maze-le

With that reasoning we should have stopped producing music after Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. Instead, our cultural context and technology evolved and so did our forms of expression. There will always be more possibilities and combinations of known elements (ingredients, words, notes, interesting questions) that nobody has tried before. Be it in the realm of cooking, music, programming, podcasting or literature -- the possibilities are (almost) endless. If I find pleasure consuming that content I have no problem rewarding those that produce it -- and I would never be able to produce such content / will find a way to do so. I am a reasonably good programmer and cook, but a pretty crappy musician -- I would never be able to produce musical content like Amon Tobin, Aphex Twin or Black Sabbath.

Yes, but only for you. The people you live your life with (some of whom you even love) are in the same state of mind as before, and you have no (or at the very least less) reason to change something for the better for them.

I am not sure if this is a good state in the long run. What do you live for when everything is always/mostly positive in your head -- but reality is as sad as it ever was. Do you really have an incentive to change something to the better if you are in a constant state of happiness?

I think happiness is a state the brain produces to reward itself for good outcomes in life decisions. The fact that it is only of limited time and intensity has its (evolutionary) reasons -- they are not the worst of all reasons.

Like with depression as chronic sadness and fatigue, chronic happiness is not something we are capable of handling long-term if we want to optimize outcomes for ourselves and others.

> Their employers pay them to learn and gather the expertise needed for their future in the firm.

I think it very much depends on the company and culture. I always had jobs where learning and self improvement was encouraged and expected (also in Germany). With a budget for conferences and books and a fixed time frame (~20%) for that. These were all companies that primarily did software development -- either direct product development or project work for customers. On the other hand you have firms where software treated as an appendage. They might have other great products but an entirely different managerial background. A mindset like: "We need a software department, everyone else has one too" can easily lead to mismanagement -- and I think a lack of time and budget for self improvement is an aspect of mismanagement in the business of creating software.

Why is this downvoted? Chained and piped AIs will probably be the next step towards building ever more powerful AI systems. There is even a framework to chain Machine Learning outputs and use other systems to improve: https://singularitynet.io/

He is definitely one of the most interesting people to listen to when it comes to AI, Intelligence and Philosophy. I've seen him in Leipzig on CCC events in the past, here are some of his other talks:

* Computational Meta-Intelligence (32C3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRdJCFEqFTU

* Machine Dreams (33C3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5nJ5l6dl2s

* The Ghost in the Machine (35C3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3K5UxWRRuY&t=2516s

He also did a very interesting podcast episode with Fefe and Frank from alternativlos! (in German): https://alternativlos.org/42/

> the year is 2289. Gazprom fully occupies Venus. Walmart controls most parts of Mars. Cosco has an estimated ownership of 80% of all astroids in our planetary system. Volkswagen is still not aligned on budgeting and long term planning.

Doesn't that leave an eventually incriminating paper trail?

Yes, definitly, there are places in the world where such relevations are much worse with much more dire consequences -- I have nothing but utmost respect for people that still don't bow under such pressure -- I am sure I couldn't do it. I was born in the eastern part of Germany, when it was still called "GDR". Most people here still have quite some "paranoia towards the government", pretty much understandably so. I was too young to experience it myself but I know a lot of stories from my family members on how life was in these times, especially how you had to maintain a double persona in public life and be always on guard on what to tell people and whom to trust.

It happened in Frankfurt (Hessen), not Bavaria, you're probably referring to the Gustl Mollath case -- which is eerily similar. You're right its not a systemic issue I think (I hope), but it sheds light on the role of psychiatric "experts" in court proceedings and how corruptible they can be in some cases.

> Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP and you're not in danger of being suicided if you uncover some high level dirt

You are not going to get disappered, but you are in danger of getting a fraudulent "psychiatric diagnosis" if you are a tax investigator uncovering dirt about some politicians or their cronies.[0][1] In this case the investigator got free, but I am sure there are some cases out there of people who didn't got as much publicity. Consequences for the people that instigated this? None! Nothig to see here, move on... And the so called "Psychiatrist" is still free, and had to pay a meagre 200000 in damages.

> lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely corrupt the German government and their corporate buddies are

That is so true, I always cringe when people use Germany as an example of a society that doesn't have a lot of corruption -- we have, it's just buried under lots and lots of red tape...

[0]: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/psychiater-muss-s...

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steuerfahnder-Aff%C3%A4re

How about: Hydrogen fluoride. I know there are acidophiles but a concentrated HF solution in water has a H0 of up to -11, surely no membrane (made of proteins) can survive that?

They just might extinguish Windows with that. Think about it: if the next Windows release becomes just another Linux distribution with some fancy proprietary features, and proprietary driver/hardware support they just might convince enough Linux firebrands switch over. The Bulk of their income is not the sale of Windows Licenses anymore but cloud services. If enough developers get around the idea that a "Windows flavored Linux" is not such a bad thing after all, they might be able to establish it as a de-facto standard platform for desktop and servers (and someday maybe even embedded devices).

I am also slightly uncomfortable with that, but they are not the player they once were back in the 90ies, they definitly don't have an OS monopoly these days, and that is a good thing. Everyone who wants to use other distributions is free to do so.

Only if really all the mass of the antimatter is usable energy for propulsion. A large chunk this energy would probably be in the form of gamma ray photons: they are not usable for thrust and irradiate the materials of the spaceship, another large chunk would be heat. And I assume you would also need quite a bit of energy for whatever vessel is holding the antimatter in place (magnetic fields maybe?), to avoid that the entirety of the 10^14J is produced instantly by annihilation with normal matter.

> I wish the Linux in public institutions that was tried in Germany caught on.

Linux doesn't have a lot of lobbying power, and no important public figures like Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates that would personally intervene on its behalf.

https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/

I am also confused about this wording but I assume it refers to the duckduckgo-app on android devices. It would be blatantly anti-competitive if google would refuse the ddg app in their app store, solely because they compete with them in the search-engine market -- there are legal mechanisms against this behavior.

That is exactly the case! I heard the term for the first time in this SSC article, clicked the Wikipedia link to fulfill my curiosity and was kind of awe struck by the whole process, so I thought I'd share it here...

This is so sad... I cannot even begin to contemplate. When I was young blogging was something exciting and new. You could share your thoughts and interests with complete strangers and make connections to people you didn't even know -- albeit not very deep ones. Never once was it about status or signalling -- I mean surely there were people for whom this was important, but they were playing their status games with each other and didn't bother the people that wouldn't care about such nonsense.

It is a horrifying notion that you are only valued based on the output of your blog / FB / twitter account. I used to think that for every cultural movement there is a counter-movement that tries to invert the values of a previous generation. Are there people in your circle that explicitly reject this notion of self commodification and exhibitionism?

Languages change -- sometimes dramatically -- over the course of centuries. English wasn't even a thing until the 1100s or so (Middle English). It would be very hard to exchange thoughts and ideas with the people of this time -- not only because of the different cultural and technological contexts but also because of its pronunciation and phonology.

Its predecessor: Anglo Saxon is even more distant from it. Try to read the passages here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Beowulf

Latin (as an artificially conserved language) has not changed that much since Roman times, but it isn't a language that is actively used in everyday life -- so you cannot claim it is: "continuously spoken over time".

Hebrew and Arabic could be interesting cases -- maybe someone more knowledgeable than me can chime in on these... But I assume ancient Hebrew and Arabic are also not mutually intelligible with the corresponding languages today.

So... you think Aphex Twin is a niche electronic music artist of the 90s and at the same time claim Taylor Swift and Beiber have "almost unparalleled influence".

I mean... musical taste has its variations and I am cool with that but this is objectively an exaggeration.

We have far more than 14 active political parties. Most of them are founded for very narrow and specific issues (Tierschutzpartei -- "party for animal welfare", Die Violetten -- "party for mysticism/esotericism"). Some operate only on a regional level, like the SSV -- the party of the danish minority in Schleswig-Holstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Schleswig_Voters%27_Asso...). On the municipal level it is not uncommon to have candidates without party affiliation -- some of them organize in "loose parties" that are more a coalition of individuals than a real party (Freie Wähler).

I think the tendency to form coalitions and compromises than hyperpartisan confrontations has its roots in the voting system. We have a system of proportional representational voting -- not first past the post voting. This allows for more flexibility on the stance of single members on some issues. It is not unheard of to have 2 or more blocks in the same party that have very different opinions on specific issues. While this might be true for any representational system, first-past-the-post voting tends to focus on one issue that becomes the core of identification for some.

>> a free theorem is when you can say something that is always true about a function machine if you only know its type, but you don’t know anything about what it does on the inside.” This seemed a bit beyond him...

To be fair, this is a bit beyond most who had no contact with functional programming and category theory.

Number one reason we dropped JIRA.

So.. the very same sentiment people had when they first saw cubist art made by humans...

I once had a project management workshop, where this pdf was disseminated as an example of why projects fail. The basic questions were: Who are the actors that enable this failure, what is their motivation, and what are the tools they wield to enforce failure. I've seen a few projects where one or two of the more subtle sabotage techniques where employed -- probably unwittingly...

I think he is trolling but doesn't know it yet -- second order trolling if you will...

Wow that was... unexpectedly intense. Like a microcosm of everything that is wrong with cults of personality.

Absolutely. This film is a "must-see" for every aspiring project manager. It is very much on point with my experience on projects for big clients:

* Continuously changing list of requirements

* Incoherent decision making process

* Unrealistic deadlines

* Upper management that pats itself on the back for ridiculous decisions

It really is a good case study for failed communication in big organizations.

I'm pretty sure that there will be reverse engineered generics with another name tag for 1/100th of the original price.

Or probably the genes and proteins are the actual execution of the opcodes in this analogy.