d4nt

I agree. Also, there are many teams or departments in companies where the humans are following the instructions of a process manual, spreadsheet or software system, without actively knowing how it works. The Company “knows” things the individual humans don’t.

I’m interested in the term “distributed monolith” and why shared libraries are bad, can you elaborate? (I’m an experienced dev who’s never worked on micro services). Say a service that consumed 6 other services became a service that consumed 3 other services and 3 libraries. The interfaces were the same, the libraries are consumed via package management and have good test coverage. Why is that worse?

I’m actually not surprised you have a service for handling working days. The list of UK bank holidays should ideally be stored in one place, with everything else consuming that. But not all of the 1500 services have their own data stores, do they?

Locking down this network of services is a massive security improvement and they've used some very neat ways of achieving it. Overall, I really appreciate them writing this up.

However, 1500 services? That really feels like they're separating things at too granular a level. Does every one of those things really need to sit behind a network call? Couldn't some of that re-use be via code libraries? I wonder what the service to developer ratio is?

I think many people would work less if they could afford to. But we're not getting paid for all this extra productivity[1].

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages...

Theory: Love isn't an emotional state as such. It's best thought of as a mental function that transforms how you frame situations from negative or indifferent reactions into more positive ones. It converts Apathy -> Engagement, Anger -> Forgiveness, Disgust -> Compassion, Fear -> Optimism.

For example, I love my children so I want to be engaged in their lives, I forgive them easily when they make mistakes, I do not think twice about helping them if they vomit or can't make it to the toilet in time, and I am excited and optimistic for their future. For other people, I might not naturally have the same kinds of reactions.

If you buy this definition of love then the opposite would be cynicism, which would produce both apathy and hate depending on the situation.

“We should provide for...” is a little troubling. Who is “we”, how did they get to that position and how are they enforcing they’re decisions on who can have food?

I think the problem might be even more complex than that. From what you’ve said they seem to be training AI to predict what people want and how valuable it is to them. This problem used to be the role of the giant distributed computational process know as the Free Market. Communism/Socialism famously found that problem too hard to solve and collapsed as a result. If there’s a new way to solve it, it’s both hard to argue that’s a bad thing, and a major threat to many of society’s institutions.

At first I was terrified of this, in the short term this could cause a lot of suffering but I’ve become convinced it will fail in the long term.

Human societies have evolved a very sophisticated mechanism for moving people up and down hierarchies using a distributed reputation tracking system. This system is interesting in that they’re trying to centralise the reputation tracking system and thereby control it.

To the extent that it replicates what people, on average, think about you I think it’ll work. But planned economies loose to unplanned ones because distributed decision making outperforms centralised decision making. Eventually this system will be misused, make bad decisions, or get ridiculously complex. Then people will loose faith in it. When that happens there’s very little China’s government can actually do to control 1.4 billion people. (That’s not to say that there their remaining options aren’t very worrying though, e.g. tanks)

It’s similar, but in capitalist systems all get a weighted vote on how many points you get. (Either by buying your time/products or if I’m your boss I can promote/fire you). By the look of it, the Chinese system gives complete control to the government. So it’s analogous to a fully planned economy.

I think Facebook would be missing the correlations of likes to the Big Five personality traits. But they could rebuild it if they wanted to, by promoting a free personality test on their site. (I assume that correlations between personality traits and political learnings has been researched before and there’s various bits of data available?) Then you can go from targeting ads at likes to targeting ads at political views.

> most workplaces won't tolerate not responding to instant messages and notifications.

This. IM conversations take longer than in person ones (or video chats), have a higher rate of misunderstandings, cannot be flagged for follow up or bookmarked for reference, and the red blobs contribute to higher stress levels. It adds nothing to productivity, IMO. Yet being ‘present’ on slack is the new being at your desk before the boss.

The general rule is: Nothing is called AI anymore once it works.

Like with magic tricks, once we know how it works it seems a lot less impressive. So we stop calling it AI. When you think about it, everything computers do could be considered AI.

We've forgotten the core point of protesting. The article skirts near the truth in the section about how hierarchical organisations are more effective than the modern decentralised variety, but it frustratingly seems to still miss the point.

The Iraq war protests, while massive, never seriously threatened the government or the established order of things. Whereas, the Poll Tax riots in the U.K. where relatively small, but Thatcher was ousted by her own party within months.

Protests work when they threaten to overthrow the government. They could either do that through existing democratic processes, via financial means (e.g. tax revolt) or violently. But the point is the same, governments are motivated by self preservation.

Protests need either powerful organisational structures with figureheads that could assume power, or a broad enough base with sufficient reckless abandonment that it could turn into armed uprising. Without either of those things, the incumbents in power are not threatened enough to act. The actual event where you all march on the streets is just a demonstration that your organisation is powerful enough to threaten the government. It's not meant to be a fun day out with the kids.

There are some very rich people out there deciding to move their money into tech. I wonder what's prompting that decision.

Random theories:

1. Big Oil is done. Battery prices have hit the tipping point and all cars will soon be electric. The traditional car companies are risky too, at least until the disruption ends and we can see who'll survive.

2. Banks haven't fixed anything, so the smart money is avoiding them.

3. They see no growth in consumer retail now that the cheap Chinese goods boom is over.

Perhaps I should have phrased the question as "why have the lower and middle classes become relatively less effective at taking rich people's money in recent years".

Something that's been on my mind recently, given the increasing amounts of inequality, is "why aren't the lower and middle classes more effective at taking rich people's money?".

In other words, rather that thinking about protectionist measures or redistribution (not that I'm particularly opposed to such things), why aren't rich people spending more cash on things and thereby allowing the money to flow down?

One possibility is that we really are topping out our hierarchy of needs. Billionaires are driving round in Priuses and wearing $80 jeans. Capitalism relies on demand being practically infinite. Could this growing inequality be a sign that this assumption is faulty?

Or do we just need to invent more drone mounted, blockchain integrated juicers to sell to them?

I found the conference talk online: https://vimeo.com/144769901

Yeah, I was a at conference last year where there was a talk from an existing Planetary Protection Officer at NASA. She seemed mostly concerned with what kind of cleaning procedures had been performed on the various probes that had were going to each planet/moon. Sounds like you'd have to be the one delivering bad news like: "nope, this new probe will have to miss its launch window, because the latest science we have says that microbes could survive where it's going, so we have to cook it for 5 days"

I think for .net developers, this makes more sense. You have an existing .net app, built to talk to MS SQL Server, if the latest version of .net can run on Linux, but your DB can't then you're faced with either managing two OS flavours, or just ignoring the Linux compatibility.

Ignoring Linux compatibility would have knock on effects because Linux is now the platform for so many other tool, e.g. Docker.

Regardless of how easy the 'upgrade and migrate to Linux' story is right now, I think it's vital that MS started down this road. Otherwise the .net framework would be [seen as] finished now, and people would start planning to migrate off it.

Pure speculation: you could run an Android VM and used an automated testing framework to drive it

I suppose it's possible that just the right amount of mass extinction events are necessary for intelligent life to emerge.

Too many and evolution doesn't build up any momentum, too little and there isn't enough change to make intelligence (i.e. adaptability) worth having. So the Drake equation would need to be looking for that Goldilocks zone of mass extinctions.

Supposing I found the index location of the next Star Wars movie in pi, would it be copyright infringement for me to mention that on a forum?

Isn't this what we mean when we talk about democracies with "well established institutions". In other words, isn't it a feature not a bug? The public institutions wield power just like the press, the judiciary, the legislature etc. And policy that does not meet with a broad acceptance by all sections of society gets blocked one way or another.

My primary concern isn't leaks or shaming. What I really have a problem with is the role of government here. Elections are not perfect, that's why we have separation of powers. But it's hard to see how any government imposed solution can be implemented without upsetting the balance and opening the door to government censorship/manipulation further down the road.

The responsibility to block this content should be with the parents and the free market. As a parent I can already purchase content filtering services. The UK government is meddling in an area it doesn't need to, with potentially disastrous consequences, presumably for PR purposes.

Given the circumstances, I think most adults could suck it up and be pleasant to each other after a relationship ended. The modern day table flip "I never want to see you again" is a luxury that comes with living in cities.

I think the bigger problem would be accidentally getting pregnant. That could be fatal for the mother, and caring for a baby on Mars, not to mention bringing it home, could prove impossible.

If the worker now gets to stay at home and pursue a hobby they enjoy, while the economy is still producing the same amount of goods, isn't that a net win?

The problem is (a) people feel bad about being on welfare, and (b) we stop paying welfare again the moment that worker makes any money, creating a disincentive to engage in any form of small scale productive activity.

It seems to me that the amount of time people work stays broadly constant, but automation changes what is considered "work".

To a farm labourer from 500 years ago, sitting on factory production line attaching two parts together doesn't feel much like work.

To a production line worker from 100 years ago, sitting at a computer typing emails to people and going to meetings doesn't feel much like work.

To us today, sitting around while the 3D printers in your factory print whatever your AI engine says they should, doesn't feel much like work. But I have a feeling that future generations will get tired of constantly analysing their performance and adjusting parameters.

Think of it this way, how many times has our civilisation run the Grand Theft Auto simulation? What about all the future GTA session that we haven't run yet. It's got to be many many millions.

Now GTA isn't a very sophisticated simulation, and the characters don't have much AI, but either no civilisation ever develops the tech to make a "realistic GTA", or no civilisation ever wants to run a realistic simulation, or there are many millions of realistic simulations in existence.

And if there are many millions of realistic simulations, and only one real universe, it's literally a one in a billion chance that were in the real universe.

Well, the web does have it's own set of UI conventions: http://www.novolume.co.uk/blog/all-websites-look-the-same/

I accept that people kill people for lots of different reasons. And that sometimes its sensible to consider intent (e.g. when passing a sentence).

But we've ended up in a position where killing people because they stepped onto your drug dealing territory will get you a mention on the evening news, followed by a trial by jury, while everyone gets on with their lives.

But killing people because you believe you're in a holy war will get you wall to wall news coverage for several days, any associates in foreign countries will be summarily killed by drone attack, and whatever particular tactics you used (shoe bomb, liquid explosives in drinks bottle, attacking outspoken news publication) will be memorialised across the globe within days in the form of updated security procedures or public reaction.

I don't particularly fear being killed by a religious fanatic, it's so rare it would be irrational to fear that. But I do fear the disintegration of my open and free society due to a social engineering hack called "Terrorism".