nnq

Don't people mostly ship containers nowadays? Or deploy code but standardize on language version.

Why t f would you want to ship / deploy a naked executable in 2019?!

...then you should be thankful that you finally have people in charge that don't give a f about "what the public has appetite for"! And you can count on new-media's collaboration to change their tastes! There's clear advantages to US's current political tendencies, at least play those advantages to the max while you still can, and use this to force & catalyze science and technology progress that will benefit the entire human race ...before political tides change again and progress on this becomes harder again.

We all know that in human history "two wrongs CAN make a right" if the cards are well played.

Tesla might be "the F-35 of personal autos", but it kind of makes sense for have the AI part of a product be SaaS. The company invested a ton in R&D, and it's also liable for the damages (including deaths!) that the feature might produce if it malfunctions (hence they'd want it disabled after N years period where supporting it is no longer cost effective - even the fact that a city's roads configuration drastically changes 10 years in the future independent of the car could make the self-driving system unsafe, it's a systems issue here, no longer and "isolated product"!).

We're probably going to start seeing this more and more with "truly smart" devices... Though we do need ways to re-sell software licenses for firmware and stuff while they are still supported, even if separately from the actual hardware.

There's an obvious first-mover advantage though... there's not that many Jim Kellers around, and they got one.

I'd bet most successful hardware advances in the ML/AI will come from companies that also push the field's edge in software Bc all the others would be at at disadvantage - their "better" hardware will mismatch the software, and that mismatch will increase development costs A LOT.

Google's TPUs, Tesla's whatever those are etc. Bet on them!

NOT on whatever Intel or IBM or AMD or Arm are doing this field. Heck, even Nvidia will probably start loosing at this game in the long run. The field is too dynamic and volatile, companies need to "eat their own dogfood" by integrating vertically hardware + software, before pushing hardware to sell to others too. This is not the old game of general purpose hardware anymore...

> Who is going to restructure / rewire / reeducate Vladimir Putin (or the like), hmm ?

"Control over physical resources" is just a means, not an end... If you want "more power for your nation" or whatever and the world stage has been restructured so you can better get that by playing a different game, you'll switch the game. And Russia seems to be good at both cyber-warfare and "mental games", they can get even better and win even more, good for them, whatever.

(And the future of cheap-renewables plus mini-nuclear will mean power/energy will be available to everyone... fight would be more on "fabrication and repair capability/tech for next-gen hardware" or stuff like that - here China and SE-Asia seem to be winning the game, and they overall are pretty pro-globalistic and pro-virtual... for their own f up reasons, but whatever, if it pushes things in the right direction, fine.)

Anyway, things are going fine, though slow (sometimes progress goes one casket at a time unfortunately)... let's just hope some people don't f things up because they have their own personal/national/etc. crusade to fight for and mix it up with nostalgia for the "past full of meaning" and they drag us into some messed up war. Let's try and be peaceful and keep commerce flowing, previous generations have worked too hard to get this global system going for us to f it up by, ironically, being nostalgic for some good-ol-times that never actually existed...

You probably have Swift in the same niche... and more elegant, not completely ignoring the last few decades of language research etc. If you want something more minimalistic there's Zig. D is just "C++ + hindsight", nothing special, only extra fragmentation of dev ecosystem by bringing in another language.

Ofc, Apple is not MS, so Swift developer experience and docs kind of suck (if you're not in the "iOS bubble" where it's nice and friendly), and multiplatform dev experience especially sucks even worse...

And "easier to pick up and code in" might not necessarily be an advantage for a systems language - better start slowly putting the puzzle together in your head, and start banging up code others need to see only after you've internalized the language and its advanced features and when (not) to use them! It helps everyone in the long run. This is one reason why I'd bet on Rust!

Ofc you'll say that "it only got worse" overall bc other things got worse... The digital-virtual economy needs to grow at least 10x, and percentually to at least 95% of the actual economy (physical goods need to be comoditized, and some maybe distribute equally in a pseudo-socialistic way, outside of the economical system - the fight should be for virtual resources). You're not going to see any "things getting better" result yet, we need to go full-speed all-in in this direction, not half-heartedly... Virtual economy has a > 100x growth potential once we have better VR, AR, and later neural interfaces. "Demand" will appear or be manufactured, in the end we'll probably have too much of it.

And tons of services can be created even around the negative consequences of this... all the cornucopia of new diseases mental and physical brought about by excessive virtual consumption will boom into a huge healthcare industry etc. This will also be growth!

And just like "power" can't be real or fake, it either is or isn't, same with resources - as long as there are exchange mechanisms, there's no difference between "real" or "virtual", everything is as real as everything else...

Entities that insist on "old fashion fighting for `real` resources" should be restructured. People rewired / reeducated.

We're on the right path, but yeah, we're maybe only 0.01% of the way there... need to do things faster and harder. Let's not chicken out now and go retro/conservative instead of pushing further! The future is... amazingly incomprehensible! Heil to it!

...yeah, but there's still a "market mechanism" - you're not going to be able hire and keep a good CEO if you don't pay at least "market rate". Also, probably most people worth >1Bn have not made that by being CEOs, that's more like what you get through successful investment (the "rich daddy" + "some brains" combo), or through being really really incredibly lucky as a founder.

This is dumb, and subtly evil too. We can have the cake and eat it too:

The point is to keep the growth of scientific understanding and of technical know-how without producing too much physical crap that is hard to recycle and overloads the environment. We need to:

(1) move our economy to more non-physical / virtual goods and service - we're doing this, but we could do better, since there are still lots of "status goods" (with little practical survival utility) that are physical and damage the environment by their production and operation - the rich should be able to buy better VR-avatar spells or exclusive-in-game-diamonds or whatever instead of cars, yachts, expensive to maintain houses etc.!

(2) make warfare fully digital in means and virtual/economical in consequences - 99% of conflict should be cyberwarfare-with-low-environmental-impact - like in "hacking to steal coins from country X's national budget wallet", not "hacking to sabotage industrial infrastructure" (sure, people will still die when country X goes bankrupt and nobody living there has health insurance anymore, but this shouldn't happen that often...)

A solution for accelerating (1) would be increasing research into how to make virtual stuff feel real and be more and more addictive - real-world "stuff" should feel soul-crunchingly-boring to our dopamine addicted brains (why go on a cruise ship or travel to Tropifukistan, when you can ride a dragon around Hogwarts and earn $$ if you're good at it!) For (2) it probably helps that everyone getting to have WMDs makes everyone scared s`less of larger scale military conflict. Oh, and fear of communicable diseases also helps move towards (1), as we can see now, but I'd personally prefer alternative "solutions"...

So we're probably heading in the right direction, we just need to stabilize the symptoms/consequences of environmental degradation short-term, and to push-the-pedal-to-the metal to disconnecting our consumption-oriented economy from the physical world (and on a parallel track go for the space-colonization-game for actual physical action - the fans of "real war", could have it too, but outside Earth, heck they could even bring in the nuclear toys, space is large).

Just translate "deserves a billion dollars" to "gets to decide how most of a billion dollars gets allocated".

Nobody can actually spend/consume more than ~10% of 1Bn. But if someone is smart enough to make 1Bn, it's probably a good bet for society to "promote that person to being in charge of how most of that 1Bn gets allocated". In most of the civilized world 1Bn doesn't automagically translate into "you're a god now, you can buy off the police and the judges and the government and do whatever". (Now sure, in a corrupt country one could fully spend 1Bn by "buying out" lots of people and institution and making himself a god, but in "the civilized world" it doesn't work, or would require significantly more than 1Bn.)

The alternatives are bureaucracies / central-planning committees. For some things they work well, for some they are catastrophic, but for most thing they are simply very very very suboptimal / wasteful and non-innovative!

Hence we "bet on capitalism" and let the guy "keep" his billion.

(There are issues ofc, one could spend a significant part of the money outside of the "legal market of civilized society" or use them to subtly "bend the system"... hence it's probably a good idea to cap personal wealth at 1Bn or smth like that and force other forms of power be shared or politically mediated. Or to just monitor that the use of the money is on goods and services that are actually legally buyable and are "bought to be used or sold at a profit" instead of "bought to profit the buyer and buy his servitude" or other schemes, or not on fake donations that buy influence.)

I don't really buy the "monopoly on violence" interpretation... it's not a natural idea, maybe modern thinkers like it bc it seems to "explain" society and state. It's more of an accidental property. And it can also be kept, and would probably work even with exceptions carved out for other species or organizations.

But I don't think that's how it works at all. Things are stable when people believe they are stable, that's it. Just like speculative prices in markets. Communism and socialism sort of worked for the short stretches of time that people were true believers in them - imo it failed bc it contradicted human psychology so the belief couldn't last. Capitalism is stable bc people believe in it, probably bc it matches better our competitive and aggressive psychology.

If the Overton-window shifts to a place where people can start believing that "global orgs" can be stable, they will be stable. Maybe it's more complicated, maybe that place is pretty strange and far away. But I wouldn't think so, it's only needed that one proof-of-concept implementation starts to be believed as stable and beneficial, and then the pattern can be propagated through a chain reaction of people betting more and more on it and then fighting to protect the outcome they've betted on.

Think the French Revolution and the ensuing toppling of most monarchies throughout Europe - that's probably the best model we have for a process like this, just that instead of toppling you'd hopefully have transformation (think modern parliamentary monarchies like the UK, which successfully transformed), and it worked out for the better in the end :)

Well, look at things in another way:

Take the current structures, but split the "commerce, mobility & transportation" part off of it. Now take these split off-parts and re-assemble them together, not taking borders into considerations, and also have some of them be fully global spanning.

Maybe drop the "corporations" name, just call them "global orgs", since a few of them could also be not-for-profit (but allowed to self-finance, and to maintain forces of self-defense) and handle "global responsibility" issues like oceans pollution, climate issues etc. Other would be for-profit could focus on providing communications infrastructure, people transit security services etc.

In the end the total amount of power could end up even more split up, or maybe a little bit more concentrated but across different borders at different layers (mostly avoiding overlapping the borders of the state level below to the ones of the layers above), some even completely non-physical/non-geographical, maybe "bordered" by different purposefully-non-trivial-to-exchange crypto-currencies.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, the core idea was not "corporations" as we know them, neither concentration of power - just that we'd need self-financing and self-defense-capable trans-national organisms that would be better fitted for providing naturally-global services like communications.

Thanks! My dev setup would also be "for Quest, on a Macbook" 80% of the time, so it means a lot if you found the very same scenario to work :)

...still hacking around with Unity, but after I get a basic PoC of what I'm doing I might switch to Godot (with C# as the language) for developing the actual MVC.

Anyone here using Godot for VR/AR dev? ...curious what's the story here and how it stands against Unity on this front since I'm lately interested with developing VR productivity apps and using a game-engine seems like kind of the only viable cross-platform solution for this, the path that others have taken too.

But which engine... that's an open question, and I'm not that fond of Unity :)

...wasn't that familiar with the gritty details this part of history, but from a simple skimming, I see that things sort of worked-out fine until BEIC shifted its focus from trade and profit to territory grabbing, waring around, and administration. And it started behaving as a nation, probably because it was... all its owners where British nobility, right? That seems to be also when things turned bad for them - they practically went bankrupt but were still artificially kept a float by the then British Empire?

Probably a good lesson to be learned from BEIC for future transnational megacorps: (1) keep your focus on making profit and growing (growing in the do-lots-of-R&D to increase your technological supremacy sense - you probably can't grow marketshare after you're already a monopoly), (2) let governments do the "drawing borders" and maintaining local civil order part, and (3) diversity, diversity, diversity - if all your owners are from one nation and one social-class / race / whatever, you'll be phagocytized or subverted by that nation and/or sub-group.

If you "own" 10 people, you call them slaves and call yourself their master, and you exploit them harshly by necessity, afraid that other slave owners will out-compete you and you'll go bankrupt.

If, collectively with other 1000 board members, "own" 1 billion people, you're part of an "elite power structure", and you can do a lot of things to make the lives of those people better - you'll still want your profits, but by having a monopoly on some things you know that no rival can put you out of business so you can relax a bit...

-archy's nature is changed by scale just like everything else, we're not fractals!

Uhm, no, not at all. Nothing about subverting, only diverting a bit maybe, or reallocating resources - let nations do what they are great at, keep their subscribers alive, sane and healthy (yeah, core healthcare should probably be left to nations, not the private sector).

And the government structures of mega-corporations will by necessity dilute into some techno-algorithmic-cyber-socio-capitalism thingy that would likely be uncomprehensible to us from our current view point. Authoritarian regimes as you can see in the world today rise mainly in small nation states! Also in places with low-information-bandwidth! You can dilute autocracy out of existence in a big enough entity where the decision making is technical by necessity because it needs to optimize a numeric output: profit. (Reason: the complexity of technical decision goes beyond the computing capacities of one mind, so you get dilution by technical necessity... true, not "democracy" by any means, but something that could be mathematically similar enough to it.)

Anyway, if other ways to keep communication and transport infrastructure out of the hands of nations could be seen maybe they'd work better. The point would be to enact "separation of powers" at the next scale/level of humanity - separate "communication, transport/mobility and trade powers" from "government and administration powers". (Separating mobility part would also "open the market" and create healthy competition between governments as some people start moving around and "shopping" for a better nation. Over time, you'd end up with better products in the "states & nations" aisle of the world supermarket.)

The end game is increased freedom and prosperity opportunities for all. It's just that I don't think that we're going to get this by looking at what worked or didn't work in the past - the future will not be at all like the past, we may not have reached "the singularity" or whatever, but we're staring at a big dark wall of unpredictibility regarding the future, and our previous experience is mostly worthless at seeing through it, we need to really really think far outside the box at how we can get what we want.

A feudal warlord system is geographically local by nature, and culturally local by accident. Corporations strong enough to out-power governments would be by necessity global and trans-cultural. This would be a very very different power and freedom dynamic, closer probably to that of large empires or current interior of mega-states, only projected globally so all can benefit from it.

You'd get the freedom & liberty that you'd get in a loosely managed empire at the bottom of it's power pyramid, because the "top of the pyramid" would focus on profit and growth, not bother imposing strict rules towards the bottom, and would favor open borders and open trade for reasons of efficiency optimization.

States would keep their power functioning as "providers of order" and "regulators of religion, culture etc.", but whenever they'd try to restrict the flow of goods or information, the "outer gods" would come down and give them a good whooping.

Also, the natural tendency would be to have the decision making of these corporations more and more automated and diluted/distributed (the media-focusing founders' power would eventually dilute in big corporate cauldrons), until step by step they'd actually become non-human, half-biological AGIs in effect, using humans inside them as components, solving the annoying problem of having "other humans" ordering you from the top of the pyramid. Sure, the power transition needs to be gradual to avoid violence, but this is the road towards "crafting our gods". Nation states, as you'll start to see more and more, will try to restrict, regulate and slow down technological progress, even at the cost of their own (and of all of us) economic impoverishment.

Uhm, maybe it's time we work harder to put communication infrastructure in the hands of corporations and other non-state non-nation transnational entities that are powerful enough so governments don't have much power over them? Maybe monopolies and tech giants could be a good thing you know... Under a few big "Unbrella Co."-s you could have a nice pseudo-anarchic libertarian global system.

Whatever happened with the idea of a future where corporations would be truly transnational and would have private armies and police forces and such and really dwarf governments in power? ...it sounded like a dystopia back then, but nowadays I'd really wish we'd be in that variant of the future instead of the current one!

Wow, that's amazing, go London! Most other western European cities are quite stagnant in comparison.

...you mistyped an extra word in that sentence: "blockchain".

Yes. Sorry: https://kivy.org/#home , https://kivy.org/doc/stable/ (docs) & https://github.com/kivy/kivy .

It's not branded as an actual game framework, but it's based on OpenGL ES and that's pretty much what it is - I mean, even their first tutorial is a mini game https://kivy.org/doc/stable/tutorials/pong.html .

It would be interesting to see less accurate statistics on the total CURRENT number of cases rather than this OLD NEWS. Cool for whoever published that, but we need more focus on speed of information dissemination, even prioritising it over accurracy, we're moving at pre-Internet pace here or someone is actively hindering the flow of info...

There was/is Kevy for Python game dev, focused a lot on touch and mobile, dunno if it is well maintained but it seemed to have a nicer architecture/API, maybe it's what you need.

Can this target mobile platforms, eg. Android or iOS? Otherwise it's a non starter, the kind of games a beginer could easily make mostly only make sense as mobile games...

> quick, synchronous audio/video communication between teammates

..."kill it with fire" or other equivalent meme is the proper response to this, no matter how wonderfully it is executed.

Really, what everyone needs is more asynchronous communication and less attention draining and less interruptions! This can only help very small teams of extroverts with very-very-similar personalities work, it brings HELL for everyone else! And creates a homogenous bubble by locking people with different personalities out of the loop because they can't stand being in it.

We should put more time into bringing to the future ASYNCHRONOUS communication tools that WORK FINE, like email, comments in project-management-systems (eg. in Trello, Asana etc.)... we need more and better of these! (And without compromising them by adding push-notification and crap that makes them synchronous and attention grabbing.)

THIS! Drop the "slightly"... I can't understand how people focus so much on the competition cheating, and so less on "wait, wtf are they doing here"... I mean, even if they are not deciding whether to euthanize or not based on this, you're still building a system that introduces "good looks" as a factor in a life-and-death decision regarding a living being.

It's not hard to jump from this a system that would use your facebook file to grant or deny medical health coverage or a similar life-and-death thing. Shift the Overton-window a little, push is a few notches further, and you're re-inventing phrenology with deep learning...

This is bone-chilling! I mean the fact that so many people overlook this...

...why not use a managed db, eg. AWS RDS from the get-go?

> As a back of the envelope calculation, take the compiled binary and tarball it. That's the smallest you should consider even possible

This is 100% wrong in practice! Binaries are almost always larger than the source code they are produced from. Just as when implementing math in code, the code always takes up more space than the equations it computes.

Higher abstraction enables higher "compression" (but this is different from the formal Shannon / info-theory meaning of compression...). If go to the realm of maths, you see that the sky is the limit.

The source coding theorem is useless when talking about code and not static data. Code encodes "how something is executed" or "what happens", not "what information there is somewhere". Execution depends on DATA plus CONTEXT. By creating a smarter and smarter shared (between multiple programs) context of abstractions, source code size can get smaller and smaller (while the executable code size is upper bounded by the fixed context of the hardware executing it - you can't write code that rearranges the atoms inside a CPU ...yet) by pushing stuff "out of the program", abstracting it away into the context, and you can "violate" the source coding theorem all the time, because what you're actually encoding is not purely data/information, but something way trickier, which we are not yet capable of formalizing mathematically fully... it's about encoding "behavior that produces a subjectively desired outcome", that's what most practical programs do in the real world, a very very small part of it is "unambiguous clearly specified" algorithms that could in theory be formalized well enough to represent as "data"...