netwanderer3

These seem a bit similar to some of the services offered by Disroot.org? They're also leveraging open source software such as NextCloud in providing related services. I'm curious of how you are paying for initial hosting costs, especially if more users start using it and you'll need to scale up? Are the operations strictly relying on donations at the moment?

EDITED: I just read your comment and realized you plan to charge users for the services. I noticed Disroot's free services experience down time quite often, but it's free. You're probably going to need an army of support staff since the expectation will likely be quite high once people have to make payments.

People were racing to add those social media buttons linked to Facebook back in the days and now they're scrambling to remove them. It's just funny how this works.

I believe the common value of being a generalist comes from the fact that you might be less prone to being biased or locked in a tunnel vision when evaluating a situation, since generalists would typically have a more complete world view under various angles and multiple lens. Specialists are often biased with their specialized knowledge and would only know how to apply it even when trying to solve problems outside of their expertise. As they said, when all you have is a hammer then everything you see becomes a nail.

The second law of thermodynamics indicates that our modern world will only become increasingly more chaos, which certainly seems to have been the case so far, therefore possessing the ability to assess the world with an unbiased mindset and under such clarity can be a huge advantage.

Though the most important value from being a generalist probably comes from getting around the diminishing returns effect. We are approaching a state where it’s becoming harder and harder to generate new knowledge in any particular single field, and yet the possibility and potential to combine existing knowledge between various different fields are rarely explored and still widely open.

Most people only specialize in a single track of expertise, they are either a doctor, a mechanic, or a fisherman, but they are rarely both. Those who possess knowledge of any two industries and are able to effectively combine them together will have the potential to generate a completely new piece of valuable information. This in turn will lead to more creative ideas and innovations. In a world where everything becomes increasingly saturated, this is probably the reason why being a polymath or a generalist is going to become much more desirable in the near future.

That's an interesting take on the quality issues of these recent films. It's true that you sort of have to dumb down your content if you aim to make it popular for a wider population. If the movie plots require a bit of thinking or the use of brain resources then most viewers probably will not get it.

Though I understand Hollywood has always been about about making profits, but in the end this will only lead to more movies simply being treated as a tool to generate revenue rather an outlet for creativity and great story telling, which was exactly what made them great in the past. In that perspective, there's no difference between a movie and a piece of commercial software.

Big explosions and FX effects are not elements that make a film great as they do nothing to connect deeply with the audiences on a human level. They are shallow, cool and awesome for five seconds but that's about it. The more you watch these films, the more you become like the population they want to target.

No wonder books are still selling so well today.

You reminded me of "the scene" back in the old days where movie groups like Centropy and many others were releasing latest films on FTP servers which were typically running on 100Mbps dedicated connections, gigabit lines were quite rare back then and mostly reserved for the most elite groups like FLT (PC Games). Releases were usually "pre'd" on affiliated topsites before getting spread to other lower tier sites via FXP transferring method by individuals called "couriers" in exchange for download credits (usually at 1:3 ratios), and it would eventually reach other p2p outlets such as DC++. Most of those release groups had their own private channels on IRC where members were like family, and they were really just a bunch of geeks. Fun time!

Nobody has mentioned the real problem is that most Hollywood movies these days are recycled garbage.

People are probably going to switch from Netflix over to Disney+ once it is launched. Once Netflix is gone, Disney+ would then jack up its price to $40/month. I think we have all seen this movie too many times before.

This is probably the best strategy. One obviously cannot stop them monitoring you since there are just so many different surveillance techniques nowadays. Therefore the best way to deal with it is by constantly throwing garbage and useless data into the pipeline so that it may confuse their algorithms and stop them from profiling the individual.

When majority of the public cannot perceive any real benefits from a product and yet it's still being pushed and marketed heavily, it just does not make a lot of sense and really goes against all business principles as the goals are obviously misaligned here. You just sort of know there's something behind the product they are not telling you.

"For Amazon, the appeal is obvious: Adding millions of new users to its services and gaining access to data like their voice-based wish lists and Alexa-powered shopping habits..."

It's okay folks. There are no privacy concerns here as they only want your voice-based wish lists and shopping habits data. Once again people just love exaggerating on these topics. /s

Influencers with million of followers are no longer where the money is because their audiences have been desensitized towards those ads and messages, and they have learned to completely tune it out. Micro-influencers are where the actions take place nowadays.

In my opinion, much of future online shopping will be done on social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, etc... where you may see a demo photo/video of a product, you simply click buy and complete the transaction right there without ever having to leave the platform to a third party website.

I believe Instagram already has this feature up now, but its availability is limited to only big brands. They are probably using it as a pilot to collect relevant data and to optimize those metrics before launching the feature platform wide.

Indeed. Many people fail to grasp that in the grand scheme of things, this is unlikely to change anything. Google has always been at the center of the tech industry. Some of its services are not only important to the public and vital for the U.S. economy, but also very critical to national security as well. Rest assured that efforts will be spent to ensure Google will continue to remain at this position in the foreseeable future. Actions like these are more likely to serve as a way to calm down the public aka damage control.

I'm not sure if I understood you correctly as there are multiple ways one can short Bitcoin at the moment if they wish to. But in the end I think we all need to remember that any theory presented by anyone here would only serve as a hypothesis based on speculation. There's no way to prove it as nobody really knows what's going on except those key individuals involved.

Because traditionally short positions carry more risks. You would only keep short positions for a long period of time if you have enormous amount of capital to sustain it. Short selling strategies and derivatives were often utilized to artificially deflate prices and conduct “bear raids” on vulnerable stocks.

Exactly! BTC futures or derivatives were precisely the tools that were used. With Bitcoin derivatives, essentially you don't even need to own any Bitcoin at the present to trade since it's a future contract.

BTC price reached its peak at $20,000 on December 17, 2017 which happened to be the exact same date that the CME Group (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) became the first provider of Bitcoin derivatives to the market. Immediately BTC price started dropping down the next day and it went down all the way to $13,000 only within the next five days! Not much needed to be said after that.

FYI: https://ethereumworldnews.com/report-crypto-platform-bakkt-u...

I have little doubt BTC price is being manipulated.

Its price was kept very low for the longest time so some very powerful organizations such as Bakkt (backed by the same people behind NYSE) could accumulate most of its market supply. At the moment the price is being artificially pumped up to build momentum until enough people from the public buy into it, then its price will once again start dropping faster than gravity.

You often can attribute the exact reasons why a stock price went up, but for BTC it seems to be a complete mystery black box that even the most well-versed traders couldn't tell you the exact reasons why it went up.

For stock price for example, you just knew in advanced even from last year that Beyond Meat's stock was going to be a hit. "What The Health", an anti meat industry and pro vegans documentary film, was a HUGE success last year and you could see from miles away everything was set up for this trend to become mainstream in 2019 as public sentiments were beginning to swing very positively towards it. For BTC however, everything just seems like a wild guess as no one could pin point exactly what drives its price.

That's why they have been doing these clinical trial studies on real patients in helping them to treat their PTSD. Last I read the results have been very positive and it is now currently at Phase 3.

The negative stories we often heard from the news most likely resulted from the unknown substances that often got mixed into the drug. This was possible precisely because of the fact that MDMA is still illegal and unregulated. When you leave such a profitable business open in the wild like that, greedy criminals are free to commit any types of harmful actions with disregard to other people's health, just to achieve their next target profit level. Under such environment and conditions, of course it's normal that all we would hear about are just bad stories. Over time this has established a somewhat false negative feedback loop that makes it difficult for the public to break away from or be rightly informed.

At least the idea of just being open and willing to try will pave the way for more of future researches. There is no denying MDMA DOES provide many benefits in some ways. If our brain reacts to the drug by producing happy chemicals and positive feelings then naturally it must benefit us human to some degree. In my opinion this is simply the law of nature and how our universe works. Similar to as when you consuming something bad or not good for your health, your body will attempt to signal by making you either sick, vomiting out, or just feeling overall terrible.

Of course just like everything in life, MDMA does carry some negative properties as well. Perhaps further researches will allow new discoveries and enable combinations of different drugs in order to help lessen its negative side effects. However, that would only be possible if more people are willing to open their mind first. This is a great start and an inflection point.

FYI, here is the link to an article I came across a few months ago. The author will take you through a great short journey in which he himself experienced and show you how much it has helped his life. It's quite an interesting read: https://medium.com/@tuckermax/what-mdma-therapy-did-for-me-4...

It's difficult enough to coordinate a group of 200 people under normal circumstances, being able to climb to the top of Everest by every single person is nothing short of a miracle!

Initially I thought it was just another Gameboy imitation, but a crank? Wow, that would add a whole new dimension to it. At this stage of the gaming industry when everybody keeps making very similar games and products, any unconventional creative ideas are more than welcomed!

Uber is screwed. They clearly stated in their SEC filing that the possibility of deploying full autonomous cars will significantly impact their future earnings.

It's interesting that Cook mentioned the danger of how today algorithms keep pushing for preexisting beliefs.

One of the risks with AI is the over-relying on analytical data. When a desirable pattern is discovered, it often leads to future actions specifically targeting this pattern simply to reinforce it more, this in turn perpetuates a narrow and single-minded culture.

It may take away our natural ability of intuitive thinking and thus preventing new patterns to emerge. Every decision must be made based on existing knowledge/data so there's no more room for any unproven hypotheses. Organizations may just avoid exploring new directions altogether when no data readily exists.

More and more people will just move away from city once these tech are deployed on a bigger scale. Life is too short to be subjected to this type of bullshit.

I love how the introductory video gives you a big picture of different ways the math can be applied to real life scenarios. I wish they did this more frequently at school. Often the students did not understand at the beginning how all these stuff could be useful and thus they did not invest in the effort or were not interested at all. Each curriculum at school should have an introductory course that clearly outlines and explains how the content of each course can be applied to real life scenarios, including examples of use cases that help students understand the big picture and to motivate them.

Through the game of tennis, I quickly learned that in order to achieve a state of equilibrium or balance, everything must be in moderation. When you hit a tennis ball, it's always a trade off between power and precision. You cannot gain in one area without losing in the other. Same principles applied to most things in life.

The problem with current methodology is we mostly measure intelligence strictly through very few standard categories like mathematics. Sure, mathematics is a universal language for everything in life, but to thrive in a human society it requires many more skills than just math. It's almost a given that when you have a gifted child measured by one of those standard categories, this kid often would have some types of deficiency in other areas that have not been measured because they are unestablished.

10% of human population have the genetics that provide them with much higher capabilities than the rest in some certain areas. Though this would take enormous effort, but if we provide adequate support to compensate for the areas where they lack, this should help raising them to a level matching the areas where they really excel, and thus achieving a higher overall equilibrium state. However, because the rest of our society is still operating at a much lower baseline, so even then it's always going to be a challenge for these individuals to fit in. Maybe they are just ahead, or behind, of our time in terms of evolutionary development?

I know a couple of friends who worked at the major banks. They all started out as contractors. I remember one guy told me during their first year that all they did was browsing Reddit at work. He was a close friend and didn't want me to join their team because he knew I would display the level of work ethic that would make him look bad.

These solutions are touching only the technical aspects and I believe most experts probably know exactly what to do, but that doesn't mean they can actually do it simply because its execution depends largely on politics.

We can have one country practicing it but another just doing the complete opposite to ruin it for everyone, then realistically we don't really make any progress at all no matter how much effort we put in.

For any climate change solutions to really become effective, it will definitely require a joined global effort. That's where our root problem is, until we can solve that the rest are just useless noises.

I believe laziness in this situation should be defined as having adequate alone time to process your thoughts, rather than always being busy doing something all the time.

People whose work involves mainly analytical thinking tasks are often mistakenly perceived by public society as lazy while in fact they have always been working all this time, probably harder than most. It's only because the nature of their work is not physically visible to the naked eyes.

Quality decision can only be made after it has been given sufficient time to carefully analyze all the information and its available options. This can only be achieved successfully when people have plenty of quiet moments alone to really think about the specific problem. Those who are always busy doing something all the time rarely have this opportunity, they are always in a rush and don't have the habit to utilize the process or pattern required for analytical thinking. Just like how everything in life is a trade off, if you don't dedicate adequate time for thinking tasks, you cannot expect to formulate quality decisions.

For those who need to take a driving test, it's always best to try schedule it for the earliest morning time slot. The examiners typically don't want to start off their day by being a prick and fail someone.

"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined.

Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff.

The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties.

Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions.

One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."

-Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

Once my phone is rebooted or ran out of battery, Signal would stop notifying me of any new messages unless I manually launch the app, sometimes I even had to tap on each individual conversation to check for new messages. I agree with some posters here that its UX badly needs a redesign too.

Viettel, the military owned mobile network in Vietnam, has chosen Ericsson as their main partner to build 5G network. It is expected to launch next year and potentially with unlimited data as well.