539 karma · joined December 29, 2013
I'll talk about it in person with people I know at work or I'd mention it on my old blog - but I don't want to risk it to the "unwashed masses".
But maybe I'm being too cautious - it is pretty in-depht here. That alone might dissuade most of the shitposters. And the karma-requirements for downvoting seem sufficient.
Maybe you intended to say this, then I'm really curious about your perspective?
He goes through how it used to be done before hooks and how easily it can be done now.
I've been through a few playlists with higher production value, but for me, this list just contained the right stuff.
Edit: Ah - I just noticed, it is only there on some.
But downvoting you is just as counterproductive as burning the devil's advocate and you have my upvote. I hope people will get a hold of their emotions.
I've just spent a month doing a script I thought I could do in a weekend. I didn't realize several of the difficulties inherent in the data, I didn't realize I'd have to up my game with regard to techniques in shuffling data and I didn't know I'd run into so many quirks in the programming language.
I didn't know what I didn't know. That's why I guessed wrong.
In everything you haven't done before, you don't know what you don't know - and only a small portion of those things could have been realized by spending some hours researching the work I needed to do. Those didn't pop up on my radar until I had to solve them :(
But that knowledge isn't without value. Knowing that it is doing stuff you haven't done before that is risky (timewise) means you can underscore when you have a high-risk assignment.
Seen from Earth, it'll be around 13 years (takes a year to got close to c and another to decelerate - that is two years to travel roughly a lightyear, then 11 to travel 11).
I wonder how long it'd take, seen from the perspective of the ship, if we had an engine capable of delivering a constant 1g acceleration.
That's the way we'll want to travel, after all.
https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-no...
AFAIK Dick always wrote about "what is actually real?", and in this book, it's about empathy and wanting things to be real. He manages to incorporate several levels.
Animals, replicants, spouses and God. What about life-affirming replicants, what about deplorable humans? It is impressively thorough!
It's not an easy book to grasp (for me at least). My interpretations is that the "other's'" status is about our recognition through wanting other to want something and how difficult that is to accept and align.
If "the other" isn't going to want to recognize itself in your desires, the relationsship isn't real.
At that point, I think the subject has transcended robots.
There's a lot of money to be made in making weapons if there's a war. And the US is constantly waging wars, rarely with victory-conditions thought out in advance.
As long as the money-makers continue to find excuses rather than reasons for waging war, I think there's solid grounds for not wanting to participate.
> Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change.
To me, this part comes off as implicitly defeatist. I don't think "people" change, and while general education makes a difference, it isn't a solution we can rely on on its own (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment).
But I think we can make a difference when shaping how people communicate on the internet. Facebook is - as I see it - made to make us interact in the most basic, emotional way, so the company can farm our dispositions. That doesn't make for healthy conversation.
If we shaped and popularized the means of being social on the internet in a more responsible way, we might see people acting in a less soulcrushing manner.
The trick, of course, is to make people like such a social platform.
The way we see it, unions are best used when there is a power discrepancy between employer and employee. In the end, your value as an employee is how much it costs to replace you. Simple as that.
So if you are educated in a specialized field, you have bargaining power (and you don't need a union). If you are working in a more generalist area, you have none whatsoever - it is an illusion (exception being if the demographics means 100% employment).
What the union does is of course to band generalists together so they have strike power. That sucks for the company. But what the Danish unions tend to do is demand eduction, lifting the generalist work into a more specialized position. You can always get good at a job.
This means that the company may have to pay a more expensive salary, but get a much improved worker and/or product. Paying 50% extra for twice the productivity is a good investments, even if you have to pay for some of the education of the former generalist.
So rather than just demand more pay, the unions demand more education and higher standards. They also demand better pay, of course - but in the end they are interested in many members working rather than few members getting ridiculous payments.
Mature unions are good for the economy. Corrupt or immature unions can be a terrible ball-and-chain for a society.
It is like being in a silent city; wrong.
In my opinion, yes. That is my culture and I stand by it.
But my point is that Danes aren't inherently better. It isn't like Scandinavians are some kind of master race with genes of goodness and kind hearts.
It is about growing and maintaining a culture and system of warranted trust, and that isn't easy. But having said that, it is just work. Every nation can do it if they set their mind to it.
I think this article gets something right, pointing out trust. Another word would be "solidarity" - believing you 'owe' your fellow countryman and that you are on the same team. What's good for you is good for me.
In Denmark, we pay something like 50% tax but we also get a lot of things covered by our state which other countries let the individuals get through expensive insurance.
This means that if my neighbour get rich, I'm happy since that means a better school for my (and his) children, help for my (and his) old parents, roads that gets fixed etc. (Edit: some of the money goes to the state and EU, while a healthy chunk stays in the municipality - this keeps the money close)
My point: it only works if people are indeed on the same team.
That is why big nations are a detriment to this model. If the taxes disappear into black holes, negligent waste and corruption the system crumbles quickly. And as we all know, it takes much longer time to build trust that to kill it. It is a constant battle (which right now, it feels like we're losing, but that doesn't matter for this post).
Can big nations like the U.S. copy this? Well, Denmark is about the size of your average state. So yeah, if each state made an effort to make the public sector make sense internally on state level, it could.
I don't think it will, though. The cultural gap is too wide and expecting people to always be looking out for number one isn't seen as a bad thing.
Just remember that Danes/Scandinavians aren't better people than others (except Swedes; we're ALL better than Swedes!). It is a matter of choice and goals.
I used this ancient video to get going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fatbs4eTdJE
This is where it almost gets profound. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt pointed out, in his "On Bullshit", that the greatest danger isn't lack of truth or even direct falsehoods - it is when we give up searching for truth, or don't care about speaking truthfully. I.e. Bullshit.
However, whatever the people can do to demand rigour and educate themselves on the matters, pales next to a media trying to hold itself to standards. When the media gives up, we are in dire straits indeed, if not utterly lost.
Where I am from in Europe, we have pretty good media standards. But at least one of our biggest newspapers is actively working to muddle the waters for a party.
Without being any kind of expert, other nations do not seem so well off.
I didn't like its overly biblical take on the universe with replicants as angels and Wallace as an old testament God, Luv an allusion to Lucifer.
Joi, on the other hand, could have been a high point. We'd have several "layers" of real with a hologram, an old Nexus 6 replicant like K and the new obedient replicants like Luv and her ilk.
But that vein was (AFAIK) just left as a gutpunch to K by the commercial hologram and didn't feel like the central theme in any way. For me, the "you play beautifully" line was the lynchpin of the old movie.
Having said all that, I only got to see it once and I may have missed something. I was awed by the movie back them, but not moved. Still left it as one of the better cinema-experiences of last year for me.
I decided to finally read "Do Androids..." after watching Blade Runner 2049 and have tried reading some of Dick's other work. It is a weird discrepancy between the low quality of writing and high quality of thinking.
This essay will give you the reasons why Dick is worth reading; maybe you haven't read any yet, or maybe you can't explain (to yourself or others) why you think he was worth reading.
Either way, my time was well spent.
Having just read "Do Androids Dream Of Electrical Sheep", I see what you did there Cory.