donbright

Feel like sending an email to Jeff Bezos that just says ????

democracy dies because people couldn't be bothered with the "mundane technical details".

its like this is a flaw of intelligent civilization that Carl Sagan didn't think about. it's not global nuclear warfare, it's not climate change, it's not some mad virus...

it's that the species becomes disinterested in performing maintenance because maintenance tasks don't produce a dopamine rush. the civilization becomes too incompetent to perform even the most basic upkeep on the structures they set in place - whether physical like roads and bridges, or social-political, like election systems.

nobody becomes famous or wealthy for performing upkeep.

to me it seems as though there is no precedent for it.

Compare to IBM. IBM created the somewhat open "PC" platform in the 80s. Within ten years there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of companies making "PC Compatible" computers. IBM stopped making PCs. Their platform "won" the marketplace but they, as a company, left the marketplace. IBM is still in business because their primary business was not making or selling personal computers.

Another comparison might be Google. Its a stretch because android is not a hardware platform as such, more of software. However Android phone is relatively open. As a platform Android has 'won' the marketplace. But Google's primary business is not selling phones or phone OSes. They make a handful of phones, and might stop at any time.

There was the 3d printer company. Makerbot. They were theoretically supposed to be open. However they, well some of them in the company, wound up deciding it was not possible because of clones. So they went closed. They also sold out to a huge conglomerate whose primary business is not personal 3d printers. I am not sure if you could say their 'platform' has 'won'....

So if I am right, then if System76 creates an 'open platform' then there will be Compatibles springing up all over. System76 'platform' might win the marketplace. But what will happen to them as a company? What is their primary business.

People mention Prusa. Maybe that might work.

finance is a different culture than hackernews, and the people speak different languages with different philosophy and assumptions about the world.

maybe this is not a technical issue, maybe its a subculture interaction issue that involves a lot of technical details.

i dont think its easy to 'understand' unless one group spends time with another, and i dont mean half an hour meeting, i mean like, shadowing someone for a week.

maybe if college campus tech leaders didnt ogle 19 year olds, there would be more women in tech.

wouldnt it be true that, basically, every boom bust cycle is "caused" in part by 'traditional' investments having low returns which makes investors look for something with higher returns? which by definition is probably riskier?

the 'cheapness of capital' seems to me to be relative to the times that one lives in, in that the cheapness is only cheap in comparison to what investors believe they can profit from it.

dear young people who are reading the above comment.

IMHO dont be afraid to take it with a grain of salt. don't expect to be rewarded for saying no. don't expect a light feather ruffling. don't expect light consequences. be prepared to get fired. be prepared to get demoted. be prepared to lose your health insurance. be prepared to change your industry. be prepared for the realities that most people face.

if you say no to something that really is important, then there will, the vast majority of the time, be major consequences. dont expect it to be easy. dont expect a reward. dont expect anyone to even understand or care why you are doing it. dont expect to be respected. dont expect anything. be prepared.

when you are living in poverty or are homeless, that no wont really mean much. only say no when you have the ground to stand on that can catch you when the inevitable smack in the face comes.

and dont feel ashamed if you have to say yes to survive once in a while. its actually what most people do. every day. even people you respect as heroes. sometimes especially the people you respect as heroes. when a really big no comes, there will be many people chanting it together, and many others behind them silently backing them up, all of whom had to say yes, in ways large and small, at some time or another, in the past, just to survive long enough to be together in that space, building that critical mass, and supporting each other.

then wouldn't we would be able to correlate rates of lower toxic behavior, like harassment and conflict, with the practice of 'cultural fit'? like doing some kind of empirical study?

ironically i would wager that the people who can pass a 'cultural fit' test with the highest score might actually be Sociopaths, since they are the world experts at being charming to complete and utter strangers.

Every single sentence you wrote above is factually wrong, demonstrated not only by the study of the history of economics and society, but also empirically in something as simple as a genetic algorithm evolution inside a computer.

so i wonder if its like sports... they aren't paying for workers to be or stay healthy. like a football team, they are paying a handful of superstars until their bodies are used up and broken, then they can discard them for the next generation.

how important are the differences really?

whether you are in a Chinese prison or a US prison does it really matter which injust, ridiculous, hypocritical system put you there? does it really matter what kind of grandiose intellectual contortions your captors use to justify their behavior towards you? if you are being raped or beaten or worked until you bleed do you really care what language they are using to scream at you while they do it? does your family, who doesnt know where you are, and wont see you for years, care what flag is flown over the walls that enclose you?

That doesn't make me trust them or their software / electrical team.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-fi-toyota-prius-i...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Barr_(software_enginee...

T-SB-0172-09

I love the concept of electrical cars but that has to come with a leap forward in software quality and electrical engineering quality, which I am not really seeing happen.

The idea of Quality is still, basically, alien in the software field. Some of that can be blamed on 'the marketplace' but then again, I believe that if people are going to call themselves "Engineers" they should take up that old mantle of the public responsibility inherent in that title, as it was developed after much blood and horror was spilled over the failed bridges and railroads of the 19th century.

my other question is has anyone ever tried to find this with rational points only

my question is can you get similar results by doing a physical simulation of charges repelling each other

my 2007 macbook could barely load it.

i hope contemporary libertarians on the moon and mars will be OK with with some of the worst rankings in everything from infant mortality to diabetes to education, because that is the legacy of this type of extremist social experiment.

i agree with everything. however.

i recently subscribed to Curiosity Stream. its like netflix but only academic-ish documentaries. its "curated" by human beings. i can almost feel the lack of "algorithm". its weird how i feel about it, compared to youtube or whatever.

it reminds me a little bit of going to a "health food store" in the mid 1990s. they were all tiny, tiny niche shops usually owned by one person or a family. they sold weird stuff like organic tofu and soy milk. nowdays, you can buy both of those products in walmart and target.

something very strange happened... somehow the shitty mass market moved towards the tiny, higher quality, higher price niche products.

how did that happen?

Not specific to robots, but i found your question very interesting to compare with this video which is specifically about managing empathy, and it's dangers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wlwDdzlpuk

"Can you run out of empathy" by Kati Morton (professional therapist).

well its an interesting question.... if 'waste' is the limiting of movement of goods or services, then every single tarrif and trade barrier is theoretically a cause of 'waste', since at some point every single product that is under trade barrier winds up in a similar situation to this ship, does it not? even if it at a small scale.

so if someone makes 25 Talos Power9 computers and the market would support 25 of them, but there is a tarriff that discourages one from being sold, then you have 1 machine sitting there, essentially on a proverbial virtual boat. Maybe its not burning fuel, but its taking up space somewhere, costing rent and overhead. Not much but a little. Now multiply that tiny amount times a billion other products ...

just a thought experiment...

I'd recommend the Sinica podcast, they have done several shows on surveillance tech and the Chinese state, including one focusing on xinjiang and these camps.

Big tech in China is closely linked to government social engineering.

As long as there are people like you, there is hope for the world....

The crux of the library in 2018 is exemplified here. It is important to have public input to the weeding process (thats what it is called in the US), because libraries are inherently hierarchical government bureaucracies, but funded by taxpayers, so taxpayers should have a say. Those books are essentially taxpayer property.

It is also true that the information inside those books is also taxpayer property, but right now the taxpayers can't access it because the Library industry, including it's professional organizations and professional educational programs, is technologically illiterate, but also lost sight of it's mission.

This fellow is called a crank, but he is cranking up the wrong tree. While he is complaining about a small number of important paper journals, and hoarders decry weeding, Alexandra Elbakyan is being threatened with prison for giving away taxpayer funded information - to the taxpayers. And Aaron Swartz... well. Rest in peace man. They just straight up killed him.

There is a saying that for books to survive, what they need is for an enormous amount of people to copy them. That is what allowed the ancient Roman works to survive, long after the Roman libraries were burnt down, and all the Roman bureaucracies in charge of maintaining important works had disappeared. That's why we can read old copies of the Bible or the Koran or the I Ching. That's why we have civilization, because people shared ideas instead of fighting about who, in the long run, far after useful value has been passed to the creator, actually owns them.

It's the modern way in which copyright is enforced, as though violators were terrorists, whether through the military or legal system or NDAs or intimidation, that's a much bigger threat to information surviving the long run, than librarians maintaining their stacks improperly.

You know what's funny is how many topics on 'hacker news' are basically questions of sociology or anthropology or economics or psychology. If you could make some kind of AI that would color the comments here based on what academic discipline they were most closely linked to, I think it would just be a sea of colors that fall under the 'humanities' or 'liberal arts' umbrella.

It's not that people aren't deeply interested in these topics. It's just.... maybe academia's current model doesn't work so well anymore. Woudln't be the first time scholarship as a profession adapted to changing society. I hate that it will happen, I hate what we are losing... but I feel like the fundamentals are strong in the long term. You can go to a book store or library ... the books that have staying power represent the ideas that have staying power, and software products that have a life time of 7 years (which is what a lot of classes selling themselves as STEM actually teach) do not make the long term cut in the marketplace of important ideas.

Otto von Bismark.

so 10,000 years from now they can look at all these nano particles in our bodies as artefacts of our civilization, like we look back at Otzi the Iceman's stomach contents.... ??

i have played with it on and off for years. when i was helping with an open source project i used it to test portability. what i really liked it about it was the simplicity. its like you can learn a lot about your own home by traveling somewhere else that is different.

i learned a lot about linking and linker flags by working with it since it didnt use the "standard way", it used something simpler.

The way I understand it, is that the Cold War was actually a War, although we forget about it, but the propaganda arms of the governments did not allow anyone to be a human being, you must be either a heroic figure or a villain. Maybe it is human nature to idealize, and in conflict to hyper-idealize.

The thing we also don't hear about, is his book "Two hundred years together", which IIRC was never even translated because it was so anti-semitic.

well, toasters didn't start having USB 3 until recently...

is there a proof that real numbers can be added?

i did not understand quaternions until I read Hamilton's original works. Maybe i just have a 19th century brain or something. but i found them delightfully free of modern gobbldeygook.

https://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Hamilton/