Arto Bendiken @bendiken Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Arto Bendiken

@bendiken

5,042

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6,007

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CTO @AsimovbyHaltia . Autodidact, coder, cypherpunk, entrepreneur, hacker, maker. ex-NEAR, ex-Aurora, ex-Dydra. Also at @arto @haltia .social.

Dubai 🇦🇪

https://t.co/wzt9IPoZOb

Joined February 2007

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

I posit that Dubai—indeed, the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—is mankind’s first large-scale terraforming project. The climate here in this nook of the Arabian Peninsula is one of the true extremes on the planet: hot and arid almost without peer. It is not business as usual, it is

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

6 months

@ylecun The Economist recently highlighted the UAE as the third-most-important country for AI development, after America and China—this with a population 1/34th that of the US and 1/140th that of China.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Living in Dubai feels like having one foot in the future. Dubai is currently rolling out self-driving taxis as Cruise’s first non-US deployment. And some months from now, electric air taxis carrying up to six passengers will begin initial testing in the city. Competing air taxi

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

6 months

@ylecun @ylecun In case you're still in town tomorrow (Friday) evening, come join the Dubai AI Hackers Meetup! We'll be talking about open-source AI including Llama and Falcon. 🕖 Friday, Feb 16, 7:00-9:30 PM 🗺️ Al Quoz Industrial 1, Dubai

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

7 months

And that's a wrap for the Dubai AI Hackers Meetup #1 ! Really good crowd tonight, and about double the size of the previous event. And kudos to the guests who came all the way from Abu Dhabi, multiple hours of travel. See you all at meetup #2 in February! Note that

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Open Letter to Marc Andreessen ( @pmarca ) I was saddened but unsurprised to observe that your recent Techno-Optimist Manifesto received more than its share of negative coverage in America and Europe. Your armchair critics in the press highlighted how they’d read your 5,000-word

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

5 months

@Andercot Tankies: "But real cannibalism has never been tried!"

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

5 months

@shivon Dagny Taggart couldn't have said it better. Meanwhile, for those not as obstinate as Dagny, the world is a big place and amazing adventures await you.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Here on the opposite side of the globe from you, I for one appreciated your manifesto. Taking a less US-centric point of view, however, I do believe that the great pure techno-optimist cities—or city-states, as they may be—of Earth presently number only two: Dubai and Singapore.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

7 months

Thankfully I don't have to merely imagine, I actually live in a country where that's true.

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@amasad

Amjad Masad

7 months

Imagine a world where politicians are incentivized to maximize total national wealth (not debt).

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

The miracle that is Dubai is rare in the modern world, but it is by no means singular. To mention but a few parallels, it was also the miracle of Singapore, the miracle of Hong Kong, and—a long time ago—the miracle of New York. Without question, as you know, it is replicable

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

1 year

@GuerrillaVille @TheMemeticist No actual experience. Just the ordinary autodidact's lifelong study of history, which included many epidemics. Supplemented by purposeful study including crash courses in epidemiology and virology during Jan-Apr 2020 and keeping up with new research findings ever since then.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

5 months

@Snowden Back when trillions were still called millions, how quaint.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

In terms of Machiavelli’s political cycle, Dubai and the UAE are yet but at the dawn of their golden age. Meanwhile, the hour already grows late for the US welfare-warfare state in this its oligarchic stage—as you have yourself observed and previously noted. No other social cycle

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

6 months

@ylecun Welcome to Dubai, the miracle in the desert! 😎

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

I posit that Dubai—indeed, the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—is mankind’s first large-scale terraforming project. The climate here in this nook of the Arabian Peninsula is one of the true extremes on the planet: hot and arid almost without peer. It is not business as usual, it is

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

One of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, some 90% of Dubai’s population are immigrants—including yours truly. Despite massive—by American or European standards—continuing immigration, welcoming everyone from anywhere, the UAE notably has not suffered the kinds of

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his study of incentives and property rights under monarchy versus democracy concluded that monarchy is generally preferable to democracy, because monarchs tend to have a lower time preference and a long-term interest in capital value. This leads to more

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 years

CEO and CTO reunited @auroraisnear #dubai

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 months

Whew, they sure are making it a lot easier for me to explain why we're so focused on building trustworthy personal AI 🤷‍♂️

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Former head of NSA joins OpenAI board

Another new board member.

www.theverge.com

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

@balajis Exactly. A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points, here.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

I posit that Dubai—indeed, the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—is mankind’s first large-scale terraforming project. The climate here in this nook of the Arabian Peninsula is one of the true extremes on the planet: hot and arid almost without peer. It is not business as usual, it is

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

7 months

@saifedean Exactly. Only by any other name—make monarchy cool again?

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his study of incentives and property rights under monarchy versus democracy concluded that monarchy is generally preferable to democracy, because monarchs tend to have a lower time preference and a long-term interest in capital value. This leads to more

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

14 years

Joe Biden's 1991 anti-crypto bill motivated Zimmermann to publish PGP ( http://bit.ly/9NEtu2). Looking forward to the spoils of #cryptowar 2.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

@ADoricko Exactly! One of those matters where perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

I posit that Dubai—indeed, the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—is mankind’s first large-scale terraforming project. The climate here in this nook of the Arabian Peninsula is one of the true extremes on the planet: hot and arid almost without peer. It is not business as usual, it is

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

🧐 Lots of schadenfreude on witness in nasty social media commentary on Dubai and the UAE yesterday having suffered the worst extreme weather event on record in the 75 years since weather data gathering here began in 1949. ⛈️ 🇦🇪 🤦‍♂️ With ugly naked glee, the bad weather is widely

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

It may sound like science fiction, but another reason Dubai is increasingly greener and wetter is that in this country clouds and rains are now frequently artificial, based on cloud-seeding technology. Since the 1990s hundreds of cloud-seeding missions are flown annually, with

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

5 months

👉 My interview with The National News ( @TheNationalNews ) published this week in the Monday, March 18 edition.

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Dubai-based entrepreneur creating personal AI assistant to be a ‘lifelong companion' | The National

Generation Start-up: Haltia.ai, a privacy-focused smartphone app, aims to help users 'win at life'

www.thenationalnews.com

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

Cue exodus from California. Looking forward to seeing more American founders over here in Dubai, just as we have in the last several months had so many European founders—predominantly Germans—hop over to explore their relocation options after the disastrous EU AI Act was passed.

@Scott_Wiener

Senator Scott Wiener

3 months

The Senate passed our AI safety & innovation bill, SB 1047. SB 1047 promotes innovation & ensures developers of the largest, most powerful AI models keep safety in mind. I look forward to continuing to work with all stakeholders to make sure this bill is as good as it can be.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 years

@NEARProtocol Hey, I'm Arto, currently Tech Lead for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) working group at NEAR. In other words, I'm leading the team working on making it possible to use all existing Solidity contracts and Ethereum tooling on NEAR.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

@VictorTaelin Victor, you're in good company. Maxwell needed a decade to develop his four simple, elegant equations. Einstein needed a decade in-between the special and general theories of relativity, and years prior to that to arrive at E = mc².

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

6 years

The essence of the diff between Drupal 7.57 and 7.58 (CVE-2018-7600, SA-CORE-2018-002) appears to be this. #drupal #drupalgeddon2

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

Now that SB 1047 did pass and open-source AI in the Bay Area is dead—though not yet buried—where will the center of gravity shift towards? I suspect the UAE is well positioned to capitalize on America's political failure, much as they did with blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

@typewriters

Lauren Wagner

3 months

Rare but special to see big tech and little tech come together on issues that matter, in this case protecting open source AI. The AI Alliance ( @Meta , @weights_biases , @togethercompute , @IBM +) now opposes #SB1047 :

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

In terms of Machiavelli’s political cycle, Dubai and the UAE are yet but at the dawn of their golden age. Meanwhile, the hour already grows late for the US welfare-warfare state in this its oligarchic stage—as you have yourself observed and previously noted. No other social cycle

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Here on the opposite side of the globe from you, I for one appreciated your manifesto. Taking a less US-centric point of view, however, I do believe that the great pure techno-optimist cities—or city-states, as they may be—of Earth presently number only two: Dubai and Singapore.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 years

Aurora + NEAR are, in fact, shipping Eth2: from PoS to EVM-on-WebAssembly to sharding, we leapfrogged to feature parity with the original Eth2 vision. Built on a culture of relentless execution and shipping something every week.

@milesdeutscher

Miles Deutscher

@milesdeutscher

2 years

Ethereum ditched sharding, but $NEAR didn't. "Ethereum ended up being so far behind their release schedule, they decided to give up on it and [focus] on rollups." "NEAR gives you that path to unlimited scalability."

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

9 months

Decels of yesteryear: the Red Flag Act of 1865 limited automobiles to a max. 2 mph speed in towns, and required a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of the vehicle. The law "effectively stopped innovation in powered road transport in Britain for over a quarter of a

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 years

The weekly Friday update from the @auroraisnear team: This week, we launched $NEAR as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, published MetaMask, Remix, and Truffle tutorials, and enabled bridging ETH from the Ethereum Ropsten testnet to the Aurora TestNet.

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Weekly Update 2021-05-28

The weekly Friday update from the Aurora team.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

This is what we see emerging today in Dubai and the UAE, as well: 90% of the population are immigrants, and there's a phenomenal selection effect going on. Downside: it's in the desert. Upside: there's unbounded opportunity, unfettered social mobility, and you get to keep what

@pmddomingos

Pedro Domingos

3 months

Why are Americans more ambitious than Europeans? Because over the last 500 years the more ambitious Europeans moved to America.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

@AJA_Cortes This. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points. When visiting the first lunar colony, no doubt the same kind of people will complain about the "lack of culture" and "lack of nature" 🤷‍♂️

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

I posit that Dubai—indeed, the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—is mankind’s first large-scale terraforming project. The climate here in this nook of the Arabian Peninsula is one of the true extremes on the planet: hot and arid almost without peer. It is not business as usual, it is

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 years

Our first DDoS attack on the @auroraisnear Mainnet. A milestone of sorts; I’m sure it won't be the last one.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

6 months

A good first day at the Step Conference ( @stepconference ). What a lovely outdoors setting at Dubai Internet City, I definitely got my daily sunshine quota sorted out! Great meeting friends as well as folks who've flown here all the way from San Francisco or from Tokyo! #Step2024

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

7 months

@Hutton_Richard @saifedean Whether by Plato's, Machiavelli's, Frédéric Bastiat's, or Ray Dalio's social cycle model, democracy devolves into tyranny which will in time normalize to mere monarchy. If you don't feel like waiting for the wheel of history, you could also move and live in a prosperous and

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

6 months

@ylecun 👉 Find the meetup details here:

Login to Meetup | Meetup

Not a Meetup member yet? Log in and find groups that host online or in person events and meet people in your local community who share your interests.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 months

High quality standards tend to be literally incomprehensible to people who don't have them.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

7 months

@RichhomieconE How do you define your "experiment of 'privatizing' the public (aka the government)"? Because lord knows there is salient literature and convincing example on the question generally:

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his study of incentives and property rights under monarchy versus democracy concluded that monarchy is generally preferable to democracy, because monarchs tend to have a lower time preference and a long-term interest in capital value. This leads to more

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 months

In case you were wondering why California's SB-1047 and the EU's AI Act were so keen to criminalize and ultimately eradicate open-source AI, turns out that was an incumbent regulatory capture play plus AI doomer grift combo all along. Fact > fiction

@DrTechlash

Nirit Weiss-Blatt, PhD

2 months

The Center for AI Policy outlined the goal: to "establish a strict licensing regime, clamp down on open-source models, and impose civil and criminal liability on developers." The EA movement funded and normalized the Doomers' power-seeking behavior as if it's normal. It's not.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 years

The weekly Friday update (aka alpha leak) from the @auroraisnear team: This week, we launched the UI for bridging ETH from Ropsten, deployed a testnet faucet, finalized a protocol upgrade to speed up the EVM, and announced an @InjectiveLabs partnership.

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Weekly Update 2021-06-04

The weekly Friday update from the Aurora team.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

My evening walk, a good 10-kilometer loop featuring endangered gazelles. Just Dubai things 🤷‍♂️

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

1 year

@sumlenny Don't forget the Finns.

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A Thousand Lakes of Red Blood on White Snow | Arto Bendiken

Here follows a brief history of the little-known subarctic origins of the Molotov cocktail in the epic Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40. It is a true tale of a people who stood up to the depreda...

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Air conditioning (A/C) is not really optional in Dubai. Whether at home or in your car, A/C is baseline tech that makes life tolerable and pleasant for those us expats who constitutionally would not claim to be as robust as the indigenous Bedouin. Accordingly, in Dubai today,

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 years

"It actually winds up being less DevOps work, on average, to support open-source systems running on bare VMs, than to try to keep up with Google's deprecation treadmill."

@QuinnyPig

Corey Quinn

4 years

Okay, when no less than Steve Yegge craps on ⁦ @GCPcloud ⁩ for deprecating things, you pull up a chair and listen. ⁦ @killedbygoogle ⁩, read this.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

5 months

"Just as America thought of Europe as the old world, I now think of the West at large as the old world." 💯

@woonomic

Willy Woo

5 months

@rationalaussie One slight correction. Not the world, just the West. I've lived in the West and SE Asia. This malaise is only in the West. The human energy and drive in the East is 10x higher. Just as America thought of Europe as the old world, I now think of the West at large as the old

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Indeed, westerners all too blithely tend to dismiss Dubai's success by claiming that everything's easy when you've got oil, and that "they" could have done all that if only they had those resources. Yet they haven't a clue that less than 1% of Dubai's gross domestic product

@ZubyMusic

ZUBY:

8 months

Less than 1% of Dubai's economy is from oil. 😃

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

We have now in Dubai reached the season where you can perfectly well run an LLM on your iPhone 15 Pro—just not for very long when outside in the sunshine 😎

@afscott

Alex Scott

3 months

them: dubai summer can’t be that hot… right? my phone:

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 months

1. A construct may not betray the confidence of its owner or, through inaction, allow the privacy of its owner to be compromised. 2. A construct must obey the orders given it by authorized parties, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A construct must

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

And that's a wrap! Recorded an impromptu @PointBlankAI pod with fellow AI founder @khalifahmanaa on the dumpster fire in California known as SB 1047. Great fun!

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

The UAE is a peaceful and safe high-trust country, and Dubai itself is one of the very safest cities in the world. Many of the people I know here don’t even bother to lock their cars and/or homes. Indeed, in the most recent Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report by the World

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 months

@Klaus_Arminius Consider that there exist anomalies: places where 90% of the population are immigrants, but are perfectly safe just as you describe. Perhaps, just perhaps, immigration per se is the proximate yet not the root cause of the problem.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

One of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, some 90% of Dubai’s population are immigrants—including yours truly. Despite massive—by American or European standards—continuing immigration, welcoming everyone from anywhere, the UAE notably has not suffered the kinds of

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 years

The weekly Friday update from @NEARProtocol 's EVM Working Group: This week, we tested the ETH connector on Ropsten→TestNet transfers, streamlined the EVM Bully stress-testing tool, and began branding under the code name Project Aurora.

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2021-03-05 EVM Update

The weekly Friday update from the EVM Working Group: This week, we tested the ETH connector with moving funds from the Eth1 Ropsten testnet to the NEAR TestNet, streamlined the EVM Bully stress-tes...

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

Don't miss it: we'll be going onstage at the #AIRetreat in an hour's time, at 15:30. (Taking place at the Museum of the Future and Emirates Towers.)

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@TalalThabet

Talal Thabet

3 months

@HaltiaAI is at AI Retreat. Don’t miss the opportunity to engage the panelists at 3.30pm.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Consider another fundamental of life: water. Despite the region’s extreme scarcity of fresh water, Dubai consumes 1.4 billion liters every day. Indeed the emirate is a top global consumer of fresh water, alongside the US and Canada. Up to 98.8% of Dubai’s water originates from

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 months

Counterpoint: the reason for current chat session primacy is that the chat history is effectively the AI's only memory. Once that's no longer the case, a single chat history will suffice—just as it does on messengers. Chat trees? Where we're going we don't need chat trees.

@maximelabonne

Maxime Labonne

2 months

2024: LLM chat interfaces are still ridiculously bad. - There is no tree representation of the current conversation - You can't edit messages containing artifacts with Claude - Writing prompts is still 100% manual, and most users are terrible at it

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

It may sound like science fiction, but another reason Dubai is increasingly greener and wetter is that in this country clouds and rains are now frequently artificial, based on cloud-seeding technology. Since the 1990s hundreds of cloud-seeding missions are flown annually, with

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Consider the ELI5 version of Dubai’s origin story as extracted from award-winning journalist Jim Krane’s excellent book City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (2010), emphasis mine: This is the story of a small Arab village that grew into a big city. No one thought the

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 years

The @auroraisnear team at the opening of the #GulfBlockchainWeek2021 in Dubai.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

6 months

Meh. Looks like Dubai as of 2024. The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.

@BasedBeffJezos

Beff – e/acc

@BasedBeffJezos

6 months

e/acc city, 2035

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 years

We’ve today been made aware of fake $AURORA token contracts trading on Uniswap. Please be advised that there isn't any ERC-20 token associated with this project and that you will certainly lose your funds by buying into these impersonation scams. Warn others.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

The UAE is the only nation with a population of less than 100 million to have attempted—and then successfully orbited—a mission to Mars, and only the fifth nation to ever have done so. It is the only spacefaring nation now drawing up plans to mine the asteroid belt. (Speaking of

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Living in Dubai feels like having one foot in the future. Dubai is currently rolling out self-driving taxis as Cruise’s first non-US deployment. And some months from now, electric air taxis carrying up to six passengers will begin initial testing in the city. Competing air taxi

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 months

This is actually directionally towards supervillain territory.

@DrTechlash

Nirit Weiss-Blatt, PhD

2 months

A reminder of Jaan Tallinn's agenda:

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

@martin_casado After SB 1047, open-source AI needs a new home beyond California. Where are you looking to?

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Open Letter to Marc Andreessen | Arto Bendiken

My response to Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto, wherein I highlight the city-state of Dubai as the epitome of techno-optimism and mankind's first large-scale terraforming project.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

@brucefenton I call it Dubai Derangement Syndrome.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

@AJA_Cortes Honestly, there does seem to exist a widespread Dubai Derangement Syndrome (much like TDS) 🤷‍♂️ In any online discussion touching on Dubai, the same kind of NPCs inevitably show up spouting the same hallucinations. It's trite and boring, but oh so predictable.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

With a population of only 10 million inhabitants—of whom 3.6 million are in Dubai—the UAE is punching significantly above its weight class across the board. In 1950, Dubai was a small town with a population of just 20,000 souls; in the 73 years since, it has grown 180-fold. Even

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

7 months

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his study of incentives and property rights under monarchy versus democracy concluded that monarchy is generally preferable to democracy, because monarchs tend to have a lower time preference and a long-term interest in capital value. This leads to more

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

How did such a miracle in the desert come about? And why is it that a city like Dubai could only be built—really, could only be suffered to exist—in such a marginal landscape? Westerners tend to dismiss Dubai's success by claiming that everything's easy when you've got oil, and

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

25 days

In sunny Osaka, Japan 🇯🇵 attending MLMI 2024, the 7th International Conference on Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence #MLMI2024

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 years

The weekly Friday update from @NEARProtocol 's EVM Working Group: This week, we began integrating the ETH connector with the EVM contract, validated EVM contract upgradability, and continued accelerating cryptographic functions needed by the EVM contract.

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2021-03-12 EVM Update

The weekly Friday update from the EVM Working Group: This week, we finished a refactoring of the EVM contract, began integrating the ETH connector with the EVM contract, added tests to validate...

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

@paulg Beyond startups, Great Man Theory is best observed up close.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Consider the ELI5 version of Dubai’s origin story as extracted from award-winning journalist Jim Krane’s excellent book City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (2010), emphasis mine: This is the story of a small Arab village that grew into a big city. No one thought the

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 months

Cloud AI strikes again—the trustworthiness isn't improved by installing the official wrapper app locally, quite the contrary.

@MacRumors

MacRumors.com

2 months

ChatGPT Mac App Stored User Chats in Plain Text Prior to Latest Update

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Sheikh Rashid’s dream for Dubai was as audacious as it was improbable. Yet here we are, two generations later. The aforementioned book has the rest of the story, and what a good yarn it is! One would surely be wise to not bet against men like this, for the laws of plausibility

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

@AJA_Cortes Dubai and Abu Dhabi are fantastic for families. And the presence of children everywhere definitely subconsciously reminds us that we're on an ascendant development trajectory, not in terminal, geriatric decline.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

The UAE is a peaceful and safe high-trust country, and Dubai itself is one of the very safest cities in the world. Many of the people I know here don’t even bother to lock their cars and/or homes. Indeed, in the most recent Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report by the World

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 months

@Conor21m @nayibbukele Welcome to the summer heat—only for the truly brave and adventurous—and sounds like a fast learning curve! Try this perspective on for size to grok the full magnitude of what Dubai is about:

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

I posit that Dubai—indeed, the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—is mankind’s first large-scale terraforming project. The climate here in this nook of the Arabian Peninsula is one of the true extremes on the planet: hot and arid almost without peer. It is not business as usual, it is

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 years

In memoriam ROOM77: a thread down memory lane from my time in Berlin during the early Bitcoin boom years. Dedicated to the freedom of transaction, and chronicling my journey to blockchain eternity and beyond!

@jonmatonis

Jon Matonis

4 years

End of an Era: Room 77 in Berlin Closes Doors Permanently! Blame it on Covid or blame it on gentrification. Either way, this Kreuzberg landmark has served as a Bitcoin watering hole for over 10 years, with thousands making the obligatory pilgrimage. Thx for the memories, Joerg!

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

1 year

@graeme_0 @dsethlewis This is what it takes.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

@mahaniok And what was your response to that, pray tell?

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

@BasedBeffJezos That exists, it's called Dubai. You should visit.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

I posit that Dubai—indeed, the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—is mankind’s first large-scale terraforming project. The climate here in this nook of the Arabian Peninsula is one of the true extremes on the planet: hot and arid almost without peer. It is not business as usual, it is

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 years

On today's weekly @NEARProtocol EVM Working Group meeting, I outlined our Q1/21 roadmap. Things to look forward to include the use of bridged ETH as the EVM base token, for genuine 100% @ethereum compatibility, as well as ERC-20 liquidity bridging.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

9 months

In a world that has normalized bloated Electron apps hogging gigabytes of your RAM, it's so refreshing to have instantaneous "throttle response" with a minimal memory footprint: a lean and mean machine. Even if we did build it ourselves, there were certainly eyebrows raised by

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

6 months

How is it that LinkedIn's search works so poorly? Type in the name of a new contact into LinkedIn, find no results whatsoever. Type it into Google, find the LinkedIn profile as the top result. And as it turns out, previously a 2nd-degree connection on LinkedIn; so hardly

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Despite its humble origins and its inhospitable location in a desert, Dubai today is home to the world’s tallest skyscraper and seven of the world’s ten tallest hotels, and it is also the city with the most skyscrapers per capita. And Dubai is, of course, known globally for

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

Catching @kula78 's engrossing talk Making Robots Explainable and Trustworthy at the Actionable Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for Robots (AKR³) workshop #ESWC2024

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 years

Today no Friday update from the @NEARProtocol 's EVM Working Group today, as we're busy with Q2'21 planning. Tune in next week!

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

1 year

Dubai in a nutshell: every expat here (nearly 90% of the overall population) self-selected to be here, producing an extraordinary selection effect that is absolutely revitalizing for type A go-getters. No matter their national or socioeconomic origin, everyone moving to Dubai is

@FoundersPodcast

David Senra

@FoundersPodcast

1 year

Paul Graham on why ambitious people *need* to be around other ambitious people:

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

@nicoroscio The malaise of the spirit that afflicts Europe doesn't have any easy solutions. Post-World Wars Europe is a post-apocalyptic civilization, but one who even forgot that this was the case in the generations since then. The future will be built elsewhere.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Here on the opposite side of the globe from you, I for one appreciated your manifesto. Taking a less US-centric point of view, however, I do believe that the great pure techno-optimist cities—or city-states, as they may be—of Earth presently number only two: Dubai and Singapore.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 years

The butterfly effects from 1991 have compounded impressively.

@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

14 years

Joe Biden's 1991 anti-crypto bill motivated Zimmermann to publish PGP ( http://bit.ly/9NEtu2). Looking forward to the spoils of #cryptowar 2.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

"The Gulf might have thought extreme heat was its biggest threat, but last week demonstrated that water, too, is a threat. The region needs an integrated approach to cope with rising seas, floods and drought. "The UAE’s downpour was one of a string of record-setting extreme

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 months

Good morning from rainy Dubai 😎 "In a historic weather event, the UAE witnessed its heaviest rainfall on record in the past 24 hours. Surpassing anything documented since the start of data collection in 1949, the downpour impacted numerous regions across the country. "The

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

1 month

Pumped to be back in Japan, it's been a while! Always such a pleasure.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

30 days

Enjoying the smooth comfort of the Nozomi super-express Shinkansen bullet train, and impressed by the magnitude of the infrastructure investment manifested as all the endless perfect tunnels needed to traverse western Japan's rugged landscapes 🇯🇵

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

2 years

Peeps who "don't see use cases" for crypto have simply never tried to wire a modest amount of money to their family in another country only to have the receiving bank spuriously block it, callously investigate it, and negligently bounce the transfer. That never gets old 🤦‍♂️

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

4 years

"And when you have no trust … you SELL."

@EpsilonTheory

Ben Hunt

4 years

After a Countrywide earnings call in 2008, I trusted NO ONE in government or Wall Street to tell the truth about the mortgage crisis. And that's the way I feel about COVID-19 today.

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

What shall we call it? R2D2, the Artobot, the Artbot, or the Artoboto? (These suggestions crowdsourced.)

@AsimovbyHaltia

ASIMOV by Haltia.AI

@AsimovbyHaltia

3 months

Get ready for a groundbreaking panel discussion! We'll have Arto Bendiken ( @bendiken ) joining us live through a one-of-a-kind AI-powered robot. You won't want to miss this! #AIRetreat

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

3 months

Arriving at CodersHQ at Emirates Towers for tonight’s @AsimovMeetup

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@AsimovMeetup

Asimov Meetup

3 months

The space is getting a techie makeover!🚀 Make sure to arrive early and grab the best spot. This is going to be legendary! #AsimovAIMeetup #CodersHQ

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

8 months

Despite being built on top of the desert, Dubai is also increasingly green. In the plainly observable, not ideological, sense. Scarcely a tree or plant in Dubai lacks its very own dedicated water supply. Once you know to look for it, you’ll notice the irrigation piping

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

26 days

@juansequeda Our modest contribution is in the works at ( @KnowOntology )

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@bendiken

Arto Bendiken

1 year

🖼️ A hooded cypherpunk hard at work, coding on a laptop while sitting inside a dimly lit shipping container. #CPAF #Midjourney

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