A library of snippets
xxx
Growing rabbits for food started in the Meiji Era to improve diet in rural parts of Japan. During wartime, production increased throughout the region to meet the growing needs for food and fur. Farmers improved the breed repeatedly to what it is today, a big rabbit with a white coat, which is easy to dye.
From: Will new year bring jump in demand for jumbo rabbits? | The Japan Agri News.
xxx
xxx
As for the GENIUS Act, having set the stage for another destructive experiment in free banking, like the one that ended in tears during the 19th century, it may well be remembered as the Reckless Idiot Act.
xxx
xxx
The next escalation in this process of manufacturing “reality” is now upon us, courtesy of AI. A recently published paper by a large group of scholars in the prestigious journal Science lays out the scenario. ChatGPT et al offer the prospect of manipulating beliefs and behaviours on “a population-wide level”. The combination of large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents will enable what the researchers call “AI swarms” to reach “unprecedented scale and precision” . They will expand propaganda output without sacrificing credibility and inexpensively create “falsehoods that are rated as more human like than those written by humans”.
From: ‘AI swarms’ are mass-producing credible misinformation. D….
xxx
John Naughton summarised the situation very well indeed in a recent Observer column. As he wrote, much of what goes on in social media is real (by which he means genuine conversations between humans) but nobody really knows how much. This matters because the erosion of trust between what’s real and what’s manufactured is making democracies ungovernable.
xxx
There were some pockets of fintech innovation (lending to the underbanked, SMEs, and corporate credit cards), but banks managed to hold their ground in the segments they care about. Could disruption in lending finally come from agentic commerce? Credit card issuers built defensible moats through decades of investment in brand loyalty. An AI agent has no loyalty.
xxx
You’ve probably heard about this social media site where bots pretending to be people post AI-generated slop to each other, regurgitate nonsensible propaganda, make up inflammatory stories and engage with cryptocurrency scammers ramping worthless digital “assets”. It’s called “X”.
Meanwhile, there’s another social media site called “Moltbook” where people pretending to be bots post AI-generated slop to each other, regurgitate nonsensible propaganda, make up inflammatory stories and engage with cryptocurrency scammers ramping worthless digital “assets”. That’s progress for you. Only a few days in and the Moltbook “leaderboard” was already largely given over to cryptoscams of one form or another with the occassional bot swarm coming up the ranks.
The Information said that other than being incredibly entertaining and slightly worrying for those concerned about AI gaining sentience, OpenClaw and Moltbook “offer a glimpse of where AI is going”. Actually, that wasn’t the lesson I took away from my first look at what was going on over there. The lesson that I took away from (you will not be surprised to hear) is that without a working digital identity infrastructure, we can’t have nice things.
(Anyway bot swarms and other forms of what I think I remember Mark Zuckerberg once describe as “co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour” are not amusing. They are insidious.)
John Naughton summarised the situation very well indeed in a recent Observer column. As he wrote, much of what goes on in social media is real (by which he means genuine conversations between humans) but nobody really knows how much. This matters because the erosion of trust between what’s real and what’s manufactured is making democracies ungovernable.
(Incidentally, last year John drew my attention to an excellent rant from Dave Winer about the infuriating tendency of chatbots to pretend that they’re your friend.
“Can we have a rule,” Dave wrote, “that AI bots must by default behave like a computer?
We could adopt the conventions of Paranoia, the dystopian science-fiction tabletop role-playing game (first published in 1984), and require all posts by bots to end with “the computer is your friend”. But if that doesn’t work, it might be time to start using some actual cryptography.)
You know what I am going to say here, of course: without digital identity, verifiable credentials and immutable reputation, there is no good outcome. I don’t think that is controversial. But how?
xxx
The recent rapid acceleration of generative AI and the imminent prospect of more ubiquitous agentic AI systems—artificial intelligence software capable of autonomously performing complex tasks, making decisions, and interacting convincingly—has renewed interest in digital identity writ large. Agentic AI is projected to become more prevalent in the immediate future, as human users proactively delegate tasks to credentialed agents.
xxx
xxx
Digital identity is the missing layer of the internet. Without it, everything we build rests on sand.
From: Digital identity is the infrastructure crisis no one admits.
xxx
xxx
Make a simple rule: they never move money or share codes and passwords based on a phone call, text, email, or social message without first checking with a trusted family member. Younger family “intervention” like this is shown to reduce losses.
From: older people are very susceptible to fraud! what are telecom and social media….
xxx
xxx
Bermuda has unveiled plans to migrate its entire national economy to an on-chain digital asset infrastructure, announcing them at this monthʼs World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos.
The country — which relies on technology supplied by payments infrastructure provider Circle and cryptocurrency platform Coinbase — aims to migrate its government, local banks, insurers, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and consumers to the new on-chain infrastructure. This would allow digital assets to be used in everyday financial transactions.
The island nation hopes the US dollar-based digital assets will offer fast, low-cost payments; enable people to transact locally; support economic activity; and meet compliance obligations.From: Lessons from the history of hyper-local currencies – Compliance Corylated.
xxx
In the US, e-commerce is something like a fifth of retail sales and analysts predict that AI will account for someting in the region of a tenth of e-commrce sales three years from now, so AI will influence around $150 billion of consumer purchases.
xxx
If the shoppers are chatbots and not humans, will they be swayed by adverts, or trained to ignore them?
xxx
Snippings