rschneid

What about this statement is so hard to take seriously? There are a variety of concerns one could have about either fiat/fiscal policy or cryptocurrency development/deployment/stewardship.

One is a highly centralized system, the other is relatively decentralized. They have different threat models, strengths, and weaknesses. I would hazard a guess that your demographic profile is similar to the members of the current cabal that try to control USD's supply and value but to those who don't have similar priorities, crypto offers a different set of values than the 'traditional' finance system. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and the person you're replying to didn't say either would be 'just fine' without the other...

Not sure why you're proud of your inability to defeat a straw man!

The idea of ZIRP seems to be relatively new... How are you sure the consequences and effects aren't still playing out? It seems SVB and FRC'd recent collapses were related to bets made during ZIRP and it wasn't ZIRP but the sudden, firm departure from ZIRP that 'caused' the issues. Tomaytoe Tomahtoe.

You also seem to lack a rational, data-backed argument. I wouldn't go as far as to say you never have, since that seems like an ad hom and not something one would do in a good faith discussion. In such a complex, chaotic system, what gives you certainty that any given things are NOT related? That seems the claim that needs justification in our globalized economy, a rational argument would presume two things can effect each other in the age of information... The question that remains is: to what degree?

I'm agreeing with you that there are many reasons why the music Industry doesn't share stems but also concluding that many among those could be rationally considered gatekeeping by various groups. I'm not disparaging the industry as a whole or the individuals who comprise it, but the reality is simply messy. Many signed artists I'm sure wish they could distribute their stems or more of their process, but are hindered/prevented from doing so by labels. Seems close to what gatekeeping means to me, but that's just like my opinion, man...

Gatekeeping isn't boolean, it falls on a spectrum. If your rationale about preventing un 'authorized' use is in fact true, the process must be effectively keeping some notional gate some kind of closed even if it's only from people you (or maybe even the original artist) consider to be acting 'unscrupulously.'

If musicians' priorities were for the world to share in their musical indulgence not just in listening but also in like-minded creation, they would release as much of their mixing tools/backgrounds/stems/etc as possible. Since the capitalist framework is a foregone conclusion, they need to keep some secrets in their sauce to produce scarcity to justify a price for their labor so they can eat... Because the farmers and butchers all keep gates of their own kind, too :)

Reading this polite exchange I couldn't help but be reminded of the classic: https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

:)

Glad we're all nice to each other in this corner of the web!

The 'words on a page' weren't specified and the idea of 'fix' isn't an absolute notion. I can think of a simple rule change that might be an improvement without forcing any procedural changes raised earlier in the thread: Restrict use of the word 'Purchase' or 'Buy' in marketing materials for products that the user is not guaranteed to have access to the primary features of for as long as they wish. You can subscribe to a game that the creating company cant/wont support indefinitely, you can buy a game that stands alone and operates indefinitely, or you can do both and purchase a binary while subscribing to online features. The precise details of which features are 'primary' or significant enough to justify ownership could be hashed out in courts, but the problem arises when these companies advertise Sale/Purchase when the unspoken reality is, as you mention, that it's really a lease, but with unspecified terms!

Somehow I don't think this country will have trouble finding folks to perform 'national-level policing'. From pop culture, I've gleaned that it's more often the opposite case: investigations are fragmented as a result of multiple organizations pursuing cases in their bureaucratic 'information silos.'

Here's a list of all of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_law_enforcement_in_the...

Ironic that one of the FBI's self-reported 'priorities' is to 'Protect civil rights.' I wonder how much longer Hanlon's razor will be a plausible excuse for this kind of lying...

I think it's a bit of an oversimplification to define equality as 'current distribution of wealth.' A very important part of wealth is being able to actually use it, and there are many ways holders or would-be-recipients of USD are restricted in who they can transact with that are far from equal. Cryptocurrencies are not without restrictions of their own, but their restrictions are more objective/technical rather than the vaguely phrased, regularly changing, cultural nature of traditional 'laws' that govern USD transactions.

Ultimately, I agree with your assessment of the research avenue as a straw man.

>And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

I think this argument misses a potentially deeper point about the true magical power of reading...

I did resonate with the majority of the piece, however.

Okay, I'll bite.

I believe ads can exist if I consent to being shown them BEFOREHAND and alternatives, such as paying to opt-out completely are offered. The world is vast and changing with increasing velocity. I cannot keep up with all the possible tech products and services coming out even if I had a theoretically perfect RSS feed combined with other follows/subscriptions to content feeds. If a product is commercially successful to the point where they can afford to throw dollars at a probability of acquiring a new user, there's no fundamental reason why that behavior is necessarily bad/unwelcome. If I visit a news website, I want to be presented (before assaulted with ads) with a notice that provides me the option of paying for the content or seeing ads. Off the top of my head, spiegel.de follows this paradigm. A level further, and within reason for a downloaded/heavily-used/customizable software such as web browser is the opportunity to see ads that are relevant to my interests by affording me the option of indicating my interests to the platform before ads are shown and the ability to easily discriminate arbitrarily against a specific ad or categories related to any ad I don't like for any reason. If I don't like the ads a company shows me, even on the free version, they should not be repeated. If I don't want any category of ads that must be fine, but they company may opt to place a generic request for support of their corporation a-la-wikipedia funding request-- I am using their software for free, after all...

But to say there isn't exploring the full range of UX that can be afforded by modern software systems.

I say this as someone who is deeply disturbed by this latest update and will stop recommending FF as an alternative to chrome with superior privacy settings. Your reply just struck me as horribly defeatist. Ads are not leaving the web, but they _can_ be served with far better motives than they are currently.

Since you study this stuff, do you mind sharing a description of the kinds of situations in which the 'sharp appearance' or related type of tactic has a negative effect?

Twitter is a platform used widely by some of the most powerful people in the world and in the US government. As a result, there is plenty of justification and precedent for said gov't to regulate their security practices and procedures. To illustrate this point, I doubt you'd have any sympathy for Twitter if they had been sending their passwords over http.

Now, I don't think the government is prepared to do this proactively and effectively, but the idea of a telco that advertises resilience to hacks (whether through social engineering or technical incompetence) sounds like it would be quite appealing to a growing segment of the connected world and whatever such promises that find success in the marketplace might be used to inform legislation or regulation, eventually...

I wholeheartedly agree! I think this is a stumbling block that all too many folks encounter and then give up on seeing the idea as a solution to climate change altogether, but there's a rather clever fellow named Klaus Lackner who frames the solution in precisely these terms. Air Capture is a waste removal problem with financially viable solutions today... It's really just about getting the right diffusion of cost.

I found out about him and his uplifting work through an appearance on the podcast Manifold [1]. But you can also learn about his research directly through ASU [2, 3].

Personally, it made me feel like the problem was far more tractable than I previously intuited.

[1] https://manifoldlearning.com/episode-040/ [2] https://asunow.asu.edu/20190429-solutions-lackner-carbon-cap... [3] https://cnce.engineering.asu.edu/

I think it's a mistake to assume that technology advancements will come in great leaps and bounds since the day of the wright brothers are over... we've been out of our atmosphere and to the bottom of the sea and made nukes++ and transistors at nm levels. Humanity has been so experienced in the domain of physics for so long that there is no low-hanging fruit left within the periodic table. The physical world has limits that our higher order thinking has identified and relentlessly struggled against. This is done every day by independent humans in labs and dreams around the world and seems by it's distributed nature to be incremental. I think Thiel's being quite foolish for lamenting/admonishing a trend that I believe will only getting stronger as the sophistication of collective human knowledge increases...

Neat website. However it seems to provide a poor experience to users who deny the geolocation browser permission, as there's no way to type in any address as a string on the few pages under the search header I took the time to explore...

Come now, I think we all know code is not its line count.

1000 lines of clear code in a mission-critical place is worth far more than a 1-liner which accomplishes the same task and only one person in the company understands...

False dichotomy. Progress can be made along multiple fronts simultaneously. 'Defunding police' isn't a single action so can hardly be labeled 'shallow' but it's definitely a step towards addressing racism since it's quite clear to anyone who's been paying attention that ridiculous levels of over-policing in America is a major propagator of racial inequality. All of this stuff is related. Nobody is wrong for focusing more or less on one battle than another...

Nonprofits are relatively underserved by tech workers. I've tried to get many of my friends to join me but the allure of bigco paychecks is simply too much. This is a pretty general answer but so's your question :)

I think if you pick a nonprofit with a mission that you feel passionate enough about to really give it your all then there's a good chance for you to quickly become a double-digit percentage of global technical productivity in a particular charitable domain.

For me it's been developing tools (mobile app and website) to help people with substance abuse issues communicate with their loved ones, themselves, and medical professionals.

Shooting firearms is definitely not the only way to retaliate against an oppressive government.

The government needs to employ lots of people. This necessarily means they will employ some low-quality people. It's such a difficult problem to produce high-quality work with low-quality employees that most tech companies of scale have optimized their hiring process to pass as few low-quality workers as possible at the cost of turning down many potentially good ones. It'd be nice to see some effort to make working with high quality-variance employees successful, but I think the reason we haven't seen much of a convincing, scalable answer yet is simply because it's a really hard problem.

The very specialized things that ASR, NLP, and Image recognition can currently accomplish is very nearly sufficient for creation of lots of autonomous and devastating weaponry. WW-III is a somewhat arbitrary yardstick, but sufficient technology undoubtedly exists today to execute a false-flag hacking debacle that results in serious armed conflict.

The worry shouldn't be generalized AI attempting to exterminate humans like The Matrix but the drastically decreasing dollar cost of causing violent damage to society as facilitated by technology, ANNs and AI. An individuals' martial power and our species' technological advancement have a direct relationship, and I don't see technological advancement slowing down. What's coming up next isn't a singular technology revelation that stabilizes humanity for many years, but an ever-increasing frequency of chaotic events. Technology is beginning to change the economics of violence at all scales.

I'm not op but I can think of a few reasons why hiring older talent poses a risk to political control.

1) More capable of starting their own, competing business. Even if the old guys won't be eating google's lunch, they have money and connections to defect and start a consulting business with their expert insider knowledge of SEO/self-driving cars/whatever they were working on.

2) The greater breadth of knowledge they have about industry and their personal preferences means they're less likely to be shuffled quietly into a menial role that makes the company the best ROI.

3) Stronger personal definitions of morality. Need a morally questionable piece of code written? If you ask a young enough person they likely won't question the morality but if you ask an old enough person I could imagine them refusing.

I think hiring young people has it's own risks, but they seem to be generally further down the line.

Losing control can happen at many scales and to many degrees.

I would expect many hiring managers at large companies to be intimately familiar with the different risks associated with different age employees, consequently discriminating in their profession. Short of some damning leaked documents or conversations however, I can't imagine how any would ever get convicted.

So invest in education ;)

I agree that a wide range of potential effects and side-effects should be considered. I'm sure a key metric in this experiment involves collecting data on how it influences users' further treatment. I think this will either put your fears to rest (for now) or immediately draw the concerned attention of everyone conducting this experiment.

Edit: Maybe it _is_ all a scheme by Big Insurance to give the masses minimal treatment and doesn't actually solve their problems but provides the illusion of a solution while sucking them into a vile dependence on closed-source AI personalities to feel any sense of therapy. Technology enables so many insidious business practices I don't know what to believe anymore.

Imagine in the future, a really smart shrink AI is invented that can provide useful insight on how mental health of an individual might be improved. Then, everyone who has logs with this bot, or similar technologies, will be able to benefit retroactively simply by having more digital data points.

Just because you're not talking with a human about the data you're generating _today_ doesn't mean it won't bring interesting discussions to bear in the future.

Nearly any new method of treatment opens up new doors for human failings and there will inevitably be some nonzero number of people whose lives are made worse by an overwhelmingly positive experience for humanity and mental health. Let's first worry about making the apps "good enough" for people to feel like they're getting _any_ decent treatment, let alone comprehensive to the point of eliminating the desire for additional human components, before we worry about this strange, potentially irrelevant rabbit hole.

This is the right idea; it isn't about digitally replacing treatment. It's entirely about augmenting it.

This kind of technology in medicine is about enabling human doctors to treat patients better with more (hopefully meaningful) data points at their fingertips. You might be surprised how far behind the medical industry is when it comes to reaching out to the smartphone generation.