Capt-RogerOver

You are not considering the value that very old individuals might contribute (and in fact do so) in many sophisticated societies with language: teaching of younger individuals and also acquiring deep complex knowledge about life, which can be simply impossible to do if they had short lives (they would just not have time to learn any of it). In many times of our history the resources weren't that scarce to begin with. Primitive tribes don't need to dig for rare metals to make their Teslas, they could survive and thrive on very abundant resources.

You had an error there about Bitcoin Core (github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin). It supports SegWit: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-core-0141-segwi...

This guy is truly a legend. A force of nature. "Windows 2000 Demo It is done in an unusual way: the browser runs a Javascript VM, which runs x86emu, which runs Linux, which runs QEMU, which runs Windows. "

If you knew the technical details of blockchains, you would not think that. And yes, the process IS much more than wasing massive amounts of energy.

> 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this

You are welcome to try. If you do come up with a less waisful solution you will be able to create your own altcoin and will make billions worth of dollars on it. Some very smart people have tried in the past and are still trying.

While it is of course going to be slower, "it's not even close" is a judgement claim. The tests you have link talk about 1.6-2-3 times the difference. In a lot of applications the performance hit is going to be worth gaining access to the whole Java ecosystem of libraries. Also the performance is very likely to increase with newer versions.

This is very cool. You can basically even call all Java classes (and the other way around) from that JavaScript! (And reliably limit the classes that can be used if you want to execute JS in a safe environment.) Why isn't this used more often? (Or is it used more often?)

It's already possible with some unofficial libraries.

While there is sure some enforceability, like he says, it has to be much harder to do because there is no way these ICOs actually have as much legal text written out and agreed upon by all participants. This has to mean that it will be much easier for dishonest actors to get their wishes with ICOs, as opposed to with regular LTDs and such.

More interestingly, there seems to be no real answer for the question you have asked. What is the real value, if the courts and legalities are what people need in this situations, and those things are already in place? Sometimes it really seems like the enthusiasm of most honest people coming into ICOs is fueled by the fact that they don't understand this. They don't comprehend what stocks are really about: making sure that the state can aid in contract enforcing.

Think otherwise? Please prove me wrong. There just don't seem to be any real industrial value in ICOs, we already have stock technology.

If you can't learn how to use Swing, it means you are a bad programmer. It does not depend on your age. You might not be willing to learn, or have some other reasons, but claiming that Swing is somehow so old that young people are not able to learn it is just plain false and completely unsubstantiated.

I think your experience reflects that basic gist I've gotten from most professionals: ORMs are complicated and convoluted because they provide a solution for a very complicated problem. If you are somewhat new and don't understand things, it's easy for you to see the few problems introduced by ORMs and think that it means that the whole concept is just unnecessary bloat. With more experience and wisdom, you understand that the few quirks of ORMs are a necessary evil for having a software that solves such a complex and flexible task.

Where are you getting the information? There absolutely are other visas. The ESTA is just an easier way to do it, and as such, can sometimes be more limited. You can also get normal visa and get other vetting procedures and likely other outcomes.

He seems to have tried to enter USA using ESTA. ESTA is not a visa, it's a visa-waiver program. It's specifically created as an easier method of entering a country, but as a trade-off, it says in the terms that they can deny it for any reason with no questions. This does not mean that the person cannot enter the country per se, it just means they need to apply for a real visa.

"Mechanical Sympathy"/empathy is a very good expression, kudos!

The term is "Consensus Reality".

It's pretty obvious that a self-driving camera-based software would take advantage of headlights on a car, just like a human does? So it never has to drive in full darkness.

While direct support from the creators of TF would be the beste thing, be sure to check out all the addon options, like https://github.com/hughperkins/tf-coriander

With all do respect for your personal health choices, that's not science nor "evidence". Just because some culture does something, doesn't mean it's the optimal way of things, especially nutrition. It's just something you have chosen to base your life on.

There are also tribes that actively drink alcohol or even consume natural opiates all the time. What's your point?

Can you link of that evidence? In form of scientific studies (quality ones)? This is not a general "you can't prove your point, you don't have science". I'm actually interested. I have been looking for hard science in this area and have seen none that would back up your claims.

Openface (probably state-of-the-art currently? If I haven't missed anything) uses a 128-dimensional unit hypersphere to represent a face identity. They have likely optimized this, so it's the dimensionality that works well in practice, not too large, not too small. It's perhaps a bit bigger than it has to be, but it cannot be too big either because that would very likely lead to overfitting. So that's 128*sizeof(float) = 512bytes = 4096 bits of information. Kinda like an RSA private key :).

Based on my life experience it is absolutely true that average people work much less if not in an office or other organized workplace. Many times even by their own accounts. This does not mean that there is a minority that can work wherever, or that work even better at home. It all depends on their interest, on the job etc. But yes, offices provide a lot of productivity boosts.

A bit off-topic perhaps, but you misunderstand the purpose of mining (hash calculations). They are not meaningless by any measure. Calculating hashes is required for the network to prevent double-spends. There is no other known technology that can do the same thing in a distributed network. This property of the network (it being distributed), along with the basic functionality of a currency has obviously been valued by the market. This means that there are people out there who gain from using it. This means that calculating hashes is valuable and has utility for people. The way that utility is implemented is just a technical design question.

If your statement was correct, one could easily extend it and say that Internet is consuming a whole lot of power for the meaningless purpose of powering the switches and routers that make up the backbone of the network. That all that energy goes to waste to have some machines standing somewhere in a datacenter that noone sees.

Obviously, those machines transform the energy into practical utility, and so do ASICs calculating Bitcoin hashes.

Yes well if I were to put my response in a more politically correct manner, it would be something like: a statement "It's generally understood by technology experts that SSLv1 is insecure for most purposes and should be avoided" - that's one thing, with it's own level of certainty. When someone is saying "it's understood by economy experts that inflation of 2% is best for the economy" - there is an order of magnitude less certainty in that statement, because the whole field is just one giant experiment, where they make up things as they go, while having little to no real means of critically measuring their results. I don't think that economy experts are necessarily doing a poor job, it's just that the field itself is much more uncertain. And since we are discussing their performance here, it's only fair that this would come up.

In that case I apologize. I have misunderstood the quote.

This is not some general consensus, this is a viewpoint that exists. Among many others.

Also this:

> Elaborate controls to make sure that currency is not produced in greater numbers is not something any other currency, like the dollar or the euro, has

Is very obviously incorrect. Fed and the congress have absolutely been producing new money in great numbers without any controls by the people. Ever seen the national debt watch? If you have not researched how Fed works and how (and when) new money has been produced during recent decades, you should really do that. You will be scared.

Generally seen as positive by whom? A few people calling themselves economical scientists who have managed to come up with a jargon complex enough to not be understood by an average person, and thus make this average person think that he needs other people who do understand economics? There is no "science" behind this, it's all a giant experiment. There is no true "data" showing that you can really manipulate inflation like they have been doing, and that it will somehow make the economy better.

Fractional reserve banking is exactly what Bitcoin has evolved to prevent :) But yes, if nothing else, the MtGox fiasco has showed that fractional reserve can in reality function in Bitcoin world for a while.

It's all ultimately debatable of course, but for a lot of crypto enthusiasts, fixed money supply IS a feature, and a great one.

Two main points I see lacking in your analysis:

1. The deflationary spiral is presented as some "fact". There is no evidence that this is what happens if there is a fixed supply. It's absolutely logical that people WILL spend less if they know the money will be worth more next year. But how much less? Is that a bad thing? In many ways, all the recent economical troubles have been caused by exactly people spending too much, spending the money they don't have. Maybe deflationary supply is exactly what is needed for people to buy what they need, not go on buy-all-sprees just because they know their money won't be worth anything soon (as it is now in the inflationary model).

2. World history regarding the price of gold. As an example from Creature From Jekyll Island (a book), in ancient Rome, to buy a custom tailor-made suit and a pair of custom-made shoes cost 1 ounce of gold. This is approximately the same order of magnitute of what it costs today, by today's gold prices.

All while Gold is, by many standards, is deflationary as well. (Well you might say that new gold bricks are mined, but it's very limited. In the same way new bitcoins are also still mined and will be so for hundreds of years.) So what happened? If fixed supply is such a bad thing, why don't people just hoard gold and the price is through the roof?

On the contrary, the history shows many examples where after societies went from the gold standard to the more "fluid" money supply, when governments started to mix other metals in the coins, when they removed gold at all - that's when the economic troubles started. Human-controlled money supply has proven itself time and time again non-functional. The people in positions of this power cannot avoid abusing this power.

There are a lot of things that point to the notion that it is in fact the "deflationary spiral scare" that is a joke, and a fixed supply is what is needed in the long run to make money work most effectively.

Your stance is completely true. In theory.

In practice the situation is very different, because noone knows (or has any way of knowing) what objective reality is, and whether one's beliefs are "false" or not. Yes, we do have the scientific method and some ways of trying to figure things out, but ultimately it's a question of choice of right mindset. The right framework. An experiment might get some data within a framework. It cannot give you a framework.

With the belief "africans are humans" example, we might all agree on that. However on the beliefs like "if it feels hard to learn this skill, it just means I'm not cut out for this" versus "I can learn anything, universe is friendly and will ultimately give me what I need, I'll keep trying to learn this" - something like that will give you hard time if you're doing solely by scientific method and if you think that you can even know whether the belief is truthful to some "objective reality" or not. Both of the stances can be shown to be "truth" or "false", and they they will yield so different results in the personal life of a human that chooses to acquire them. Is believing one of them is self-deception? Maybe it's believing the other that is self-deception?

>> I'm very wary of interpretation motivated for pleasure as opposed to clarity and truth.

And it's very interesting how that has been working out for you? In most people that I've studied it does not lead to a particularly happy life. (Not just stable, but happy.)

I think the core issue here is that in the internal world of humans' souls, there is no such thing as "clarity and truth". It does not work that way. Something like pleasure (but concepts of love, compassion, greatfulness, and others can give even better results) are just better suited. Because in the areas where they are used (the happiness and enlightenment) those things are just easier to find. Concepts of "truths" on the other hand are notoriously elusive and in many ways simply non-existant. What is your life, a tragedy of stoicism? A pointless nihilistic movie? An enlightened miracle? Which one is the "truth"?

There is a lot of discussion about definitions of Free Will. If you define which one of them you are operating upon, then perhaps we can continue discussion. So far I'm not sure what you're trying to debate :/.

I am assuming your full definition is not "Free Will is the capacity to have done differently given the same situation.", because that definition has a lot of problems: How do you define "same" situation? In our life there are no two cases which can be called "same situation". There are no 2 same humans, there are no 2 same time instants, there are no two same life situations, etc.? So what is the point of having this definition? At the very least, it's very non-scientific?