alansammarone

Exactly. If you can't consciously choose to turn off your phone and go read a book, you never had anything that remotely resembles free will.

I don't think all of these are a problem per se. The problem is (and probably always was) people with empty minds. Sure, now they can fill it more easily with junk, but the whole point of technology is to make life easier after all.

If you're learning or working on something you love and you want to have more time to do, its a perfectly reasonable choice to outsource "what I'm I going to eat next" or "how do you I get from A to B". The problem is not having anything that you love to learn/work on.

Well, the cold war was much more severe. I meant to ask "Could this last 50 years, involve many proxy battles and grow to a cold-war-scale political tension?".

Could this turn into into a cold-war-like exchange of pleasantries?

Every time I read an article like this, I get a bad feeling and I say to myself "I'll definitely exercise more - I don't wanna be all buggy when I get older due to my lifestyle - I'll do this NOW!". Then a couple of hours later, I'm back coding happily seated. I'm sure this is the case for many of us.

I wish our brains could keep this bad, guilty-like feeling that makes us take action around for longer.

While everything you said is true, I think it misses the point. It's clear that in order to have a reasonable discussion, we need to have two reasonable people who are willing to discuss. And you may just include "is not a conspiracy theory nutjob" or "is able to express his/her point of view in a clear way" in your definition of reasonable (of course, you should'nt include "agrees with me" in your definition of reasonable").

The point is that you should try it out to see whether they're "reasonable". And if they are, then you're supposed to have an open, genuine discussion with them.

Maybe uniting with humans in general is also a reasonable option.

Thanks for this very detailed and well written comment. I'm a physics student, so this is tremendously interesting and useful. Thanks.

This is amazing. It never ceases to amaze how much complex behaviour can emerge from gravitation. After black holes, neutron stars, gravitational waves, solar systems, this is yet another example of a structure that arises from gravitation alone (granted, many other principles of physics are needed for this to happen - for example conservatin of angular momentum). What else will we discover?

I could never find one that is as well thought and as well written as Sublime, and I've tried many, many others before.

Well, the argument about being blocked from reading to your kids is a pretty good one. Never thought of it like that. You convinced me. Thanks.

Why? I don't see any way in which it would be "fair" to get an advantage (or disadvantage) because you happen to have been born in a particular family, which is a random process. Of course, there are implementation difficulties associated with it - how would you enforce something like that - but in essence I think it's a pretty good idea.

That is SO annoying. When it happens I don't even read the article anymore, I just rage close the tab.

I've never heard about quadratic voting before. This is very interesting!

While it is true that some people probably need a nanny, I feel like forcing everybody to have a nanny is highly unfair and not a viable solution.

Could you please expand on the matter?

Could you please expand on why its necessarily better for the average Joe to invest money (without knowing beforehand whats gonna be a "productive enterprise" of course) instead of fuelling the economy directly by buying goods? (honest question)

Not only that, but there is also something morally very questionable about making promises and don't giving a sh*t about whether you'll be able to deliver or not.

This a wrong attitude in its moral and legal aspects, and I think it tells us something about the very worrying ethical aspects of today's (or maybe it was always like that) startup environment.

I don't think a scientific study loses any merit if it doesn't make people reading it happier.

Out of all the internet giants, at least to me, Apple has time and time again demonstrated to be reasonably ethical. Their position on encryption, net neutrality (granted, a bit late), gay marriage, their willingness to fight political positions which they disagree with... It could certainly be improved in many ways, but it's still one of the few companies I somewhat trust. Their innovative character is also something I really like (again, granted, it used to be much more so in the past).

I used to feel this way about Google too. Given the current events, I don't anymore, and I'm seriously considering DuckDuckGo.

But Amazon is essentially a market place. Google is a search site.

This is a very good point. People tend to look for more "balance" when they are unhappy with whatever their main focus is right now. The obvious example applies: people don't like their day jobs very much, and so they go around advocating more "work-life balance" to compensate for it, because they feel it is a necessary evil. It's not (at least in most cases).

If you're not happy with whatever your main focus is, you need to change it, not add more stuff to compensate.

(Of course, there are still some things that you should pay attention to apart from your main focus, like your health and family. This is not the point here).

Every week we're seeing more and more news like that - whether its the government or internet companies - in which people's right to privacy and to freedom online are being severely threatened. I'm not an american, but I grew up seeing the USA as an example of freedom and progress. It's very sad that this is becoming less and less true every passing day.

We must build a decentralised web. Now.

That's a very interesting point, thank you for the explanation!

I've focused on backend for the last 7 years or so, so I've been kind of out of contact with the frontend world. Recently I started working on a personal project, and I thought it would be a good time to learn some of the modern tools people have been using for frontend dev.

I was completely baffled by the myriad of options out there, how complex they look (note I've been working on very high performance, distributed backend applications, so complexity on itself is not an issue), and how it's very unclear when to use any one of them or what each one is good for. I tried Angular and React, and both feel like almost a different language. You have to learn their internals to work effectively with them, and it often looks like they create more complexity then the original complexity they were trying to reduce. I have no problem learning new things, in fact, I love it! It just feels like there are other things to learn that will stick around for longer - JS frameworks/libraries seem to be very hype-driven these days. What are your thoughts on this?

I often see people pointing out that college has other pros other than just teaching people technical skills, which many can learn from other sources.

My 2 cents: College has also many cons. Apart from the monetary issue, college forces talented people to learn things way more slowly than they could, in a much less efficient way than its possible. College also forces you to go through some very uninteresting classes. Some people would argue that this good, since in the "real world" that is often what happens. I don't like this line of reasoning: that is part of the problem. You shouldn't do what you don't like, and college shouldn't teach you that. From a biological point of view, college is the most productive time in your life.

Should we really be forcing (and by that I mean: should the people hiring engineers require a degree) people to sit through slow, sub-optimal, boring classes during their most productive years, in the hope that they get used to being unhappy most of the time?

College may be good to some people, but it may also hurt a lot of talented people, who waste their valuable time and become used to the fact that its ok to be unhappy with what you're doing. It's not.

Yes, but it might also be the case that we don't observe something outside of it, but rather infer the existence of something outside of it through some other phenomenon (which is much more probable - observing something outside of the visible universe as we know it would violate relativity). In that sense, it would be there, but would never be visible.

I think that's a very important point that most people tend to ignore. In many discussions, people simply assume and take it as an obvious fact that family >> work. I think this is only true for some kinds of work, and generally only true for not-so-fulfilling jobs. It even feels like it is somewhat arrogant , or maybe just narrow minded, to focus solely on influencing their kids or having a stable relationship. What about the rest of the world? It's not OK to simply forget about it.

Any normal person is able to remember, in any given moment, the "experience" (in a very broad sense - meaning cognitive and emotional processes) it had in its recent past (modulo memory limitations caused by various factors). Wouldn't that imply that there is a single consciousness inside each brain? i.e a single "state machine"?