Mark Gritter

From today's #MoneyStuff, the question is raised: if Elon Musk is found to have violated securities law and must disgorge $143m in unjust earnings, but not enough specific victims can be found, what should happen?

High priced lawyers are busy arguing that courts cannot order repayment unless it goes to specific victims. And if no such victims can be identified then Elon gets to keep his cash, presumably. Giving the money back to the market makers who were the last link I the sale seems like an unjustified windfall. I am fine with the Treasury just keeping it, but I can see how that moves the cash from one category of penalty to another.

This I think is an area where cryptocurrency does actually have a useful innovation to contribute. If Mr. Musk has contributed a fraud on the market at large (a large distributed system in which it is hard to apportion losses.that match his gains) then we turn that around and spread the restitution out in a similar distributed fashion. Elon should have to buy a basket of equities and the "burn" it, reducing the number of shares that exist and thus increasing value for everyone else. (And also for him too, but we can solve that with the right math.)

There are no doubt some practical obstacles to overcome but I don't see any block in principle to the clearinghouse agreeing that those shares no longer exist.

#financialcrimes

I had a very simple theory for this run. I had True Grit, Bludgeon, and Stampede. Exhaust every other card in my deck so that I'm throwing down a free-cost Bludgeon every turn--- right?

Instead I went on a shopping spree because I had Monkey's Paw so it was hard to turn down additional powers. And if I'm playing _two_ attacks per turn, might was well have something else? And if I'm exhausting cards then I should get Howl From Beyond...

This is my problem, I can see synergies between cards but stop thinking at the whole-deck level.

Cleared Ascension Level 5 anyway but was taunted at the end with the "large deck" achievement.

#SlayTheSpireII #SlayTheSpire

Aphyr casting shade both on LLMs _and_ humans.

https://woof.group/@aphyr/116364118144210270

Two Regent ascensions (3 and 4) tonight by basically just ignoring the stupid sword and spamming stars. Unfortunately I'm coming to believe the ability to bank up an unlimited amount of a resource is just broken.

3x Black Hole on this one which is 9 sweet points of global damage for gaining _or_ spending stars. The build is otherwise trash but it doesn't matter because Just Keep Spamming Stars.

#SlayTheSpireII

One thing I haven't heard discussed much about LLM-based programming:

Are we at the end of any serious programming language evolution?

It seems to me that if you believe (a) coding assistants are going to be the dominant way software is written, and (b) the only way to get reasonably good coding assistants is to train on tons of existing code, then it follows that (c) new programming languages will be at a significant disadvantage because there's just no corpus to train on.

The strong version of this hypothesis is that even new features of existing programming languages will be hard to roll out, because the bots won't use them!

I'm sure there are researchers who are looking at "programming languages that are easy for coding assistants to write" (Darklang went this route) but I think this is futile as long as (b) is our best bet. Maybe "AI" will deliver general reasoning capabilities good enough to transfer to any language, but that's not what is shaking out right now.

Any studies on coding assistant success across existing languages? That might be interesting to look at.

#CodingAssistants #ProgrammingLanguages

I'm doing an extended version of my talk about serial art and Rogue, at #Minnebar! The original version at the Roguelike Celebration was just 10 minutes, but I had to cut a lot of content so I think this will be fun to revisit.
https://sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/1956