pseud0r

In 1915 Nikola Tesla wrote in the New York Times

"Some day there will be, say, six great wireless telephone stations in a world system connecting all the inhabitants on this earth to one another, not only by voice, but by sight. It's surely coming."

Sad day.

I think Bret Victor is right in that Seymour Papert's ideas are not useful only in teaching children about computers.

This essay inspired by Mindstorms is a great read http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

Yeah, direct manipulation of the program in real time.

The issue with programming is often that programs tend not do work exactly how we think they work, so we have to reverse engineer/debug them to find out how they work and then change that into how we want them to work. Especially as programs grow larger. I think visualizing the program and the state of the program can help with this, especially if the visualization can be directly manipulated.

There's a reason why people draw in photoshop instead of typing the values of pixels in an array.

I think the biggest problem with textual programming isn't the text per se, but that text is used as the underlying format. I'd rather have projections of an abstract syntax tree that I could manipulate as text with different types of syntax or as various visual objects when that would be more useful.

That's just because you lack the tools to efficiently create new DSLs

Visual programming is really superset of textual programming. Is basically GUIs vs command lines. These day most people use a GUI such as Windows, Mac OS X or X Windows rather than using DOS or a pure Linux command line. The issue is that current visual languages in general try to force everything into a node based language. It need to be able to describe different data structures in different ways, some maybe as text, some as tables, others as networks.

There is a reason people write books with illustrations, not pure text books, especially for advanced topics.

Assuming development continues as today we should have the first (synaptic level) human connectome ready around 2035. Should be interesting.

Sounds like maybe this could be used for deep-learning networks to learn what to pay attention to. The memorable regions should be the salient or important regions in the image. Basically the more you are paying attention, the more memorable something is.

With an Aeropress and a coffee grinder you can make much better tasting coffe, much cheaper, and almost as fast.

For anyone interested in why we age and what research needs to be done to cure it, I'd recommend this article

http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v78/pdf/bcm_10...

The most interesting part is that a relatively simple medical procedure called plasmapheresis or plasma exchange, might be used for rejuvenation. The process would be to exchange the blood plasma of an old person with that of a young person many times over a period of time.

The blood plasma contains signaling molecules and there is strong evidence that some of them are used to synchronize the current age throughout the body, perhaps to a master clock somewhere. This causes telomeres to be shortened, DNA repair mechanisms to be turned off, stem cells to stop dividing etc. If the clock could be reset with young plasma, the stem cells would be reset to a young state and can start dividing again to regenerate tissue. Experiments on rats suggests this is indeed happening and a number of academic labs and even a startup called alkahest is now working on getting this tested in humans.

aging = rate of damage / rate of repair

Some damage is intrinsic, caused by free radicals, wrongly transcribed DNA, misfolded proteins etc.

Some damage is caused by external factors like sunlight (skin damage), sugar, smoking, pollution, radiation etc.

Things that increases damage increases aging and things that decreases rate of repair also increases aging.

Exercise increases rate of repair and slows aging in that way, while sitting still all day decreases the rate of repair and thus increases aging.

You seem to think that aging is only the intrinsic damage, but in many cases the type of damage that happens can be the same and external factors can increase the intrinsic damage that happens continuously. Some of this damage will decrease cellular repair mechanisms and thus decrease the rate of repair and you get a vicious cycle, external damage like having a hand chopped of doesn't really influence cellular repair, but smoking and sugar intake do influence cellular repair in a negative way and can thus be said to accelerate aging.

Sugar can increase aging, see for example this for starts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-product

The sugar is causing the damage. Some studies also show some types of fruit juice being damaging, filtered juice being less healthy than unfiltered ones for example.

One quote from Wikipedia on the issue

"The total state of oxidative and peroxidative stress on the healthy body, with the AGE-related damage to it, is proportional to the dietary intake of exogenous (preformed) AGEs and the consumption of sugars with a propensity towards glycation such as fructose and galactose."

These kind of things would be really great for science labs also.

Let say you're doing some medical research, growing some cell cultures and you add some compounds to the cell cultures to see what happens. Then something weird happened to some of the cell cultures, and you don't know exactly what caused it. Perhaps that thing was really an important scientific discovery waiting to happen, but you missed it, because you didn't have all the data.

The process is normally recorded with a lab diary, where you write down everything deemed important. The problem is, you're not going to notice everything, and there is also a lot of things that you can't see without more sensors that just your eyes.

The system Bret describes here is basically an automated lab diary. With enough sensors it could record much more data, much more accurately than a person, and it has a way to query the actual data rather than having to either manually browse through pages of text or searching through it with just a basic full-text search engine.

A problem with many scientific experiments is that you might a lot of measuring equipment and sensors for the thing you are doing an experiment on, but you don't have the same thing for the experiment itself, to easily be able to debug the process and to see where something went right or wrong. Why was one lab able to reproduce an experiment, but another couldn't? This kind of questions can be very difficult and time consuming to answer.

I've found I can access lucid dream-like states of mind when meditating on LSD, including visualizing algorithms. I also feel more focused and awake in a sense, on LSD, compared to a lucid dream, but maybe that's just me.

I haven't really used it for anything very useful though, the laws and conditions of today makes it a bit difficult. But it can give a glimpse of how things could be in the future, when computers are directly connected to the brain and lucid dreams or psychedelics are not really relevant any more.

Actually most individual sentences aren't all that bad, it's more that the overall tone of the article seeks to portray bitcoin as something bad, though it does funnily enough seem to be somewhat pro-dogecoin.

Thanks for letting me know about italics, it was meant as a list and not a quote. I'll make sure to remember for next time :)

I find the Dunning-Kruger effect article on rational wiki rather ironic.

Many of the articles on that wiki is written by people with only rudimentary knowledge of the topic that they're writing about, yet the authors claim to be experts, and "debunk" and criticize things without even doing any research.

Take http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scrying as an example.

There have actually been quite a few real scientific studies on scrying, and while there may be little evidence of psychic powers, there is good evidence that staring at a point, for example on a crystal ball or the surface of water, leads some people to see dream-like hallucinations at the point where they are staring. See for example http://books.google.com/books?id=am9NAAAAYAAJ&q=crystal+ball...

The following is presented as indisputable facts in the article:

Bitcoin is a scam

Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme

There is zero chance that bitcoin will ever be mainstream

Bitcoin does not have a single advantage over fiat currency

Bitcoin will never be useful for online shopping

None of the problems with bitcoin can be fixed

All bitcoin users and developers are incompetent, does not know anything about economics, does not understand people at all and has no understanding on how to build reliable financial computing infrastructure

Looks pretty one-sided to me.

The lawn mower has a private key that is uses to sign messages with. There are several solutions to the problem of verifying whether or not it's a lawn mower.

One solution is to use a reputation system, you see others have borrowed that lawn mower and have given it a good rating, or the owner has a good rating.

Another solution is by certificate authority that guarantees that it at one point was a lawn mower. Of course someone might try to rebuild the lawnmower into a fake one by removing the engine and feeding it fake gps coordinates etc. Maybe this problem can be solved also, but it will be much more difficult, that's why I think reputation will be the main way at first, just like in ebay or alibaba.

Obviously you can not prevent someone from stealing the lawn mower, just like you can not prevent a drunk driver from crashing into Amazon's data centers. In this case however, the lawn mower will not report that it has completed its task and the renter will not pay, so the owner of the lawn mower takes all the cost.

In general such a cryptocontract would work like this: First money is put in escrow, then the lawn mower goes to its destination, mowes the lawn and then returns to its owner. The code for the lawn mower could be verified and maybe signed by a third party so it can be more trusted. When the lawn mower has returned to its owner, the money will be released from escrow.

If there is any kind of dispute, yeah sure, you might need dispute mediators. For example the lawn mower didn't do the job well enough, because of a software bug. Even cases like this could eventually be in the contracts though, so the contract might have a clause that says the owner is not responsible for poor lawn mowing caused by software bugs, and you have to decide if you are okay with that or not.