pontifier

Reminds me of "Rainbows End". In that book, book scanning was done by throwing books into wood chippers and blowing the fragments through ducts filled with cameras. All the fragments were then reconstructed automatically.

This is enlightening to me. I've been giving strategy when people have been expecting plans.

This could be the root of a lot of my communication problems. I guess I need to figure out how to translate between these better.

At some point there won't be any more suckers left. That's when crypto will really collapse.

Back in 2012 I was on a startup weekend team that built the opposite. It was a site to help landlords vet tenants. It's remarkable the amount of damage a bad tenant can do.

We never actually launched it due to the possibility of it being misused in housing discrimination and our liability for hosting information that could contribute to that.

Truly there are a few bad apples in most groups that just make any progress difficult.

I'd like to get all of it into Murfie... If I can ever get it restarted...

We need a better way to help these people live life without committing crimes.

My suggestion is a type of UBI that is immediate, fair, and would immediately be effective at easing some of the desperation these people must feel.

I propose a tower that drops money. $1 every minute. The price of such a tower in dollars would be just over a half a million dollars per year. It would serve as a tourist attraction, and a way for someone needing a few dollars to get them without begging, without stealing, without stigma. It would put dollars in people's pockets that would be spent at nearby businesses. I don't see a downside.

The town I live in, Pine Bluff Arkansas, has an organization called Go Forward Pine Bluff. They waste so much tax money it's unbelievable, and the things they do don't benefit the people.

I'm fighting them as hard as I can, and I hope to someday build a tower like that in this town.

This is very thought provoking. I think this is going to be one of those foundational pieces that I return to again and again when evaluating a situation. It helps to explain a lot of behavior that seems totally irrational on the surface.

I believe in Murfie. Despite the problems I've been having reviving it, I still believe it is the future of how music should be.

Automatic rejection is a tactic used by all sorts of con artists.

If they say no and you never come back then they don't have to worry about you anymore.

It's the way the judge references the ReDigi case that is troubling to me. It's been a while since I read it, but I thought ReDigi found that digital copies don't have the same first sale rights that physical copies do.

This judge seems to think that the first sale doctrine isn't even applicable.

The Google book scanning case had previously indicated that giving full copies of scanned books to the owners clearly fell under fair use in part because of the first sale doctrine. This ruling seems to ignore that.

I do truly hope you're right though.

I'm a little bit worried about how this might affect Murfie.

I've been an advocate for years for a model where people own physical media, and have access to the media they own in any way they see fit.

The way this ruling is structured, it paves the way to make even ripping your own CDs to your MP3 player illegal. As common as it is, this right has never actually been tested in court.

There is a precedent that any work done in a data center on behalf of a user, because a user initiated the action, has the same protections as if the user had performed the action themselves. It has been used, in connection to copyright, to allow "cloud DVR services".

I'd argue that in the case of AI generated work as we see it now, especially if a prompt from the user is required, that work would not exist except for the action of the user, and is thus created by their action.

If I wave my camera around taking lots of pictures, and then find one that I really really like I can copyright it. If I generate a bunch of AI images and find one that I really really like, I think I should be able to copyright that too. In both, the creative spark comes from discerning what has value.

Art is in the eye of the beholder.

We're going to be awash in so much AI generated content that the act of lifting something truly marvelous out of that background will be a creative action worthy of protection.

There's something kind of weird about banks. They get people to deposit money, then they lend that money out, and there's all these weird ways that they operate and make money, but deposits seem to be the weak link. At some point I'd expect a bank like business to exist that just didn't take deposits, but still did all the other bank-like stuff.

I had some interesting results by asking it to interview me as if it was a writing a book about me. Somehow it really got me to think about some things I hadn't thought about in a long long time.

I think it can be a very powerful tool for exploring our own mind.

Oh I invested most of it, and now I don't have all that cash anymore. I have assets instead. I'm back where I can worry about spending a few bucks on something minor.

I totally had this happen. When I was growing up we didn't have much money, and I've always tried to be really frugal. I tend to agonize over minor necessary expenses like gloves or shoes. When I went from a couple hundred bucks in the bank to almost a million I felt strange. I tried to ignore those feelings, so I could live like a normal person. It only took me about a year to...

I mean... Well... It goes pretty fast and things are pretty much back to the way things were.

I did not understand at all how people who win the lottery could blow through it all so quickly. Growing up, the limit on my spending was availability. When that availability went up, I didn't really have the right tools to change my internal spending algorithm quickly enough to maintain a comfortable level for a longer time.

It truly didn't fix as many problems as I had hoped, and it turns out a million dollars isn't nearly as much as I thought it was.

I have the feeling that the next big thing we're going to see is cheap and easy ways to very effectively insulate old buildings. Then you won't need to heat or cool them very much at all.

I was thinking about doing something similar on a smaller scale to dump the heat concentrated by an air conditioning system. I was thinking that it might be useful for heating in the winter.

I can't believe nobody has shown how violent vacuum implosions can be. Here are some of my favorite vacuum implosions:

Train car imploding: https://youtu.be/Zz95_VvTxZM

Vacuum chamber imploding: https://youtu.be/qs6p8tPaur4

The National Upcycled Computing Collective (https://www.nuccinc.org/) is a group dedicated to this concept.

They are doing some very interesting work along these lines.

I have some friends at the National Upcycled Computing Collective (https://www.nuccinc.org/) that have been talking about the untapped resource of older devices for several years.

I highly recommend checking them out.

The scanner works perfectly in everything except Firefox. I've tried multiple scanners, I've tried different settings. I think I even tried setting an inter-character delay. Firefox is the only thing that seems to drop characters. I basically had to write the back end of my web app to do error checking after the fact and reject barcodes that didn't have the right number of characters. Which doesn't help at all when some barcodes are different lengths. I had to add an extra step for the user to tell the back end how many characters were in the barcode before they can scan one.

I switched to Firefox several years ago out of principal, but it's been a struggle to stay with it.

2 big issues I have are the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue.

The other was almost a deal breaker, and still could be. When using a barcode scanner, Firefox can't keep up with the characters coming from the scanner. It will randomly drop characters. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some scans weren't working, and the scanner works perfectly in Chrome, works perfectly in a text editor and intermittently drops characters randomly in Firefox.

If it were just the start character, or the end character it wouldn't matter so much, but it drops characters in the middle of a barcode. It has for years, it's a known issue, I don't see it ever being fixed.

This article nicely explains something that most people just don't get when I talk to them about cryonics. Death is a legal construct that has changed meaning over time. Every new medical advance we make shifts that line a little so that someone who would have been dead, isn't.

I'm an Alcor cryonics member because my idea of death doesn't match the current, accepted, legal definition. I happen to think it will eventually move really, really far. When I talk to people that say dying is a natural process I just laugh because it seems unnatural to NOT want to give yourself every chance of survival.

I seem to recall Xerox Parc was designed to foster serendipitous meetings between departments.

Some individuals probably feel much more productive because they're able to work without interruption. My guess is that because serendipity is reduced, variation between employees is growing, and useful techniques aren't being shared.

After "Time Train", I saw "Timer Tain" and couldn't figure out what a "Tain" or an "eTain" was. I even saw "Tim Ere Tain" before I saw "Time Retain". Maybe just keep that "R" capitalized everywhere.

There's a vivid scene where they create a tiny bobble above a candle to catch the hot air.

I always wondered if creating a bobble around an off-center weight would allow you to kind of spin it by wobbling it.

There were some places where large pieces of land unbobbled without any relative movement, so maybe they were locked in their rotation somehow?

I really liked that book a lot.

I believe there's a directionality component that happens when you fall into a black hole as well. The directions out of the black hole begin to constrict into a point above you, while directions that end at the singularity become more and more spread out, until every direction leads to the singularity as you cross the event horizon.

Edit: this Forbes article describes this effect. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/01/19/what...