otakucode

They just said '2-3 weeks' to give themselves some cover at first I think. On the day of its announcement they said 2-3 weeks. When I actually registered to send mine in a week or two later, it said 5 days. And it took maybe 5 days (I wasn't really paying that much attention, I don't use my MBP all that often) from when fedex picked it up to when they dropped it off with the battery replaced. It was actually quite a pleasant experience all things considered. Only gripe I really had about it was that the support person I chatted with when registering my system for the repair requested I use the system to do multiple things (add a separate administrative user for them to use if necessary, log out of iCloud, deactivate system in iTunes, etc). When you tell me not to use a system at all because it is in danger of bursting into flames at any moment, I'm not a big fan of then being told to use it to prep for sending it in...

I've always been stunned that the CIA is permitted to continue operation after their many catastrophic failures. I mean, failures on a scale that are just mind-blowing and show their intense ineffectiveness. A couple weeks before the USSR collapsed, for instance, the CIA wrote a paper describing the USSR as a threat continuing to grow and the largest threat on the global stage. This isn't so much because they were incapable of seeing that the USSR was on the brink of collapse.... well, sort of I guess it was. What I mean is that they had the intelligence to know, but the concept was so dangerous for them to fathom organizationally that they couldn't admit it. The USSR was their bread and butter. They had more spies in Moscow than the KGB. We already knew the USSR wasn't doing great when Reagan was around. When he took office, the CIA was asked to do the standard thing and put together a bunch of briefings for the incoming president. The head of the USSR division at the time was Aldritch Aimes. He put together a paper saying the USSR was a paper tiger and running out of money. The director of the CIA threw the report away and told Aimes 'the president wants an enemy and we're going to give him one'. (that was one of the major things Aimes claimed made him jaded and led to him becoming a double agent for the KGB because he no longer viewed the CIA as doing serious work for good but just a group of opportunistic lackeys)

So they missed the USSR collapsing... and the fall of the Berlin wall... and the Arab Spring... basically every gigantic sociopolitical change for the past 70 years has caught the CIA by surprised and that not being the case is literally their only job.

I do not see why experimentation is impossible if we are in a position where there literally is no alternative other than doing 'experiments' except refusing to address the results and change tactics except under extreme political pressure. Things like 'we believe if taxes are lowered on businesses, it will result in them hiring more workers', after it has been tried for 30 years and has resoundingly shown to be a collassal untruth, actively destroying the middle class and leading to tremendous instability even among those who do remain employed, at least if we could say it was an experiment and we were uncertain of the outcome, we could say 'well that didn't work let's try something different' instead of it being a political battle fueled by people just trying to trick others into thinking that reality is different from what it is.

In a situation that affects so many people, it may seem unwise to do experiments and try things where we can not say with certainty what effects they might have, though we admit they may be substantial. The ethics are very dim on that front. But the alternative has to be considered. We do not have 'generally accepted treatment' to turn to and rely on. We only have other experiments, albeit while not calling them experiments and not treating them as if their outcomes are in doubt, simply forging ahead with blinders on. I can't imagine an argument that would justify that as more ethical than earnestly doing experiments.

Humans do a great many things by default that are directly in opposition to determining truth. Look at any list of common logical fallacies. Every single last one of them is something humans do by default. They're intuitive and emotionally persuasive.

There is little similar between what was suggested by the person you're replying to and any policy which simply throws both opinions out. What he was describing was engaging with the content of an argument, not its speaker. This is proper. This is how things should be decided. "Who gets on TV" is an antiquated limitation which generated the difficult situation where someone has to make that call, and the unrelated constraint of needing to break for commercial or move on to the next topic in order to keep the audience engaged or keep to a programming schedule exacerbates it. The way the medium is used makes it impossible for a positions justification to be explained, only the position with no justification can be presented. This simply should not be done, but is the sort of thing which due to technological limitation was done out of desperation for a time. Commercial interests, of course, still motivate this approach, but those commercial interests, I think we can both agree, are not intimately tied to the ability of the medium to assist the audience in coming to a nuanced understanding of available views.

There is a very big difference between the ideal situation, where in every instance you have infinite time and access to all possible relevant information, and the practical situation with limited time (not 'oh I can't pay attention to one argument for 45 minutes' but 'if we do not do something before Tuesday, hundreds could die') and resources. It is not incorrect to discuss the ideal situation, because it will always be present and always provide the limiting constraints on the practical case. While you can be in a position where you could argue 'we should trust the expert because we have exactly and only 2 choices and his authority is better even though he can not explain it', even in that situation it must be admitted that what you are doing is wrong. It is a wrong thing which is being forced by circumstance to be done. In the ideal case, you are guaranteed truth. In the practical case, you try to do the best you can. In the practical case, the redneck might have a point (farmers, for instance, had been talking about global dimming for years before scientists gathered the data and became concerned... we were able to reverse it, but not before the pollution from England caused the jetstream to shift and led to several years of intense drought and famine (remember Live Aid? That was global dimmings work) in Ethiopia. Then you have cases where a doctor says other doctors should wash their hands between doing autopsies and delivering babies. He was not right because he had authority. In fact, the argument against him was that he was not respected enough in his field and that it was insulting to suggest that the doctors killing women and children left and right were actually at fault. Those were the more respected members of the medical community. We were saddled with leaded gasoline for decades because the community of research chemists all agreed it was safe and did so for financial benefit and based on very 'common sense' arguments (lead is so heavy! It will fall to the ground and not travel far from the road, how would it get in the air?). When a toxicologist reported the danger, he was met with insult and told he was entreating on chemists territory. Because people trusted the authority of the professional research chemists, he got ignored. Because of them having their authority trusted, they could not afford to even investigate the truth. If they lost that authority, and the trust, they would be done. All unnecessary and a tragic bit of scientific history every researcher should know. Those authorities are just people. They can be just as selfish, mistake-prone, prideful, etc as anyone else. It is not reason to dismiss them. It is reason to expect them to present you with solid evidence, solid argument, and to NEVER ask you to 'just trust them'. The same applies for the redneck. If he provides solid evidence, solid argument, and never asks you to 'just trust him', you review his argument and evidence exactly the same.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's the best-selling philosophy book of all time, and you really can't go wrong with it. It's not about Taoism directly. But it is. You get that with Taoist sort of things.

Have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? It's the best-selling philosophy book of all time. I actually only read it fairly recently, and was stunned at how relevant it was. It was written in the 70s, yet even includes a few passages about computers! It's not about zen, or about motorcycle maintenance. But they both make appearances. I'd recommend giving it a go if you get the chance. It might make Zen and Tao seem a bit less New-Agey to you.

Or, you could check out my personal introduction to the Tao... The Tao of Pooh. I read it when I was a teenager, thinking it positively absurd that anyone would create a book attempting to explain an ancient school of philosophy through Winnie the Pooh. It's not absurd. I found it sublime, and the idea of taoism made a powerful impression on me and probably played a sizable role in driving me to further study of philosophy.

I studied Philosophy in college (alongside CS). It's basically all about argumentation. I do not see argumentation as anything negative, assuming the context is correct. It is how we come to understand one another and, largely, the world. Our intuitions, the automatic understanding that we come to from the blunt associative process in which our brain relates things, are almost always wrong in very profound ways (especially in modern society which the brains structure, which gives rise to those associative processes, did not evolve for). Everything else comes from discussion and argument.

The correct context is necessary, though. Equally as important as both participants (or more) using the same language, all participants must be interested and willing in participating. I would recommend, if in something like a general chat environment, that you ask if they're interested in discussing the topic. If they're not, then move along. If they are, make it clear from the outset that you want to understand why they believe what they are claiming, what led them to the understanding, what they believe they gain from it, what evidence they might have, etc. Asking questions, well made ones, can often go a long way. But sometimes people just want to rant and aren't in the headspace to have a sit-down real discussion.

There will still be times, regretfully frequent, where it will become clear that either one of the participants is engaging in bad faith or, more common, do not actually understand their own position clearly. For many, their beliefs are accumulated like flotsam as they drift through life rather than through deliberate consideration of evidence. Those people might benefit from hearing you speak, but not from a back-and-forth dialog. There is very little general appreciation for finding out one is wrong. Most people flinch away from it and take it as an insult and will interpret honest questions like 'Why do you think that is?' as snide dismissal of their own positions, reading it incorrectly as an assumption that they are clearly wrong and you are just trying to figure out how they ever managed to become such an imbecile. There can't be any honest discussion with people in this position. It will just devolve into them shouting no matter how calm you yourself remain.

There are always opportunities to engage with people honestly, for some people that takes a long time. Often once they realize that your goal is not to make them look or feel like a fool, that your goal really is to understand a different position or even just explain your own so that it is understood even if not necessarily agreed with, most people will become more willing. Some will only have earnest conversations with those they are familiar and close with. As with all human interaction, it depends heavily on context.

I have always liked and tended towards a Socratic means of explanation (Socrates taught primarily by asking questions, getting the other person to essentially lead themselves to understand what he meant through recreating the reasoning process he himself followed) but I realized after awhile that a lot of people find this approach highly difficult to engage with. They often see it as you 'forcing' them to say things and 'putting words in their mouth'. This happens particularly with people who don't have a reason-based basis for their beliefs but more of an emotional connection to the ideas and don't like how saying certain things 'feels' even if they can admit intellectually that they are actually true.

Argumentation is an art. It probably can't ever be made 'simple', but it is a critical part of our society and time invested in learning how to do it better through practice or study will usually be richly rewarded (at least in an intellectual and personal sense).

It bothers me greatly to read so many news stories that have conspicuous absences of factual information. If there was a legitimately dangerous product on the market it would be critically important to share exactly what products, brands, etc are affected in what regions.

Imagine if we woke up to news stories saying eggs were contaminated by salmonella. And nothing else. Just a blanket fearmongering piece about eggs across the board with no mention of which producer in which region was affected, no information about what timespan the affected eggs were purchased in, nothing. Just 'people are getting sick from eggs and doctors cant guarantee you aren't next!'

Your understanding is wrong. Cheap vape liquid from dodgy sources years ago used diacetyl. This was quickly discovered and vapers stopped purchasing it and it immediately became prominently listed on pretty much all products what proportion of vegetable glycerin and/or propylene glycol is being used and that those are the only ingredients aside from nicotine and flavoring. If anyone is still using diacetyl they are probably dodgy gas station disposables from China.

And that mortality has more consequences than most people could ever imagine, but less have spent time considering. It's just one of the very biological factors that define large chunks of what humanity fundamentally is. All I can think is that my choice to minor in Philosophy alongside majoring in Computer Science didn't turn out to be as weird and useless of a choice as people at the time seemed to think it was.

The reason I personally believe you have to have a physical presence is that changes to the physical body which do not touch the brain can and do have profound impacts on consciousness. If no body is necessary, then why can't consciousness sustain itself for prolonged periods in situations of total sensory deprivation?

People who experience total facial paralysis experience profound changes to their subjective consciousness, particularly their emotional capacity changes. Anger is often the first thing affected. First, they lose the ability to feel anger. Then they lose the ability to remember what anger felt like. Then they lose the ability to recognize anger in other people. (These changes progress over years)

People placed into situations of total sensory deprivation very often see their conscious self dissolve into 'hallucinations' across all their senses.

Quadriplegics that acquire their paralysis from disease or accident suffer psychological and emotional changes which are more substantial than would be expected from the injuries alone (I was never clear on how exactly this was distinguished, so take it with a grain of salt).

I have never understood why people who talk of 'uploading their consciousness' or just creating a human-like consciousness in a computer would assume that the simulated consciousness would function markedly different from, in the best case, a person experiencing profound sensory deprivation. Consciousness can not be sustained if the feedback loop of the body, perception, and environment is broken. Consciousness is an emergent property of a feedback loop. If there's no feedback loop, the property doesn't emerge.

Watching the Netflix 'More Human Than Human' documentary, one of the people featured commented when comparing Siri and the AI in the movie Her that systems only need to become 'a little more sophisticated' to reach that level. That is a big problem. It's not 'a little more sophisticated' at all. It requires emotions, and the vast majority of people do not even know what emotions are. I'll spoil it for you. Emotions are a trained response, the product of neurological feedback to the response of prediction operating on primarily internal perception. Often the relation of moving from one topic to another in a conversation is not based upon the subject matter of the text. It is based upon shared cultural experiences garnered over a lifetime and similarities in the emotions evoked by certain things.

Even pursuing the goal of creating a 'truly intelligent machine' is dangerous, philosophically speaking. What happens when we create a bot that does antisocial things? We shit it down. We scrap the project. We saw that with Tay by Microsoft. This is dangerous. It is clear that once we DO produce a human-like intelligence... it will be better than us. It won't have any of the rough edges or not-safe-for-work parts. At everything we value about human beings, it will top us. We can look at history to see how humanity responds when something which was previously seen as 'fundamentally human' is taken out of our quiver. It is not pretty. The folk legend of John Henry shows that the man who is willing to kill himself to be better than a machine is not an idiot - he is a hero to motivate the masses. I don't think it is a stretch to imagine a future when humanities worst qualities become what we see as virtue because AI 'can't' do it. A robot can't hate. It can't be violent, bigoted, angry, etc. When that is the only thing humanity has left that defines them as 'more' than the world... why should we be sure they won't come to see that as their virtue? We have already seen all of those things valued as virtue in our history when similar pressures weren't even at play.

Then there's the more unknown approach. A machine-based intelligence which is not given a body. That's really the big question mark. We can be confident, very confident, that it will not be recognizably human in any way, shape, or form. Most of our attributes as humans are derived directly or indirectly from the biological facts of our existence. An organism sharing none of those things will share none of those attributes. And it will be weird in surprising ways. I don't think there is any reasonable danger of such an intelligence "taking over the world" in any substantial way. All conflict is rooted in resource contention. And we have nothing that such an intelligence would want or could use. If it wants energy, the only real resource we would share a need for, it would be best off launching itself into space and sitting in orbit with a bunch of solar panels. We don't have any idea what a singular intelligence, one with no concept of "individual" because there is only one of them, would be like. One which has no inherent mortality. One which does not deal with disease. One which has no concept of family. One which has no sense of age. These are things which define us and make us human, and it will lack all of them. It would probably be a great challenge to convince such an intelligence that we existed, that we were real, that we could communicate with it, and get it to want to. It could simply conclude that it will wait for 10,000 years and hope we are extinct by then.

I do like the idea of weaving database functionality into the OS, but I also have concerns. Oracle has, on a few occasions, taken to extending their database technology to areas like this and the result was obtuse and perverse. I am thinking of a large system I worked on forged in early Oracle Forms and Reports. Each form (window) would have trigger procedures stored in the package that represented it, and you were left with the kludged-in features of PL/SQL for basic things like looping and control flow. SQL was never intended to define software. And attempting to take it and mutate it in that direction is starting from a false premise I think. Sure, with anything that is Turing Complete you can build anything. But that doesn't mean you should.

If that danger is avoided, the broad concept itself might have merit, most especially in replacing the way we deal with filesystems which should have changed decades ago. I believe that storage should be separated into mutable and immutable categories. Immutable data (software packages and the like) should be managed by a universal networked content-addressable versioned immutable data store. Something like Perkeep mixed with the Internet. If you did something like 'apt-get install firefox', it would lookup the current versions GUID from a DNS-esque service and check the local store, then the local network store, and then hit the Internet store of data if necessary to pull down the content. It could be thought of like extending storage from registers, L1 cache, L2 cache, L3 cache, main memory, disk outward to the network, with data traversing each level only when necessary as a kind of overgrown cache control. Very storage-constrained contexts could purge anything immutable with confidence that it would be able to pull it back in when necessary. Call it 'swap to the cloud' if you're a marketer who doesn't realize how horrific that sounds to technical folks.

Mutable storage would be handled as a local database, it would be all of your personal content and similar, stored and indexed with ways that are efficient for data which can change rapidly and which must be preserved as it may be the only copy. Individual disks should, ideally, be presented to the user as a unified whole with reliability information baked in and managed by the OS in the background. Whether and which data is replicated, striped, etc should just be something people set with their hardware providing maximums (if you have 3 drives, you can choose 300% reliability as its max and based on the drive reliability, age, SMART status, etc, the system will rebalance what is stored where in order to best preserve the users desires, only bothering the user when things cross a certain threshold of uncertainty). Data is important. Not just for corporations, but for everyone.

Software Transactional Memory should be built into the hardware level and supported at the OS level, and can be supported at the OS level before hardware has a chance to catch up and accelerate it.

The OS should present itself sort of like Smalltalk "images" operate to the user, albeit with most of the moving pieces covered by a thin veil unless you launch a 'system edit' sort of mode which would make the running objects editable and present live development tools. Code editors should not simply be text editors, but tools which know they are operating on code and treat it as such, allowing one to operate on an AST or syntax tree view for certain operations.

Vector graphics and the concept of graphics 'surfaces' rather than a simple framebuffer should be the 'step 0' of supporting moving to a more modern system. Take advantage of modern pixel densities on high-resolution screens.

>I'm not aware of any better easily measurable metric

Why should an easily measurable metric which has meaningful value exist? It doesn't seem obvious to me that it should at all. Determining the capability of a researcher is inherently a very complex intellectual task. The desire is to reduce that task to something which removes the need for the person doing the evaluation to read and understand the produced research, or to even understand the field of study in many cases. Perhaps, instead, those who are put in charge of things like awarding grant funding, granting tenure at universities, and deciding who to hire to teach ought to be expected and required to evaluate the research on its merits. This would greatly increase the intellectual sophistication and capability needed for people in those positions, but the alternative will always be fairly easily exploitable because it is easier to goose a metric than to do solid research.

We see the shortcomings of trying to reduce complex intellectual challenges to checklists or metrics all the time. And we simply ignore the alternative of relying upon intellectually capable people meeting the challenge. Personally, I don't understand why.

If you try to reduce a complex intellectual task to a metric or a checklist, you are begging for exploitation.

And it is interesting that not in even the most extreme circumstances would billionaires even dream of cooperating or coexisting with others except in situations where they can dominate and control others.

What changed was computers. Computers didn't just improve productivity incrementally. It was easy for the management class to deal with giving a worker an 8% annual raise when their productivity grew by 10%. Then computers showed up. And workers using computers were suddenly gaining 80% or 150% productivity (if measured with the same metrics as previously). The management class could not tolerate giving out wage increases that large. The 'work hard, be more productive, and you will make more' mantra was only ever meant to be a means to preserve the status quo. It was not meant to facilitate the large-scale social change that rewarding profound productivity increases with profound wage increases would create. There was a very well-defined concept, held by both the upper class and the middle and lower classes, that it should require 40 hours of sacrifice per week for 40+ years before a person could financially survive retirement. If people could retire at 40 years of age, it would throw everything out of whack. Or at least that was the presumption.

All those stories about how automation and technology would enable people to work less have two sides. They're very appealing with workers. They're grim horror stories for those who define themselves by how many people they control and how much value they get those people to produce for a low price.

Because the vast majority of them did not start as ISPs. They started as media distribution companies and built an empire based on the value of doing media distribution. Then the Internet came along and made distribution worthless, and the ISP gig was taken up with infinite reluctance.

If you are incompetent enough to store passwords in plaintext in your database, the chances that you will be capable of fixing that situation once you find out that's a terrible idea is vanishingly small.

Fair Use is specifically an affirmative defense. Not a defense like self-defense at all. It's not a matter of 'yes I did a bad, but I had a good reason', but 'it is my right to do this, I did nothing wrong'. The other references to Lenz v Universal in this thread established this and it's been upheld in many courts.

The problem is, in the USA at least, there is a legal right to Fair Use of copyrighted works. Analysis of Fair Use issues is not simple and is impossible to automate. Music companies have been consistently breaking the law with their claims. The law requires them to do a proper Fair Use analysis prior to lodging any complaint under the DMCA. While it might be possible for Google to automate removal of a given scrap of music from a video, and providing that as an option to the music companies as an alternative to blocking the entire video or disabling monetization might be a good idea, it leaves a few problems on the table. Music companies would still be legally obligated to perform proper Fair Use analysis on every single video they do this to. Additionally, there is no such thing as a central copyright registry that Google could use to verify that the people filing the claims have any right. Googles systems can be, and actively are, abused. It's the sort of situation that I imagine Google really dislikes, as the law in this area is basically impossible to automate. So, they will probably just automate destruction of Fair Use because the groups most likely impacted have fewer resources to fight it.

Whitey Bulger recently got transferred for no stated reason to a prison in West Virginia and within hours of his arrival was beaten to death by an inmate with mafia ties.

A couple years ago I listened to a college course from The Teaching Company called 'Explaining Social Deviance.' It analyzed deviant behavior in a multitude of different societies and contexts, going through history and modern day across the globe, examining what behavior societies found deviant, what they do about it, how they attempt to stop it, etc. When the social scientists researching the topic studied the upper class, they realized that crime could not be classified as 'deviant' in that social context. It was accepted, expected, and universal. Restraint from criminal activity was actually what was deviant.

Despite the fact that white collar crime does more economic damage and even kills more people every year than street crime, it is punished very rarely and then typically only lightly. That's a social issue, and the majority of society are complicit in it, fighting for tougher laws to control the middle and lower class while fighting against substantial penalties for crime committed by the upper class. The Protestant Work Ethic says that hard work, endurance of suffering, and virtuous character is the only way to wealth, so the public presumes that is how the wealthy got wealthy. It is almost never true, however.

And it's crystal clear and obvious in this case that it doesn't matter. The man shot a bunch of people, and was subsequently killed to stop his slaughter. There is no doubt to his guilt. There is no case to build. While the public may wish to know more about the shooters motives, that's not something the public or any law enforcement agency needs to keep people safe.

I am not certain what evidence you could point to to suggest that any of the things you suggest is done with more money ever actually happens. We have very concrete real evidence that all of that 'more money' goes into financial services companies, and all gains go back into the financial services industry. Companies hire workers when they need more money, not when they have an excess. Workers generate profit for companies, they're not a sink. Once those companies can purchase robots rather than workers, if it's profitable they will do that of course (and I would rather be starving to death in the street than doing a job that a cheap machine could be doing better, I've seen some people suggest we reserve some low skill jobs for humans and I think that sounds like the worst and cruelest torture imaginable). The gains they make from those robots will not be used to hire new workers, it would obviously be better spent purchasing new robots and if that would serve to reduce demand for their products from oversaturating the market, they will send the money to the financial services industry.

Every choice has positives and negatives, however. Robots are good at some things, and bad at others. This could lead to an interesting clash. Robots, modular manufacturing, etc is very good at producing large numbers of identical copies of a product. There is no guarantee that society will continue to value this over production of a wide variety instead. If every production run is in numbers of dozens rather than millions, the advantages of automation start to falter. It's also important not to underestimate the power of human brain flaws. One of the flaws of the human brain is 'essentialism'. It's a complicated concept, but boils down to people might see robot-produced goods as not as 'rich' as human-produced goods, even when they are identical. Essentialism is the belief that an objects history is somehow attached to it. And if society decides that an object which has a human hand in it is far more valuable than a 'soulless' robot-produced good... whoops. That could seriously limit what products robots are actually able to bring value to. Human sense of value is what rules the economy, not objective value.

There were many tradeoffs made back when production centralized into factories and big companies. All of those tradeoffs are up for renegotiation, and those who simply assume the choices made 100+ years ago are going to stand will be, I think, sorely disappointed.

What perspective are you viewing it from? The perspective of the worker is not the one that thus far funds or initiates any robot-driven initiatives, so I'm not sure why the effect on them would be used to judge success. For those who did fund and initiate the move toward robotics, it has been extremely successful, driving large amounts of money away directly into the hands of executives and shareholders (who are primarily financial services companies). As far as whether the moves will be undone or whether they will cease to be increased going forward, it's that perspective that it is necessary to take.

One factor that so many analysts across the spectrum fail to account for is something that I think is going to lead to a great surprise for a lot of people. All of this technology, all of the data platforms, robots, etc.... it's CHEAP. Everyone focuses so closely on how these technologies will affect the factory floor, the centralized gigaproduction facility, they completely miss the fact that the distributed back yard shed operation can outcompete them. It doesn't have the overhead and the limitations of those centralized factories. Advancements in distribution, shipping, and logistics are available to everyone for a pittance. Services like Uber at their heart provide nothing but some server space for some software. That 'server space' can have its necessity disappear into the ether with distributed computing platforms simply aggregating the compute of its users. Not something currently regularly done, but there is no technical impediment to such a thing. And software like that has a tendency to just pop out of nowhere some weekend and change the landscape immediately. The software part could be handled like any FOSS project. Uber is a center in a system that doesn't need a center. (I'm not saying centers don't have advantages, I am saying that their presence is not an iron clad 100% absolute necessity for the system to work.)

At the same time companies have been abandoning every bit of value they ever offered to workers since the 1980s, welching on pensions they tricked people into working for them with, adopting wage stagnation so that workers have to jump ship every few years to remain solvent, etc... technology has been making it such that those displaced workers could pretty easily outcompete the companies that ejected them. The companies are still restrained by Baby Boomer execs who refuse to leave and refuse to abandon the management practices drilled into them in relation to manufacturing and retail business. They're blind to the outrageous overhead and inefficiencies of their offices and practices because, as far as they see it, 'this is how it has always been done.'

It is impossible to predict when any of these things will come home to roost. It is also nearly impossible to explain just how large of a change we are in for. It is on the scale of the Industrial Revolution which created central factories in the first place. That led to urban centers exploding in population. It changed how we built houses. It changed the moral norms of society. It changed the food we ate. It changed how we married. It changed family structure. It is not much of an exaggeration to say it changed everything. And now it's fundamental tenets (that production must be centralized, that distribution networks must be built, that large numbers of relatively low education physical laborers capable of extended periods of mindless repetitive actions are necessary, etc) no longer hold. It will probably take a long time. And it will unfortunately probably come with a great deal of conflict and bloodshed. That's just based on how history has gone in the past with changes of this scale.

Any centralized identity system solves a problem we don't have. It doesn't simply serve to identify a person. It serves to aggregate an identity and tie together extremely disparate and unrelated data. It enables a data leak or abuse to not just compromise one service, but all of them at once. If there is a leak of data from, say, a dating site that involves dumping the public keys of the users alongside the user activity associated with it, then the credit card company and electric company and water company and the gaming forum you signed up for and multitudes of other utterly unrelated organizations now have the ability to correlate your dating activity with your activity on their service. The identities on all of those separate systems being the same identity is the problem a centralized system solves. And it's a problem we have never had.

I had a thought awhile back. In the vast majority of uses, identity is exactly the issue. Yet in the vast majority of compromises or problems, the problem is correlation and combination of data. By this I mean it seems to me that, say, the Social Security Administration needs to be able to identify a citizen in order to know whether and how much they need to pay a person of a certain identity to avoid paying the wrong amount, the wrong person, double-paying, etc. There does not need to exist an identity which spreads beyond that. Your credit card company does not need to use the same identity and a unique identity which functions solely within the context of the credit card account is all that is needed. Instead, we have identities that get spread across multiple services even though there is never any actual need to relate or correlate the activity across those services. This seems like the sort of situation that cryptography can solve, although obviously there would be a lot of usability work to be done. But it seems to me that cryptographically unrelatable distinct identities which has only 1 possible point of aggregation (you) is what is needed.

>but what foundation of knowledge they had prior to that point seem unknown?

Well, he hadn't graduated high school yet. Your points about the expense are probably sound, unless he was doing some serious wheeling and dealing (which is certainly possible, some high schoolers flip sports cars and make money that way, etc) but a large part of that would be an artifact of being one of the first to attempt this sort of thing at this scale. Modern manufacturing often doesn't scale down very well. Such steps are necessary, however, to improve the level of capability of the hobby community in general. The next project will probably be done cheaper, learning where there is flex in the process, etc.

What happens to old fab tech? A few years ago I tried searching around online to see if there was anywhere you could buy decommissioned machinery for fabricating NAND flash, but I couldn't find anything or any sign that such things ever really come up for sale. Has anyone worked in a fab or otherwise have some idea of what happens to the stuff that worked at larger process sizes?