No, it does make sense. Most of the purported growth in government spending is just using raw figures, and not correcting for either inflation or monetary expansion. It is a convenient mistake.
The GENIUS act enables tech companies to become reserve holders -- buy US Treasuries with customers' money. Stripe offers a "transactional ecosystem" to the customer in stablecoins, the customer gives USD to Stripe in exchange for stablecoins, Stripe buys short-term Treasuries and makes a shitload of money on interest.
Part of the very high level play is the US Govt seeks to diversify away from depending on nation states for borrowing, and to promote tech companies to the status of reserve holders.
This doesn't add much to the consumer however. I think in fact we are looking at a "fragmented currency" future where you hold like 36 different stablecoins in your wallet because certain platforms accept certain stablecoins. The GENIUS act doesn't offer strict guarantees for getting out of a stablecoin into USD, so I predict dark patterns and "incentives" to make it hard to get out of a stablecoin.
That only makes sense if Stripe issues their own stablecoins? If they let their customers hold USDC on the Tempo chain, then any revenue from holding short-term treasuries goes to Circle. Are you suggesting Stripe would force Circle to share some of their revenue with them or they launch their own stablecoin to compete with USDC?
Good point. In the scenario I described, I'm assuming Stripe will launch their own stablecoin. I tend to think all major tech companies are incentivized to launch stablecoins and give you discounts and perks when you transact using their stablecoin in their own ecosystem. The more of their stablecoin they issue out, the more money they make on interest.
So then by using this product you are de facto buying short term US debt lowering the debt costs in a way? Is that what you are describing? And Stripe makes money on that short term carry.
Still doesn't answer why you would need any crypto here. Why can't the USD transferred to stripe just be a record in an SQL database saying customer X has N USD in the account, and transferring that around could be done instantly at zero cost by changing an sql row.
There are all sorts of protections around who can be a custodian of someone’s money (for good reason)
However there are use cases like running a marketplace, where the platform would like to be able to direct the flow, maybe hold things temporarily in case there are multiple transactions or to split a transaction up between different clients, before paying it out daily or weekly as a lump sum. Often it’s just to avoid fees, because the marketplace operator charges their fees in a different way (like a flat monthly invoice) and they want to assist with money logic as a service, but not be the custodian of the money.
Even just knowing that money has moved at all can be useful, without any ability to touch it, and it’s difficult to get permissions from conservative financial institutions, whereas permissionless ledgers make it easy.
Crypto can help add that nuance. It’s still your money, but you can give a third party the ability to do some things to assist you, without giving the ability to transfer it all to themself and run away with it.
That sounds like banking or payment processing. Albeit with later Paypal has proven that you do not always need to return funds, but still there is regulatory history on that...
Stable coins are new enough and have not catastrophically crashed yet so there is less oversight.
so the short answer to the question of "why crypto" is just to work around regulation, to be able to act as a bank without the regulations that apply to banks?
Yeah and this is codified in the GENIUS act which passed recently. It enables tech companies to act like banks in certain dimensions, without being regulated like banks.
ah, okay, i see the part i'm missing here. the GENIUS act doesn't let "tech companies" act like banks, it specifically lets stablecoin issuers act as banks. so this is stripe's play to take advantage of that.
Yeah. Stablecoins create demand for Treasuries which drives the price of Treasuries up and interest rate down. So this pressure lowers debt servicing cost for the US government, and Stripe is the holder of those Treasuries and gets paid interest.
This would also serve to counter the drop in global Treasury demand due to recent tariff stuff where presumably our traditional debt holders are losing appetite for US debt...
It also creates a kind of strange situation where stablecoins are basically spendable "Treasury tokens". So you give 1 USD to Uncle Sam (via a middle man like Stripe), get back 1 stablecoin. Then you go and spend the stablecoin, and Uncle Sam goes and spends the USD. It's like a weird double spend situation. Prior to stablecoins, you buy a treasury bill with USD, you hold this unspendable treasury bill while Uncle Sam gets USD to spend.
If the analogy you say is correct -- I think it makes sense in that its stripe that is actually the individual who is holding the treasury (short term debt) and the stablecoin user can spend it on something, and the US treasury can use the debt. At the end of the day stripe is holding the risk.
The "core reasoning" part of AI may be increasingly important to improve, and its "database of factual knowledge" aspects may be less and less important, maybe increasingly a hindrance. So more focused and specialized training may take over toward increasing reasoning precision, and not this never-ending stream of new data.
So maybe we'll get better reasoning and therefore better generated data/content in the wild, without this negative feedback loop everyone is worried about.
If AI is meant to sound nearly identical to a human, you don't need more training data.
If its meant to act as a natural language encyclopedia, we'll never get there with LLMs which amount to natural language processing on top of a massively compressed dataset.
Trying to make AIs more factually-accurate with more training is probably hopeless. Current events and encyclopedic knowledge will be provided by tools. The LLM's core job is to choose the right tools for the job and synthesize their outputs.
For example, I just asked o3 "how many Is are in antidisestablishmentarianism", and this was its train-of-thought output:
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The user wants to know how many “I”s are in the word “antidisestablishmentarianism.” They probably mean the letter "I" in lowercase, though the question was a little broader with "Is."
I’ll treat it case-insensitively and count the total occurrences of the letter "i" (both uppercase and lowercase). I can count them manually now, or use a tool for faster analysis.
Analyzed
word = "antidisestablishmentarianism"
word_lower = word.lower()
word_lower.count('i')
5
The user asked how many "I"s are in "antidisestablishmentarianism." I’m taking it to mean whether it’s counting "i" or "I", and I’ll consider them as the same for simplicity. So, I’ll count the 5 occurrences of "i" in the word. I manually broke it down and verified there are indeed five "i"s, so the final count should be 5. Pretty straightforward, now that it's all clear!
Done
There are 5 “i”s in “antidisestablishmentarianism.”
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You can come up with complicated definitions of "core reasoning" where this doesn't count, and I understand there's great demand for such definitions, but this clearly satisfies common-sense understanding of the term.
Then I guess Ubuntu has had reasoning for several decades:
sudp
Command 'sudp' not found, did you mean:
command 'sudo' from deb sudo (1.9.9-1ubuntu2.4)
command 'sudo' from deb sudo-ldap (1.9.9-1ubuntu2.4)
command 'sup' from deb sup (20100519-3)
command 'sfdp' from deb graphviz (2.42.2-6)
Try: sudo apt install <deb name>
I might just be on the opposite side of the aisle, but to me chain-of-thought is better understood as simply more context.
Of course there is ambiguity though, more context would be hard to distinguish from core-reasoning and vice versa.
I think LLMs/AI mean we can substitute reasoning with vast accumulations and relations between contexts.
Remember, RLHF gives the models some, and perhaps most of these chains-of-thought, when there isn’t sufficient text to scrape for each family of problems. When I see that chain-of-thought, the first thing I think of is of my peers who had write, rewrite, nudge, and correct these chains of thought, and not about core reasoning.
The CoT has that same overexplained step-by-step so many RLHF’ers will be accustomed to, and much of it was authored/originated by them. And due to the infinite holes it feels like plugging, I dont call that RL reasoning.
That’s amazing because made up language might also just be context scaffolding sans reasoning, e.g. it’s arbitrary extra context for machines to relate human text better. I’m not even trying to play devils advocate—-like both sides, true believers or pessimists, come up with wholly unconvincing arguments. (I genuinely don’t know if the tweet is a true believer or not). At least the pessimists aren’t coupled with the AI marketeers.
There's also distillation, where you can drastically improve a small model by training it on chains of thoughts of larger models. You can't achieve the same performance by training on original human texts. This suggests that those chains of thoughts reliably contain "densely packed reasoning", meaning the LLM probably has developed internal clusters of "reasoning circuitry", loosely speaking.
It's a read/write protocol for making external data/services available to a LLM. You can write a tool/endpoint to the MCP protocol and plug it into Claude Desktop, for example. Claude Desktop has MCP support built-in and automatically queries your MCP endpoint to discover its functionality, and makes those functions available to Claude by including their descriptions in the prompt. Claude can then instruct Claude Desktop to call those functions as it sees fit. Claude Desktop will call the functions and then include the results in the prompt, allowing Claude to generate with relevant data in context.
Since Claude Desktop has MCP support built-in, you can just plug off the shelf MCP endpoints into it. Like you could plug your Gmail account, and your Discord, and your Reddit into Claude Desktop provided that MCP integrations exist for those services. So you can tell Claude "look up my recent activity on reddit and send a summary email to my friend Bob about it" or whatever, and Claude will accomplish that task using the available MCPs. There's like a proliferation of MCP tools and marketplaces being built.
But yea privacy is a silly thing to propose to a surveillance industry.
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