otakucode

The problem I see with Uber is that, at the end of things, all they provide is some software running on some servers. While not an easy weekend project, it would not be impossible for a distributed system to replace it, making whatever life they have almost certainly temporary. Every action they take to extract more profit will only increase the pressure toward development and move towards a distributed system. As long as it can present an app to a customer that can hook them up with a driver without being obtrusive, it seems like a service destined to become a commodity and certainly not something likely to be a cash cow for long.

My understanding, and this might just be marketing PR I honestly don't know, is that Anker sends their own QA people to the factories in China, so they're able to meet a higher standard. I always rely on them for battery stuff, and now USB cables since apparently no one else can make cables that reliably work to connect my phone to my car except them. I went through half a dozen different brands before theirs finally worked and remained working.

According to the book 'The Everything Store,' Amazon's search engine is a matter of internal contention. Years ago, when people noticed that Amazon's search engine was terrible (as it is), someone from another group in the company developed a new search system based on Elasticsearch and more modern technologies. He presented the new search to Bezos. But there was an existing team whose primary responsibility was the search functionality. And the man who led that team was one of Bezos' personal friends. That man was, apparently, petty and status-seeking, so pushed back against adopting the new search engine. Bezos proposed that there would be a contest between the old and new search engines. Judged by his friend, head of the current bad search engine team who didn't want the new search because it threatened his status. Predictably, the new search 'lost.'

You make certain that even a 'failure' can break even, and make it so that a success gets milked for all its worth. While you can't increase the chances of a win, you can affect the payout, essentially.

You are correct, but I think your prediction false. We need to remember that "Hollywood" is a specific set of entities. We're not talking about independent film producers. We're talking about the largest film publishers. And those film publishers are like publishers in any other creative endeavor - they have been almost completely eliminated in having any business reason to exist. While their empires were built upon solving the problem of distribution, that no longer has any value whatsoever. In fact, due to the ways they built their distribution networks, they are severely hampered in the ways in which they can actually do distribution compared to purely digital/online firms. Distribution, the golden goose that made them billions, is now a noose around their necks. Whereas once they funded new productions as a side hustle, something that was necessary just so they had something to distribute, their role as a source of money is now the only thing they have to offer that has any value.

Anyone can distribute a movie. A clever 12 year old who knows how CDNs work can set up global distribution in their spare time for fun. This is a problem. Being reduced to a source of funds in a creative business is almost guaranteed business death. In the past, total control over the distribution chain allowed movie publishers to manipulate things to be profitable. There is a very inconvenient fact that businesses in the creative space have to deal with (although they never admit it, not even to themselves) : the public response to any creative work is random. Truly and perfectly random. There is nothing you can do to improve your odds, they remain even. Sure it seems like there are things you can do to bend things in your favor, like use big-name stars, throw a lot of money at the project, etc. But run the numbers. It doesn't work. Not even a little. For every Titanic or Avatar you have a Waterworld or an Ishtar. The book 'A Drunkard's Walk' has a couple chapters about the creative fields, book publishing and movie publishing specifically, where they go through the research and the numbers. It's just random. The audience is different every time, so it makes sense that the end result is randomness in the theaters on opening weekend and right after publication.

So what do you do if you're a business who wants to make money, and your industry has changed from being this thing you could control and make profitable, kicking your failures aside as fast as possible and keeping your successes around for as long as possible, to being mostly a game of chance? You lean on the little control you still have, of course, and movie companies definitely do that in the theaters. Good luck catching a movie after opening weekend if not many people showed up that weekend. Maybe go see Avengers: Endgame for the third time? But that's pretty limited in how much it helps. It still hurts badly to drop $10 million filming a movie and then having to kick it to Bluray or streaming after 4 days in cinemas. What you do is play it as safe as humanly possible. You don't take any chances. You make sure the movies have big names, have big special effects, have big budgets, and you definitely don't do anything that would ever risk limiting your market whatsoever. You don't mention religion, you stay away from politics, you absolutely prostrate yourself at the feet of anyone and try to make the most broadly palatable thing you can based on aggressive focus-testing, analytics, etc. You go wholesale soulless. It's the only option, really. And it probably still won't work. It will probably still catch up to them eventually. Because you can't escape the numbers, and big chances even on the safest bets at the craps table is still gambling.

The creative work will continue to come from independent filmmakers, and their destiny is bright. Not billion-dollar Avengers: Endgame bright, but bright enough to keep yourself warm beside and make a living off of. No longer do they have to keep their fingers crossed and hope Weinstein buys the rights and puts it on a shelf somewhere to prevent it from competing against him in the box office. They can sell to Netflix or Amazon or Disney or just "publish" the thing themselves. And a niche market is fine and survivable.

You are making the presumption that a modern parent would permit their child to go outside and play without going with them. The primary reason most kids don't want to play outside is because their parent goes with them and kills every single opportunity for fun.

And how does society view those people? Deserving of their compensation, and the general overall view is that they earned that money?

Not necessarily. There is always a balancing act done when looking at something like a game. How much of the game are you going to accept as "they are processing this as reality" and how much of it are you going to throw away and assume the player is not processing as reality? In most cases, those who want to see games as dangerous assume, with zero justification, that the player identifies all digital characters as full human beings - but every single aspect in which those characters differ from human beings is totally ignored. Why some aspects, like mortality, ability to feel pain, desire to retain property, would be assumed by the player to be identical to reality, yet the ability to respawn, the lack of friends, family, society, ability to speak, etc should be completely ignored is never explained. It seems entirely self-serving. Ignore the obvious profound flaws and disproofs of any actual claim in the argument, and simply rely on a dumb vague emotional association between concepts to trick people. It's a grossly unethical and intellectually bankrupt discussion in most cases.

If the player entirely buys into the reality of the game, then every character not killed was brought to life by the player. Creation of life must be given equal weight to ending of life, shouldn't it? And what lives are these? Mindless drones typically walking eternally in a loop. No family. No friends. No change. It is a desperate hell if considered reality. And the polygonal structure, the low resolution textures, all of those technical limitations, those have to be being processed as reality too, right? (If not, why not?) What consequences does that have? How about the altered physics of the game world? Shouldn't players have great difficulty simply getting around if they accept the physics in games and attempt to act in the real world in accordance with them?

Games draw an awful lot from film. Film is an artform that laces together absurd lies and unreality into an experience that the audience can accept as 'real.' It's a very fascinating subject. If you take a camera, and you point it at two people having a fightfight, do you know what the response of the audience will be? 'Meh. Doesn't seem real.' But instead add a musical track that didn't exist in reality, add cuts in perspective that are impossible for any body/brain/eyes combo to accomplish, take out the meat-slapping sounds of landing hits and substitute in recordings of snapping celery and carrots, and blammo, the audience is on the edge of their seat saying "now that was a REAL fight." Except, of course, no, it wasn't. It is precisely because it bore so little resemblance to actual reality that it worked and the audience were able to maintain their willful suspension of disbelief. The audience is engaging conceptually, but not viscerally.

Games crank that up even further. And they do such a good job of it that is causes us language problems. When people talk about games, they talk about the concepts as if they are real. It is primarily the analysts of games that are least capable of dealing with them in any capacity aside from accepting the concepts as real, while ignoring the real material facts of them. It's like they're so totally un-real and there is so obviously no question at all of their unreality that people just ignore it and proceed on a level of "but what if their CONCEPTS were real and people couldn't tell the difference? Not people like me, of course, but maybe worse people, like young people!"

The brain is exceptionally excellent at distinguishing between and dealing differently between fiction and reality. Consider an actor. Either on a stage, or on the set of a film. They walk into frame, and another person, a real human being, is present. The actor raises a real gun, sneers with an acted hatred which must be presented externally as realistically as possible (and emotions are almost entirely composed of their external expression and biofeedback from same), and points it at the other person. That other person wilts in acted fear, irises expanding, eyes going wide, mouth dropping open, again all the outward expressions matching actual mortal fear. Both actors have the intellectual knowledge, SOLELY intellectual, that the gun is loaded with a blank. The approaching actor pulls the trigger. The gun explodes with its loud retort, the 'shot' actor crumples to the ground, wails in 'pain', whines, and 'dies'. The brain of the shooter is receiving every sensory input that tells them what is happening is real. Great effort is expended in trying to 'sell' the scene, so there is gunsmoke in the room that burns the nostrils, there is 'blood' leaking from the victim, etc. The shooter intellectually knows it's not real. But that is the sole indicator to his brain - an intellectual knowledge that he is an actor participating in a scene and what is being experienced is not real.

In the case where this scene was real, the shooters brain would be scarred. Their neurology would be branded by PTSD, their psychology would be turn apart with regret, guilt, etc. And the only distinction between the two situations is knowing it's not real. Clearly, knowing something is not real isn't just a slight thing. It is tremendously strong (maybe impenetrable) armor against the consequences that assail the brain of a person having a real experience.

The whole brain doesn't need to "tell fact from fiction". Only the one tiny piece that holds the "reality" flag seems to be the only thing needed.

There is now a technology which can mess with this flag, and it freaks me out a bit. It's something which feasibly could be done already in a consumer space, but it's not being used, and probably shouldn't ever be except under strict controls. It is usually referred to as "virtual embodiment" and involves using VR in a particular way that tricks the brain into dissociating from your physical body and identifying very profoundly and deeply with a virtual body. It could be done by anyone with a VR headset and separate webcam with the right software. Research is currently being done using the technique for therapeutic uses, and it seems to have some efficacy. Those experimenting with it, though, have realized its power. It could potentially do real, profound, and potentially long-lasting damage to the internal mental 'model' people have of their selves. It could get weird. Like imagine a 15 minute experience that could afflict you with 'phantom limb syndrome' making you feel like you have a painfully tightened fist on a third arm growing out of the center of your chest. They've obviously not experimented with doing anything like that, it would be tremendously unethical to do so, but the therapeutic uses they have had success with being turned, even accidentally, to 'the dark side', could be pretty harmful it seems.

A year or so back I read an article about virtual embodiment and the researchers involved calling for a 'Code of VR Ethics'. They were considering a much more general case which I disagreed with (and still do) and didn't seem to be considering the situation like I described earlier of the actor. The actor has more "immersion" than any VR scenario will ever be capable of having. The actor knows the person they're pointing the gun at is a real human being - a human being they have a personal relationship with - and the scene is 'rendered' is infinite fidelity across all the senses including smell, hearing, touch, proprioception, absolutely everything is dead on exactly what an actual murderer would experience with only the one intellectual fact cluing the brain in to the unreality. I reached out to Dr. Metzinger, the leader in the field of research on virtual embodiment (I didn't realize who he was at the time, I just dug up his email after the article and was surprised he took the time out to carry on a discussion with me for awhile), and asked for his thoughts, but he hadn't considered the situation before. At a first blush he supposed that because it would be easier for the actor to turn their head and see all the cameras, crew, etc, that might factor into it as it would be easier than 'escaping' a VR situation, but that might be balanced with the lack of fidelity in VR, the weight of the headset, etc.

It's really very fascinating that this intellectual knowledge about the fact of the reality of a situation is so powerful. Intellectual knowledge is usually not very effective at all in influencing how the brain responds to things. Consider the situation where you are a person who was not raised in a nudist/naturist body-positive environment (as statistics would suggest you probably are), and one day you come to the rational conclusion that it is both nonsensical and harmful to you for it to bother you if other people see you naked. You can convince yourself of this totally and fully with perfect rational consistency (because it is perfectly rational). Then imagine you get 'pantsed.' Your intellectual knowledge would not protect you from the automatic emotional response and trauma. To change that would require repeated exposure around others with conscious effort expended to alter your emotional response, something which could take years to have a real effect on the trained response that is your emotional system. Your intellectual knowledge can guide that, but it's nowhere near the nearly impenetrable armor of knowing something is not real. That distinction is, to me, very strange.

I can't think of any situations where self-benefit, when not justified by claims it will make you more able to function as a worker or 'contribute to society' (aka an employer), isn't laced with implications of inherent immorality, assumptions of damaging health, etc. If food is delicious, it must be unhealthy. If an innovation makes things easier, it must be dangerous. If something is fun, it is probably addictive. If something is addictive, it is inherently immoral and bad. If you pursue pleasure, you are self-destructive.

Yes, if you take up exercise and yoga and healthy eating, that could be seen as 'benefitting yourself'.... but it is OK only because those things are cloaked suffering. They're things you don't want to do, they cause pain or discomfort and involve avoiding doing the things you would prefer to do.

I am open to a counterpoint. I might just not be thinking of something where doing something pleasurable because you care for it for your own benefit is seen as a positive, something a mother would love to hear her child is pursuing, something that would be met with people at a party saying 'good for you!' that is, at the bottom of it, just fun.

That is the only way to sell recreation or relaxation to Americans. Benefiting yourself or pursuing pleasure always has to be justified. I can't recall the source, but I read a long and insightful article about this specifically and the difference in viewpoint between Americans and most Europeans. It explains why some products and trends perform differently across those places despite so much else being shared.

It made sense in the past. But, it's not actually focused on productivity, it focuses specifically on suffering and the effort. When productivity is possible without strenuous effort, something which wasn't very common in the past (it was possible in things like art, which was consequently never valued as highly as dogged physical labor), it is viewed with suspicion and derision. Society is structured around placing high value on sacrifice and suffering as a consequence of the Protestant Work Ethic in the west. Productivity is beside the point. I believe this is one of the main reasons why the introduction of computers has resulted in skyrocketing productivity paired with frozen wages, and it will get worse. As everything was built around the idea of rewarding physical exhaustion, discomfort, strenuous effort, etc, when the majority of work is mental work which has no real outward signs of strain, it won't be rewarded. As a result, longer and longer hours will be expected, wages will not rise, and any cries for understanding by workers will be met with derision by the public at large. "It's not like you're working hard."

Working hard is valued, and should be pursued for its own value. Asking for compensation is crass and devalues your effort. Being productive without suffering or straining is not valued. It is seen as "cheating" and whatever is produced is seen as inherently less valuable. These are problematic perspectives that are causing us social problems and will continue to do so until there is a social re-evaluation of things. Until then... burnout for everybody!

Or, realize how much work you actually need the worker to do, and stop insisting on 40+ hour work weeks. Pay them for the work they are doing, not their hours. That's what salary positions are SUPPOSED to exist for. If they complete their tasks quickly, then let them go home.

Exhibit A should be Eric Schmidt's book 'The New Digital Age' in which he explains his view that because Google is rich, they should therefore take the reigns of global culture and decide the moral and social norms of society. He is not terribly secretive about the fact that he believes he is inherently Better than the masses and should be a large player in herding the public 'for their own protection.' Of course that just so happens to amount to ossifying global culture in the exact state it was in when Google rose to prominence in the early 2000s but I'm sure that's a total coincidence.

Running YouTube at a loss of hundreds of millions a year for over a decade on a billion-dollar+ infrastructure purely and solely to guarantee that no competition could ever rise against it would, I think, be an easy sell as anti-competitive.

I personally would also like to see Google be the first of many "sellers" of digital goods prosecuted for fraud and false advertising for constantly advertising that they are "selling" you digital content when they are, in fact, only giving you a license which itself amounts to a contract lacking consideration - placing no obligation upon the licensor and extending no legally enforceable benefit to the licensee.

Let's see if Eric Schmidt stands by his "if you haven't done anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to hide" viewpoint in the coming months. Should be fun.

That is a savagely, tragically dangerous position to take in a country with subsidized healthcare. We have many examples of unintended consequences resulting from attempted behavior modification with the goal of improving health, and government policies, due to the way they are executed, are inherently much more difficult to reverse or change than education. Just for one example, look at the American Heart Association. In the 70s, they believed they saw evidence that the amount of the diet which came from saturated fats produced increased risks to heart health. So they pursued governmental avenues to reduce the saturated fat intake of Americans by 15%. They succeeded. Saturated fat was removed from many products available on store shelves. Which made them taste like cardboard. Which made sales fall. To restore flavor, they filled the products with sugar and salt. Sales improved. Average American caloric intake skyrocketed. It birthed an obesity epidemic, a diabetes epidemic, and yes, a heart disease epidemic. Meanwhile, research showed saturated fat wasn't quite so dangerous as once thought.

Trusting people to their own devices and doing no more than education is not perfect. But it reduces the odds of unintended consequences like this drastically. It also makes it much easier to change course when necessary.

In the medical literature there is a classification referred to as a "chipper" who generally smokes only 1 or 2 cigarettes a week on average. Humans are many and varied.

That has not been my experience. With a cigarette, once you start it going, you basically need to finish the whole thing in a short period of time. If you really only wanted one or two drags, sorry, you're down for 10 minutes or so of smoke. (Or you could put it out and waste it, but given how expensive cigarettes are I doubt many smokers are inclined to do that.) With vaping, you can take one drag and put it down. Figuring out the volume or amount of nicotine consumed would be very complicated. And, of course, most of the negative effects of smoking have nothing to do with nicotine and it seems if there are negative effects from vaping, those will likely also not come from the nicotine itself.

Whatever the cause, it has to be something extremely subtle and very unlikely to occur. We know that from the simple numbers. Tens of millions of people vaping on an hourly basis for years amounting to ~500 cases means that whatever is occurring is a freak occurrence and not some direct consequence that has a high likelihood of occurring in typical people.

The primary reason for a need for guns is to retain the ability for a violent uprising to overthrow an oppressive regime should one arise. One of the benefits of the American system is that it does not assume infinite beneficence and eternal benevolence on the part of the governing body. This is wise because we know history. It doesn't make sense to fear being shot simply because many people own guns. If it did, then it would make sense to be in constant fear of vehicular homicide because automobiles are everywhere. It is not possible to make it impossible for people to harm or kill one another. Humans are hard to keep alive, not to kill. What protects you is not the inability of your neighbors to kill you - they all can, and easily - or the legal system, it is social and the philosophical outlook of those around you. Those factors are scary to people so they often pretend to not see them, but they're really the only protection humans can ever have and it is what they actually rely upon to determine if they 'feel safe.'

Name the last school shooting that took place at a school without surveillance cameras. Can you? I doubt it. School shootings predominantly occur at the most locked-down and oppressive schools in the country. The solution to some adolescents being driven into such intense desperation that they are willing to annihilate themselves just to do some damage and escape is not to squeeze them tighter.

That is doubtful. Consider scale. While there are a few dozen really densely packed cities, there are a couple orders of magnitude more small cities. There simply aren't enough people to 'fill up' the small cities in the US. There will of course always be regional places that are more in-demand than others, but overall it's like moving from a puddle to the ocean. It's just not going to make a dent.

Criminal negligence requires violation of established standards. Not just 'common industry practice' or even 'basically sensible', but legally established standards bodies who have laid out what practices and requirements must be fulfilled. Computer and software systems lack these standards completely. There is nothing. As such, if a computer is involved, it is impossible to prosecute criminal negligence. This is a big issue that will only become more pressing, but there are strong arguments on both sides of the argument over whether such standards should be established or not.

Computer people don't want to raise the barrier to entry by requiring licensing and following regulations, and money people don't want to pay for licensed computer/software engineers. Not to mention just deciding what the standards should BE and how the standards body should be constituted and run is guaranteed to be a rats nest and a sequence of progress-thwarting horrors... but the cost of not tackling it and paying for it will cost lives. We can be guaranteed that.

I hear pig farmers will have lots of land available soon.

It has bothered me for decades that this seems to be a 'bug' in the design of the US government system. ~500 people whose job is to create new laws. 9 people who can effectively remove them (SCOTUS), and who have a very limited schedule. Plus if they are ever too busy and pass on hearing a case because others are more pressing, that immediately cements the law into place and establishes it as having 'survived Supreme Court challenge' since refusing to hear is equivalent to accepting the lower court ruling and establishes it as precedent. I do not see how you can run a system with ~500 'inputs' and 9 low-flow 'outputs' for a long time without resulting in an overflow of oppressive tyranny.

There would definitely be a market for 'open source appliances' I believe. Appliances built to last, based on modular design, and with full documentation available along with plenty of hooks included to permit third party creation of modifications and enhancements. Basically, applications as a sort of durable platform. Want to be able to connect your oven via wifi and see an image of what's cooking or get a food of its current temperature? That sort of thing could be added a little addon card or module, etc. Of course, most businesspeople would look at that and say 'sure, even if you come to dominate the market, what THEN?' and not like the lack of a built-in way to force people to buy new product. But eventually you would expect there to be one person who would be satisfied with making a few hundred million dollars over a decade even if that shrinks later on.

'Make game of that which makes as much of thee' is some ancient wisdom. This sort of behavior by Google certainly does justify providing no more than a 12 hour window to Google to fix problems under responsible disclosure. Many in the industry are unhappy with Google only giving companies 90 days with Project Zero as they feel that large corporations should be given preferential and deferential treatment (they are people after all), but when it comes to app developers 12 hours is acceptable? I think not. Those who wish to set the rules must be willing to play by the same.

And will continue to do so because anyone who wants to create a new browser will be locked out of supporting EME by Google as we've already seen happen a couple times. Then once they get rid of the address bar and URLs, the only way to find anything on the web will be through a search which Google happens to also dominate in.

Why is a very lightweight 15" laptop out of the realm of possibility? It's not like displays today are inherently heavy. If OLED panels become viable for notebooks, they weigh nearly nothing, but even with existing LCDs with LED backlighting, those don't weigh much either. They do need to pay attention to making the case rigid across a larger area, but that ought to be possible without adding too much weight given modern materials. The LG Gram 15 only weighs 1.1kg, for instance.