KGIII

What are we going to do? Accept that it is not our job to stop people from doing things we don't like? I have no social media accounts, I never have, but I don't begrudge others their pacifiers.

We all do harmful things to ourselves. I find it easier to accept if I just accept my own negative acts. It's easier, for me at least, to accept that other people enjoy different things. I'd probably make a piss poor evangelist, but the reward is I spend less time being unhappy with other people's choices.

As far as I know, it is all patents. Here is another source, as linked in my above post:

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/tesla-just-gave-all-its-patent...

Tesla will let you use their patents for free. They will let anyone use them, even direct competitors. There is no charge.

Any other IP could just be reverse engineered, for the most part.

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/tesla-just-gave-all-its-patent...

I am fit and healthy. So, I can't say how simple it is. I don't know, I'm not in their shoes.

But, I'm told it is simple - for the vast majority of people who are overweight. Put fewer calories in than you use and the result is weight loss. Operate at a caloric deficit and the result is less weight. That is it.

Note: That is just weight loss and doesn't imply that it is healthy eating. Obviously, it should entail more, but I understand it is pretty simple physically. I was a fat kid but I got chicken pox at the age of 15 and have been the appropriate weight ever since then.

If I had to take a stab at it, I'd suggest more immediate gratification and less abject poverty. I have no source and didn't look for one, but those may be causes for less personal discipline.

And we do have excess food production. We can feed the whole planet. Food supply isn't the problem, distribution and affordability is the problem.

So, that is my purely layman stab at it. I wouldn't even know where to begin doing quality research on this.

Absolutely! In the past year, I've been doing more computing on a tablet and I don't block ads on the tablet. I am logged in to a variety of sites and make zero effort to hide my activity.

I started paying attention to the ads about six months ago, because I'd manage to notice how poorly targeted they were when I did see them. They are terrible.

I think the best targeted ads have been from a company that sells barn doors. Really, they are in fact selling barn doors online. That's a very compelling ad for me. Except, you know, I already have doors for the barns. I am not actually in the market for new barn doors.

I don't actually need a bra, free for thirty days. I don't have breasts. The missus doesn't use my tablet and actually has her own network connection as I tend to saturate mine sharing Linux isos and stuff like that.

I don't need a used car. I have more than adequate automotive sources already. I'd buy a used car, but it would not be a Toyota that has just come off lease. Maybe try selling me a 900S Turbo from 1992?

I don't have any major medical problems, trying to sell me drugs is pretty silly. I don't need insurance, I'm already well insured. I'm not concerned about paying the least amount for insurance, I'm concerned with the best coverage and service. An ad for, "We are dirt cheep but just shoot you if you're involved in an accident insurance" is not very interesting.

They have vast amounts of information on me. Why not try to sell me a new plow? I'm kinda in the market for one. Why not something to do with hunting, fishing, gardening, or food preservation? Not one ad has has any of those things. They know I own a Kubota, why not advertise some new implements?

I don't get it... I'll buy stuff. I'm more than happy to buy stuff. I love buying stuff. I buy stuff I don't need - all the damned time. Yet, literally no ads have compelled me to click and make a purchase. I have clicked, I just haven't found anything worth buying. I've never bought anything from a placed Internet ad, except when I was searching specifically for that product.

Something is broken.

Another anecdote; your comment is the only one I've ever noticed that appears to be defending Slack. From an outsider looking in, I'm not sure why it is so popular.

Your comment ties in so very well with an above exchange concerning resultant binary sizes. RAM was once $100 for a MB, I paid $400 for 4MB of RAM.

Shocking, when I look back at it.

I get it now. Thanks. I was curious as to how that might come about.

From a link in a comment above:

> 386 x86 ARM MIPS PowerPC MCore ColdFire Transputer ShBoom and a V, um, V840? Or something?

So, quite a few architectures.

> plus interest ...

> I paid cash.

How are you paying interest if you paid cash?

Ads make content available to people with no money to spend. Restricting content to those who can pay, instead of paying by ad placement, is only going to further the divide between social classes.

Too much of anything is bad, even exercise.

jimminy stated they'd never uploaded any videos, which makes it even more puzzling.

Yes, I see that. It's second in a very narrow category that I'm not sure equates to 'the entire world' when talking about general taxation. The OP didn't state that "German single people are taxed at the second highest rate in the entire world."

So, while it's interesting, that's not really the same as what the OP suggested.

If you're in the US, you probably pay a much lower percentage than you do in many other nations. That much I can establish.

Wikipedia has some good tables but, like you suggest, compiling that data is not that easy due to biases. There are also different names for the taxes, different categories, differences in reporting, etc... About all I can conclude is that I don't pay much, compared to what I'd pay elsewhere, in taxes.

I actually don't mind paying taxes. I do mind how the money is spent, but that veers into a digression and politics. So, I'll skip that for today.

Hmm... I'm not sure 'unmarried singles' equates to 'secind highest taxed in the world.' That's a rather small category? As a percent of GDP, it is pretty far down the list of the countries they include.

We here in the US enjoy very, very low taxation. What is strikingly odd, to me, is that many of my fellow citizens believe we are taxed at comparably high rates.

At any rate, I'm still not able to find anything that puts Germany at the top, even for corporate/business taxes. It looks like some of the Scandinavian countries are pretty find of taxation, though they do enjoy quite a few benefits from that system.

Edited to clear up some verbiage.

I am not he, but I may be able to offer some history/perspective.

There was a real fear of computers back then, much like the fear of AI today. They worried that the 'big brain' would put people out of work and take over the world. Multiple movies were made where the computer was the antagonist, including the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The first computer I ever touched was called a calculator and I've heard a couple of reasons for this. The official reason was that people expected computers to be big and the HP 9100A wasn't very big by standards of the day. The second, and unofficial reason, was that it came out in the late 1960s, which was at a time when people had a real fear of computers.

If you're curious, I believe the model I used was the 9100B. It supported magnetic strip cards and punch cards to store your algorithm. You'd load it into the memory by swiping the card or inserting the punch card. It would output to a TV and there was a plotter option that functioned pretty much like a modern plotter. There was also a dot-matrix printer included that was like what was on the older POS systems for receipt printing.

Anyhow, they called it a calculator instead of a computer. People had notions of what a computer was supposed to be and this was not that.

At the time, I didn't really appreciate it for what it was. I think my first exposure was in 1971 and it was used almost exclusively in the physics and astronomy labs. It wouldn't be used in the astronomy labs until later, after the observatory was completed and the telescope put in.

This was all at Kents Hill, no apostrophe, if you'd like to learn more about it. It's a boarding prep school located in Central Maine. As I was leaving, we got a mainframe connection to Dartmouth, which was a 'real' computer, though I never played with it.

So, largely people didn't seem to envision much for the future of computing, at least not at the personal level. There were exceptions, some visionaries who saw the potential, but the idea of a personal computer wouldn't really exist until later in the decade. Frankly, nobody saw much use for one. Computers were pretty useless without a great deal of domain knowledge. To use one, you were almost required to know how to program one. Specialty software was the norm and interaction was limited without knowing how to program.

For the most part, games were also limited to hardware specific devices and were console format or, eventually, arcade games that were not general purpose computers. People really didn't have much use for one in their homes and, as mentioned above, there was a real fear of computers.

YouTube has a copy of the HP 9100 promotional video. I can dig it out, if you want. It was pretty remarkable but I wasn't nearly as impressed by it as I should have been. So, I don't really think that the future of computing was obvious to everyone. In fact, I'd say the opposite was true and that it was only obvious to a very limited set of visionaries.

Edited to clean up some verbiage and add a wee bit more information about the 9100.

Edit again. If you have 21 spare minutes and would like to learn about the HP 9100, you can click this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki1Inux1_wU

(I figure some folks might actually be curious about the tech of the day. That was pretty state-of-the-art back then and far more compute power than most people would be exposed to for the next decade and a half, if not longer.)

Yeah, worth watching the video. The music accompaniment was terrible and louder than it should be, but the concept is nice.

In the end of the video, they show it where the trackpad would be, which makes me think there might be a size issue. They also show it with a regular keyboard and I'm not sure everyone would require one. I do know that people like tactile keyboards but some folks have managed to function without one. So, a model where the touchpad is also the keyboard might be cool.

I touch-type, but maybe the trackpad could also be some sort of secondary display? I could see that coming in handy, perhaps even to display the above mentioned keyboard for this who can't touch-type.

Off-topic: HN is one of the few sites where I regularly click on links in the comments. On most sites, that's not a very productive activity. On HN, it is often interesting and educational.

Yeah, it looks like you're right - though he may have a tombstone, or the images of it might be faked.

That makes more sense, as Carlin seemed (if nothing else) principled.

I can't find any OECD data that says Germany is the second highest taxed country in the world. The closest I can find is the tax as a percentage of GDP and, in that listing, they are 13th.

I'm interested in reading more/a list of the highest taxed nations as a way to easily counter the claim that the US is the highest taxed. Do you have a link/citation, so that I can verify that?

Maybe? We have learned a lot about the brain in recent times. You can, today, hack your way into controlling a mouse with your mind. That's all external and, of course, requires a headset.

I doubt I'll be alive to see it, but it seems that is the most probable method to get mass adoption of VR. Right now, it is really niche. Right now, we are still trying to do it the way we've been doing it for the past three decades. Things are faster and smaller but there are limits to those two traits.

I'd absolutely love AR. I have a modest collection of automobiles and sometimes work on them. I sometimes make things out of wood. I sometimes can't identify an animal species or plant family. Having the ability to augment that would be a wonderful way to enjoy life even more - at least for me.

But, even if we got these down to the size of eyeglasses (which seems really unlikely for the foreseeable future) I'm not sure we will get mass adoption by Jane Q. Public. It's not a cell phone you pick up and put away, but something worn. The form factor is, by itself, a negative.

I dunno? I can't predict the future. I'd still volunteer to test a viable method. With the ubiquity of cellular network connectivity, it'd be fantastic to have the sum of human knowledge at your immediate beck and call and without the need for an external device.

I would absolutely love AR. It'd be fascinating to look at a bridge or building and see who designed it, when it was built, how it was constructed, who died while building it, the floor plan, utilization rates, etc... Ideally, this would be done while not actually driving.

As for the direct methods, I think we may get there someday. We already enable paralyzed people to interact, albeit on a minimal scale, with a computer using nothing but their mind. There is even a DIY movement that has enabled this, again on a minimal scale, for hackers at home.

No timeline, no estimates, but I think we may get there.

My thinking is that miniaturizing is a limited endeavor. We're very unlikely to ever have things like AR by means of contact lenses. So, we're looking at something people will wear.

It is my own personal view that I see no great benefit in consuming print media by means of VR. For that, I have a tablet and a few ebook readers around the house. I am not sure that I (expressing only my own thoughts) see any great benefit in that.

That'd be him, thanks!

He is buried in a cemetery, according to Google. I wonder why? He seems to have been rather principled and I'd have not expected him to do so.

The other thing is that some really good thoughts come from comedians. Beneath the humor, there is frequently some good thoughts, intellectual thoughts. I wonder why this is? Psych is, obviously, not my domain. I don't really understand why we do many of the things we do, but I will avoid too much digression.

Some of those giant earth-movers, like the tracked mining equipment that fills a giant mining-sized dump truck, are already powered by electricity that is generated on-site. They have big giant cables that trail behind them.

I mention this just to share that there is some chance of this improving, even in areas we might not think likely. If it is a long-term mining operation (short-term someday, perhaps) then I can't think of a technical reason that prevents wind and solar being used to generate the on-site electricity.

A recent HN article was about one of the mining dump trucks being powered by battery and using regenerative braking to mean it was able to charge itself. Those giant diggers are already using braking in their cables that power their shovels. Maybe there is something to capture there, as well.

In my work, I had the chance to deal with some riggers and some crane operators (smaller stuff) by just exposure while collecting data. During that exposure, I learned something new. Lifting the stuff up is actually pretty easy. It is putting it down that is difficult. Maybe there is some energy to capture in that process?

I see other 'startups' that I think are missed by the SV folks. They aren't tech, but may use tech in their startup. I see quite a few of them.

They are people starting their own business. A friend borrowed some money to start a business where he drives a remote control vehicle down pipes to examine them from the inside. The space didn't have much 'local' competition and he was able to spot that, take advantage of it, and now has a dozen employees, has repaid the money, and is seeking to expand his operations. A similar experience was loaning my sibling some money so he could start a plumbing company - except it is more niche and not residential. They use some tech but they aren't tech companies.

It seems to me that the SV pundits see the tech startups while not seeing the guy who does vehicle power washing on-site, the interior decorator that uses 3D modeling and VR, or the folks who opened a diner where they have automated the food ordering process.

A poster above mentioned that they experienced VR some 30 years ago. I, myself, had a chance to work with it in the early 1990s. Truth be told, it was horrible. It was rudimentary and the graphics were very poor as it was computationally expensive. Exploration stopped and we reexamined the tech a decade later, with similar results.

I've long since postulated that I'd absolutely volunteer to 'jack in' to a neural method to control a computer - complete with my standard joke about being willing to even have a wifi antenna poking out of my skull.

I wonder, then, if we are going about this the wrong way. We are trying for ocular stimulation directly. If we could skip that and move to neurological stimulation directly, I'd expect VR and AR to finally reach the tipping point. There is, after all, a finite amount of miniaturization that's possible.

It is purely a hunch that tells me VR/AR are not destined for wide-scale 'normal people' adoption until it doesn't require external apparatus to utilize.

As it is, we already have people who don't even like wearing simple eyeglasses. However, if it didn't require such, then it may just be something we humans add to our bodies to augment it.

Thoughts?

I have to wonder if some of that growth was related to Moore's Law? Namely, the number of transistors grew and the use of them grew linearly with them in a sort of 'if you build it, they will come' fashion?

Now, as I understand it, growth has slowed outside of the labs and Moore's Law appears to no longer be valid. So, there will likely still be growth, but the growth will be more rare, difficult, and expensive?

Like your VR example, we've often had great predictions of the future and so very few of them actually pan out as expected.

I don't know, it's just a thought I've pondered.

No, but I'd donate that to a viable cause. I used to be pretty poor so I still know how much $100,000 is worth. (It's a whole lot of skeeball.)

So, I'd not pay that to cure me of the common cold. Not a chance. I don't mind the cold. You sniffle and feel poorly for a few days. Meh... The benefit isn't worth that much to me. I'd probably pay up to a few thousand for it, but not that much.

Would I pay $100k to prevent me from getting the common cold, I am absolutely able to afford it?

Hell no. I might pay for treatment for someone who were immunocompromised. For me? Nope. It's just a virus. It'll go away.

I'd pay a lower amount, however.