When I started teaching at a medical school in 2018, a couple of friends and I put together a web page with which to inflict pain and suffering on the MD/PhDs there: “Bitcoin v. Medical School”. Here’s what a session looks like:
There was a threshold of $150 billion that, if reached, would point out that the user’s med school tuition could have, if invested in Bitcoin, made him/her/zir/them (the medical school in question is Harvard and, of course, it was officially gender expansive at the time) the richest human on our beloved, yet imperiled, planet:
Despite not having made any money from being the Father of Modern AI Systems (Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015), Elon is still so rich as to make the $150 billion threshold absurd. (Even without Elon, the tech boom and inflation have pushed roughly 8 additional guys over that threshold.) Today I went into Emacs and updated it to $1 trillion. Just another way in which Elon’s extreme and unconscionable wealth makes life painful for the rest of us.
(Note that while Emacs is popularly associated with Richard Stallman, a Massachusetts resident canceled for pointing out that Jeffrey Epstein’s activities would have been legal in Massachusetts (age of consent: 16), the text editor was actually originally built by Guy Steele. Thus, we may use Emacs without any moral conflict over using the work of someone who has been canceled. Separately, could we all get on board with supporting the Iranian missile and nuclear weapons programs if they would chant “Death to vi” instead of “Death to America”?)
Related:
- Elon Musk Net Worth Tracker (in the /envy/ subdir)
Phil, so Proud to learn that you are a member of my Harvard Meritocracy, and a Medical Doctor like Dr. Jill Biden too…I never knew!
Claudine: you were my inspiration. Prior to becoming aware of your spectacular career at Harvard, it never would have occurred to me that a person with zero knowledge of medicine could become a teacher at Harvard Medical School.
I admire Gavin Andresen (ne Bell) more for his work at Silicon Graphics than bitcoin. My admiration doesn’t pay the bills, though, even my own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Andresen
VRML kind of flopped, IMO because it wasn’t as dirt simple as HTML in the early days. Imagine communicating in 3D as well as these 1.5D JavaScript text boxes (which are about 1% of the power of Emacs running on TOPS-20 in 1985). I’m not sure which markup language this box I’m in speaks. (Newspeak Markup Language? Would be fitting.)