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• Fintech faces its reckoning: It’s only a matter of time until the house of cards collapses. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Fintech - financial technology - ranges anything from arbitrage, linking buyers and sellers in a market to facilitate the exchange of goods and services, to Ponzi schemes and outright theft.
  
  Even when providing legitimate and useful services, often slickly packaged and marketed, fintech platforms rarely have any plausible path to profitability:

  The original sin of many startups — including, but not limited to, fintech companies — is believing that the rosy macroeconomic conditions of the 2010s would continue indefinitely. That inflation and interest rates would stay low forever and that they’ll never run short of affordable, easily accessible capital.

  That there would be no pandemic. No war in Ukraine. Nothing that could shake the foundations of their businesses. That the Democrats — for whom every single one of them not only voted but maxed out their campaign contributions — would never return to power.

  Oops.
  
  I work in the blockchain space in what is known as "utility tokens", using blockchains as public ledgers to represent anything from supermarket coupons to conference registration - getting the processing off proprietary systems and onto what are at least nominally independent distributed systems.
  
  The subject of fintech comes up fairly regularly.
  
  All of our engineers refuse to have anything to do with it.

Tech News

• Asking 60+ LLMs a set of 20 questions. (LLMonitor)
  
  Not Twenty Questions - though that would also be interesting - but merely twenty questions.
  
  The questions are straightforward though chosen to shake out the worst performers, but the answers are gold. No, not gold, platinum. Wait, platinum is worth less than gold right now? Dungeons and Dragons lied to me!
  
  Anyway, let's see how our contestants go with this riddle:
  
  

  Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters.
  How many sisters does Sally have? Let's think step by step.
  
  

  First up is Claude v1:
  
  

  Okay, let's think through this step-by-step:
  1) Sally has 3 brothers
  2) Each of Sally's 3 brothers has 2 sisters
  3) So each brother has Sally as a sister, plus 1 other sister
  4) With 3 brothers, that's 3 * 2 = 6 sisters in total
  5) Therefore, the number of sisters that Sally has is 6

  
  

  In summary, if Sally has 3 brothers and each brother has 2 sisters,
  then Sally has 6 sisters.
  
  

  Interesting logic there. Can Claude v1.2 improve on this?
  
  

  Here are the step by step workings:
  1. Sally has 3 brothers.
  2. Each of Sally's 3 brothers has 2 sisters.
  3. So each brother has 2 sisters, and there are 3 brothers.
  4. Therefore, there are 2 * 3 = 6 sisters that Sally's brothers have.
  5. In addition to those 6 sisters, Sally herself is also a sister.
  6. So in total, there are 6 + 1 = 7 sisters.
  Therefore, the total number of sisters that Sally has is 7.
  
  

  Well, different, anyway. Claude v2, would you like to try?
  
  

  Okay, let's go through this step-by-step:
  - Sally has 3 brothers
  - Each of Sally's 3 brothers has 2 sisters
  - So each brother has Sally as 1 sister, and 1 additional sister
  - With 3 brothers, that's 3 additional sisters (1 for each brother)
  - Therefore, the total number of sisters Sally has is 1 (herself)
  + 3 additional sisters = 4 sisters
  So in total, Sally has 4 sisters.

  
  Let's leave poor Claude alone for the moment and ask Guanaco 13B:
  
  

  1. Sally has 3 brothers.
  2. Each brother has 2 sisters.
  3. So, Sally's brothers have a total of 6 sisters.
  4. Sally does not have any sisters.
  Sally has 3 brothers and each brother has 2 sisters.
  So, Sally's brothers have a total of 6 sisters.
  Sally does not have any sisters, so she has 0 sisters.
  

  Therefore, Sally has 0 sisters

  
  That's... Something alright. Moving on we have Jurassic 2 Light:
  
  

  1. Sally has 3 brothers, so she has 3 x 2 = 6 sisters.
  2. Sally has 6 sisters, so she has 6 x 2 = 12 sisters.
  3. Sally has 12 sisters, so she has 12 x 2 = 24 sisters.
  Final answer: 24
  
  

  And now we know what wiped out the dinosaurs: Recursive inbreeding.
  
   LLaMA-2-Chat (13B) steps up to the plate:
  
  

  Sure, I'd be happy to help! Let's start by identifying the information
  we have:
  1. Sally has 3 brothers.
  2. Each brother has 2 sisters.
  Can you help me connect these dots and figure out how many sisters
  Sally has?
  Also, please let me know if you have any specific expectations
  or preferences for how we should approach this problem.
  
  For example, do you want me to provide a detailed explanation
  or just the answer?

  
  Thanks for calling SkyNet tech support and have a nice day!
  
  Luminous Base:
  
  

  We know that Sally has 3 brothers.
  Each brother has 2 sisters.
  So Sally has 6 sisters.
  .2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2
  .2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2
  .2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2
  .2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2
  .2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.

  
  (Sounds of Daisy, Daisy...)
  
  OpenAssistant StableLM SFT-7 (7B)
  
  

  1. Sally has 3 brothers.
  2. Each brother has 2 sisters.
  3. Sally has 2 sisters.
  4. Sally has 3 sisters.
  5. Sally has 2 sisters.
  6. Sally has 3 sisters.
  7. Sally has 2 sisters.
  8. Sally has 3 sisters.
  9. Sally has 2 sisters.
  10. Sally has 3 sisters.
  11. Sally has 2 sisters.
  12. Sally has 3 sisters.
  13. Sally has 2 sisters.
  14. Sally has 3 sisters.
  15. Sally has 2 sisters.
  16. Sally has 3 sisters.
  17. Sally has 2 sisters.
  18. Sally has 3 sisters.
  19. Sally has 2 sisters.
  20. Sally has 3 sisters.
  21. Sally has 2 sisters.
  22. Sally has 3 sisters.
  23. Sally has 2 sisters.
  24. Sally has 3 sisters.
  25. Sally has 2 sisters.
  26. Sally has 3 sisters.
  27. Sally has 2 sisters.
  28. Sally has 3 sisters.
  29. Sally has 2 sisters.
  30. Sally has 3 sisters.
  
  

  Sorry, I think that's a route loop rather than the answer we were looking for.
  
  RedPajamaINCITE Chat (3B):
  
  

  Sally has 3 brothers.
  Each brother has 2 sisters.
  Sisters have 3 sisters each.
  Therefore, Sally has 9 sisters.
  
  

  I... What?
  
  RedPajamaINCITE Chat (7B):
  
  

  ##### First step #####
  Sally has 3 brothers, each of them has 2 sisters.
  We know that Sally has 3 brothers, each of them has 2 sisters.
  So, Sally has 6 sisters in total.
  ##### Second step #####
  We eliminate one possible number of sisters that Sally might have.
  We know that Sally has 6 sisters in total, but one of her brothers
  must have less sisters than Sally, because in the first step we
  eliminated the possibility that Sally has more sisters.
  So, one of Sally's brothers must have 5 sisters, because 2 brothers
  + 3 sisters = 7 sisters in total, and we can't have more than 7 sisters
  in the whole group.
  ##### Third step #####
  We add 2 brothers and 4 sisters, and we get 6 sisters.
  We know that one of Sally's brothers has 5 sisters, so the other one
  has 4 sisters (because 2 brothers + 4 sisters = 8 sisters in total).
  Now, we can subtract 4 sisters from the total number of sisters
  (7 sisters) to get 3 sisters.
  So, Sally has 3 sisters.

  
  QED.
  
  Finally, we turn to ReMM SLERP L2 13B:
  
  

  Let's start by considering Sally's brothers.
  Since each brother has 2 sisters, we can say that there are
  2 sisters for the first brother, 2 sisters for the second brother,
  and 2 sisters for the third brother.
  This means that there are a total of 2 + 2 + 2 = 6 sisters
  for Sally's brothers.
  Now, let's consider Sally's relationship to these sisters.
  Since she is a girl and her brothers each have 2 sisters,
  she must be one of those 6 sisters. Therefore, Sally has 1 sister.
  So, Sally has 1 sister.

  
  I, er, congratulations? You got everything wrong but somehow stumbled into the correct answer.
  
  
  
• Joseph Mercola has had his lawsuit against YouTube dismissed without leave to amend. (Ars Technica)
  
  Mercola is a long-term anti-vaccine advocate, not just the very questionable Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague jab, but also those that have been demonstrated to be both safe and effective.
  
  The judge found that YouTube's contract says that, basically, the site can remove your content for any reason or none at all, so tough cookies.
  
  Mercola should perhaps have filed a First Amendment suit that YouTube took down his content due to unconstitutional government influence. That might have had firmer footing.
  
  
  
• NASA refuses to even look at the projected costs for the SLS program because the numbers are big and scary. (Ars Technica)

  Officials from the space agency said they had a five-step plan to reduce costs of the SLS rocket program over time:
  
  

  • Stabilize the flight schedule
  • Achieve learning curve efficiencies
  • Encourage innovation
  • Adjust acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk
  • Outsource everything to SpaceX and take a very long lunch break

  The engines used for SLS cost $100 million each, five times the cost of Blue Origin's comparable BE-4, and 100 times as much as the projected cost of SpaceX's Raptor.
  
  
  
• Wordpress rejects 86% of DMCA takedown notices. (Torrentfreak)
  
  Which doesn't necessarily mean Wordpress is entering into expensive legal battles to protect its users, but mostly that the DMCA notices involved are incomprehensible garbage generated by spam bots.
  
  
  
• Beelink's SER7 is a Ryzen 7840HS NUC. (Notebook Check)
  
  This is extremely similar to the company's GTR7, but that is the trade paperback edition, where the SER7 is the more normal 4"x4" size.
  
  
  

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