715 karma · joined March 11, 2015
Interesting Story
- Soul of a new machine
- Hackers by Levy
- Masters of Doom
Lots of interesting information, not so compelling as a narrative:
- Open: How Compaq Ended IBM's PC Domination
- Elon Musk (bio by Vance)
- Softwar (Larry Ellison)
Related to tech, but not really tech:
- The Decipherment of Linear B
- Oglivy on Adviertising
- The Great Beanie Baby Bubble
I find for something with a narrative structure, in a normal book format, I expect to spend about 1 minute per page -- very approximately.
For example, I bought "Night Train To Lisbon" at 2AM last Saturday night to read as I was falling asleep, and I finished it around 2AM last Sunday. At 470 pages, ~ 8 hours of reading, not that different than a normal work day worth of "effort" on Sunday.
For me, the most important thing is finding books that interest me -- that is why I would decide to spend an evening reading instead of other solo downtime like watching tv or a movie, or gaming.
[edit: although I see it has a lot of illustrations so kindle format maybe non-ideal.]
If you can join and leave voluntarily, then it's pretty important.
2. Lack of opportunity and recognition: I would accept this as an excuse for an individual, but not a large group. Resource allocation is a task of the group. Still, it is possible to attribute to the wrong group. It wasn't the slave's race that failed to recognize him.
- buggy unreliable code is inevitable, but it shouldn't bring down the whole app. It isn't often that I see mobile apps crash to OS. There should be a finite number of things that can cause it.
- The are well know strategies to cache data that may change over time, this is true for all caches, if it can't change over time it isn't even really a cache, its just a static asset.
By society I was thinking of Western society. Wikipedia lists equality as value in 2nd paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_culture
By morality I was thinking along the lines of socially accepted behaviour in the contemporary United States, and mainstream Christian morality which isn't the official state religion, but in my opinion the basics of it are taken as a given in politics, government, media, and academia.
Overall, I'm referring to mainstream anglo law, society, and morality.
> why wouldn't you want things to be optimal, depending what what they're optimizing for?
The reason is that when you express your goals, you don't fully understand what the consequences will be. There may be consequences that are totally repugnant to you. The child-story level version of this is where you get a genie which gives you your wishes in a horrible way: i.e. I wish to be the richest man in the world, and so the genie kills everyone else. I want a nice big house like my parents, and so the genie kills your parents and you inherit. Et cetera.
Telling the computer to do what you want is notoriously difficult for simple imperative programming, to the point where many people think a large fraction of the population just isn't up to it intellectually, and if you need proof of this you can search for fizz-buzz interview stories. Setting up goals or incentives for a system that behaves in a way the you can barely understand is even more difficult.
The law says racism is illegal in certain situations, and society says racism is undesirable in most situations.
The law and society aren't claiming that racism is statistically non-optimal -- in fact, there are lots of things more optimal than status quo that many people would find totally horrifying.
If are widely replacing human systems with AI systems, I think this is a legitimate concern.
I really depart from the article in two areas:
1. The AI will inherit the biases of its creators. This is possible but far from guaranteed. And relatedly, inclusivity of the development team guarantees nothing regarding the goals of the system.
2. Criticising the people who are warning of the problem and trying to do something about it. This is related to the AI control problem. There is no switch that can be flipped that will prevent AI systems from Bad Ideas. It's not that we just aren't flipping it to preserve our chokehold on captialism. Implementing morality in AI systems is a genuinely monumental problem. And the people who are doing something about it are behaving very altruistically.
I'd like to see apps try to implement this kind of message within the normal UI without forcing the immediate priority over my own needs.
And moreover, to act as a liquidity provider when the market movement isn't random, but instead most people are buying BTC which is going up, is also a money losing position -- MtGox is the only seller of BTC which keeps rising. I think this implies they were buying BTC off-exchange.
But since MtGox users are buying more than selling, MtGox doesn't have to convert their cash back into BTC -- MtGox's losses are occurring in BTC and are essentially invisible, but when they lose money in BTC, they are effectively increasing their short position.
I'm not fully seeing how the feedback loop would operate, I think you'd need to factor in MtGox's total capital, their short postion, and the market size ... I can see how their position gets worse and worse.
I can't think of any historical precedent though. The final result is kind of like the Salad Oil Swindle, but the path taken is different.
edit: maybe a bucket shop in bull market would be a similar mechanism.
> Song downloads and streaming music account for 70 percent of U.S. music sales. But the industry's total revenue has dropped by 66 percent since 1999.
The profusion of bullshit "statistics" being used the advance a prejudiced position is so grating. I know why the music publishers are doing it, but the journalists don't have to just repeat it. There are actual interesting numbers that could be calculated.
Of course music revenue is down after moving to a massively more efficient platform. Profit is the relevant metric.
50% "listen on youtube", and generate "4% of revenue" ... I don't even know how this could be changed into a meaningful statistic. I guess you could compare TV+radio listener numbers and revenue share 1996 versus 2016 ... for it to really make any sense you'd have to compare listeners and revenue through all mediums. If there is a change of composition away from high-revenue mediums to lower revenue mediums, that would be more relevant.
And why use the year 2000 as the baseline, when recorded music has a 100-year history.
I'm still looking for the right PDF reader, currently using GoodReader which for me is merely acceptable.
In my estimates I was focused too much on development time and not providing adequately for testing and deployment. On an existing project with the procedures already well in place it was fine, but for new or new-ish projects I was always under-estimating.
The other thing was calibrating my margin of safety. I now typically estimate at 2x the time that I think it will take to allow for unexpected issues and unrelated tasks that always pop up. That also works for me with the expectations of the people that I work with -- the estimates are used for planning and coordination and aren't effectively deadlines, but if I underestimate too often is causes coordination problems with the business people.
Softwar (Larry Ellison), Matthew Symonds
A Perfect Red, Amy Butler Greenfield
Assault on Lake Casitas, Brad Alan Lewis
and fiction:
This Census-Taker, China Mieville
Whatever, Michel Houellebecq
From what I understand (something may be getting lost in translation)
- The increasing debt is being used to keep up growth
- The growth that is being bought by the debt isn't enough to service the debt
- Some sector of the economy will have to pay for it, because growth will wither until it is paid.
Quoting: China is also constrained from reducing the debt burden though monetization, financial repression, or taxes on households because in each case the cost is indirectly allocated to the household sector, which simply exacerbates the original imbalance. This leaves only two alternatives. First, Beijing can expropriate the wealth of small and medium enterprises directly or indirectly (in the latter case by raising taxes), although this means undermining the most productive part of the Chinese economy. Second, Beijing can liquidate government assets and use the proceeds to pay down debt. There are no other plausible options.
edit:
also: the process of deciding who gets forced to bear the debt will be highly politicized and contentious. The blog post explains how there are strong negative consequences to each choice.