Next, I’d love to move in to text SPAM, the perplexingly unsolved problem that we’ve been particularly reminded of every election season for the past 20 or so years
The idea of a Lego AI sounds amazing... just thought of what might happen if you took a photo of your pieces then said "I like original Star Wars, make me a series of spaceships from that" and it outputted step by step instructions to create them. So cool.
Sure, something seems a bit lost in the creative flailing that is the growth path of young Lego-ists, but it would be really cool.
They need more than that - they raised $22M but only for a portion of the company so presumably at a valuation of multiples of that. To get a 10x valuation it may have to become a unicorn.
Depends on the environment. In a startup, the top performers often say basically “what took you so long? Glad we can move faster now. And try to hire some more top performers for me to work with.”
> Although the new data are consistent with other evidence that firearm violence has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic,5 the reasons for the increase are unclear,
Seems like there is a pretty obvious candidate for that, lockdowns.
Still, only time will tell, as they go on to say with the rest of that quote:
> and it cannot be assumed that firearm-related mortality will later revert to prepandemic levels.
This bundles in firearm suicides with firearm homicides, obscuring the real issue.
When most people say "gun violence" they do not mean gun-as-tool-used-in-suicide, they mean nonconsensual use of a firearm against someone.
Suicides are way up. Gun murders are up too, but they're still pretty low in the scheme of things. They're "safe to completely ignore" low if you're not in one of a few specific counties in the US where gang violence causes 70-90% of the gun murders.
The movie plot/evening news gun violence stuff that you hear about is so rare as to be safely ignored in all parts of the US.
Making guns harder to access probably reduces suicide rates as well because there are few faster, easier methods of suicide than a gun[1]. I think it's valid to lump gun suicides with other gun violence for this reason.
> The consensus among public health experts is that there is strong evidence that reducing firearm suicides in contexts where more-lethal means of attempting suicide are unavailable will result in reductions in the total suicide rate (see, for example, Office of the Surgeon General and National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, 2012; World Health Organization, 2014; for review, see Azrael and Miller, 2016).
One developed country with few guns having a higher rate but dozens with few guns having a lower rate is not a very strong argument in favor of your point.
Only in a simple world where any given phenomenon can only have a single cause.
For example, imagine we find that higher speed limits increase the rate of automobile accidents in a given area. That finding doesn't preclude that poorly maintained roads might also increase the rate of accidents. So just the existence of an area with a high level of car accidents and very low speed limits doesn't necessarily mean that there is no correlation or causal link between speed limits and automobile accidents. It may just mean that the area suffers greatly from other causes (like poorly maintained roads).
Similarly, I think it is fairly intuitive to assume that there are probably a host of causal factors in suicide rates. For sure, means isn't the only factor but it is an important one.
There's been research into means reduction, and it does seem to have an effect on reducing suicide. The hypothesis is fairly intuitive: many suicides are a response to a crisis, and a human in crisis-mode is not always a great problem solver; lack of an obvious means sometimes gives people some extra time to reconsider.
I started triathlon training and the swimming helped bring my back and knee pain into line such that I could actually run again and I haven’t had a reinjury of the back disc (previously every 12-18 months like clockwork for 10 years) in 7 years. I don’t even swim much anymore, just light maintenance through running. Swimming is magic.
Deploy this to production on NEAR and fund it every step directly with staking rewards that are piped in from a small endowment and it will run forever.
Hell, I’ll give you the tokens myself just to see it go!
NEAR doesn't look like a good choice if someone wants to create "The most expensive implementation of Game of Life (Probably the slowest too!)" :D
NEAR is perfect to run a high performance simulation, there is an existing project http://berryclub.io/ where users may play on a pixelboard and earn rewards in the meanwhile
This represents a reasonable-sounding surface view but is mostly off the mark. There are valid concerns but insufficient logic to justify a dangerous trap.
O/P TLDR:
1. Art is silly too but it's ok for Real Art because we've done it that way for a long time
2. It'll become a soulless money-grab
3. Buyers don't understand scarcity
4. It's killing the environment
re #1 (Art):
> You either own this thing or you don’t.
This logic just doesn't make sense and seems backwardly purist. Status conveyed by owning original editions of physical art doesn't just come from having it sitting on your wall where you can show it to 3 people a week, it's from making sure people know you own an original edition (art as flex, art as humble brag). In the digital world there is tons of status to claim using mediums beyond that narrow view and that's fine.
And the point:
> Owning a Honus Wagner card doesn’t mean you own Honus Wagner. Or a royalty stream or anything else but the card itself.
Why should you limit your thinking on what art can be and why it's valuable to people based on an old model? The "other stuff" which can be layered in increases its value substantially to some segments of buyers and there's no reason the artist shouldn't benefit from this.
re #2 (Paying creators):
> CREATORS may rush to start minting NFTs as a way to get paid for what they’ve created.
Why shouldn't creators get paid!? This is a very top-down, privileged argument. The biggest impediment for most creatives to creating their creations is usually worrying about monetization! Why shouldn't we try to get them paid as much as possible with as little work as possible so they can go back to making the things we love?
Chris Dixon had a good post [https://a16z.com/2021/02/27/nfts-and-a-thousand-true-fans/] about how NFTs allow more fine-tuned segmentation among different fan groups, allowing artists to gain more from their work while simultaneously satisfying the market. Seth is a marketer who understands segmentation intimately, so I have to imagine this is an oversight.
The embedded fear here is that we'll corrupt the purity of art by finally allowing creators to have a business model, and to be fair it's one that will probably see some crazy bubble dynamics and abuses. But that's well worth it if the world becomes a more creative place by introducing better tools to monetize creation and community.
re #3 (buyers don't get scarcity):
> BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there’s no limit on the supply.
And buyers of stock may be blind to the fully diluted EPS of the shares they're buying... what's the point? Again, there's a reasonable embedded fear that we'll get over our skiis and convince people or imply things that aren't true, resulting in consternation, but this isn't sufficient to call NFTs a "Dangerous Trap"
re #4 (Environment):
> They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade.
This is a fully Ethereum-centric view of the world but today Ethereum isn't the only chain. Ethereum is only used for NFT minting right now because it had years to build up tooling but it is unsuitable for creators because transaction fees run in the $50 range just to transfer tokens and >$100 to mint, so obviously creators are desperately looking for alternatives. And they're out there -- I work on the NEAR project (near.org) which is Proof of Stake, has purchased offsets to become fully carbon neutral, and is cheap enough to test in prod. Look where the ball is going, not where it is today!
Sorry for the rant. We need the biggest voices to present a more nuanced case for this technology.
