chrisin2d

> Population is growing. There are limited resources. One day someone's going to dam up someone else's water and wars will be fought.

I remember taking a university lecture on "water history" and it was... surprisingly fascinating and enlightening.

Some of the earliest conflicts have been over water for farming. The concept of hydraulic despotism describes how the need to control and coordinate water resources across large populations and lands gave impetus for the first civilisations and complex governments, like ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, Peru, and others. They developed all kinds of technologies, measurement systems, and bureaucracies to deal with water.

They say that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. There will certainly be more conflicts over water in the future. We have the civilisational 'technology' of national governments to manage intra-national resources, and we're seeing the active invention of new civilisational 'technologies' of international blocs and more to manage global resources.

> They can still have an effect on society for sure, but I believe the concern is out of proportion with the effect.

I believe the contrary: that high-quality, convincing audio (and video) deepfakes will be cataclysmic for society. Voice audio is one of the last digital artifacts that people will believe with their senses.

When Donald Trump’s “grab them by the p—“ audioclip came out, he was at least forced to acknowledge it.

Once high-quality audio deepfake tools become available, amateurs will be able to flood the web with fake audioclips of politicians saying things they never did, and truly unscrupulous politicians will be given technological cover for any damning audioclips of theirs that get leaked.

Once we cannot trust our senses, then we will be only able to trust our institutions and then our tribes. But trust in institutions is already decaying rapidly, so in the end there only ideological tribes will be left.

I’m an avid Factorio player. It is rare to see such commitment to craftsmanship that the Factorio developers demonstrate. Every aspect of the game is continually refined and improved. The game is very performant even when there tens of thousands of entities moving around at any moment.

The multiplayer gameplay also reveals a lot of fundamental truths about collaborative engineering as the player must debate architecture, prioritize and balance between the short term and the long term, join individual efforts into a group product, discover Schelling points, and so on.

I just took a look. I find them rather abstract, verbose, and repetitive, like cookie notices. I too think it's a decent start. Personally I would use the labels to look into a certain few sensitive apps, anything health or dating-related.

There are a dozen or so items split between three lists: (1) Data Used to Track You, (2) Data Linked to You, and (3) Data Not Linked to You. The distinction between (1) and (2) is not entirely clear.

The language is ishy-washy: "The following data may be collected and linked to your identity." Is or isn't it? I would like to see firm language: "...data will be collected..."

> Really we need parental advisory ratings like we have for movies to easily know which apps sell data.

I agree. There's value in the App Store privacy labels if you really dive in, but I doubt that many people will scroll to the bottom of an app page to properly read the privacy label.

I think it'd be useful for many users to see a punchy above-the-fold badge that says "Privacy-friendly", "Uses some personal data", or "Uses a lot of personal data" (or terser copy to those effects) and links to the detailed privacy label further down-page.

I don't think that he was necessarily 'stoic' in the ascetic sense. He was down-to-earth and preferred creating and transforming things over simple conspicuous consumption. He did big stuff like founding companies and revitalizing downtown Las Vegas and smaller stuff like turning a parking lot into a vibrant, artsy micro-community and creating a co-living community with his friends in SF after his first company acquisition. (According to his book.)

I have mad respect for Tony. He was creative and didn't let money or the desire for status get in the way of what he thought truly mattered. He focused on fostering interpersonal connection and creating new things.

What a cool, one-of-a-kind dude.

Interesting. It is somewhat analogous to how thirst satiation is inhibited (partly) by gulping liquid as well as gut fluid osmolality.

There's more to life than money.

The USA offers higher quality of life and has a cosmopolitan, multicultural society. I live in the Netherlands, where I enjoy an extremely high quality of life, get access to diverse cultural programs, and get to meet interesting individuals from every corner of the earth who have come to pursue art, technology, and science here. Dutch tech salaries aren't the highest, but I'm living a great life. Dutch and American societies are open-minded and immigrant-oriented: both readily and easily assimilate millions of immigrants.

During uni, I did an exchange study in Beijing and Shanghai. I'm open to working a short gig in China, but I would never settle down there. Chinese cities have thin veneers of modernity and glitz, but they are polluted, offer poor quality of life, and—aside from small expat circles—are monocultural from a global viewpoint. I am thoroughly convinced that China lacks the West's ability to draw, retain, and assimilate foreign talent en masse.

I used to work for a major e-commerce company and will back this up. The importance of performance, of course, depends on the use case.

In e-commerce, the biggest factors (that come to mind) to compete on are—SEO and brand aside—price, offerings, and convenience. Convenience has two dimensions: UX and performance.

If a user has a very clear idea of what they want from your site, they'll probably be patient. If a user is channel surfing (and the vast majority are when it comes to shopping, comparing options, etc.), then every millisecond matters. Every millisecond spent loading is a millisecond not spent selling/convincing.

I am in agreement. The web was envisioned as a utopian place where information could flow freely, watering humanity to grow enlightened.

But it turned out that on the web, misinformation is cheaper to produce than true information, individuals—no matter how independently-minded—are no match for corporate and state actors that have vastly more resources and motivation to manipulate, and tribal identity is more powerful than abstract ideals.

What have we wrought?

I have thought about how it would be societally healthy for parents to bring their babies and infants to work. In modern times we treat child-rearing as a private matter to be hidden from public adult life, but it’s long been a communal matter.

Admittedly, I’m not great with kids: I don’t have the instincts yet. But I can recognize that childcare isn’t something that someone can schedule as a 4-hour bloc to be one-and-done in the evening (if they can’t or don’t want to hand their child to some hired service): it’s interwoven throughout a parent’s day. Sure, there will be crying and other noises, but I can deal with that. It seems to me artificial to make the 9am-5pm workday so sterile and devoid of organic human activity.

I’m young and was a child of a single working mother not very long ago. I remember it being difficult for her. But I am now grown and — in a nod to my mother and other parents like her — favor a parent-friendly work culture.

As a UX designer, I agree on the point that cities need a UX designer (or several...) to make civic information visible, legible, and navigable.

I lived in the Chicago area, same as the author. In Chicago, parking signs read as if/else-if/else-if/else sequences that are annoying to parse while driving. The 'design process' (or whatever process manifested these signs) clearly had city processes but not users in mind.

In downtown Chicago, you can find yourself endlessly circling blocks in your car looking for a free spot, attempting to interpret contradicting parking signs, while some driver closely tails behind you impatiently. The street parking experience is very user-hostile.

The author points out a confusing spot between 1100N and 1166N State Street that has three signs on one pole. Such is a common occurrence.

https://goo.gl/maps/do93fXNdTnb1driQ7 Here, on the same pole there are two seemingly contradicting signs: one with a green circled P and another with a red crossed-out P, both with small arrows pointing in the same direction. There's a pay box and another pay to park sign. You the driver have 1–3 seconds to react and decide: do you risk it (it says tow zone... but it also says pay to park and there's a pay box right there!) or do you try the next street over (but this is already your 5th block and you're running late for your appointment)?

You could have sign wombo-combos that go like:

1. "Pay to park, 7 days a week" — okay, seems like you can park

2. "No stopping, no standing [A]am-[B]am, [C]pm-[D]pm, Mon-Fri" — oh, what time is it exactly? And today is a Monday, right?

3. "Street Cleaning, 1st Monday of the Month, [X]am-[Y]am, 1 Oct-1 Apr" — and which Monday of the month is today?

and so on. Exceptions upon exceptions upon exceptions.

I live in Amsterdam. Your point is valid that the flat topography makes cycling easy.

But electric bicycles solve the issue of climbing slopes and are extremely cheap. For the price of an entry-level car you can buy 6 good e-bikes or 2–3 top-of-the-line models. Making cities more bike-friendly would be a boon to the working class who could then enjoy mobility cheaply.

Great UX makes a world of difference. UX is about more than just features or appearance: it's about everything coheres together as an experience for users.

UX should be relatively easy to copy, but it seems (at least to me) that many people have a hard time copying UX. Many people will copy features or appearance, but their execution usually lacks something. This is not a dig: most people don't get it.

There are a few people who do, and when they create something new, only afterward does it seem so obvious.

This is just my take.

Indeed, an open-ended interface like a VUI invite unimplemented interactions.

I worked on a conversational agent and now realise that there are fundamental usability barriers that are very difficult to overcome:

- Limited information bandwidth. Adults can visually read between 250–600 words per minute, plus they have peripheral vision that can help in scanning for shapes, colors, and images. Plus information in a GUI is persistent on a screen for easy reference. For voice, adults can only comfortably listen at 150–160 WPM and would need to hold information in their memory for reference. This makes voice ecommerce impractical for anything beyond familiar essentials.

- Lack of editing layer. It’s simple and straightforward to correct text box input, but it’s difficult to correct a voice command and doing so is ambiguous and adds extra chaotic information. A lot of people think aloud, so they frequently self-correct themselves mid-sentence or add on information in an ad-hoc manner: “I’d like a cappuci—er, make it a latte. (pause) And oh with soy milk.”

- High context switching cost. GUI’s keep contexts within frames, tabs, and windows — and the user can easily (low cost) switch between them. This is an Amazon shopping cart context, this is a Reminders context, and so on. A button press is unambiguously contained within its context. In voice, contexts are not quite parallel but sequential and have to be built up over time.

I think that the FBI and our government should use every tool at their disposal to find the killer(s) and their sponsor and bring them to justice. If the perpetrators are sheltered by an uncooperative country, then we should apply diplomatic pressure.

All murder is tragic and horrible. I think that assassination—of journalists, entrepreneurs, activists, and so on—to be an especially abhorrent category of murder, because it is intellectual terrorism and has an outsized impact. A single murder is a tragedy to a family, a community — but a single assassination is a tragedy to all of society. The plausible fear of being killed for challenging an industry incumbent, a corrupt politician, or an unscrupulous business places a sword of Damocles above any would-be upstart. It pre-emptively silences voices and minds and reduces a society's capacity for progress.

"Lossy compression" is a succinct description. Humans, constrained by finite time and cognitive resources, cannot understand reality at its full resolution. Narratives are compact maps of the territory.

We're living in a second Gutenberg moment. I think that epistemic ecosystems, like biological ones, have information carrying capacities — the aggregate ability of its members to produce, exchange, and use information. We all live in one or more such ecosystems. Think: liberal university-educated Bay Area millennials in technology and the kind of information they produce and exchange within that ecosystem. When the information carrying capacity is exceeded, the ecosystem becomes unstable (Narrative collapse) and has to stabilise by splitting into smaller ecosystems that can support coherent, authoritative Narratives.

I think it's useful to look at the first Gutenberg moment. The mass production of books caused an information explosion that exceeded the information carrying capacity of the Catholic ecosystem and resulted in its fracture into smaller Catholic and Protestant ecosystems that can exert enough power to control Narratives (new capacities). We can see a similar scaled-up phenomenon today where countless novel virtual communities and ideological factions that don't conform to the traditional Left-Right dichotomy emerge and offer people various new, coherent maps to the vastly expanded information territory.

I think (as an American in Amsterdam) —

Low-end: LIDL, VOMAR

Lower-middle: Dirk van der Broek

Middle: Albert Heijn, Jumbo

Middle—high: EkoPlaza, Landmarkt

High-end: Marqt

I buy my bread from Vlaamsch Broodhuys—an upscale bakery chain—as there’s one by my home.

Diverse good breads are easily accessible in the Netherlands, I find. Back in the US, getting good bread is requires research and a drive. In my college town, both of the only two good artisanal bakeries were started by Europeans who were too fed up with American bread culture!

> However, a higher velocity of capital without commensurate economic value being created ~= massive inflation.

This is a good point. Money maps to stuff and services. But there is ample surplus production (and unused capacity) in our economy.

Every year 40bn+ pounds of food is wasted at the retail level (on top of all the waste that happens before retail in production), while ~11% of the American population is food insecure.

Nearly every clothing company — H&M, Nike, Burberry, Eddie Bauer, and so on — destroys billions of dollars of unsold clothing every year in order to preserve their brand.

We have material abundance thanks to highly optimised mechanisation and more recently automation in agriculture and manufacturing. UBI can allow the poorest parts of society access the surplus that we would otherwise destroy.

My alma mater, the University of Illinois, made a uniquely astute and prophetic move in 2017: it purchased a 3-year $60m policy to insure against a drop in Chinese student enrolment in case of a political or health event. They foresaw trouble and hubris from the current administration. Lo and behold...

In Our Time with Melvin Bragg from BBC Radio 4. It’s a colossal podcast series split into six podcasts discussing Literature, Culture, History, Philosophy, Religion, and Science. Each episode Melvin Bragg brings together a panel of professors and experts (mostly from within the UK) to discuss a topic, event, or famous figure.

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish from Farnham Street. “Master the best of what other people have already figured out” sums it up.

EconTalk with Russ Roberts from the Hoover Institution. Russ brings on distinguished guests to talk about economics, finance, and more. It’s a neat way to discover interesting thinkers. The topics are far ranging: he once brought on Judith Donath to talk about human-computer interaction and online communities and identities.

I think that HN readers trend rationalist and see the problem as one of presenting evidence. I respectfully disagree and present a different perspective, one which premises that objectivity is futile and that information is social/tribal.

There is truth and then there is information. I think that people can know only information — projections of truth we think to be truthful. Information must be stored as memory and thereby is rendered organic and messy.

I argue that information is socially constructed. Given the overwhelming complexity of the world, individuals evaluate the trustworthiness of information by how much they trust its transmitter and how people in their network — who collectively form their realities — also receive that information. There is scarcely enough time or resources for individuals to independently evaluate information (in a non-social way for truthiness). Observe for ourselves: how much do we accept as information just because someone we and our friends/family/colleagues trust says it?

In short, (I think that) we believe what others believe. The cost of evaluating information is too high, and so too is the social cost of believing something that is contrary to the beliefs of those others who constitute our immediate realities (the ones we directly experience day to day).

The answer in a democratic society that aims to have a free press? I think that at an abstract level the answer will have something to do with shortening the diameter of our society-level social network and more densely connecting distant subgraphs — such that different social realities can be bridged and the Overton window can be narrowed around the mean.

One merge-tribes implementation: Institutions that socialise people at a national or state-level and cross social classes, like a year of mandatory national civil service around the country. As we go through life, we progress through a series of institutions that socialise us at increasingly wider levels: family, grade school (hyperlocal), maybe religious group, middle school (local), high school (local), then university for some (international or national but upper middle-class if prestigious; otherwise regional). The EU’s Erasmus Programme brings EU students to study in other EU countries: individual networks that otherwise would never connect, get connected — and at a collective level the Programme contributes toward a pan-European identity. But in the US and the EU there are lack of institutions that socialise the masses both at a national/union level and across class. I expect that people will balk at the idea of a compulsory program in a “free” society, but I think that it is more productive for people to think about what a healthy society should ask of each members so that it can sustain a healthy abundance of freedom.

Another idea: Facebook and other online social networks creating intimate channels — not mass channels that inevitably devolve into shouting and chanting — that foster more cross-societal interaction and awareness. Though I think this is a lot weaker than an “IRL” solution.

I find our modern epistemic crisis very interesting and welcome emails to discuss.

It's known as phatic communication. It's not nonsense or noise: it conveys a wealth of information.

It (re-)establishes the relationship between two parties (and to observing parties). You can tell if two people are strangers, friends, or enemies by how they do this ritual.

It signals intention on part of the initiator and receptiveness on part of the responder. If "Hey, how are you?" gets a cold and abrupt "I'm fine." without a reciprocating question, then it's a pretty strong signal that the other party isn't open to further or prolonged conversation.

It's also like a shibboleth. How someone interacts in the ritual can signal how well socialized s/he is and whether s/he's an in-group or out-group member. If you ask someone you don't know very well "How are you?" and s/he immediately begin telling you about the rash on his/her belly and how s/he hate the traffic and the weather, then that might tip you off that s/he doesn't understand your society's social protocols and therefore is either a social misfit or an outsider.

What about social, cultural, and civic life and public services? These depend on density, scale, and networks.

> "a densely packed apartment complex in the middle of a noisy city"

I dispute the notion that dense urbanism is not necessarily unpleasant. What you describe is a consequence of thoughtless architectural and urban design. I live in a four-storey apartment building with a garden in a quiet, bucolic neighbourhood in a core urban district in the Randstad — a dense megalopolis of over 8 mil people in The Netherlands. Density makes cycling, public transit, and walking feasible. This greatly reduces car traffic. Reduced car traffic requires less urban space to be spent on road and parking surfaces — urban space that can instead be spent on green and public spaces. Reduced car traffic in turn means less urban noise. It is a virtuous cycle.

To preempt the expected protests that this kind of urbanism is only achievable by centuries-old cities: it is true that it is much easier for old cities to achieve this, but it is possible for car-centric cities as well. Rotterdam — its centre razed in WW2 and rebuilt to be car-centric — managed the transition. Old cities have many modern districts: see IJBurg of Amsterdam.