emhs

I hadn't tried Magit before now, but on the suggestion of this blog I'm giving it a look through. Looks good so far. I also enjoy the style the blog is using: anyone know what backend the author is using?

Somehow, even though Collapse is insane if you think about it hard enough, and even though Pilot-waves are semi-classical and seem to be adding an additional complication that may not be necessary, both of these seem to be more popular among physicists than Many-Worlds. Somehow, even though superposition is observed and observable, even though the scale on which we can observe it is climbing steadily larger, people keep assuming that it either dissipates sometime before our scale, or that it's an illusion produced by some sort of semi-classical, overcomplicated reinterpretation.

The original idea—that the wave function is the whole deal—works just fine if you accept that we can be in superposition too. If you simply accept that the entire classical concept might be an illusion, and work up from the wave function, there's no reason to shoehorn in an idea like Collapse or Pilot-Wave.

Yes, Copenhagen is wrong. Yes, Collapse is patently absurd. Yes, assuming that there is exactly one, stochastic, probabilistic reality makes no sense. But that doesn't mean we need to add something complicated like an underlying superfluid that supports all of spacetime. This smells like Aether.

Why does no one talk about Many-Worlds?

What's this about the death of SMTP?

I've seen a couple new sites out here in the bay try paying "beta testers" $5 or so each to contribute a little content. I remember doing that with BlockAvenue (they advertised via Craigslist SFBay).

Color me impressed. I do wonder if there's any way to reliably influence the pattern of the mutations. On the surface, with the differences in thread-scheduling patterns, I'd say it seems like a meaningful improvement on the randomness of the system PRNG.

If you have a sufficiently well-developed model of thread-scheduling patterns, then the randomness reduces in quality to that of the system's PRNG. But thread-scheduling is a serious pain, so this seems promising.

Some of this (especially the new post indicators) can be provided by a Chrom{e,ium} extension I've been using called Hacker News Enhancement Suite [0].

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bappiabcodbpphnojd...

The key is that it's just like normal web apps, except they talk to each other easily, despite possibly belonging to different suites, and don't put your data at as much risk by operating on an external server.

I don't know if basing things on source is necessarily a negative. Perhaps better binary distribution mechanisms would be worthwhile, but maintaining the source-basis is a good way to ensure we're less susceptible to falling into a pit of proprietariness.

They're right that people don't like creativity or dissent. There was a good post on Less Wrong about this [1], and about how the rejection of creativity, the rejection of what to you, is blindingly obvious, is key in the break between the creative person, the independent thinker, and their trust in society's expectations and sanity [2]. Seeing the things that the established process missed requires valuing finding a better idea more than how many people you might piss off along the way. It make take several ideas to get there, but you have to learn to reward your brain for producing ideas, and you can't expect society to provide that reward. You have to produce that reward all on your own, until you find the right idea and succeed with it. Then everyone shuts up for a moment, before talking about how they knew you'd figure it out all along, and they were starting to think in that direction just the other day.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/ [2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/qf/no_safe_defense_not_even_science/

This is where the Less Wrong post on Occam's Razor [1] comes in handy. It helps make clear how to respond to someone who argues that backward perspective.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/

As far as Intelligent Design, Yudkowsky has another useful post [1]. It's part of his sequence "The simple math of evolution", and provides some interesting perspective on the subject.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/

Well, one could call "Christianity" a superset of individual religions that fit within a certain range, and do the comparison off of individual denominations. That has the further advantage of demonstrating how individual denominations within Christianity often themselves have incompatible beliefs.

Hashing is performed locally, probably via crypto.js, so you can verify it, I'd wager.

Open source != free (libre) baseband hardware that you can directly modify the software on. Being able to compile and modify is fine and has no impact on the network if you're not able to run it on the primary network.

> The source could be released for inspection and audit,

Dude, that's exactly what he asked for.

Does Cobb know the ring indicates dream/reality?

Post-catharsis, pre-wake, in Limbo to get Saito, he has the ring. If letting go of Mal got rid of the ring, it wouldn't be there on him in Limbo.

Well, they're using the static, known density at 4 degrees Celsius to produce water with a known mass, and then test what the measurement of that mass comes to. Basically they're using a known mass of water as a calibration aid. But I don't know that this level of precision could compete with the efforts underway.

Because that maintains the imprecision. Multiplying won't somehow scale the precision up as you go. It will in fact magnify the imprecision.

The key difference is that we no longer posit that we know everything. We assumed we knew things we didn't, in ancient times, and in the process relied on hand-waves to keep moving, until some scientifically minded folks got too frustrated with the inconsistencies and started to accept that perhaps we didn't know it all. Now we know we don't know, and use the inconsistencies to tell how close we're getting to knowing enough to have consistent understanding.

The key is that we continue to improve our ability to gather evidence about what the universe looks like, and insist that our theories keep pace with the evidence we're gathering. So, the previous hand-waves occurred in large part due to insufficient data, and unwillingness to look for more. We've moved past that, to a large extent.

What Fedora is planning is leaving /usr/bin/python pointing to Py2, but making all their tools explicitly depend on and request Py3. This is distinctly different from the Arch decision, which instead resulted in fixing everything that expects `python` to mean Py2 to explicitly request Py2, or assisting with the porting process to Py3 for those applications.

This is what I get for commenting about movies I haven't seen yet.

E.g. the Robert Downey Jr movie where he controls a fighting robot. Bigger and nastier risks allowed than human boxing.

I still haven't seen that, though...

The nature of email is that the government's methods would simply collect all users' data, regardless of whether it was the target's or not. This would be true regardless of Lavabit being designed with user protection in mind or not, unless specialized methods such as those Levison offered to write were employed. Such methods would necessarily vary from provider to provider, because each provider is set up differently. The government simply defaults to massive collection in all cases so they don't have to write that or pay someone to write it. He offered to give them a means to get only the data they asked for, but they turned that down.

As the cryptocurrency community solves the problems of easy access on the go and easy acquisition of the coins, it is inevitable that bitcoin, litecoin and the like penetrate deeper into consumer markets. A problem in this, however, is that getting a wallet synced with the blockchain is becoming a longer and heavier process. A solution to consider going forward is the possibility of micro-centralization, where consumers would have their own micro-servers that their mobile devices would access, just like the mobile bitcoin wallet clients that use APIs on public wallet hosts. In this way consumers would not have to sync the increasingly weighty blockchain to their mobile devices. All the same methods of interacting would be available: QR codes encoding addresses, easy sending of money, etc. The difference would be that the servers would have to default to a secure but simple set up in the beginning. Perhaps entering a one-time key generated by the server (displayed on a tiny screen, perhaps?) into the mobile client to start a handshake process?

They are implicit, though, as the copy about small sample sizes is paired with a photo of a nervous child.

Say what you will about quality differences in the tools, but the availability of the tools comes down heavily in Android's favor. Further, getting through the developer-license-acquisition process is hit or miss -- some people have it easy, some have it hard. Despite whatever advantages it has, iOS obstructs the ability to learn from users' needs and iterate quickly. Yes, there are things that could be better in the android ecosystem. But the ease of getting a bugfix to your users matters, and iOS fails on this.

This is referring to all the push to use "The New Google Maps". One is not currently obligated to use it, but it's there and being pushed. He seems to be using it.

I dug a little further. Not only is there "Detective Stu Pitt", there's also "Laughlin Foo" for the next day's presentation, and the link at the bottom is for the North Dakota State Attorney's Association, though the only state mentioned (and whose seal is used) is Oregon. This is phony.

700. Missed Tagalog, Slovenian, and Amharic. Also, dude, you could do with another Lao clip, or a better clip-selection algo, 'cause I heard the Lao clip twice. Would've been good if it had been a different clip, but giving me the same clip is just a gimme. Great game, though.