PinkMilkshake

It seems reasonable until you realize you could completely wreck their local economy.

If you start paying people to compile lists for you at a higher rate than they are paid performing important local services, then they will stop performing important local services and start compiling lists for you.

What needs to happen is slower growth.

So foreign businesses outsource to the Philippines, paying them low wages. Then other businesses see this as a good way to save and do the same, and then more businesses and so on. Soon the people in the Philippines have options, and their market starts to become competitive, and they start demanding more pay (which is good). During this whole process they are spending that foreign money into their local economy, allowing it to grow and keep up.

China is a good example.

I think someone posted this video previously which was very helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA5zh3yG_-0

All the prop demonstrations by the presenter are awful, but the scientist explains everything very well.

Every XPS 13 I've touched has this annoying issue with the touch pad where it fails to reject your thumb while it's resting on the click button. It drove me nuts. Hopefully they've resolved this because I really like the XPS line.

3Blue1Brown has a great series on Linear Algebra. His explanations are so clear that by the 2nd or 3rd video you'll already understand how it applies to computer graphics.

https://youtu.be/fNk_zzaMoSs

> Most "game AI" isn't "real" AI at all, in any meaningful sense

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, this sounds like the AI effect at work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Agreed. I use a iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. It’s a great writing experience with the benefit of having a digital device. I wish they would make the pencil compatible with the iPad Mini. Then it would feel like I’m using a true digital notebook.

I can speak for Australia only. Some options include:

* University run HPC facilities.

* Your university might have a deal with government funded facilities like the NCI (National Computational Infrastructure). Their computer Raijin has GPU's.

* Or, they might be a participating University in AARNET (Australian Academic and Research Network), which next year will have web-based Jupyter Notebooks for smaller stuff.

* I 100% guarantee there are multiple unused snowflake GPU clusters sitting under academics (with more money and influence than sense) desks that were purchased under the auspice of being "absolutely essential for their work" or "its the end of the year and we HAVE to spend this money" and because hey ignored all advice from IT it never works and is unsupported. Find them, be the support guy (if you have time) on the condition you get access.

I often feel the same.

I could show someone a single photograph of an animal they have never seen before and they will recognize it forever, from different angles, in different lighting, in black and white, probably even from a silhouette.

The more I dig in to ML the more it seems like it's cheating, like a mathematical trick. At least the way we are using it.

I can't help but feel like it's a game of Pachinko with pixels instead of balls, and neural weights instead of pins and holes.

I'm no expert though so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Your comment inspired me to preorder one. So I just did. Thanks!

Just a hypothetical.

Is it possible the way to fix this issue is to actually have all vendors do the same thing.

Should all the vendors including Mozilla switch to Chromium and then fork it, couldn't we look at this as a "rebasing" of the Web?

If the forks are true hard forks, then we shouldn't necessarily end up in a situation where one vendor has more power than the other.

On the contrary, all vendors would now be on an even footing with the same strong, highly-compatible core engine.

All the issues people have with Firefox and Edge would no longer be relevant, and the only thing left to judge one company from another would be their value-add services or their ethics.

Look for a local gaming cafe and rent all of their machines.

WWI is super fascinating. It sort of marks the final transition period from stand in a polite line and shoot at one another style warfare to modern warfare.

What I took away from Adam Curtis's film HyperNormalisation is that the internet didn't cause these issues, but it is to blame for us not being able to do anything about it.

If it ever got to the point where Google had achieved complete domination of the web, do we just leave?

I'm curious as to what point we say screw it and create a new web. Is that even an option? Is it even plausible or desirable?

Possibly, but that's an untargeted and justifiable privacy feature in a browser who's primary shtick is being privacy focused.

I think if Mozilla included code that specifically targets Google, they would be crossing a line.

Unfortunately, that would be biting the hand that feeds.

Because they are separate ideas and not all of them are dependent on one another. Money and/or markets can (and did) exist without capitalism.

The point is not to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Few ever bother to separate Money, Markets, Capitalism and Corporatism when discussing this stuff. There's probably others I'm also not differentiating properly. It makes talking about what is and isn't working difficult.

When I argue with commie friends, they frequently conflate collaboration with collectivism. One claimed that the internet was greatest communist project ever.

We're so screwed.

Every time I read this stuff I feel truly privileged. I'm a New Zealand citizen living in Australia. Not only do both countries have universal healthcare, but they have a reciprocal agreement to provide free healthcare to each others citizens.

Australia has bulk-billed doctors and there's no shortage of them. I can book an appointment online for tomorrow, wait for 10 minutes in a waiting room and see a GP for free. I can even choose which GP I want to see. And I'll likely get anything they prescribe me for free as well. Medicare refunds so much money I sometimes feel guilty because I know I can afford it.

My partner has a chronic health condition that resulted in her large intestine being removed and she requires thousands of dollars worth of medication a month, likely for the rest of her life. We've never paid for surgery or medication beyond admin or prescription fees.

I want this for everyone and I pay my taxes gladly. I would pay more for an even better system. You don't have shit if you don't have your health.

Maybe wisdom is like Pokemon, but instead of collecting cute cartoon animals to abuse, you collect heuristics.

At one extreme, people go through life and pick up new mental models along the way. At the other extreme are people who actively seek them out.

So age should bring wisdom, but not necessarily more than younger people.

I've only had a passing interest in learning assembly. It's always been in the "maybe one day" category.

But after learning about how small the RISC-V instruction set is (less than 50 apparently, but I can't find a citation for that anywhere), I'm far more motivated to get into it.

When even RMS isn't progressive enough for you... crazy.

Something that has stood out for me in the the modern political climate is that progressives tend to claim all of this is ultimately to protect us from fascists. And it tends to be what you are accused of being (or at least an enabler of) if you stand in the way of their policies. I've had long debates with radical leftist friends and we always somehow end up at fascism. I'm a useless center-left, fence sitting, Nazi enabler according to them.

But many of the loudest public voices (from all sides of the political spectrum) advocating for free speech are Jewish or have Jewish heritage. Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, Eric and Bret Weinstein, RMS and probably many more that I don't know of.

Jews are the O.G. of oppressed minorities and are often the strongest advocates for free speech, science, democracy and so on.

Maybe we should listen?

Feel free to correct me. There may be some selection bias going on.

Side note: I really like that Person/Pers/Perse idea. It sounds little odd at first, but it's the best gender-neutral pronoun I've heard so far and we really do need one.

This is really cool. The GPU project they are currently featuring is amazing. I didn't realize that was possible.

Windows has a surprising number of ways to code out of the box and all require nothing more than opening notepad and saving it with the right file extension.

.js .vbs .bat .ps1 or .hta

The problem is they are not simple to use for the average user. Windows lacks a straightforward procedural automation system. Flow, Workflows and PowerApps address this in some ways but are really jank.

I want something like:

  GET COLUMN 'customer name' FROM accounts.xls
  REMOVE ROW 1
  SAVE customers.xls
  EMAIL foo.xls TO 'some@guy.com'

And taps are just zero-length swipes!

Another one for the Bitcoin Obituaries https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries

Honestly I have no idea whats going to happen. I threw some money into Bitcoin I was okay with loosing and check on it every few months. It's been fun.

Maybe some perfect storm of the Lightning Network, Web Payments and dodgy banks or failing economies will bring about some crypto-utopia. Or maybe it will implode and in the end all we have done is collectively purchased a metric shit ton of GPU's.

Actually, that's not all we would have done. It didn't work out but at least we ran the experiment.

Whoops, you're right, I completely misinterpreted that post. Thanks for pointing it out.

> It’s like all the people who say they’re not a feminist but they think women should be paid the same for the same work and rapists should be prosecuted.

Feminism is an odd example. Do you mean gender feminism, postmodern feminism, Marxist feminism, equity feminism, radical feminism, individualist feminism, black feminism, liberal feminism, etc?

You can't even say that the commonality among them is they "think women should be paid the same for the same work" because they don't even agree on what qualifies as a woman.

> rapists should be prosecuted

Few (if any) are debating over whether or not rapists should be prosecuted. The current argument is over whether or not that should be done with or without due process.

> China would not be where it is without the great effort (though hamfistedly implemented) it put into controlling growth

I would not advocate this authoritarian approach (I'm not saying you are). Part of the solution is what you said earlier, education. But population stabilizes on it's own as a country goes through the Demographic Transition.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

Or for something more light-hearted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348

Slightly off topic but does that syntax highlighting theme in the video have a name? It's rather nice.