davidgu

I wonder how this affects pattern recognition.

Would people more readily recognize that say, "Large Spiky Orange Fish" strategies lead to greater returns, compared to if the strategies were presented as "Short | Value Investment | Large Market Capitalization"?

This could also be an interesting way of eliminating inherent bias while leveraging human pattern recognition abilities. Represent values pictorially, and hide data labels.

Another _problem_ with these suggestions is that they suggest +5 services to replace one. It's difficult enough to have a coordinated migration to a single new service. This just compounds the problem.

To have a good chance at becoming a viable replacement, all of this functionality would have to be replicated in a single service. Taking on a multi-billion dollar company's cash cow product head-on is quite a difficult task.

I feel that it's unlikely that ulterior motives are in place, given that Signal's core user base consists of privacy conscious folks, thereby preventing an easy pivot towards a closed ecosystem once critical mass is reached. It's likely that if this were attempted, someone would just fork Signal, with support for some kind of decentralization, and split the user base in two.

However moxie seems to have an outdated form of federation in mind when he gives examples of IRC and email. While it is true that these technologies have been quite rigid, there are other examples of distributed technologies that are quite flexible in implementation. Bitcoin and Mastodon are examples where changes and updates are pushed through regularly.

The determining factor seems to be the amount of control the principal developer holds over the ecosystem. Mastodon instances basically all run the same code, and (mostly) everyone is happy with the direction they are going. Thus, Eugen pushes a new release, everyone runs it, and protocol changes can propagate throughout the network. Old nodes get left behind. However, say Eugen (or Signal) massively screws up, and they get forked. Now, any protocol changes must be adopted by both camps (who by definition have differing philosophies) to be fully applied.

He was absolutely right. It's just that the benefits of written language massively outweigh the small loss in memory performance we experience.

If your computer's OS and all your files were stored on a 64gb ramdisk, it would be fast, yes, but not very useful.

It seems that almost every technological development will cause us to become "weak as a species," for the simple reason that these developments remove difficulties we have faced in the past.

Cars and bicycles damaged our endurance. Shoes softened our soles. If these technologies disappeared overnight, yes we would be worse off as a species, but that says nothing about the benefits of these technologies.

If these technologies improve our mental effectiveness, even if only within a specific type of sensory stimulation, it's likely that we would adapt our sensory perceptions to deliver these "optimized states," possibly through new technology, for an overall net gain in efficacy.