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>This is an aspirational wish but not reality at the moment.

No shit. If it existed, it would be pointless to work on it.

A system where anyone can rent out their CPU time will result in less centralization than we see with current cloud providers. A system where anyone can mine productively will result in less centralization than we see with current cryptocurrencies. Will it result in zero centralization? No, and I wouldn't expect it to. That's most likely impossible.

I disagree. Making proof of work involve real applications rather than just cryptography means that machines will need to be general. It isn't possible to build an ASIC capable of running ordinary applications.

Bitcoin is entirely owned by people with ASICs. The barriers to entry are enormous. It's totally pointless for me to mine Bitcoin on my laptop, or even on my Beowulf cluster. But if mining involves normal computations like you'd want to run on a normal cloud, then a laptop is capable of doing useful work and the barrier to entry is low.

Making normal computers useful is a huge improvement over Bitcoin and is the motivvation behind currencies like Monero.

>Coming up with a way to have a decentralised currency where everyone involved gets a fair say without consuming too many resources is a super interesting problem.

I think the obvious solution is to do useful work rather than throwing away work on crypto. Have miners solve real problems and give them credit for getting the right answer.

This is what Ethereum is supposed to do. I don't think it's a great solution. It's still extremely wasteful since every node runs every computation. Even something like TrueBit, which is designed to be scalable and efficient, is still far less efficient than normal cloud architectures. It still throws away the vast majority of the work in the interest of safety and incentives. These systems are good if you want trustworthy computation, but not if you want high-performance and power-efficient computation.

I'm trying to design a system where something like 95% of the work goes to useful computation, but I have nothing anywhere near shippable. It's a hard problem.

That's why I mentioned it. I also disapprove of .google, but it's less ridiculous.

1. No idea.

2. No idea.

3. No idea.

4. About 0%. They're laughably unscalable and wasteful.

Especially something as generic as .dev. I could possibly see Google having a legitimate claim to a .google TLD, but not something like .dev that is in no way limited to Google.

We lost that battle a long time ago. The Internet is mostly corporate now and will be for the foreseeable future.

What sort of virtualization performance and features does Epyc have? I haven't seen much good information.

EDIT: Actually, yes I have. I know that Epyc allows encryption of every VM with a key the host can't access, which is wicked. But I haven't seen benchmarks or in-depth analysis.

I have no problem with an episodic show, but I think an episodic Trek-like has problems. It just isn't plausible that a starship can come inches from destruction every week. The crew would wind up severely traumatized. If space travel were that dangerous, interstellar society would collapse. And it's implausible that they discover some Amazing Thing (like time travel) that should totally shatter their conception of reality and then forget about it in time for the next episode.

Not on an LCD. The backlight is always on, even if the screen is black.

I wonder how much power the 50 pounds of JS on Youtube costs.

I disagree. There's NO situation where this kind of update is good for users. Being unable to accidentally brick your machine is good, but no user benefits from having adware and spyware installed.

>Maybe it's more that Facebook thinks it's horrible when people kill themselves, and that if Facebook's tech could help prevent suicide, inaction would be immoral.

That doesn't entirely contradict what I said. We generally assume psychologists and therapists are benevolent, but they aren't allowed to disclose private information even if it's in the best interests of the patient. Even if we assume Facebook is perfectly benevolent, this kind of vigilante psychology with no oversight is scary. They've thrown out all established codes of ethics in favor of just doing whatever the hell they want.

And I'm certain Facebook isn't benevolent. They deliberately make their website as addictive as possible. They have run experiments that tried to make people unhappy. If this really is a selfless attempt to help their users, it's inconsistent with what Facebook has done before.

This may or may not be a useful technology, but the fact that Facebook thinks they have the ability and the right to diagnose their users with mental illnesses is disturbing. They have more information about their users than psychologists have about their patients. They can (and do) build a psychological profile and diagnose mental illness. Yet rather than keeping this information in the closest confidence, they sell it to the highest bidder. They can (and do) run experiments without getting informed consent (or any consent).

They're playing psychologist and should be subject to a similar code of ethics.

Another interesting article:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

I hate the way this article is written. This is a news story, not an editorial, but it's clearly trying to tell me what to think.

Here's the correct headline:

"Japanese politician required to leave chamber after bringing her baby to work"

The Post has gone downhill very quickly since Bezos took over.

Gambling is definitely comparable to (and possibly worse than) cigarettes. Gambling has ruined plenty of lives, and it can ruin your life in a few days while smoking takes decades.

Addiction can be horribly destructive without causing physical harm.

I don't know how bad these apps are. Gambling apps can be as bad as a slot machine or a roulette wheel, but we have no idea what kind of psychological damage the more insidious ones cause.

And there is physical harm. Obesity is a public health crisis. I don't know to what extent these apps contribute to it, but it's not zero.

I wonder if he actually believes it's flat. It sounds to me like he might be just trying to get funding. These kinds of stunts are obviously his passion, but he repeatedly had trouble funding them. It's very convenient that his conversion just happened to get him the funding he spent years looking for. Playing the fool to fund his dream would be a clever marketing trick.

I have no evidence that he's not sincere, but I'm not convinced either.

Setting aside the flat Earth craziness, "amateur astronaut" is about the most badass hobby on the planet.

It's not a real monopoly, but it acts like one. They obviously aren't the only gaming company out there, but they own the rights to several beloved franchises. Like, as I mentioned, Star Wars. Also most popular sports.

Because some of their games are actually good. I hate their business practices, but I still want to play Battlefront 2.

And they ARE a monopoly. They own the rights to a lot of my favorite franchises. If I want a Star Wars game (which I definitely do), it's EA or nothing.

I'm confused by it, too. The main reason I've preferred Firefox to Chrome for years has been performance. It's pretty much the same in responsiveness and uses far less memory.

Chrome being the fastest browser is ancient history.