emblem21

I once wrote a book in 2005 about the inevitable fusion of central banking theory, economic psychology, and "good-enough" artificial intelligence. Whole brain emulations weren't required. Instead, mass expansion of mobile devices and the consolidation of civil behavior into those devices (purchasing, voting, socialization, documentation, research, institution interactions, welfare benefits, etc) allows a sufficiently powerful enough AI to read an NSA trunk and be able to create a model of the "animal spirits" of the individual constituents of markets. It couldn't model human behavior accurately, but that wasn't required. Instead, it could create a chaotic chain of events between all actor demands and capabilities via small actions that would result in massive economic policy enforcement.

Instead of invading Iraq, the machine predicts a convoluted path of investment schemes that ultimately bankrupt the dinar, the ruling party, and the entire nation. No bullets fired. No soldiers deployed. To economists, it would look like normal macroeconomic activity.

I never released the book because I realized I was writing a business proposal.

Gawker is not a press.

Gawker is a Caymen Island corporation founded by a foreign national.

Are you agreeing that corporations are people?

You can't improve closed systems. You just change who carries what cost and shout loudly that you've made things better.

From the US communist parties of the 1930s to the overleveraged anti-American sentiments of US citizens in the 1960s to the massively expanded and nebulous academic rush to redefine oppression in the 1990s to the "European socialism is so perfect" fantasies of the American lower class in 2010s, Russian propaganda has long been the bedrock of modern America leftism.

I never said the problem wasn't addressable. I said the types of people “safe spaces” are supposedly "protecting" are of zero consequence. As long as they are engulfed by their trauma, they are literally, of zero consequence. The problem of handling trauma is very addressable: Eliminate the safe space.

To elaborate, we have to talk about the nature of neurons and, specifically, neural plasticity.

Trauma is trauma (regardless of mass media campaigns to favor one type of trauma over another on a monthly basis) and neurons adapt accordingly. (Not always optimally in regards to personal development in an industrial context, mind you) Most importantly, they also heal accordingly. VR/AR experiments show the important of the visual cortex in rewiring the neural systems of paraplegics, allowing them to move their feet. This clearly shows the need of people to experience the world beyond what they have already modeled to be a reality to overcome massive trauma.

If people who have literally endured physical destruction of parts of the spinal column can utilize therapy to reprogram massive regions of the neurology to restore some physical functionality to a previously unrecoverable fate, I'm left with no choice but call into question the entire premise of "the safe space" and what function it is actually serving. (Other than unofficial voter turnout rallies)

Neurons are feisty things and to undermine their amazing abilities by claiming an individual's trauma is beyond neural plasticity is ultimately discrediting the fundamental humanness of the people you are aiming to protect. You are effectively saying "This victim is so broken and so subhuman, not even their neurons work anymore." In essence, you are the one saying people are machines because your altruism has concluded they are incapable of engaging in neural plasticity, and thus, must be denied sensory input via safe spaces to reflect that incapacitation.

Protecting the traumatized from what YOU think they should be protected from ultimately deprives them of the experiences and opportunities that neurons need to adapt to the trauma. No one heals in a jail cell of sensory denial, no matter how well-intentioned the warden. Thus, putting rigid borders on context will always fail, even if you are successful in the feat.

Have a little bit more faith that two billion years of biological evolution knows slightly more about itself than a few hundred thousand Xanga/LiveJournal ex-pats who are spending their 30s in one last angsty hurrah on Tumblr.

I realize this conclusion regarding the necessity of novel and unpredictable experiences to assist in trauma recovery contends against the widespread obsession of pathological altruism; the idea that those who mean well must do anything regardless of efficacy. This explains why Medicaid will always exist, no matter how many ill-willed scammers or high-power lobbyists game the system to their respective favors. Pathological altruism dictates that no cancer can ever be large enough, even as it devours the system whole. This just creates an ecosystem of competing parasites that undermines the legitimacy of that altruism via Poe's Law. Eventually, recruitment drives start to fail as essential outsiders and new blood no longer view your altruism as meaningful. Then it's off to the next monthly flavor of altruism, which is the same as the last one, all made up of the same previous players, but now with slick new branding to attract the freshly unaligned and uninitiated!

1. If I started posting the N-word over and over again this very moment, you would instinctively consider that unreasonable, so let's stop pretending to not know the definitions of things.

2. You can't rigorously define the boundaries of context.

With those two axioms, we can conclude that the root of the matter, which protecting the feelings of children who have been catered to their whole lives, is not a path worthy of resource or virtue. These are the same overmedicated people who simulanteously hold the belief they are just specks of dust in the universe while screaming about the importance of their feelings. Too many TED talks, not enough TED debates.

They are of zero consequence when you account for these factors.

I always read the comments. In fact, I don't even read the articles on HN. I just click on the comments.

I read comments on reddit and the *chans and tumblr. The comments is where the magic happens. It's where all of your best planning and PR spit-shine goes to shit and something unexpected occurs.

The problem is that certain Western cultures have raised a generation of people who think they can micromanage every single aspect of the creative process. Just to bridge the gap, imagine everything you, the reader of this comment, might know about science or programming or some arcane field of complex rules. Now imagine the capacity of your mind to have that knowledge. Now imagine a person with the same capacity, but none of your knowledge. What did they fill it up with?

Rules of brush strokes at certain humidity and temperature ranges for a certain chemical for a certain color of red oil, horse racing statistics from 1942, the amount of chocolate per day required to make their loved one's adopted child happy, the number of times a boss taps their pencil on a desk before they reach a conclusion, the amount of paper you have to buy per month to feed your new hobby in origami, the character development of a favorite D&D campaign out of several simultaneous D&D campaigns... the intensity of your capacity for your knowledge is just as equal as the intensity of their knowledge. They come up with their own rules and classifications and means in a way that makes sense to them and their internal consistency. They'll fill that space up with things you'll never know about.

Do you, creator of a product or maintainer of a company, ---REALLY--- think your willpower, mixed with the vast resources of other people's money, can truly steer the flow of this mass web of humanity intensity into an expression you desire? You're pissing in an ocean of piss and there's no splash-guard. You can micromanage your domain as much as you want because you can quantify those risks to some degree of predictability. You can't quantify or control the cacophony of mass human reaction when they are exposed to your presence. If "internet culture" is mean and stupid and evil and racist and sexist, you might as well yell at the sun for being too hot or water for being too wet. There is no "internet culture." There is only a convenient summary of your experiences to justify why the comments are wrong and you are right.

Maybe the problem isn't the comments. Maybe the problem is the expectation that other people should automatically like us, or at the least, be polite. Maybe the problem is that the medium itself makes the expression of intentions via subconscious behavior impossible, so when someone shitposts, you get hurt by it because, to you, you were very clear in your intentions. Maybe the problem is that you're trying to force the internet as a medium of communication instead of as an archive of data preservation and/or a national infrastructure failsafe in case of strategic nuclear targeting to telecommunications facilities. Do you treat your dishwasher like a piano because you love music?

The ancients knew they couldn't control the rivers, but they did know they could capture parts of it at important areas to maximize their desires.

Emotions exist for a reason. Deny them at your own peril.

The problem with rational choice is a paradox: Not only can the individual respond to incentives, the individual can also prioritize incentives based entirely on subjective rationality.

You can know the decision an actor makes, but not the motivation. You can know the motivation an actor has, but not any future decision.

Suicide queens.

Should all cameras be forced to create Dadaist interpretations of what they capture instead of a best-attempt at the actual image?

Doesn't this reasoning hold up for outsourced jobs as well?

VCs are just doing the same investment strategy that record labels used to do... before file sharing decimated their mechanical royalty agreements. For every Britney Spears, you had 10+ other acts that could barely produce a break-even single. It's highly Pareto-driven.

Combine that with the fact that 2016 has only seen 7 tech IPOs...

And the fact that investment in sub-25M cap is dead thanks to Sarbane-Oxley/Basel III...

And GDP growth forecasts being cut by the IMF...

The only thing propping up the tech market right now is the fact that Apple, Microsoft and Google hold 23% of all U.S. corporate cash. Exit strategies pivot around whatever initiatives these three players choose, which means they, in essence, control the direction of tech innovation without having to acquire a single business. VCs will automatically organize their investments based on the acquisition habits of those three players in the hopes they get caught in the net as well.

Do you live in an area where you get to like all of your neighbors? Did you go to a school and you ended up liking every single student there? When you take public transportation, do you like every passenger? You might say "Well, it's a company, we control every single aspect of it, down to cellular mitosis so of course we can control how culture grows!" and that, my friend, is called hubris.

If you think you truly have such powers as to steer precisely how humans interact with each other across different departments, contexts, on/off hours, and their cumulative personalities, then I'm going to have to politely ask you to put down the keyboard for a minute and consider the idea that humans aren't programmable robots. How can you consider this idea? Easy!

Take any culture you are personally grooming right now. What makes you think you are the authority on defining the borders and structure of that culture? Are you the appointed cultural architect? And if you think you are, then you are no longer talking about the actual culture that is organically growing around you with each and every interaction of minds. You are talking about what you THINK the culture should be based on your position of influence.

And that model of what you THINK culture is... is not the actual culture it's attempting to represent. That position has a name: It's not cultural architect. It's the morality police and it's a cheap cop-out that stops you from actually exploring your own assumptions of how your peers are engaging.

To you: Unity = strength

To me: Unity = stagnation

So while you hide your reasons of not wanting to work with me based on "culture fit" and "not being someone you want to work with", I can define PRECISELY why I wouldn’t' want to work with you. I'm forced to justify my assumptions. You can just silently reinforce them.

And that's why the whole "culture fit" craze is bullshit.

Securely share small files/folders via AES from CLI

6 lines of Bash

https://github.com/codeotter/sharenow

Can you not understand why people will do whatever it takes to get a shot at controlling the largest amount of nuclear weapons, the reserve currency that powers the world economy, the most technologically advanced military in world history, the world's most influential fourth/fifth estate, massive trade flows between 180+ nations, and unlimited impunity with the power to pardon anyone in your inner circle?

It's the kind of power where, upon victory, you can erase how you won.

Obligatory Laine: Serial Experiments reference

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj6ADC8ezxk

* https://youtu.be/l1yI7un5NyQ?t=1023

Greetings. Our corporate structure is undergoing a fundamental transition (from a software contractor to a holding company) and we're still deciding on presentation and community outreach.

...which is to say we have plenty of researchers but no social team. :)

Our primary goal is the formation of autonomous labor by helping put the institutional periphery into place: legal review, trade agreements, economic policy study, political and memetic steering, and financial innovation. Robots just won't automatically take all of the jobs. Humans are very good at cutting their own throats collectively and we very much account for this.

We have three private tech projects at this time that cover the UAV and theoretical mathematics space.

Dear writer, the future is fewer people writing sponsored content.

At Emblem 21, we analyze not just the time, material, and energy costs for economic activity, but also the complexity components as well. Every economic activity consumes and yields complexity. This complexity is difficult to measure given its contextual nature, but it is encoded into the pricing of the transaction itself.

Currently working on very advanced neural networks to detect the edges of this contextual complexity.

Autonomous labor doesn't destroy jobs because the autonomous labor is also a consumer of complexity, energy, and time.

https://s32.postimg.org/pjzgj39wz/Labor.png

The entrenched elite can always legislate protectionist policy and scale human effort horizontally through socialist interventions to make humans cheaper than state-of-the-art AI. This is especially true in the long interim between now and holy grail breakthroughs in object recognition.

Charlatans and predators can always rally the surplus humans into being political forces to siphon off a percentage of productivity gain made by "good enough" AI.

As an autonomous labor theorist, I'm kept up at night often about what to do with the surplus humans. On one hand, hard AI problems can be augmented with remote assistance and intervention. (A cleaner bot discovers spray paint on a wall.. is it graffiti, an advertisement, or part of a mural? Better summon a human eye to make sure.)

On the other hand, "good enough" AI will allow total war scenarios to arise from the ashes as manufacturing millions of murder drones 1.) helps create employment for a nation and 2.) allows the extermination of the surplus for cheap. A human death squad takes about 16-18 years of investment to create. A "good enough" autonomous drone death squad takes about a week.

The most immediate gains of autonomous labor will allow expansion into domains that are currently too expensive to get a foothold in or scale into. These opportunities are where many of the remote assistance jobs will be created. (Deep mining, space construction, etc)

All eyes are on navigating the political climate until those price points are reached, which is why the cry for universal basic income is so tantalizing. Helicopter money on the plebs so they won't revolt and destabilize the global order that makes advanced robotic development possible. If they fail, then the attractiveness of cheap death squads to resolve the human surplus question will most certainly win.

Land is, technically, unlimited in the real world as well.

Not all of it is accessible (other planets) or fertile (desert)

Not all virtual land is the same, either. Some virtual land is a vendor doing streaming-as-a-service. Some is payment processing-as-a-service. Containers cannot help you regarding the leased farming equipment. No matter what land you move you, you'll still need those third-party services.

King: Here's some land for you to work on.

Serf: But we don't own it.

King: You need to improve your soft skills.

Serf: Sir, we don't own it.

King: You need to realize that you're going to starve if you don't start farming now.

Serf: Sir, how much of the food will you take for working on your land?

King: Don't worry about the agrarian debt or vendor lock. Think of me as a land-as-a-service provider.

Serf: But...

King: I already have deals with farm tools to offer you at a discount! $40 a month with $0.01 per pound of food created! Also, friendly reminder of soft skills..

Serf: Well, sir... I... I guess my farm has yet-to-be-proven...

You can't differentiate your product if you are the product. Tech service startups are just renters of digital property they can never own. They're the street shops of the internet.

How to run a startup in 2016:

* No homebrewed tech allowed. It's too "complex"

* We should only use off-the-shelf libraries and SDKs because bar-to-entry isn't a real investor risk ("Just trust me, I'm a charismatic CEO who played golf a few times with the best friend of the college roommate of the guy who helped the guy close Series A for Baidu")

* Soft skills, soft skills, soft skills! Smiling > coding

* I don't know what technical debt is, but I'm sure we can safely rewrite our core product from scratch in between Series B and Series C. Product owners, customer support teams, and quality assurance re-on-boarding is a money problem, not a leadership problem.

* Security audits? I have no idea what those are, but lets incorporate IoT into our product suite somehow. That seems hot right now to VCs.

Bubbles. Bubbles everywhere.

The binding of the element to the lexical scope is done for later executions. .call is immediate.

  for(var i in list) { 
    (function(element) {
      someAsyncCallThatNeedsTheRightIndexedElement(element);
    })(list[i]);
  }

I've seen people grumble that this is "too clever"

I've been known to snap back "Bootcamps don't have a monopoly on what technical solutions are valid"

Pointers are probably too clever for most people.

Admittedly, goto is too clever for me. :(

My problem with these sorts of discussions is that they try to put technical know-how on the same footing as social aptitude, charisma, and other "soft skills".

I can throw darts on a map and find billions of people capable of "connectedness" and "leadership". Finding you capable "technical" talent on the other hand...

This ease is mostly due to connectedness and leadership being naturally grown out of decades of organic social interactions that people need to do in order to... you know... survive. You can accidentally reinforce these properties just by being 1.) a member of the human species and 2.) alive.

No one accidentally reinforces the understanding required to mentally maintain the thousands of arcane exceptions written by the result of C-Levels pivoting endlessly across outsourced teams for the cheapest price, compiling the world's worst spaghetti code responsible for an everything-on-the-line application.

And if this seems a bitter, then look into your own organizations and experiences: Who gets fired/quits the most? Human Resources, C-Levels, Marketing or the Technical team? Whose ass is on the line when the fires start? Who is expected to work 10+ hour days every day for all of eternity?

Looking for unicorns does not make you a unicorn hunter. It makes you delusional. A senior knows unicorns don't exist even if people look to him/her as one.

Hedge funds are downstream of money with performance-driven interest.

Markets (the major players that skew the averages) are downstream of banks who use money the Fed's pay the interest on.

His gamble is that the elite would rather give the market unlimited welfare a la Japan to keep the signals of valid global demand alive.

The Fed will not allow a correction... mostly for political reasons.

Satellite warfare adaptability simulation?

We are witnessing the death of the hypervisor (global banking), not the virtual machine (nation-state agreements) or the underlying operating system (cultural norms) or the underlying hardware. (nature)