drastically increase the supply of coins beyond the intent of the creators; everyone comes together and removes those state transitions manually despite their objective validity. A more practical notion would be some type of "this transaction was fraud, someone has authority to reverse it." Of course, this is a hard tradeoff, but users should be able to make it.

I self-taught some math which gave me the benefit of no deadline, and I did not memorize derivations - I learned them. The typical experience is that the derivation given to you is that 'satnav route' and offers little intuition for what it does or how you would have even thought to do it.

The exercise for me was always the same: re-derive the proof by injecting context, motivation and intuition.

You are clearly a wizard of a prior era. But it is a new era.

The unceremonious use of (what I speculate is) AI-assistance is becoming more normal. I think a lot of people who were die-hard skeptics will just quietly protest less and less. Also, for people who use it well and poorly alike, the urge to not advertise any AI-use at all is common today. People who know how to use it well don't feel the need to explain themselves to unreasonable absolutist skeptics.

> they'll raze the ground to ashes before anyone can use it for legitimate means.

You were so cynical you thought this one category of people would literally prevent any fruitful use. Now you simply argue with me whether the category exists at all.

> I really have no idea what you're on about. There's TONS of examples of people abusing this already.

Grossly dishonest in spirit, you are.

While I'm on board with you about the inabsolute security of this (relative to what's typically expected of cryptographic systems), the fact that their 'verified' state requires a live certification and can be revoked means that the sensor responsible for obviously faked images will see those images and that device no longer certified.

It all relies a lot on trust in Apple, and integration with Apple, and relatively unmotivated attackers.

Or maybe you can just get too spoiled with it grokking your intent, then become so vague that your vague ideas are actually just bad ideas. Certainly has happened to me.

Is that hotel example real? Curious how exactly you employ this technique—my naive idea was, if talking software development, a sort of 'sanity-check auto-linter agent' catch errors on a regular basis (every 10 seconds, every write, w/e).

Not so much reducing cost by reducing headcount, but reducing liability; it's the legal labyrinth which is the barrier to entry to scale business. While it is present elsewhere, it's universal in employment.

The real question is "how big can a business be before it requires a legal department?" That an AI can automate many rote tasks and have some expertise means the benefits of scale with less of the risk.

Of course you'd feel no need to justify all the exceptions when people you don't like are excited about a movie, food item or video game. Yuur justification for cynicism is vacuous, which will obscure realistic concerns.

The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.

If you're saying it's predicting, then each result should be falsifiable.

The result of an LLM output should be able to be scored against what it is supposedly predicting. Of course, that isn't possible, because it isn't predicting anything when giving novel outputs, otherwise that thing would exist independently.

I view favored house-odds, on arbitrary games or not, as unethical and predatory. This is the classic casino slot machine and related. However, Poker doesn't have house odds, it is a fair game.

Move one level up: prediction markets don't have house-odds if implemented plainly. On non-game events, they also have a positive externality, which already contradicts your claim: prediction markets predict quite well.

Yet another level up: investing in the stock market. The same authentic gambler who burns money into a slot machine can play the stock market to similarly disastrous ends. But if you define this as gambling and want to outlaw or limit it to 'professionals' then you bar people from capital markets which is absurd.

I find that when I give an LLM my full handcrafted codebase, it does very well. It follows my conventions, sees the intent and can coherently build within its scope. It writes much better code than a 'vibe' prompt.

It is always tempting and I myself will continue pushing the boundaries, but when you keep an LLM in reasonable scope (that may be one line, function, file at a time, depending on your idea of reasonable), you, by definition, can get sound utility out of them.

In the context of 'decentralized tech' I've come to believe literal 'decentralization' has unavoidably poor network effects, while 'accountability' gives what people envision from 'decentralization' without the tradeoffs—by being a more fundamental property (decentralization can emerge from it if required).