r00tanon

It will be interesting to check in on Mr Zaloof in about 5 years time.

Going straight to working RNA is a huge assumption in the analysis, but it's thought provoking to set some sort of lower bound and see how big the cosmos would need to be.

Still, somehow we may find a process like natural selection at a cosmic level that makes life way more likely than a purely random starting sequence.

The more I read about string theory, including Brian Greene's books, the more it seems akin to arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of an n-dimensional pin.

If anything good comes out of string theory research it will probably be the development of the mathematical machinery and the computational power that is needed to perform and analyze more experiments and the observational data we are gathering in the study of high energy events out in the cosmos.

It's become more clear to me that pushing content based on past content consumption promotes harmful effects to both individuals and to society.

The data collection needed to provide such feedback is inherently prone to privacy violations and exposes safety risks (see what China is doing to monitor social media activity.) Secondly, these feedback algorithms can pull people into echo chambers of disinformation and amplify all sorts of negative feelings and behavior.

Not sure throwing more technology and regulation at the problem is a solution. In the end it will probably require a social shift; a realization that "social media" makes us less social at a deep level while providing the illusion of being social. Paying attention to the person in front of you used to be considered polite. Now it's considered old-fashioned?

I don't have kids, but I do pay property taxes, which largely contribute to schools. I also pay federal taxes that contribute to child tax credits, etc. So, my contributions are not offset by costs of children I do not have. I do not complain. If you've brought kids into the world, then you have a responsibility. I help pay some of those costs even though I don't have kids. I don't think that is unfair and I don't begrudge, because it helps raise a healthy society. But please don't cast my life choices as selfish just because I made a different choice.

Remember, remember, the 4th of October.

Yes. It is true. If you enter Facebook into Facebook. It will break the internet.

"Post hoc ergo propter hoc"

Oh yeah. Been there and still have faded T's.

But then there's the licensing and the sales guys. Talk about pure evil.

Lawsuits are an ineffective way to improve your tech.

Yet another example of the negative consequences that come from selling snake oil in the "click-based" economy created by social media algorithms.

The people feeding this Facebook group are likely making a tidy living off this. Something that would have been far less likely before Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The cumulative effect of so many fringe groups being pumped up like this is, paradoxically, they act like viruses that make society itself sick.

For the moment believing that this proposed amendment isn't just some tactic related to getting (or not getting) infrastructure legislation done...

For many reasons this regulation would be unenforceable and/or impossible to comply with. How would a miner be able to fill out a 1099?

Super easy way to convince Apple they might want to re-think things. Buy something other than Apple products, starting with the iPhone.

I was recently watching Kal Penn's "The Giant Beast That is The Global Economy", and the episode that covers the "Rent Seeking" behavior of large, entrenched, companies, rings fairly close to the kind of play Bezos was pulling out - maybe he's become too acclimated to the book and retail business.

Good questions! Well, if it's anything like dancing (and I think it might be), we'll always have a hard time telling when we're good.

Going with that analogy, I'd say you know when it gets easier, when you begin to see forms and patterns, and can use them to tackle new challenges.

Some other thoughts: * When you are solving problems and seeing how to improve your code through testing and refactoring.

* When you can start reading other people's code and understanding the gist of what is going on at a high level without getting bogged down in the details.

* When you start feeling very comfortable with your tools.

* When you feel the satisfaction of solving problems.

* When you help others learn something.

Finally, dance like no one is watching. Enjoy yourself. If it's not bringing you joy, then you are unlikely to progress further. Either way, enjoy the process.

The combination of unique trading features offered as part of Robinhood's business model combined with the social media and relatively inexperienced investors acting in concert is prone to unintended consequences for both the business as well as the investor. That was my main point. Here's a more comprehensive article on the subject. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/28/gamestop-now-called-a-pump-a....

Read this. https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...

If you happen to work in the industry, you've probably had to certify compliance with SEC regulations to stay employed.

There is a regulatory framework, enforced by the SEC, that prevents firms from collaborating on trades in attempts to manipulate stock prices.

When an army of retail investors openly collaborate on messaging platforms to manipulate a stock's price, essentially a crowd-sourced "pump and dump," it falls under SEC enforcement. A retail investor can still be prosecuted for violating SEC regulations, such as using insider information, when trading.

This is yet another example of unintended consequences with regards to social media and its power to concentrate misinformation and incite mob behavior. I'm sure the vast majority of the people on Robinhood trading up Gamestop (GME) have no idea of the potential legal harm they may be exposed to, not to mention financial harm, even though the T&C's they signed on opening their accounts (especially margin accounts) almost certainly spelled out those risks.

Robinhood business model is the canary in the coal mine.

Very cool. Although I prefer Inkscape, and it handles SVG nicely.

Social Media and 24-hour Cable News were designed for addictive effect. it's all based on fear. Fear of missing out mainly. The monkey brain wants constant reassurance.

Then, to be assaulted with ads while consuming these "information sources" on top of the crap. It's designed to sell you things you don't really need or want, and if your mental health suffers as a result, well, neither the producers or the advertisers give a shit.

Reminds me of my exposure to APL. So great. Why isn't it a mainstream language?

Probably many of the same reasons Haskel is not yet a thriving mainstream language.

90% of problem domains yield well to procedural/hybrid languages.

The rest could stand the additional rigor and even provability possible with pure FP languages.

Laundering money through banks is risky. The better option is to find private sources who are their own banks and not really scrutinized to a high degree. If Trump (idiot) can do this and get away with it, I can only imagine this is a common business model for billionaires that he's simply copied.

Undoubtedly a deal meant for Trump friends and family to take in millions of insider trading profits.

Very interesting. Amazing how much we owe, without realizing, to the early pioneers and designers of the first computers, who often prognosticated issues we deal with today.

I recently have been researching Leslie Lamport's TLA+ project. Definitely in line with the ideas in this paper. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html

I get a vicarious sense of irony when hearing Donald Trump talk about the need to avoid bank fraud.

Sharing schemas and contracts in a distributed architecture is a hard problem. The interesting thing is these are central to communication, so we should definitely talk as a team about them - if anything, that's probably the one thing if you had to choose what to talk about. Then the INTPs can scurry back to their holes and continue creating stuff while the ENFPs form a committee for the next pub walk.

Full disclosure: INTP here.

This coincides with my own experiences in the financial sector. Distributed computing is undoubtedly the way to scale, but the trick is making the distributed nature of the system completely invisible (or as much as possible) to the developers, the applications and the supporting staff.

I have seen this phenomena of thinking that a large system, broken down into tiny parts, is somehow easier to manage time and time again over 30 years of development. In every case, the one thing the central thinkers fail to realize is that complexity is like conservation of energy - it can be transformed, but it cannot be destroyed.

Also, when it comes to large teams I have seen one thing work when it comes to sharing a resource(s) critical to a larger system - shared pain. If the central/reusable code/service breaks everyone's stuff, then everyone forms a team to immediately address the problem before continuing on. The solution is almost never "find a way to let the other teams continue while something important is on fire." It seems like a major motivation for a microservices architecture seeks to avoid the pain - which perhaps is not the best reason to use microservices.

I like the idea of unseen, but indispensable, complexity. For instance, the human brain is probably the most complex thing in the world, but the interface is fairly simple :)