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explainplease

103 karma · joined October 6, 2017

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explainplease··on Just own the damn robots
> In comparison to what? Eachother?

Yes, that is the point I tried to make with all those paragraphs.

> These are economic systems and are seperate from political systems.

I directly addressed this in the penultimate full paragraph.

> and let's not pretend china isn't capitalist

It depends on how you define "capitalist." Some industries in China are state-controlled--is that capitalist? Is "capitalist" 0% state control, or < 100% state control? How does China's capitalism compare with capitalism in the rest of the world?

> It still is not correct

I realize that you're not the first person I replied to, nor the last, but I wish you would say why you think I'm wrong, because otherwise what's the point of saying so?

explainplease··on Just own the damn robots
Thank you for sharing that. I wish more people like yourself, who have first-hand experience, would speak out. As you noted, the rhetorical techniques they use are not in good faith. We need more actual witnesses to testify against it, because such personal testimony is less susceptible to the deceptive, distracting non-arguments they use.

> To me, it's a wasted effort. This energy all those bright young people invest there could be directed towards coming up with something really new or at least making what we have more social. I hope they'll get there one day.

Indeed. This seems to be the troubling outcome of their long-term efforts in academia. It often seems like humanity is doomed to repeat the horrors of history, not only because our memories are so fragile, but because there are always a few dedicated to systematically erasing them. What a tragic waste of human resources. We could stand on the shoulders of giants, but instead we are pulled back into the crab bucket.

Keep fighting the good fight, my friend. :)

explainplease··on Just own the damn robots
By "means" I mean "necessarily results in," not "is defined as."

If after my clarifying that you still disagree, please explain, otherwise what's the point of saying so?

explainplease··on Just own the damn robots
It sounds really silly, but that might actually be the only way to prevent a few bad actors from taking over the world with killer robots. Of course, enforcement would be a problem.
explainplease··on Just own the damn robots
I hate to be dystopic, but what happens when a futuristic Unabomber gets a hold of 3D-printing, self-replicating robots and programs them to kill? Will we all be walking around with our own 3D-printed bodyguard robots, programmed to watch and destroy any other robots that look hostile? Or will the first bad actor's robots destroy everyone else's (or everyone else)?

> Then everything will cost only as much as raw materials.

Seems like one would want to own the raw materials, then. But if the evil Dr. Robotico's robots can kill the owners and take their quarries, then what? Does he rule the whole world? Are we in a race to robot armageddon?

Man, that Paperclips game is starting to seem more and more prescient.

explainplease··on Just own the damn robots
I think it's helpful to look at it in terms of control vs. freedom. Communism means more state control of people, capitalism means less.

In these terms, what if capitalism is simply the natural outcome of x amount of freedom? Therefore, shifting away from capitalism means shifting toward either anarchy or communism (even if both of those options are far away in absolute distances).

This makes it hard to discuss things calmly and rationally, of course: Few people want actual anarchy, and few people want actual communism, but a move in either direction is a move toward one of them, even if it's not intended to go all the way. And if you do move one way or the other, some of those few people who do want to go all the way will try to capitalize (ha) on the opportunity.

Incidentally, this may be an argument for leaning more toward capitalism, i.e. toward less state control: because people as a whole will never agree on a single course of action, and because there will always be those among us who want to achieve more power and wealth for themselves at others' expense, leaning toward less state control reduces the potential damage and power/wealth accumulation that "rogue" actors can achieve.

Or, to put that another way, it reveals an inherent weakness of leaning toward more state control: that power corrupts, and humans desire power, therefore using the force of law to concentrate power in the hands of fewer people (ultimately backed by the use of force, as all government power is) results in more corruption, and therefore results in more suffering for those not in power. Capitalism certainly causes suffering as well, as the robber barons demonstrated many years ago, but at least that suffering is not enforced by the state--it merely arises opportunistically, and each instance is temporary and localized, not permanent and universal.

Of course, globalism greatly increases the scale of that localization, which demonstrates that theories about economics, government, etc. must be revised and kept current with the times. Our governments and economies are largely built upon ideas whose foundations were laid centuries ago, before any of today's technologies could have even been conceived of. For example, the American Founders could not have foreseen the kinds of rapidly changing, global corporations that exist today, and so we should expect their ideas to have some vulnerabilities which may be exploited by newer technology (to think in infosec terms).

Anyway, if you are wanting to move away from capitalism and not toward anarchy, you necessarily are moving toward less freedom and more state control. I think the important point to note is that state control of economic means cannot be isolated from other facets of life. It necessarily influences all other parts of life, for the economy is that from which human sustenance flows.

To look at it another way, capitalism allows for greed, which has very negative effects--but it also accounts for greed, which is part of human nature, and which motivates. Specifically, it accounts for it by allowing everyone to be motivated by it. In contrast, giving the state more control concentrates the greed in fewer people, by law. And I think it's better to allow the evil of greed to be evenly distributed (which does not guarantee the even distribution of wealth, health, or happiness, but allows it to be pursued), than to use the force of law to concentrate it in fewer people, expecting them to rein it in for the sake of the greater good, because that fails to account for human nature--it's essentially a GIGO system.

Food for thought. :)

explainplease··on Just own the damn robots
If you haven't already, I highly recommend playing the Paperclips game that was posted recently. When your enemies are merely numbers on a screen, what does it matter who or what they are? Your machines are tasked to eliminate them, and if your machines are better than their machines--or, in this case, if the enemy don't have any machines--you win, and they disappear. Then you task your machines to clean up the mess, and in a short time, it's as if your enemies never existed.

We hope that there would be enough good people among the wealthy and powerful to avoid such a scenario--but would there? Do we know that for certain? I don't think we do. Look at how the wealthy and powerful already exploit people on both small and large scales, from Hollywood execs satisfying their sexual desires one victim at a time, to corporate execs exploiting cheap overseas labor that, to them, are merely numbers on a screen, helping them increase margins.

It all boils down to the same problem in the end, that of evil, and it's not going away, merely taking different forms throughout the ages.

explainplease··on Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
I used to do the same with my DSL connection. I noticed that the connection would drop or degrade when it rained sometimes. I started scraping the modem's status page with curl (the status page didn't require logging in), and graphing the SNR and data rates with gnuplot. Then I added temperature and precipitation data scraped from Weather Underground with a Python script to a separate CSV file.

I did confirm that the SNR varied with temperature, with both daily and long-term cycles, assuming from thermal expansion/contraction in the lines and connections. I also observed dropouts when it rained.

The strangest thing was that there was also a hard 12-hour cycle: every morning and evening, at the same times, the SNR would suddenly drop (in the morning) and go up (in the evening) by several dB. I never figured out what it was, but I always guessed it was some equipment turning on or off that caused interference on the line.

One of the coolest parts actually was simply using GNU `date` to parse dates in natural language, so I could run something like `plotmodem 2 months ago to 1 month ago` to graph the data from the previous month, or `plotmodem 2 weeks` to see the last 2 weeks of data. I used `date` to convert natural-language dates to a standard format which I then parsed out of the CSV files with grep.

explainplease··on My Sudden Synaesthesia
For synaesthesia-challenged Emacs users: https://i.imgur.com/ZQkgI3U.png
explainplease··on Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives
> One advantage is that for millions of small files, batching them together into one monolithic ZIP file allows for faster downloading. As opposed to a round trip to fetch each file. But there could be a happy medium where we batch 1,000 encrypted files to download to your computer then split them up, decrypt them, and cleanup any temporary files before fetching the next 1,000 encrypted files, etc.

Well, any such software that didn't have pipelining would be poorly designed. ;) Compare to software like rsync, Unison, etc, which transfer large numbers of small files quickly. Seems like a good solution would be to build on librsync.

explainplease··on Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives
Thanks for your detailed answer!

> In the case of the Zip file download, we chose the format of zip because both Mac and PC (the most common desktops) natively understand it with no additional software needed. In other words, if you just lost your computer, go to ANY COMPUTER ANYWHERE and you can fetch your files with a web browser. Zip preserves the file hierarchy and the last modified time, so it's "pretty good".

Security issues aside, from a space and time perspective, that's much less convenient for both you and me: it takes time and space for you to prepare the zip file, and space and time for me to save it and extract it. It would be better to install a simple client and restore the files directly into a directory. In the case of a few files, it doesn't matter much, but in the case of gigs of files, it definitely becomes a problem.

Is there any chance of you implementing a more CrashPlan-like restore option in the future?

> Longer Answer: To clarify, Backblaze produces four different products/modes for different customers with different needs and requirements. We want customers to choose what is appropriate for them. One size does not fit all:

I wish this explanation were on the Backblaze web site, because this makes it very clear. :)

Is there any chance of implementing a hybrid of #2 and #4, a client-based, zero-knowledge option? i.e. basically, CrashPlan's client in the private-key mode.

If Backblaze were to implement this, and add a Linux client, I'd seriously consider switching.

Thanks for your time.

explainplease··on Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives
This is confusing and concerning to me as a potential customer. Having used CrashPlan and other proprietary and FOSS backup software, I don't understand this description of how restoration works with Backblaze.

1. Why is the data being decrypted server-side instead of client-side? The server should be sending the encrypted data to the client, and the password should never leave the client machine.

2. Why are zip files being created? The client software should be receiving the data and writing the files directly to the selected restore directory.

e.g. this is how restore works with CrashPlan, and it only takes a few seconds to begin the process. Files are written directly to the selected output directory.

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