a16z seems to view turning society into a dystopia as a goal, so that makes sense. Their portfolio includes:
- DoubleSpeed, a bot farm as a service provider, allowing customers to orchestrate social media activity across thousands of fake accounts to create artificial consensus on the topic of their choice. Never pay a human again!
- Cheddr, the TikTok of sports gambling, whose differentiating feature is allowing users under 21. Place live in-game bets with just a swipe!
- Coverd, a new type of credit card where you can wipe off bills by betting on your favorite gambling games in their app. No VPN required!
Wow, I just checked the doublespeed website and it is comically evil. The footer says — verbatim, and in huge letters — "never pay a human again." (I'm not selectively quoting; it's a full sentence, despite their weird capitalization.)
If Neal Stephenson tried to write a villain this on-the-nose, his editor would tell him to tone it down.
Can A16Z tell the difference? Insert that meme "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus, from the classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus".
a16z and others like them never met a dystopian warning they didn't interpret as a titillating invitation to an uncomfortably exciting and inevitable future!
because most people are incompetent, produce incidental complexity to satisfy internal urge for busy work, and under-think the problem, greatly... that's why, and don't get me started on the morons who run the show
I agree very much with you. Should I downvote you? Is this some sort of ritual?
Jokes aside, even if the technology works as intended (and that's a big if), the opportunities to abuse it are plenty and absolutely scary. I know that 'government weather control' is currently a realm of fantasy and conspiracy theories. But sunlight is the driver of climate and weather on Earth. Changing the incident solar power over a large enough region even by a little bit with respect to the rest of the world can bring about massive differences in weather patterns. While these particles are meant to spread around the world, it can bring about this effect if its degradation/dispersal times and release point into upper atmospheric winds can be engineered. It isn't as difficult as it sounds. And given that these people aren't willing to address the primary drivers of global warming - massive production of CO2 and the ever-increasing wealth inequity, there is absolutely no reason to believe that they won't misuse and abuse it to their own financial advantage. In some ways, it's actually worse than nuclear weapons, because there are a bunch of weather calamities that have very high costs in terms of lives.
This is such a stupid and meaningless thing to discuss (whatever Cook's plans are), as he has no personality and no vision, and yet tons of reflective and philosophical comments in here.
Who gained financially from Brexit? I mean in terms of the "elite" behind the scene. If no one gained that would be really weird. Someone or some group of people must have gained something, financially, even in an indirect way. Can you think of anyone who benefitted?
A single artificial neuron could be implemented as:
Weighted Sum
Using a summing amplifier:
net = Σ_i (Rf/Ri * xi)
Where resistor ratios set the synaptic weights.
Activation Function
Common op-amp activation circuits:
Saturating function: via op-amp with clipping diodes → approximated sigmoid
Hard limiter: comparator behavior for step activation
Tanh-like response: differential pair circuits
Learning
Early analog systems often lacked on-device learning; weights were manually set with potentiometers or stored using:
Memristive elements (recent)
Floating-gate MOSFETs
Programmable resistor networks
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