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Practicality

1,439 karma · joined July 22, 2014

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Practicality··on Scientists discover new mechanism for information storage in one atom
First thought I had as well. Aren't quarks matter too?
Practicality··on Cassini's “Grand Finale” Will Be a Blaze of Glory
I still think the key is raising the collective intelligence. Not that smart people are always productive, but they are capable of being so.

So long as the average human is just barely sapient, we aren't going to be collectively achieving much. It's always exceptional individuals who have great achievements.

Average people don't really do much. Nothing personal against being average, of course, it's just not sufficient for great achievement.

I think intelligence augmentation, such as neural lace and Neuralink, is a step in the right direction.

Practicality··on Most Female and Male Occupations Since 1950
Nothing that went from female to male?
Practicality··on Friends Are Genetically Similar (2014)
Evolution doesn't move fast enough for any technology to be relevant to the discussion of how this works.
Practicality··on “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”
Not a downvoter, but it doesn't quite work. Google isn't against open-source. It's somewhat related, but not exactly.
Practicality··on Fish are eating lots of plastic
Evolution was so last eon. We've got CRISPR now. :D
Practicality··on Fish are eating lots of plastic
You know that fish is a type of meat, right?
Practicality··on Perfection is a modern heresy
It's just a blog post about what he has observed as a common problem with teams falling behind. I think it's a little much to call it worthless.

Excessive focus on unimportant details is a real problem. Everybody probably naturally focuses either too much on details or too little, and this person recently ran into some teams that focused on them too much, preferring to polish features the customer didn't care about rather than finishing the product.

Practicality··on Pliny the Elder May Have Been Found 2,000 Years Later
At first, I only saw one ad when I went there (just now). I forgot I had my adblocker on. Then, I tried to load the page again and saw "Haaretz.com is now inaccessible to visitors using ad blockers"

Wow, someone is actively working to squeeze the incoming traffic.

Practicality··on 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)
Capitalism sometimes rewards those who provide value, but more often than not has no problem rewarding people for spouting self-righteousness.

If you think that everyone who gets rewarded in a capitalist society do so because they provide value then you have to ask: What value do scam artists provide?

Practicality··on Show HN: A stop-motion video of an engine
Right. As someone who has torn apart an engine before I was constantly thinking "where are those parts going?" "Are they just throwing them on the floor?"
Practicality··on Early Facebook and Google investor slams them for “aggressive brain hacking”
Targeted ads. They look like interesting articles but then when you get there it's just a few facts and then more ads. You end up making somebody money from ad clicks but never find out the information.

Ironically, the solution is to usually just google the topic, satiate your curiosity and move on. But I can get stuck in a looking at ads for an hour before I realize what is happening. It's such a waste.

Practicality··on Early Facebook and Google investor slams them for “aggressive brain hacking”
It's a real problem. Anecdotally, I've talked to several people struggling to stop clicking on ads so they can keep getting things done. I struggle with it sometimes as well.
Practicality··on Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan
Oh man. About 10 feet behind my chair is where another department likes to have their meetings. And for whatever reason, they also like to stand there and swap gossip about all the employees.

I mean seriously. I DO NOT need to know any of those things. Especially while I am trying to work. Please go away. Of course they talk really loudly too.

Practicality··on Autism and gender imbalance in tech
"Why on earth is this a test for autism?"

I agree. There is a clear gender difference in seeing color [1][2][3][4]. The use of colors here would invalidate the test for autism, at least in the context of gender difference, since it would be testing for how well you see shapes versus colors.

1: http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191999 2: https://www.livescience.com/22894-men-and-women-see-things-d... 3: https://www.colormatters.com/color-symbolism/gender-differen... 4: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-w...

Practicality··on I fell in love with an assassin (2008)
I am pretty sure he was referring to Buzzfeed's clickbait titles. They are pretty famous for it so it's a fair comparison.
Practicality··on How I tried to get into game development and failed
I have been having a lot of fun playing this game with lots of others here on Hacker news.

Some suggestions: 1) Make the levels more obvious. It's not clear why players are stronger than others for some time. It would also be nice to see how far I need to go to level up more clearly.

2) ADD CHAT! I can't emphasize this enough. We need to be able to yell at each other and complain and work together.

3) Add the ability to switch classes more often.

4) Make the differences between bots and humans more obvious. I want to immediately know when I am fighting a person. A different color name, make them glowing, something.

5) Show the leaderboard after you finish. I want to be the best player today, or the last hour, or the last week or whatever.

6) Don't deduct any stats when I level up. Sometimes when you level up you are suddenly slower. I shouldn't get punished for leveling up.

7) Show my kills against different players. Let me develop a grudge. It makes it fun.

8) Show a message when a player kills a player! Let us know something cool happened.

Practicality··on How I tried to get into game development and failed
I've been trying to figure out how people could see farther than me! HA, now I know
Practicality··on “You’re Not the Customer, You’re the Product”
Like those privacy policies you get from your credit card companies: "Do we share your personal information with other companies? Yes. Is there anything you can do about it? No."

I always laugh at these. At least they are telling me.

Practicality··on Robots that learn
I still want one that folds my laundry.
Practicality··on We’re dropping Google Ads
So many of these problems go away if we just enforce higher quality (less annoying) ads.
Practicality··on 'Hitler Tamed by Prison' (1924)
There also would need to be a motivating factor. US doesn't have any reason to want to take over Canada.
Practicality··on 2038: Only 21 years away
Here I thought it was a post on the singularity. It might be ironic if all the AI starts running into all sorts of 2038 bugs and this ends up being a huge issue.
Practicality··on Scientists Are Planning to Run for Office
For what it's worth 314 Action is more about supporting 4 issues: http://www.314action.org/issues/

The headline is a little misleading, but this isn't actually a "support scientists, in general, running for office," but rather "support specific scientists running for office who support the issues 314 wants to address."

Practicality··on Why isn't there a Google for the law?
For what it's worth, I was taught to sit in the intersection when making a left turn in driver's ed.

Maybe it's an east west thing, but here is a video of a guy complaining about people who DON'T enter the intersection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_bcjCOzob4

Again, he is saying that the proper thing to do is to enter the intersection and sit, regardless.

So, it seems like the issue may be that in some areas this behavior is promoted (even in drivers ed classes) and in others it's illegal.

Of course, I am not from a large city that deals with gridlock, so that may be part of the difference.

Practicality··on Long-term stress erodes memory
Michael McIntyre explains the leaving the house/car part perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GO2xz0L9gQ

(Edit: The full presentation is pretty relevant to the topic too if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cFt2tWsI4)

Practicality··on Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
"Hopefully you'll leave this talk a little dumber than you started it, and be more immune to the seductions of AI that seem to bedevil smarter people. "

Nice.

All in all, effectively reasoned. I've been making similar arguments for the last few years. AI is likely to create a lot of problems, and solve a lot of problems. But I think both aspects are messy and our relationship with our future technology will be complicated and fraught with regular human issues.

Some of those potential issues are very serious, yes, but serious like automating jobs and not solving the employment issue, or creating a very effective army of automated drones and single-handedly taking over a country (or, sure, the world), not issues of AI destroying the planet and/or enslaving all of mankind.

Practicality··on Nestle says it will cut sugar in chocolate by 40%
Hmm, I am might make that actually. That sounds like a fun project.
Practicality··on What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?
There was still a driver, but all the bins and cans were ID tagged and had weight sensors installed. This was earlier technology (a lot of cities have similar things now), but it was basically a locking hydraulic lift that coupled with an interface on the cans. That picked the cans up over the truck and inverted them. So it just dumped things into the truck.

So there were no workers, just a driver.

Because of the jobs issue, they went back to having two men that pick up the cans by hand. But because everyone had the new cans with all the extra hardware now the work was harder. It was the worst of both worlds until they issued everyone new regular trash cans a few years later.

Practicality··on What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?
Very true: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/
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