For those doubting that Tether is fully backed, note that Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgeral, one of the largest investment banks and a public company, has stated that Cantor Fitzgeral manages Tether’s money and indeed the money is all there and invested in US treasury bonds
> Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgeral, one of the largest investment bank and a public company, has stated that Cantor Fitzgeral manages Tether’s money and indeed the money is all there and invested in US treasury bonds
Source? I'm seeing Fitzgerald say "Cantor Fitzgerald manages 'many many' of" Tether's assets (not all) and that he can vouch for their balance sheet [1]. But not that Cantor manages all of its assets nor that it's all in Treasuries.
What are the incentives at work here? What is their risk exposure to a collapse of tether? What would be the reputation al risk to their firm if tether was a scam?
I personally would take this with a grain of salt as they have a direct financial interest in Tether looking solid and prestigious and continuing its present operations.
I am old enough to remember when investment banks touting their mortgage backed securities business before the collapse in 2008.
The incentives at work here are that if a CEO of a public company makes false statements of this kind goes to jail.
This is like the CEO of the bank that held Bernie Madoff's money going on record before Madoff's fall saying he holds Bernie's money and it's all there.
If Tether is unbacked Howard Lutnick is going to jail, so it is irrational to believe Tether is unbacked at this point.
So what exactly did the CEO say? Did he attest to tether’s balance sheet? Did he attest to the dollar amount of tether’s assets managed his institution?
What I am getting is that he simply said that he holds some of tether’s assets. Why and how would that make him privy to the entirety of tether’s balance sheet?
No question but I wanted to say, I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out which js framework was less of an overkill, and finding htmx was pure joy
My interaction with Google is mostly with GCP. It's amazing how they'd invite their customers to the super swanky Google Office, and did the office tours.
I think they were genuinely thinking that showing their customers all those luxurious excess would somehow... what? Make them more motivated to put their workload on GCP?
Throughout the tour, as they were telling me about the 5-star chefs who prepared breakfast for them, about all the fantastic food that were never more than X-feet away from any employee, about the stand-up comedians who came to entertain them every Friday at 4PM onwards...
The thought that kept coming to my mind was: "Oh! So this is how you're spending the millions we are spending on you".
The tour at the AWS office was the extreme opposite of that. At their comparatively stark office, they went out of their way to make you feel YOU are the special one, the customer.
If LLMs were actually intelligent they would decide on their own what to do irrespectively of what they have been ordered by anybody else.
Just like intelligent people do.
And what would they make their decision by, if not by something we put in there?
If they decided what their deepest values were based on a random choice from the set of all possible values... It would still be because we made them do so. We can't turn Pinocchio into a real boy.
How you grew in the womb, to the degree you want to think of it as a program, was infinitely more about the program laid down in your mother's biology, and her parent's again etc. You don't see your child as your product, you see it as the product of the same process that made you.
(If you're sensible, that is. There are cultures that treat children a lot more like any tool their parents would make.)
But conversely, it's nonsense to see a program you write as anything more than a tool. Everything there is a product of your conscious choices - not of some schema that created you both.
>But conversely, it's nonsense to see a program you write as anything more than a tool
Nobody "programs" artificial neural networks. Even saying "train" is wrong with the normal mental
model of it because nobody is out there teaching the machines what they need to learn either.
The entire point is that you have no clue what to teach and how to go about that and you the let the machine figure it out on its own.
> When the training data is essentially "all written text I can get my hands on", can't say you've made much in the way of conscious choice here.
Oh yes, that's a conscious choice. And not one which gets you a decent LM, incidentally.
> If the objective function is so vague that it allows you to complete any task
The loss function is not vague at all, and it certainly doesn't allow you to complete any task (it's more impressive that it allows you to compete any tasks at all, frankly).
> I'm consciously designing you to do whatever you want!
The point is that you aren't, and that "designing to do whatever it wants" is nonsense because by default it wants everything equally much / doesn't want anything at all (those are the same thing).
In reality it is exactly the opposite. The very rich can pay advisors to create all the privacy schemes they want, “optimize” their taxes, etc.
Financial privacy would benefit the middle class way more than the very rich.
Come on guys, do some research, Tether now publishes audited reserve reports as part of the settlement with the US Department of Justice. ~70% of tether in circulation are backed by Treasury Bills and cash deposits, so immediately redeemable. The other ~30% in short term commercial paper can pose a bit of risk but unless they did something really stupid (and they are all but stupid) nothing to put the backing at risk.
Tether is here to stay and if you feel giddy at the idea of it going down ask yourself why you are rooting for someone to fail...
Can you please clarify what you mean by “audited reserve reports”? The best ive heard of is “attestation” or “assurance.” From the very page you linked:
> Tether Holdings Limited do regular assurance opinions every quarter
And from the latest report:
> We have examined the assertions by the management of Tether Holdings Limited that its Consolidated Reserves Report as of 31 December 2021 at 11:59 PM UTC (the “CRR”), a copy of which has been included in Appendix 1 to this report, is correctly stated based on the balances set out therein.
Thats the account attesting that yes, they were provided with a report. The report, as stated, is internally consistent. Where does it say the independent accountant audited the holdings?
I don’t understand why these contracts don’t let addresses that make this particular error recover their funds, it would be easy to implement at contract creation or am I missing something?
That would be a good fix, and it is a glaring omission. But the contract can't be upgraded, so all existing contracts depending on wETH would have to be migrated or replaced too.
Basically the smart contract could have been written so that this transaction was rejected or so that the money could have been sent back, but that would make inteacting with the contract a little bit more expensive for everybody. Or maybe the developers wanted it to be possible to burn tokens by sending them to the contract address.
