Sorry I'm from Sweden and our banks have a service called Swish where we can send money on the phone. Paying in cash is extremely uncommon now a days. Every time I've bought or sold something on FB Marketplace the last decade I've used Swish. I thought you had something similar called Venmo in the US?
The problem in the US is too many options. In the US, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle and CashApp are all pretty popular. And there are others.
They’re easy if the one you use is the same one the other person is using. If you’re a Venmo person and you want to transact with a CashApp person, well one of you have to download and set up a new payment app or pay cash.
Some people will want cash for in person transactions but it's more rare. In the US you run into a lot of people who don't trust phones, technology, tech companies, the government, or any other number of reasons to demand physical payments.
> Some people will want cash for in person transactions but it's more rare. In the US you run into a lot of people who don't trust phones, technology, tech companies, the government
No, it's because majority of digital payment systems can be abused. Stolen accounts, payment disputes and more can cause a seller to lose the item and the money.
Cash is very, very hard to counterfeit, and there's inexpensive devices[1] to virtually guarantee a bill is genuine. There's no post-transaction fraud scheme that works once cash had exchanged hands.
> There's no post-transaction fraud scheme that works once cash had exchanged hands.
Yes but it is vulnerable to other fraud schemes, like misrepresentation or theft.
But yeah, when faced with the possibility of fraud many people instinctively retreat from the unknown (technology) to the easily understood realities of cold hard cash. Its biggest advantage is ease of understanding.
I assert it's more than that. Even Zelle can be susceptible to post-transaction fraud schemes.
Yes, someone can steal your cash - but they can also steal your item.
Setting aside theft - cash is simply the most secure way to ensure you keep your money post-transaction. There is no fraud mechanism to abuse, and no way to reclaim cash once in-hand.
For anything of value, the "old school" rules of meeting in a very public place and only accepting cash are still really sound.
Of course there is fraud risk with cash, it is just all on the buyers end of the transaction.
People are still getting scammed with cash every day with fake/locked/misrepresented/stolen items being sold on marketplace sites.
All of the legitimate reasons to reverse a reversible transaction is a fraud vector that cash is vulnerable to. That’s why reversible transactions exist.
Venmo isn't really something I'd consider a "bank service"; it was its own company for a bit, and I think now it's owned by PayPal.
The closest thing here is probably Zelle, but at least with my bank's app, the interface is a bit of a pain. This basically is just another form of what the parent commenter said; how much do I value my own time and convenience compared to what I'd be getting?
Since the government and corporations aggressively spy on everyone, and since government programs are often incompetent or overfunded or underfunded or corrupted or evil, there is (justly) little faith in the government.
Cash works fine. It can't be censored easily, it can't be tracked easily. ATMs have it.
Yes but "the search space is too large" is something that has been said about innumerable AI-problems that were then solved. So it's not unreasonable that one doubts the merit of the statement when it's said for the umpteenth time.
I should have been more specific then. The problem isn't that the search space is too large to explore. The problem is that the search space is so large that the training procedure actively prefers to restrict the search space to maximise short term rewards, regardless of hyperparameter selection. There is a tradeoff here that could be ignored in the case of chess, but not for general math problems.
This is far from unsolvable. It just means that the "apply RL like AlphaGo" attitude is laughably naive. We need at least one more trick.
I wrote: it's not particularly orwellian. like all the other us administrations have had mass surveillance boners too. and the us is not nearly as surveillancey as other fascistic regimes, or even contemporary social democracies.
finally, orwellian means a lot more too, especially "controlling how people think by controlling their language". again, the trump administration doesn't do that much of those things.
this administration has a lot of problems, but its pretty straightforward.
>Hey that's a weird thing in the result that hints at some other vector for this thing we should look at
Kinda funny because that looked _very_ close to what my Opus 4.6 said yesterday when it was debugging compile errors for me. It did proceed to explore the other vector.
> Especially if that "thing" has never been analyzed before and there's no LLM-trained data on it.
This is the crucial part of the comment. LLMs are not able to solve stuff that hasn't been solve in that exact or a very similar way already, because they are prediction machines trained on existing data. It is very able to spot outliers where they have been found by humans before, though, which is important, and is what you've been seeing.
That's silly, they don't want to manage people, they prefer to build actually useful things. I've recently learned how many programmers actually don't care about building things.
They love the craft, for all they care they could be working in a black box in a void as long as it fed them interesting problems to solve.
They don't see any actual benifit in the AI increasing the velocity of how fast they build useful things. That was never of value to them, all they see is the problems becoming more boring to solve.
That’s fine. New opportunities to provide value will emerge. If software becomes oversupplied, fewer people will enter that field and move to other areas where value is needed. If you only want to add value in the software space, then yes, it may be a problem.
If now only everyone who is talented at crafting software (or any other job that might be replaced), but who is out of a job could magically be as talented at something else, and enjoy doing that other work, then we would have no problem. But one issue is, that often significant time goes into becoming good at what one does. Switching has a very high personal cost in terms of time and having no income for a prolonged time.
Even worse, people are not the same as when they were younger. They may have less ability to learn. Almost certainly they have lower internal motivation and enthusiasm, since their career of choice was just taken from them. Job retraining programs are probably a big hint here. They have a poor track record.
I produce software too but I starting producing food recently. I feel like it really takes edge off my AI-related anxiety. (I also realize I'm more rural than most of HN).
Or it could have just been a genuine question. I'm not American and I've seen DoW used in newspapers and thought the name change was official. Personally I've thought it a more apt and honest name for what they do.
But the backlash in the commments here show how ideologically charged the question seem to be.
I wasn't aware of how ideologically charged the question was. I'm also not American, but I'm glad I made the question. It's a clear sign for us not Americans to just leave them be.
I agree. I live in Brazil and even though tariffs and interventions weren't directed at us, they influence the economy and political decisions. Also, Venezuela is right next to us, so instabilities there do tend to affect the whole region.
Do you really trust in random comments on the internet which states something to which the possibility is slim, because literally nobody cares why somebody calls the way it is, when that somebody knows both names, and when it's not political? I don't think that's optimal, and it's a hefty understatement of course.
I think you're the one applying anti-vax logic here. Imagine beating a guy up for looking at you wrong and then get into a semantic argument with the judge on how you shouldn't be charged with assault because it was actually an act of defense, you see if you hadn't assaulted them they would surely have assaulted you so it's defense.
You're basically saying the US don't need a Department of Defense because the Department of War is doing such a good job.
Yeah, otherwise the USA would have been invaded by Cuba, Iraq, Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and a hundred more, and they all would have a fight over who can have it. Thank god the US defended themselves against those terrible guys. Especially the WMDs were quite the close call, the Iraqis were minutes away from nuking the land of the mart.
Yes, invading Hawaii was part of imperial Japanese planning. If you don’t understand that defense spending is still worthwhile even if you don’t blow anything up with it, I’m not sure how we connect.
One fun thing would be to raise the abstraction level of the game.
How would it feel to only interact with your base/economy/army via prompting and face someone doing the same.
Would words per minute replace APM, what would the meta look like etc. Would you be able to adjust the system prompt for your "army" to suit your play style?
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