Seeing is understanding.
Last week with @DigitalChamber & @SpruceID, we demonstrated real-world blockchain & digital identity use cases for NY State Assembly Members & staff.
Practical applications, tangible outcomes & IRL conversations is how we push blockchain forward.
Twenty years ago this month, I stood before a room at Google and presented work on deep learning networks.
For ninety minutes the questions came, and for ninety minutes I answered them.
The objection, when it finally arrived, was wonderfully mundane.
"It requires too much compute."
"Perceptrons are too slow."
I suggested something unfashionable at the time. I suggested looking forward.
Moore's Law was hardly a secret. Computing power was increasing relentlessly. If we started then, if we built for where hardware would be rather than where it happened to be that afternoon, we would arrive ahead of the curve.
The response was largely the sort of practical wisdom that ages badly. The future was judged by the limitations of the present. A common habit among intelligent people.
Today we live in a world intoxicated by Large Language Models.
Every newspaper speaks of them. Every boardroom discusses them. Every investor discovers them with the enthusiasm of a tourist finding Paris.
Yet the amusing thing is that LLMs did not appear because somebody suddenly discovered neural networks. They appeared because computation finally caught up with ideas that many had dismissed as computationally expensive curiosities.
The mathematics did not perform a miracle.
The silicon improved.
What was once "too much compute" became routine.
What was once "too slow" became infrastructure.
What was once dismissed as impractical became one of the largest technological revolutions of the century.
There is a peculiar vanity in assuming that the limits of today's hardware are the limits of tomorrow's civilisation. It is rather like refusing to build a cathedral because one happens to be standing in a quarry.
The future rarely arrives by inventing entirely new ideas.
More often, it arrives by waiting for old ideas to become affordable.
And so here we are, surrounded by LLMs, watching the world celebrate what many once rejected, not because it was wrong, but because it was early.
The difference between a visionary and a sceptic is often nothing more than ten years of semiconductor manufacturing.
Or twenty.
BREAKING: MicroStrategy's, $MSTR, unrealized loss on its Bitcoin holdings rises to a record -$12.7 billion.
This puts the company's position down -$28 billion over the last 12 months.
@NostalgicNestEg That Dark Dragonite definitely top 3 if not Top 1 also. Safe to say both of us got taste lol
1- Dark Dragonite
2- Evolving skies Dragonite
3- Ascended Heroes Dragonite
@angelodotsui Prismatic Umbreon less popular than Pikachu and less appealing yet holding strong at $1,500! Who really knows! At the end of the day, it’s Pikachu 🤷🏻♂️
in 2000, @saylor was the laughing stock of wall street after losing $6B of investors money.
but he didn’t quit.
he spent the next 26 years of his life retard maxxing and found a new way to run it back and achieve an even bigger loss of investors money.
inspirational 💯
Another set of Mew sales, another HUGE price gap 😳
These two "Bubble Mews" sold on the same exact day:
💰 BGS Black Label 10: $236,500
💸 CGC Pristine 10: $2,880
That’s a $230K+ gap for the same 2024 Paldean Fates Mew ex SIR 👀
Yes, Black Label is the gold standard, yes, it’s ultra low pop, but should it really mean THIS big of a difference? 🤔