THIS is a fine and perceptive scoop. May have been the best single piece of 'morning after' journalism on the Super Tuesday primary. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/03/05/super-tuesday-2024/cryptos-big-night-00145274 Congrats to Jasper Goodman. Personally, I think it is still an open question whether Bitcoin and all its kin, cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets, are a permanent feature of the American and world financial landscape or whether they are going to vanish away. They may be doomed to become as hard-to-find as an etch-a-sketch. BUT ... if you are of the permanent-feature persuasion, you will consider March 5, 2024 an important on the way to the securing of that status not through market savvy but through the political system.
Artificial intelligence, in the form that bothers people most these days, is a matter of the consumption of very large masses of text, and their re-packaging and re-use of that text to look and sound like something new and original. Should this worry us? Maybe not. It may be about to self-destruct. After all, as it happens more and more often, the AI algorithms are more and more busy digesting AI-generated texts. As a group of (admittedly human) researchers noted recently, “We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models." The models as they consume their own work will self-degrade and become useless over time. One of the members of the group of scholars involved is Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University professor. He has put the problem this way, in a blog post, “ Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will m