When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.
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If employees are paid in tokens that means employees are *paying* for tokens out of their own pockets.
No different than mining company town folks having to buy (or rent!) boots and work clothing from the company that employs them. At "special" rates, no doubt.
By the way this should tell you all you need to know what class "white collar" vibe coders and broader IT folks are.
Hint: no, you're not running the company town, you're renting your tools from your factory owner.
@rysiek Can you pay the bills with LLM tokens? -
@rysiek you'd almost think sam altman was some sorta crypto guy
@davidgerard Apropos of nothing. How is Worldcoin doing?
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@davidgerard please go right ahead!
Every AI company wants to have their own private monopoly money they themselves issue.
@rysiek @davidgerard Most of them have people involved who were in Crypto so it's not surprising, or ties to Elon and Thiel who dreamed of controlling the money supply back in the 90s. We're going to see them all take another crack at making ICOs a thing soon, I'm sure.
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RE: https://mas.to/@trendsbot/116211553284922724
When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.
This is AI bubble companies trying to print own money. Printing your own money only works if you find a way to make it necessary. That's what taxes do, for example (recommended reading: David Graeber's "Debt").
Here:
👉 "printing money" part is paying employees in tokens
👉 "taxes" part is requiring employees to use AI in their day to day work (thus making tokens necessary)
Cryptocurrency and AI compute share the same goals; fobbing a fraud onto the gullible .
They're both fool's gold.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/07/the-guardian-view-on-cryptocurrencies-a-greater-fools-goldhttps://www.workers.org/2025/06/85955/
https://finbold.com/senior-economics-professor-says-bitcoin-is-fools-gold/
https://news.bitcoin.com/peter-schiff-argues-bitcoin-is-fools-gold-not-the-real-thing/
Company scrip as employee wages was outlawed nearly a century ago and for good reasons.
https://medium.com/financial-times/cryptocurrency-salaries-are-a-bad-flashback-to-company-scrip-392f4160bbdaIt often was disguised debt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip
https://rethinkq.adp.com/artifact-coal-company-scrip-miners/
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@rysiek It's not that. It's much more sinister. They want to pay you in tokens AND expect you to use them for the work they pay you for. Therefore, part of your payment is required for you to work.
@mms I get into that a bit later in the thread
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If employees are paid in tokens that means employees are *paying* for tokens out of their own pockets.
No different than mining company town folks having to buy (or rent!) boots and work clothing from the company that employs them. At "special" rates, no doubt.
By the way this should tell you all you need to know what class "white collar" vibe coders and broader IT folks are.
Hint: no, you're not running the company town, you're renting your tools from your factory owner.
The only man who made money in the gold rush was the one who sold clothes and pickaxes.
Serfs, the lot of us.
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@rysiek currently tracking down Altman touting this idea of tokens as money in 2024 and again in 2025 on podcasts, lotta excerpts
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If employees are paid in tokens that means employees are *paying* for tokens out of their own pockets.
No different than mining company town folks having to buy (or rent!) boots and work clothing from the company that employs them. At "special" rates, no doubt.
By the way this should tell you all you need to know what class "white collar" vibe coders and broader IT folks are.
Hint: no, you're not running the company town, you're renting your tools from your factory owner.
@rysiek I am constantly thrown off by the "journalism" around the subject.
I can't remember if I have ever read about a "success AI story" that is not narrated by openAI or Anthropic. -
RE: https://mas.to/@trendsbot/116211553284922724
When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.
This is AI bubble companies trying to print own money. Printing your own money only works if you find a way to make it necessary. That's what taxes do, for example (recommended reading: David Graeber's "Debt").
Here:
👉 "printing money" part is paying employees in tokens
👉 "taxes" part is requiring employees to use AI in their day to day work (thus making tokens necessary)
@rysiek Did Disney ever pay it's staff in Disney Dollars? Wouldn't surprise me. If they didn't then there's probably a law against it, only reason I could think might work. Or unions.
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@rysiek currently tracking down Altman touting this idea of tokens as money in 2024 and again in 2025 on podcasts, lotta excerpts
@davidgerard oh good. Looking forward to reading about it!
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@rysiek The only difference i see is the fact that suff produced by soviet factories was usually quite useful.
@montar @rysiek ...you must not be from that region and that time.
We even had jokes about stuff we bought and then had to actually make it work.
One was about USA stealing the plans for a rocket, and building truck / train engine / whatever out of it. And then somebody from the USSR would go "oh, you just have to hammer it in shape!". -
@rysiek Can you pay the bills with LLM tokens?
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Cryptocurrency and AI compute share the same goals; fobbing a fraud onto the gullible .
They're both fool's gold.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/07/the-guardian-view-on-cryptocurrencies-a-greater-fools-goldhttps://www.workers.org/2025/06/85955/
https://finbold.com/senior-economics-professor-says-bitcoin-is-fools-gold/
https://news.bitcoin.com/peter-schiff-argues-bitcoin-is-fools-gold-not-the-real-thing/
Company scrip as employee wages was outlawed nearly a century ago and for good reasons.
https://medium.com/financial-times/cryptocurrency-salaries-are-a-bad-flashback-to-company-scrip-392f4160bbdaIt often was disguised debt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip
https://rethinkq.adp.com/artifact-coal-company-scrip-miners/
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@montar @rysiek ...you must not be from that region and that time.
We even had jokes about stuff we bought and then had to actually make it work.
One was about USA stealing the plans for a rocket, and building truck / train engine / whatever out of it. And then somebody from the USSR would go "oh, you just have to hammer it in shape!".Q: What is it: does not glow and does not fit in one's arse?
A: Soviet device to glow inside an arse.But I think @montar's point was more about how stuff produced in those factories was at least ostensibly useful.
As in: a washing machine is a useful thing in general, even if a particular washing machine happens to be broken.
Which is not really the case with "AI" tokens.
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RE: https://mas.to/@trendsbot/116211553284922724
When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.
This is AI bubble companies trying to print own money. Printing your own money only works if you find a way to make it necessary. That's what taxes do, for example (recommended reading: David Graeber's "Debt").
Here:
👉 "printing money" part is paying employees in tokens
👉 "taxes" part is requiring employees to use AI in their day to day work (thus making tokens necessary)
@rysiek aside from the whole "maybe your product sucks if you have to force the employees that make it possible to use it" thing, company town behaviour is also maybe not the best sign of a healthy company or economy
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Q: What is it: does not glow and does not fit in one's arse?
A: Soviet device to glow inside an arse.But I think @montar's point was more about how stuff produced in those factories was at least ostensibly useful.
As in: a washing machine is a useful thing in general, even if a particular washing machine happens to be broken.
Which is not really the case with "AI" tokens.
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@rysiek I swear, Rysiek, those people are truly getting more and more on my nerves… they and their crony fellows and their corrupt friends… 🤢
Hardware is bought by them… so that we use their cloud…
They are all in the same boat… data is the new gold; let's kill E2EE and train our slop generators with everyone's messages…
Move fast and break their minds and societies…
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/spiralist-cult-ai-chatbot-1235463175/
Let's pay our workers in sh*t and force them to use it to pay…🤢🤢🤢
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@code_disaster @mu they taste like anything you can prompt a slop generator to "imagine"
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@rysiek aside from the whole "maybe your product sucks if you have to force the employees that make it possible to use it" thing, company town behaviour is also maybe not the best sign of a healthy company or economy
@OctaviaConAmore yup, I mention company towns a bit later in the thread.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Bruce LaBruce (@brucelabruce.bsky.social)
https://bsky.app/profile/brucelabruce.bsky.social/post/3mgv5p4uqy227
> HBD to the wonderful Barbara Feldon, who so stylishly and elegantly played Agent 99 on the 60's TV series "Get Smart," BOTD in 1933, turning 93 today! Here's hoping that she lives to be at least 99!!
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Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson
#coding #programming #foss #books
https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/
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@Alberto però mi ricordo che qualcuno li provò, forse Pippo, e stette male...
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@mariosiniscalchi temo di essermi espresso male. Intendevo dire "essere rappresentati NEL CSM", perché, appunto è il loro organo di autogoverno e penso abbiano diritto a farne parte scegliendo chi ci deve stare e non affidandosi al caso.
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Mapping The Sound Field Of An Acoustic Levitator
Sound! It’s a thing you hear, moreso than something you see with your eyes. And yet, it is possible to visualize sound with various techniques. [PlasmatronX] demonstrates this well, using a special scanning technique to visually capture the sound field inside an acoustic levitation device.
If you’re unfamiliar, acoustic levitation devices like this use ultrasound to create standing waves that can hold small, lightweight particles in mid-air. The various nodes of the standing wave are where particles will end up hovering. [PlasmatronX] was trying to calibrate such a device, but it proved difficult without being able to see what was going on with the sound field. Hence, the desire to image it!
Imaging the sound field was achieved with a Schlieren optical setup, which can capture variations in air density as changes in brightness in an image. Normally, Schlieren imaging only works in a two-dimensional slice. However, [PlasmatronX] was able to lean on computed tomography techniques to create a volumetric representation of the sound field in 3D. He refers to this as “computerized acoustical tomography.” Images were captured of the acoustic levitation rig from different angles using the Schlieren optics rig, and then the images were processed in Python to recreate a 3D image of the sound field.
We’ve seen some other entertaining applications of computed tomography techniques before, like inspecting packets of Pokemon cards. Video after the break.
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My youngest dog always walks around the house and back yard like he's ancient. Like, wobbling along like he's in pain, kinda limping. But, when we're on a walk or he's off-lead in the forest, he's like a rocket, absolutely full-tilt 100% of the time, not a care in the world, no think just run. No trace of a limp, seemingly no problems.
I think he's just really lazy when he's somewhere boring? Like a sullen teenager ambling through the halls at school.
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Al posto di Gassman per interpretare l'avvocato Guerrieri sarebbe stato meglio
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Point of order.
CAMH in Houston is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Arts_Museum_Houston
CAMH in Toronto is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Addiction_and_Mental_Health
You were possibly thinking of this other Toronto institution?
