PeanutCurry

That doesn't negate the damage though. Requiring a grey or black market to use the currency in a nation of economic significance restricts bitcoin's utility. This will be a value hit when competing against any potential currency that can overcome those hurdles.

Practice is important and when coupled with introspection/self-reflection can help a lot in identifying areas where easy improvement can be developed. However, of equal importance is targeted study. If you want to tell better jokes, study successful comedians and their jokes. If you want to write, read stories by successful writers. Meanwhile, as you do these things always try to understand why the audiences for these things liked them so much.

I don't think they're ignoring the issue, I think you're pushing an issue that they've already explained in parts of their statement that you chose not to quote.

> st3fan: Because that library is there does not mean that we are giving data to Google. It does not even mean that it is active or that it is sending anything.

Having gone through the comment chain in other places it seems like your entire position in the debate between you and st3fan is based on ignoring what he's actually saying in general. In response to their request for evidence your responded

>That's pretty simple. Don't use proprietary software.

which sidesteps the query entirely and does nothing to lend credibility to your original position.

I don't expect to change your mind and frankly I don't have a reason to, but if your goal is to have productive or persuasive conversations then you may want to evaluate your current communication strategy.

I'm not entirely sure I understand your metaphor in this case. I appreciate that it had something to do with efficiency but then I got lost because a 20:1 farmer-to-other feeding ratio seems incredibly unrealistic and made it hard to understand whether the ratio was relevant to the metaphor's point or was just an off the cuff sort of detail.

I think computing limitations is the big one but also software limitations in terms of how much software a company might need to develop for itself to compete with a big player. Right now there's a lot of innovation going on. Not that there won't always be innovation, but in the grand scheme of time I'd argue web-tech will one day reach a state of the art that progresses more incrementally in the way that fields like physics, biology, etc. tend to with of waves of small insights rather than the few decades of rapid evolution they underwent in their infancy.

It's at that point of incremental innovation for web-tech where I think little guys become competitive because that's where they can start smaller businesses running cheap but 'good enough' hardware and premade open-source software to provide similar services to the big players albeit at smaller margins to provide comparable but less comprehensive products for cheaper. These smaller businesses are where I imagine the decentralization manifesting. Especially if some of those businesses are things like "Join our regional hardware co-op and contribute your unused processing power to our service in exchange for a share of the profit". That would be huge on its own for de-centralization, if a profitable service could bring anybody and everybody a worthwhile amount of money for simply running their web-service software during downtime.

I may have phrased that poorly, I didn't mean that you would be searchable for being in the area. I meant that you would be searchable for being witnessed picking or carrying mushrooms in the area which is very different from your example of simply walking through a high crime area.

I agree with your addendum, I actually paused for about a minute while I was writing my reply to contemplate the right word to use for current oversight. Originally I was going to say insufficient/weak oversight but that seemed too much like it implied that the solution would simply be stronger/more oversight.

This doesn't sounds like an issue of too much money though, it sounds like a combination of baseline compensation not yielding a high enough return, inadequate oversight agencies to catch this sort of behavior, and the consequences of being caught not being strict enough. It could even be argued that just paying more would discourage the corrupt behavior in your hypothetical examples because the doctors are taking those actions to simply make more money.

Except for the part where you completely ignored their point that you and anyone else with security concerns can conduct their own audit of the code and verify whether or not the telemetry functionality is performing in the manner described.

Definitely relevant but it seems like this would probably be argued as a case of probable cause. If the local police are aware that people have been picking mushrooms in the region because some of them contain psilocybin then it wouldn't be unreasonable to consider foraging for mushrooms probable cause in their jurisdiction.

Could you expand on this a little? I'm confused because the ACLU is not a government organization, they're not part of the infrastructure.

I realize I'm risking downvotes with this one, but I think it's worth acknowledging. While Charlottesville was a tragedy, and the time is not right imo to discuss it with the public at large precisely because it was a tragedy and people are still mourning, the event was overall as peaceful as any severely political protest ever is. The deaths and injuries that occurred should not be simply discounted as if the people are simply disposable, but the majority of activists on both sides did not cause those deaths and injuries. Unless there is a major point of information that I am ignorant of, the driver who has catapulted the event into the national spotlight acted essentially in isolation even if his ideology was not held in isolation at the event. He acted heinously, and now is not the time for taking easy solace, but I think there's some merit in the reality that by and large people on both sides were able to demonstrate with the -relative- peacefulness of a generic controversial American protest with orbital counter protests.

My issue with the whole article is that I don't understand the use-case here barring personal interest because that's a universal use-case. If I'm legitimately poor I'm going to buy the shittiest tablet I can for content consumption. This will run me between $30-$60 dollars and let me have my own personal machine to use with the library's wifi. If I have my own internet, I probably have enough income that within a year I could save up enough for a shitty tablet w/ attachable keyboard or a cheap used laptop. After that, computing power doesn't really matter because I'm just using the thing to go to community college while I either: a.) Pursue the scholarships that will get me into a 4-year college or b.) Pursue a sufficiently lucrative 2-year certification.

If neither of those things are attainable I should be sticking with just using the library's computers to try and manage to produce some form of profit I can put towards eventually getting into community college.

If I'm not dirt broke, this entire article is sort've pointless from a practical standpoint unless you just really enjoy this sort of cost-saving exercise. But if you don't and you're making enough for a real computer then you may as well just get the real computer.

Why would it be better for it to be more expensive to prosecute someone? The point of laws is that we'd like to see them enforced. If the people don't like the laws they should change them not try to cripple their government's ability to do its job.

That's a very low bar for an essay... at least in terms of length. I'd be surprised if this took long to write which isn't a criticism so much an expression of confusion as to why you called it an essay. It's also a little weird to call it inexcusable they didn't acknowledge Hanlon's Razor because it's hardly a common reference. Even the wikipedia page only gives two instances of Hanlon's razor being used and one of them is an acknowledgement that the general idea is very likely much older than the Jargon File glossary entry.

To be fair, I think this is a normal reaction to hyped AI in gaming. I remember reading an article (comment chain?) some time ago on here about how a lot of people though Deep Blue would beat Kasparov through some sort of advanced understanding of the human mind, a new sort of intuition, etc. But ultimately it came down to being able to brute force the potential move space quickly. The games will change but I wonder if the overarching effectiveness of AI victory through computational brute force will.

I have mixed feelings on this. In part because I want to be pedantic but also because I think there's multiple levels here. To be succinct, because that first sentence was wishy-washy, I don't think it's wrong to identify Islamic terrorism as being associated with Islam. THAT BEING SAID, it's not productive to have a public discourse from this perspective in my opinion because the general public is emotional and whimsical and so giving them a complicated debate only invites the opportunity for miscommunication and the development of hate in my opinion.

The reason I think it's important to identify terrorism committed in the name of Islam, Nazism, Christianity, etc. with their respective belief systems is because it empowers us to ask 'why'. Why are so many terrorist organizations affiliated with Islam, RECENTLY SPEAKING? Why has white supremacy become more visible in the American social space including the pre-charlottesville social space? I don't have the end all be all answer. But I think asking the question is important because whatever the true answer is, I think it's fair to say that it's probably regionally rooted, potentially linked to the economics of certain groups rooted in those regions, and because of the regional nature of many Islamic terrorist groups and white nationalist groups, I think it's fair to say that there is a cultural BUT NOT UNIVERSALLY CULTURAL element to it. I would make a similar assessment of the IRA in Ireland, Christian terrorists in Africa, and by now you can probably see where I'm going with this. Acknowledging the affiliations of these organizations and their beliefs is important because it explains THEM. It doesn't inform us about their beliefs, but it allows us to analyze why they have chosen to affiliate with those beliefs in a hopefully honest fashion.

None of that is meant to imply that Nazism should be viewed as American, or that Islamic Terrorism should be viewed as a sub-element of Islam, but acknowledging that these contexts exist with regard to SPECIFIC ORGANIZATIONS is important in my opinion because the root of these issues is often multifaceted and can only be combated, in my opinion, with a comprehensive understanding of these groups and their spiritual as well as political influences.

Edit: I will acknowledge when I edit an argument in the face of something that someone has pointed out. This post has already been heavily edited for my own satisfaction however because while modern examples of significant terrorism are obviously not evenly distributed across cultures, that does not mean that one culture is implicitly prone to terrorism and I'm trying very hard to keep my grammar and framing of arguments as neutral in that respect as possible while acknowledging the current configuration of terrorism, hate, and extremism across the globe.

Without meaning to make any greater point, being sued isn't the same as being found guilty but is often treated as being 'close enough' in the media.

I don't see how that's a particularly useful view of what the statistics reflect, especially since I clarified in the same post you quoted that I was speaking with regard to nazism in the modern context.

Further, it wasn't simply nazis in the abstract that killed those few million people, it was nazi controlled Germany. It seems dishonest to ignore that aspect of the history because you gloss over all of the political maneuvering allowed the nazi party to become the force that it was such as the Reichstag Fire Decree. On top of this you ignore the history of antisemitic racism in early 20th century Europe that allowed the nazi party to gain enough popularity to attain traction as a political party.

Your point that anyone supporting the spread of nazism is supporting the actions of the nazi party that existed in Hitler's Germany is valid. However, in America this sort of speech is not as distinctly illegal as it is in much of (all of?) Europe and so from an American perspective a discussion needs to take place about how to approach the topic because for us blanketly outlawing nazi groups because of their beliefs would erode some part of the general freedom of speech that we operate with. Whether that erosion represents the loss of anything of value is debatable, but it would none the less represent a decrease in our overall speech protections. This is where my point about evaluating and qualifying the reach and influence that groups like this actually have becomes relevant, because a rational discussion would be dependent on this sort of information.

In this instance I think it is because the point I was making in pushing a somewhat pedantic argument is that while what happened in Charlottesville, and arguably catalyzed the current popularity of nazi discussion, is obviously a tragedy it's also a highly emotional topic precisely because it's a tragedy.

This was why I concluded with the argument that we should at the same time be focused on identifying and quantifying the reach and influence these groups. Because in the wake of an extremely upsetting event it's important to emphasize the need for intelligent debate and evaluation or else the discourse becomes volatile and incapable of rational decision making.

I'm obviously being a bit facetious when I say this, but are there really few things worse than nazis? I'm not expert on the subject of neo-nazis or the nazi movement, so maybe this seems more complex because of my position of ignorance. But none of the statistics seem to imply that nazis are more than simply intellectually repulsive and socially disgusting. That's not to say that nazi affiliated groups never commit crime or kill people. But by the numbers they seem like a very small blip on the crime radar compared to groups like the Sinaloa, MS-13, ISIS, Boko Haram, or the Lord's Resistance Army.

I realize the significance of what the nazis accomplished in the past. But there are actual talks about further restricting freedom of speech in America being put forth by some groups because of the attention that's being given to white supremacists and nazis right now with seemingly little attention being given to identifying and quantifying the reach and influence these groups actually have in the modern context.

I don't know if it's really fair to blame Netflix for this one. There's no obligation to charge the minimal price for your product, just the minimal competitive price. As for content, Netflix was able to dominate streaming early on because nobody had realized how big the market was going to be yet. It's a lot harder to dominate the market with other people's content now because everyone is realize how valuable their contracts with Netflix were and are starting to pull the rights to stream their content in favor of hosting their own platforms which forces Netflix into the content creation business if they want to stay relevant. None of that is really Netflix's fault in isolation.

Pirate streaming but that's already a thing. I think the interesting thing about piracy, ignoring the entire cost/no-cost and legality debates, is that pirates have the potential to always focus entirely on the end-consumer's experience because they don't care about the red tape that constricts the services provided by legitimate businesses.

I didn't mean to imply that both can't be done at the same time. I thought you meant that diversity programs were an inherent part of finding the best talent when you wrote

> "It's Google's perogative/obligation to find and retain the best talent. I suspect that's what the purpose of their diversity programs are for."

To me this meant that to find the best talent it's more effective to focus on subsets of the total talent pool, which didn't make sense to me.

I don't see the correlation between diversity programs and retaining the best talent. Not because diversity isn't important, or because it's a negative thing, but because in general diversity programs function by more closely examining/attracting a subset of a larger total population of workers. You could still of course find the best talent within those subsets, but the implication is still that you could just as easily miss the top talent that isn't in those subsets.

This was my takeaway. My understanding of the top comment in the chain wasn't that we shouldn't be offended. Just that we shouldn't be surprised. It would be like being surprised that Boeing takes orders from the U.S. government sometimes.

I think this depends on what you frame what an opportunity is. Giving everyone the opportunity to try and meet a certain criteria in order for you to accept them into whatever job/institution you represent is a binary opportunity in theory. They'll either meet the criteria or they won't. If you frame being able to cultivate the skills to meet your criteria as being an opportunity in itself then that negates your offering as being an 'opportunity'.

My main criticism of the memo has been the external discussion it provoked. Like anyone who's been following the story I obviously have my own feelings on it. But, what seems to be missing is the social context to judge if he was out of line in how he delivered his memo or simply because he delivered it at all.

I don't know how often memos of this nature circulate around google and that's important context because a lot of the discussion really seems to boil down to "How do we feel that this guy got fired". Do other employees send out memos that also contemplate diversity in tech/google with similar length and calls to action? If so, do those employees send out their messages via the same channels that this employee sent out his memo? Without understanding more about the social context the employee was operating in a lot of necessary context is missing imo.

None of what you said actually makes sense. "Real leaders in a war of aggression are those who don't show up or fight on the other side", then what about people who command from the field? What about the massive ability of a General's ability to affect the outcome of a war from the planning rooms?

Even your final phrase, "lead, follow, or get out of the way" makes no sense because there are literally no other courses of action available and you make no real defense of any of the three beyond preceding that statement with a quote from Einstein which you seem to feel is sufficient simply because... Einstein said so?

I'm not working in machine learning so please cut me down to size if I'm just not getting it. But my big criticism of the article was that it just sort've glosses over the elephant in the room. China is going to have a massive data set... of Chinese citizens. With how much the ruling party exercises its authority over the nation and the nationalist nature of a lot of Chinese culture I don't see how this data will be broad enough to leverage against other nations in terms of making things like behavioral predictions. Everything I read about China makes these grand premonitions but really it seems like China is simply preparing to not need anybody except for China. Which is very Orwellian but a lot different from WORLD DOMINATION.