canoebuilder

Let's think about your example and what it entails.

So you're going to a pizza party with your friends, and instead of saying to your buddy Mike who you're about to see in person and share some pizza with, "Hey Mike, here's 5 bucks, thanks!"

Instead you fire up the ol' ethereum whizbang machine, and "pay" Mike. The payment then rattles around the ol' globally distributed whizbang machine, at the SPEED of Light! powered by electricity through countless microscopic electronic gating mechanisms before finally settling into the storage media of thousands of computers around the world, where it will stay, forever.

That seems needlessly wasteful of resources and expensive.

What it boils down to, is what is this good for?

While some may have been, not everyone was confounded by the introduction of the web. Many could see obvious avenues of potential and development.

Even back in the 60s or 70s people were envisioning computer network enabled home shopping. Not sure many were envisioning a global distributed turing complete whatchamacallit with ever expanding resource needs because of no garbage collection by design.

So simply, what's the point? What do you do with it besides buy pizzas with your friends? How is it better than existing methods for doing whatever you envision doing with it?

What if anything, does it enable that would otherwise be impossible?

That's an interesting way to think about it, but how do you communicate to the program that a tree fell on your car and you need it to give you money for a new one?

Basically what's the mechanism for communicating certain cases or conditions to the program, how does the program verify the claims you make to it, and how many of the scenarios where that works are practical for any real world applications?

>there is no way around a smart contract environment that actually works.

What about the present system where people develop trusting relationships in business and elsewhere and deal with the occasional anomalies and breaches of trust as they arise, but in the big picture they're not really a deal breaker because they are relatively rare and we humans are wired for socially harmonious behaviour and mutually beneficial actions. Is that a way around it? It seems to have been working decently well thus far in terms of facilitating extensive commercial networks around the world.

Put in X out comes Y,every time. No room for interpretation, just pure beautiful math. That was the idea anyway, for some reason it seems they decided to implement some of these contracts in a not particularly rigorous way.

Jacques is talking about the theory and premise behind the smart contracts, and you Marco are talking about the people interacting with the smart contracts. People who of course are existing under the scope of our present legal systems.

As long as real people can be hauled before a real court

I think this is the crux of the misunderstanding. Because actions can be taken in these crypto-systems more or less anonymously, it is not obvious that you can "haul some one before a real court" should they wrong you in some way, and in those cases when you have parties interacting in these systems anonymously, the laws of the crypto-systems are the extent of the laws they are operating under. Provided extensive investigative effort isn't undertaken to unmask anyone operating anonymously.

Things is, with Apple and Google there is a rather low ratio of spectacular failures to output of products that are in many cases, rather effing amazing. Whereas with the cryptocurrencies unfortunately, the spectacular failures be they in the form of scams, schemes, or heists, more or less are the story.

It's not like these recurrent tales of avarice, greed, or just plain seediness are crowding out the print space for the tales of all the amazing things cryptocurrencies are bringing about, there's room to tell that story to, but where is it.

At this point it's getting harder and harder to locate where there is that glint of hidden potential in cryptos in the face of all the malice and fuckups.

What are the benefits of thousands of different systems keeping a record of every single transaction, and how is this not a hindrance to widespread use of our best available option?

Crypto-currencies have utility and uses but they are rather niche and specialized. Crypto-currencies aren't a mass market system. And they're not structured in a way that they can be.

Was that "classist elitism," or did Schumann just know what he was talking about?

https://www.google.com/search?q=london+demographics

Why is it just westerners/whites who are expected to cope with a changing population?

Can you imagine a scenario in which say Beijing, or Tokyo, or Jakarta, or Riyadh, or Nairobi, or Lagos, or Mumbai were filled with a foreign population that was greater than 50% of the total population for the city?

Can you imagine a scenario where any country outside the western world had demographic numbers showing that foreigners outnumbering the founding population group of the country in the sub 25 age group?

These scenarios are unimaginable and quite absurd even to ponder for anywhere outside of white countries. And yet, have you been to London? Have you looked at demographic charts?

People can raise objections to the population displacement you seem to favor without it having anything to do with "racism, scapegoating, and a general inability to cope," or "muh jerbs."

There are plenty of westerners who think, "We've got a pretty good thing going here, we've brought a lot of good to ourselves and the world as a whole. And we'd rather not see our civilization drastically altered, because a drastic altering of our civilization will impede our efforts and abilities to go on doing good for ourselves and the world."

That's a nifty little portmanteau of echo-chamber and ecosystem, though I do recognize it could have just been an innocent misspelling.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=processing+python&t=hd&ia=videos

Interestingly, what these averages do tell us is that the average hedge fund return is not much, if at all, better than the average index fund return, with the index fund return graph being much more uniform in variance.

How about a browser extension that hides any overlay divs with the string 'cookies' and input buttons?

Having this public doesn't really defend against it any way. And if someone were to perform this act, it would be easy enough to figure out what was going on.

If you're buying bitcoin because of some utility it offers you beyond speculation, the price doesn't really matter. You just exchange one monetary denomination for another and do whatever you plan to do with it.

When you buy something like an internet connection or any other good or service you perform a cost benefit analysis. For example, if internet connections were 100x their current price, many fewer people would have one.(And interestingly for a network like the internet, the higher the cost to access, the less users, and thus less useful because of the network effect.)

This is kind of an odd damning of capitalism, because no matter how we organize society, there is going to continue to be mothering so long as our species is to survive. And whatever societal system we may have, that society is going to be built in large part by mothering.

"Economically productive" in what way? If you want to adopt a short term perspective of a particular nuclear family making X dollars over Y years, maybe.

But that's a rather shallow and irresponsible way of looking at things without accounting for what's better for the future society of our descendants, economically and otherwise.

What in most cases will produce a better quality of individual, a child raised at home by a loving mother, or a child shuffled off to some "childcare" to be looked after by a minimum wage worker absorbed in a smartphone half the time? (Not that all non-motherly childcare is like that, but you get the point)

That's really good. Particularly as it relates to non-financial budgets, such as a time budget. In fact it immediately got me out of my chair and up for some physical activity!

What class of problem is searching for duplicates or uniqueness among a set of billions of items? If it is a tractable problem, what is the most effective algorithm?

'Yuppy' mean young urban professional. If you live in SF, working in the tech profession, you're likely some value of 'young,' and therefore a yuppy.

A car somehow alleviates those concerns?

There's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.

--

"You're talking about people who"

I was saying that when I choose between car or bike, it is most often going to be bike.

I wasn't making any broad prescriptions for society, but if I were to...

You get to where you're going and in my experience you just kind of have a blah feeling.

Where as if you get on a bike to go somewhere not only is the trip there enjoyable(provided the route is not overrun by hordes of car zombies~), but when you get there you're nearly guaranteed to be in a good mood. Like "Alright, yeah let's do this!"

~even then though, it's hard to not enjoy a bike ride.

In addition to bemoaning that intangible, but nonetheless real, loss. There has been recent study of the detrimental effects of light pollution on the creatures that share the planet with us.

I think this is representative of an issue that is an underlying cause of a lot of modern chronic stresses. Our disrespect for all the life on earth and to future generations of that life, especially of our own species, by our falling down on the job of our stewardship of the planet.

Now that's a tall order to rectify, but if our collective actions can result in emergent effects that are detrimental to our societal and planetary health, the opposite is possible as well.

opposed to purely pursuing industrial optimization and efficiency.

Not to take away from your general point at all, but I think the above is just something a lot of people tell themselves or that is assumed but the evidence for it is not actually there.

Similarly, there seems to be a lot of, "Well, we have to do X, because we have to do Y." Where Y is not something that actually has to be done.

I think a lot of things just develop a kind of inertia and go from there. Cars for example in their overbuiltness and overuse are about the farthest thing from efficient and optimized, especially when you factor in their impact on the environment, destruction of human life, and general unpleasantness.

How can any point in an infinite set be reached in a finite number of steps? For that to be the case, isn't the set in question necessarily a finite set between 0 and infinity?

For one to not be evil, does that entail the exclusion of all actions that can be construed as evil, even if it is perceived that doing so is for a greater good?

I'm going to say yes that not being evil means at no time doing evil, no matter what the expected outcome.

Regarding the interview, it's interesting, not over the top interesting, but interesting.

Some things I recall -

_tweeting in SF to get pot holes filled

_the value of perseverance

_building something open-ended and having users further develop it

Those last two get down to the basics, things we've all heard before, sometimes it can be good to hear them again or presented in a new perspective. Of course, there will always be those hearing them for the first time, as well.

I know linking directly to image files is in some circles the hip thing to do, but I don't get, as it creates a frustrating dead end if one is interested in more information on the subject that may be on the page with the image or available from following a link on the page.

And, apparently this site admin doesn't like it.

Anyone know of any particular markets where a small timer might have a better go at it due to insufficient volume to attract the bigger players, or for any other factors?

To see the interview, it seems you'll have to go to the front page, charlierose.com, click the 'archive' tab on the flash interface and scroll down to 08/11/09.

-- To charlierose.com site devs, linkable content - good.