planck01

For the same reason as why biologist spend a lot of time studying E. Coli, fruit flies and mice (besides being interested in them in themselves). It's because those organisms are similar enough to humans, but still a lot simpler to study. In this way we get important clues and ideas of how stuff might work for human cells, which is still very hard to work out and prove, but is a lot easier than just starting in the dark with human cells.

Interesting rebuttal from someone in the field (who is actually quoted in the paper): http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/12/no-negative-masses-...

I worked on the Semantic Web. It has so many fatal flaws, that I am amazed in hindsight that I didn't see them back then.

Berners-Lee was successful with the Web because it was not an academic idea like Nelson's and Engelbart's hypertext, but it was a pragmatic technology (HTTP, HTML and a browser) that solved a very practical problem. The semantic web was a vague vision that started with a simplistic graph language specification (RDF) that didn't solve anything. All the tools for processing RDF were horrendous in complexity and performance and everything you could do with it could typically be solved easier with other means.

Then the AI-people of old came on board and introduced OWL, a turn for the worse. All the automatic inference and deduction stuff was totally non-scalable on even toy examples, let alone web scale. Humans in general are terrible in making formal ontologies, even many computer science students typically didn't really understand the cardinality stuff. And how it would bring us closer to Berners-Lee vision? No idea.

Of course, its basic assumptions about the openness, distributedness and democratric qualities of the Web also didn't hold up. It didn't help that the community is extremely stubborn and over confident. Still.They keep on convincing themselves it all is a big success and will point at vaguely similar but successful stories built on completely different technology as that they were right. I think this attitude and type of people in the W3C also has lead to the downfall of the W3C as the Web authority.

Well, he was wrong. And he admitted it in 2010:"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler ... Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ..."

A pet hypothesis of mine: I think consciousness comes from our evolved brain capability to simulate and predict the behavior of others for the purpose of recognizing if we are conned. Consiousness then is being able to apply this capability to ourselves.

The topic is interesting, but the story didn't contain what I was looking for. It doesn't describe how the manager was awful and how it was improved, nor how it was measured that things improved.

Actually, the rather non-connected tips don't really resonate with me. I am also a dev who became manager. I don't even involve myself with sprint planning and day-to-day monitoring of small tasks. I have enough devs that are capable of doing that, so I delegated those tasks. I trust them.

I mostly try to provide structure where needed, help my teams with escalation and solving of problems. Content wise I try to set out the grander vision about in which direction we move (of course with input from the teams) and have content wise discussion with my teams every few weeks. For the rest it is mostly developing your people and making sure they love their work, they have everything they need, listen to them when they need that and help them where possible.

So.. Java will slowly die.

Google bought Waze quite some time ago. Did you know that? I see maps and waze slowly converging.

Netflix also works in Firefox on Linux since almost a year or so.

I am obviously very skeptical about these kinds of claims, especially if extraterrastiality is claimed. There is nothing in the article supporting this and there are so many extraordinary events that have had to occur for this to hold. From breaking our understanding of physical speedlimits, to motifs for hiding and appearing on very specific sites.

I always love the Mitchell and Webb sketches that show the absurdity of these kind of claims: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=59zLZ6PpeSA

I don't see any sexism in this story. Some people just are rude and there are assholes everywhere. What the author describes is a group dynamic going sour and alpha behavior. Everone, male or female, will experience this at some point in their life. That sucks, but it will never change as it is part of the human condition. Also, being a woman doesn't mean you are entitled to emotionel gentler treatment.

That's right. People can't stand the idea of freeloaders that don't have to do anything and get everything for free, while we are working hard to pay for their stuff. Even if this hardly happens, the thought alone scares and angers the hell out of most people.

The surveillance laws are introduced because of increasing terrorism. It is hard to see people as enemies of humanity if what they try to do is prevent mass killings of islamic extremists.

Obviously there are dangers of going towards oppression. But at the same time Europeans are saved by internal division between member states. Most countries are so small that they cannot pay or accomplish spy programs like the Americans can. And collaboration between countries hardly happens, as we saw in terror attacks.

Things only become problematic if European intelligence agencies come into existence.

I am not sure if basic income works. But I am certain that assuming everyone is lazy and won't want to work if they don't strictly need to for survival is not how people work. Market-oriented thinking seems to assume this. But I think that most people want to have a purposeful life and achieve things.

I do expect it will influence the number of bullshit jobs that exist to keep people at work. And it might influence the lowest income and most mechanical types of work. Which is fine if we can automate and mechanize those. But I don't expect a lot of effect on more intellectual work.

I don't think immigration is the main reason people have anti-eu sentiments.

More problematic is the forced integration of diverse cultures and diverse economic backgrounds who don't speak the same language. Also there is a lot of obvious financial waste in its centre, lots of lobbyism and poor democratic safeguards. People, including me, feel they have no influence at all and a lot of the de decisions being made are not in the personen peoples interest. Massive immigration issues only examplify those issues.

Immigration (actually refugees) went up massively in 2015 and 2016 because of what happened in syria.

> Releasing it?

Why not. Governments hack each other to get an edge. Sometimes to just know what is going on, sometimes for silent diplomatic 'cheating'. And if they think they would benefit, I am quite sure its not above Putin to release it for propaganda reasons.

I am Dutch and tall too. Way taller than my parents. However, I always suspected it has to do with things like growth hormone in meat instead of fresh food.

The elephant has a bigger brain, but it also has a much larger body it has to monitor and control which takes brain power. The sperm whale has an even bigger brain, and an even larger body.

It all comes down to the relative brainsize / bodysize. This wikipedia article describes it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient And as you can see in that article, our quotient is far the highest of all animals. I find it weird that the authors of the article don't mention these things and do not seem to be aware of this.

Minecraft is many orders of magnitude less complex than our universe. We could be in a simulation, but then the parent universe would be orders of magnitude more complex and we would not be a significant simulation of a civilization's past as the original argument goes.

Of course we might be entertainment, but to explain this universe you would then have to explain the way more complex universe in which we run. We cannot proof this is not so, but now it seems pretty similar to the god hypothesis.

I suspect that the proof against would be along the lines of:

'The theoretical minimum computer for simulating any 1 particle at realtime is at least X particles big. If it would be 1 particle it would not be a simulation. If it would take less it would not be able to capture all possible states. Eventually, every realistic simulation of a universe will either be orders of magnitude less complex than reality or will be orders of magnitude slower than realtime. In both cases realistic simulations of ones universe own past will never be possible and hardly worthwhile and thus we probably don't live in one.'

This also says that computing power cannot grow indefinetely.

>That means that would justify the persecution of the world's Jews and the general anti-semitic sentiment of the mainstream during that period?

Of course not. But they were persecuted. But the point is: Muslims are not. So your opinion that Muslims are in the same position as the Jews in 1915 is nonsense.

> which they did during the zionist insurgency, and are also doing today

I think that implying that what Israel does today is similar to the barbaric acts of constant mass murdering, ethnic cleansing, torturing, raping and beheading that is done by Isis is absurd.

That is one similarity between Jews and Isis Muslims, they both claim a country based on their religious texts.

I don't know what you try to frame as 'Zionist terrorism'. I am not a fan of many Israeli actions, but as far as I know there were no structural attempts of structurally terrorizing and brutalizing Palastinians by Israel that are in any way similar to what we see Isis doing today.

>Seems like the Muslims of 2015 are basically moving to the position of the Jews of 1915.

Except that the Jews of 1915 were not blowing up, mas-murdering nor terrorizing people, nor were they waging war on non-Jews. Also, Jews were prosecuted throughout the world and eventually deported and/or killed, while Muslims are not in any way.

Concluding, it is not alike in any way.

> secularists brought us the most violent conflicts in history

They didn't do this 'because of secularism' and that's a big difference. They tried to replace religion with other dogma's en use the religious control for their own purpose. Sure, being a secularist doesn't make you good or non-evil. But without dogmas it will be pretty hard to convince others to blow themselves up for your evil plans.

No one ever committed mass shooting while shouting 'in the name of science', or 'I hate you because I am a securalist.'

There is no or hardly any aggression against muslims in the western world, except by other muslims. Most aggression is the other way around.

> Because 'Muslims' are many, and terrorists are few.

The same holds for fascists. Fascists terrorists are driven by their ideology, which in itself can be evil and wrong. That many adherents to an ideology are not violent is in itself not an indication of lack of evil. Even if there were billions of fascists, this wouldn't prove lack of evil of fascism.

The reason that people out of principle will not condemn Islam in western society is that is seen as 'another culture' and a 'minority' in the West. Both aspects are seen as a source for racism, which is bad. But therefore it seems hard to truly look at Islam as a possible source of evil. And I think it is.

The article shows that the Fermi paradox is even more mysterious than some thought, because we will probably not be the civilization in this universe or galaxy that is 'in front' as we are not early but average.

However, something always bothers me about the Fermi paradox. I've never seen the most obvious resolution mentioned (at least to me). I think that we are just not (yet) able to detect any civilization given the maximum technological state a civilization may reach. Many people assume that because technological progress has been exponential last century for humans, that this can be projected indefinitely into the future. Similarly like some thought about indefinite economic growth. But this is nonsense, it is much more likely we will plateau at some point. The Seti-project listens for radio signals with star strength, assuming that a proper developing civilization is able to manipulate stars as radio beacons. I find this highly unlikely that any civilization will ever reach such technology or that it is even physically possible. I think it isn't.

The only thing one can say is that apparently in this galaxy, no civilization seems far enough 'progressed' yet to have colonized the entire galaxy, as I also think that crossing galaxy boundary will be a no go for any civilization. But will humans ever undertake such a quest? It will mean building generational ships, enough DNA diversity to make a new civilization feasible (minimum 5000 people?), finding a good habitable planet from here or be doomed as traveling will take thousands of years and will be tremendously costly in terms of effort, energy, materials and personal costs. How likely is that we will ever do that for every planet in the galaxy? Technology to turn one selves inward (e.g. VR) seems a much more likely turning point at which outward exploration might not seem that interesting anymore.

You can read more about that here: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-independent-group-d-wave-quantu...

Scientists claim is that a previous positive comparison was unfair because, "problems designed to run well on the D-Wave Systems were run without optimizing on conventional machines"

As far as I know people do not doubt D-Wave's machine is a quantum computer because it is adiabatic instead of the general kind, but because there are doubts that it speeds anything up at all compared to normal computers. If it doesn't, then it might not even be an adiabatic quantum machine.