I had a thought the other day...

Governments get involved in all the financial transactions in order to tax them. Your company makes money, it gets taxed. You get paid a salary from the remainder, it gets taxed again. You spend it on something, it gets taxed again. That company takes it in and it gets taxed again. Over and over, tax after tax after tax. And all of this requires complete loss of privacy, they have to know all of your transactions so they can tax them accordingly, and the accounting and compliance costs spawn a huge financial industry which is actually.... entirely unnecessary.

Instead, all this loss of privacy, all this compliance cost, all the tedious filling out of tax forms where you aren't sure if you are doing it right and they hope you do it wrong so they can also collect fines and interest... the whole thing could go away.

And I'm not talking about anarchy. I'm talking about a funded government that doesn't need to collect taxes.

Just use inflation: The central bank prints 3% more money each year and gives it to the government.

Now before you all yell at me about how inflation is a horrible thing... this is a compromise. It is far better than the invasive tax systems we have today, and if the amount of money government gets is fixed by a constitution, and the fiat system (there would still be one) didn't expand via fractional reserve lending but only by this predictable monetary inflation, it strongly prevents government overgrowth, and also moderates boom-bust interest rate cycles, and still stimulates economic activity because the currency continues to lose value.

This is just the start of a crazy thought. I haven't thought it through deeply. But I do really like getting rid of the invasive tax compliance back-monkey.

Yeah looks like you and your new partner have different strengths and weaknesses.

You should complement each other well.

So tired of this argument. The point is not to delete something with absolute certainty that it’s gone - we all know that is a lie, the point is to be able to fix obvious errors, accidental embarrassing posts - even if it’s not guaranteed. nostr:note1fmqsrzjhyfqqf7yt3zfrkjamhdyu3l4p6v9aqa7aun3yh7djdy5s44l9hn

What do you think of my new friend?

GM brother. I look forward to seeing you again in a few days. 🫂🤙🏻💜

it’s a joke but thanks 🫣

“My phone got stolen. How do I recover my Nostr account?”

I hEAR you

Probably the craziest week in Open Source AI (yet):

1. Mistral (in collaboration with Nvidia) dropped Apache 2.0 licensed NeMo 12B LLM, better than L3 8B and Gemma 2 9B. Models are multilingual with 128K context and a highly efficient tokenizer - tekken.

2. Apple released DCLM 7B - truly open source LLM, based on OpenELM, trained on 2.5T tokens with 63.72 MMLU (better than Mistral 7B)

3. HF shared SmolLM - 135M, 360M, & 1.7B Smol LMs capable of running directly in the browser; they beat Qwen 1.5B, Phi 1.5B and more. Trained on just 650B tokens.

4. Groq put out Llama 3 8B & 70B tool use & function calling model checkpoints - achieves 90.76% accuracy on Berkely Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL). Excels at API usage & structured data manipulation!

5. Salesforce released xLAM 1.35B & 7B Large Action Models along with 60K instruction fine-tuning dataset. The 7B model scores 88.24% on BFCL & 2B 78.94%

6. Deepseek changed the game with v2 chat 0628 - The best open LLM on LYMSYS arena right now - 236B parameter model with 21B active parameters. It also excels at coding (rank #3) and arena hard problems (rank #3)

There's a lot more; Arcee (mergekit) released a series of LLMs, each better than the other, and Numina and HF Numina 72B (based on Qwen 2) and Math datasets, Mixbread with embedding models (english + german) and a lot more!

It's fun to see so many releases next week with L3 405B

Haha, if we are to nitpick over the wording some more, I would argue the word centralized/decentralized can be used to describe several aspects of a software system.

The aspect I were thinking about is how easy it is for the people behind the service to screw over their customers. And I'm asking how to make the mints more trustworthy.

A better word to use here may be trustless.

Cachu does not have a trustless setup and therefore I were asking how to mitigate the lack of trust.

You tell me that the Cachu use federated solutions. That's new info to me as you can guess since it was one of the solutions I proposed.

Back in the day I remember Calle telling me that Cachu does not use a federated setup. So good for them, if your information is correct and they have been coming around on that one.

are you coding Java today? 😄