Many of the Persian Gulf GCC nations essentially had a form of generous UBI since the early 80s. It has certainly made people far less enterprising and productive. Inflation hasnt happened since they import the vast majority of their requirements. It has led to increased religiosity etc since people are freed up to engage in religious activities all day long and don't necessarily have to develop skills like social competency or engage with others.

Many north African and middle eastern states tried to switch to democracy and that did not go as planned either, would that mean that democracy does not work?

Any policy (UBI or others) must take into account the state and potential of the country. Based on the Gulf state UBI example (if correct, I did not check) it would mean that with their initial conditions UBI will not result in developing skills (although, thinking of it, maybe their purpose of giving UBI was close to the one observed, their ruler don't strike me as very progressive).

In a world where we produced so much that we have caused climate change and mass extinction, I can't imagine people being less enterprising and productive being a truly bad thing.

Nontrivial to use. Still need to pass it to someone to convert fiat to crypto. Bitcoin is a public ledger, would be even easier to tie to him in some ways.

Trade the entire wallet, that isn’t registered to anyone’s name? Seems easy enough to move money illicitly with crypto

So now at least two people - who I'm going to assume don't have 100% trust in each other - both have the private keys. How is this going to work?

Physical hardware key, so neither party knows it, but possession of it is the authentication.

Essentially crypto can be untraceable like cash or gold, it can be traded off the books, until you ‘launder’ it into someone’s name.

In our area, the teachers union straight up released a pro-Hamas, anti-Israeli resolution despite no one asking them for their opinion. And we're in a fairly dense Jewish area.

You'd probably have admins and technology suck up most of the funding. At least in the US, funding and outcomes don't have that much of a correlation. DC area schools have among the highest levels of funding per student and the worst outcomes as well.

There are action models based on LLMs like Gorilla LLM or autoGPT that take a natural language input and convert that to API calls that could do all sorts of things from sending emails to performing stock trades.

To my knowledge it's still the harnesses that perform those actions, not baked into the weights (other than perhaps special tokens denoting that an action should be taken)

I think we need models to safeguard against models and then maybe hard coded rules to safeguard against those models missing out on things. It would be exceedingly hard to verify what all could be maliciously encoded in a billion parameter model waiting to be unleashed with the right sequence of tokens.

Yea, he casually added that term as if people wouldn't notice it. High earning, attractive, middle aged men are often targets for sexual harassment by women but it is not taken seriously at all.

tbf I was kidding, but his response was straight up malicious. You're not wrong though, that's a real issue.

Why is this about individuals at all? As a former academic I feel academia has a higher principle to uphold its principles about assigning credit where it is due and so on. Right and left are largely meaningless terms, we should be striving for the truth.

Its just incalculable what the ROI on this kind of a mission is. It is amazing that US and tech was in the state it was in when the planets aligning themselves happened and we were able to send these out there. A decade here or there and the opportunity would be lost.

Outside of a few places like the US, people care a hell of a lot about the genetics. Try putting Africans in India, or Japanese in China, and so on, there is no such thing as the melting pot in the vast majority of the world.

They don't care about genetics. They just dislike specific groups of people. Which ones is largely arbitrary and has more to do with history than genetics. Some places also have a much narrower "in-group" than others, again largely as a result of history. In some cases the "in-group" doesn't even include all the groups of people that historically live in the same territory, e.g. present-day China has significant undertones of Han nationalism or India with Hindu nationalism, despite both countries being geographically huge and ethnically diverse.

In the moment, aside from historical preconditions, the largest factor to how narrow this in-group is and how strong the dislike towards those not in it is, is mostly a matter of perceived scarcity and danger. As every good business owner knows, the best way to distract an employee from how small their share of the profits is, is to dangle a more desperate group in front of them as a scapegoat. Give someone your scraps, then make them deathly afraid others want to take it away from them, and they won't dare to ask for more (or solidarize with others against you - racism was one of the biggest cudgels against unions in the early 20th century US before simply framing unions as communist became an option).