dbpokorny

Sexual surveillance and repression goes back to the dawn of civilization and the origin of language. Everybody wants to know who is having sex with who. This is, I fear, the ultimate question of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy. It is difficult for a human being to resist the temptation to ask who is having sex with who, especially after spending decades building a system that is designed to answer exactly that question (a.k.a "artificial intelligence" or perhaps "artificial gossip" would be a better term).

> Gossip, according to Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, does for group-living humans what manual grooming does for other primates — it allows individuals to service their relationships and so maintain their alliances on the basis of the principle: if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Dunbar argues that as humans began living in increasingly larger social groups, the task of manually grooming all one's friends and acquaintances became so time-consuming as to be unaffordable.[51] In response to this problem, humans developed 'a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming' — vocal grooming. To keep your allies happy, you now needed only to 'groom' them with low-cost vocal sounds, servicing multiple allies simultaneously while keeping both hands free for other tasks. Vocal grooming then evolved gradually into vocal language — initially in the form of 'gossip.'[51] Dunbar’s hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that the structure of language shows adaptations to the function of narration in general.[52]

> Critics of this theory point out that the very efficiency of 'vocal grooming' — the fact that words are so cheap — would have undermined its capacity to signal commitment of the kind conveyed by time-consuming and costly manual grooming.[53] A further criticism is that the theory does nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming — the production of pleasing but meaningless sounds — to the cognitive complexities of syntactical speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#The_gossip_...

Your computer has to download the tweet before it runs the tweet. It will be cached on your computer. Compliance with twitter TOS means you have to clear your cache when twitter says the tweet was deleted. Since you're using the tweet to run code, it doesn't hurt anything if you ignore the "deleted tweet" advisory.

Yes, it goes from Excel to Microsoft Project to the plotter to the wall. And then beings the multi-year process of watching the baseline and targets drift away from each other like ships at sea...

It sounds like suicide by cop, which is a real thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_cop

The Guardian and Salon are two of the worst offenders. I learned a little while ago that Sam Harris took on Salon. I always thought Sam Harris was a blowhard and annoying to listen to, but I have a lot of respect for him now. We need more honest, courageous intellectuals to take on the fourth estate.

You have left out a very crucial fact which completely destroys your argument: Twitter has no verification process that the tweet was deleted because you're NOT ADVERTISING THE TWEETS. You're using them as source code. So the public is NOT privy to what you're doing with the tweets! So Twitter would have to get a search warrant to determine that you aren't deleting tweets! Of course they don't care; they care about what you're revealing to the public.

If you can get a good toolkit for writing a GLR parser, then people will write their own tokenizers, BNF formal grammars, and plug it into your parser. It would take a single person about two to six weeks to get something thoroughly polished in JavaScript along the lines of what is described. However I think that without some form of centralization, (perhaps a subreddit? idk) it will be difficult for the standardization and namespace organization process to take place. If it is just one person, there is no question of standardization; if it is multiple people, the question of who is in charge of the namespace becomes relevant. Who is in charge of the namespace in this particular experiment?

I can't stop laughing. I think you have to admire the elegance of the concept as performance art though: this is cheap insanity. In fact, I've got to hand it to them, this is the most fun I've had looking at something programming related in a while. I recall the opening lines of SICP,

> I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

Quoted in The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Hal Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman and Julie Sussman (McGraw-Hill, 2nd edition, 1996).

These facts are just wrong. Google and FB both received massive funding early on.

Don't say "we", say "a few very wealthy and powerful individuals who do not represent anyone other than themselves"

I can see why you think that, but I think you're wrong. Blocking ads just means that advertisers will have to get better at providing their audience with quality content. It's the invisible hand of the free market at work. I'm not going to block content I want to consume! Just make content I want to consume.

> In the current situation, it seems that at the very least we are going to see an increased use of ad blockers, resulting in further damage to internet advertising and national economies

This is absurd. Destroying my focus so you can sell your product does not "damage the national economy".

> Capitalism has been hijacked by a lucrative surveillance project that subverts the “normal” evolutionary mechanisms associated with its historical success and corrupts the unity of supply and demand that has for centuries, however imperfectly, tethered capitalism to the genuine needs of its populations and societies, thus enabling the fruitful expansion of market democracy.

> genuine needs

Capitalism reflects genuine greed, not genuine need.

What problems would you rather attack with C + Go vs. a somewhat more mature C + Python?

I'm just posting to say that I agree, and I have nothing else to add to this conversation.

This isn't quite correct; it should go

> Then we go to war in order to make sure some other country can't create artificial scarcity of resources, which would reduce the number of people we have against our wishes

It is about preventing someone else from cutting off your supply lines.

> Implement thunderbolt? Sorry, that's Intel proprietary, no can do.

Sounds like Intel is guilty of "illegal tying". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

On top of that, the DMCA has interoperability clauses which may need to be updated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering

> implement a set

> don't use a hash table

> use the stack

> complain when language doesn't have tail call

wat

> As a matter of fact, the need for proving existence theorems was not felt until the end of the nineteenth century, and I refuse to believe that someone like Cauchy or Riemann did not think of them. More probably, they thought about the possibility of proving existence theorems, but they rejected it as inferior mathematics.

...

> Most often, some student will retort with the dreaded question: “So what?”

Insecure snob.

I was under the impression that the problem was a corrupt and impenetrable legal system built to erect barriers to entry and protect insiders, the virtue in whose hearts is boiled away in the fires of greed and lust for power.

This is a sort of French Revolution type system: the elites can keep shitting and pissing until suddenly a conspiracy forms and KABOOM a whole bunch of dead rich people in the street and NOBODY CARES because they're perverted scum ! ! !

B R I N G

B A C K

T H E

G U I L L O T I N E

Orange! I remember that language. It is the language which produced what I consider to be the all time #1 hacker news comment:

> Let me put your mind at ease: If you are serious, and if you attain any success, I solemnly promise you the Internet will string up your language, dismember it publicly, douse all the pieces in gasoline, light them on fire, and dance around the flames. Why is that actually something that ought to put your mind at ease? Well, it's inevitable anyhow, so you might as well go ahead, have some fun, and make some decisions about what Orange is going to positively be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9784334

it is mean but oh so vivid

Not if you start with a small compiler

more like a "fuse" that cuts off power to X and Y when Z fails

> You’re doing option A already, right? This is just standard operating procedure when it comes to finding code on the internet – a hyperlink comment ensures you’ll be able to debug down the line.

XD

I'm not qualified to continue this discussion further.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GicWZl9HmU4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine

The answer to that question depends on whether or not a robot is pointing a gun at your head. Might makes right.

In theory we could rig up a quad copter with a machine gun, loudspeaker, and AI, with programming that demands that every human it encounters be interrogated with the question, "do I, a mechanical computer, have the ability to think?" and if the human gives a negative reply, it uses the machine gun on the human until the human is dead or decides to utter a positive response: "yes, this flying death machine can think".

Whether or not we say "machines can think" is a political question, and political power comes out of the barrel of a gun. If a machine can wield political power, then it can get you to say "machines can think" because truth is inherently political.

> many journals consider it an ethics violation to use a control group, the logic being that in denying your experimental method to the control group you're putting them at a disadvantage

> doing education science is unethical

lel

"we're going to teach you how to learn, be we refuse to learn how to teach"

you are missing:

"A Shorter Model Theory" by Hodges

"Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction" by Sutton and Barto

"Neuro-Dynamic Programming" by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis

"Set Theory An Introduction To Independence Proofs" by Kunen

"Naive Set Theory" by Halmos

I like "How to Make Wealth" because he doesn't beat around the bush, he just come out and says that "wealth" is nothing more than an "object of the desire to possess" and if you can do something that increases some else's desire-to-possess something that you have or control, then you are creating wealth.

> Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth

Whether or not you agree with this "metaphysics of wealth" it is a good read because it illustrates some intuition behind economic theory.