smoll

Like the poster above, that was my understanding of the term strawman. But upon rereading your post I realize I misread it, and that you're more saying to be careful so you don't fall into that trap (rather than saying "all companies who are sales-driven will necessarily end up falling into this trap"). My bad.

"ran by sales that need a checkbox for their presentation" is a total strawman. I think we both agree that being entirely sales- and short-term profit-driven is a terrible strategy, but it is possible to have an appropriately long-term outlook yet uncompromising about the unit economics when the success of your business is still an unknown. Being sales-focused is perhaps even a way to keep "what people want" in top of mind, and works especially well for certain products/industries.

I really enjoyed this article, but calling "being sales driven, not product driven" a mistake doesn't make any sense to me -- had they not made the call to be unit-economics-focused, they might have gotten into some product-perfecting rabbit hole and failed to generate the traction needed to actually keep their company afloat. This is something I notice in a lot of articles like this; they say "we should have done X instead" without acknowledging that doing X would have exposed you to a bunch of unknown unknowns, any one of which would have sunk you. I agree though that in general "make something that people love" is sage advice, but using the fact that your company succeeded, though not quite as quickly as you would have wished, as evidence for it just seems invalid.

Wow, I always thought the Byzantine Generals Problem was just a metaphor.

What Infrastructure as Code (IaC) options exist for Cloudflare Workers? AFAICT neither Serverless nor Terraform support it. IaC is table stakes for any new part of my tech stack, and I would prefer not to code it from scratch - unless deployment/configuration is extremely easy to automate via CLI or something...

I just visited Bali and encountered the Bali Street Dog for the first time, which is apparently a semi-feral breed that basically doesn’t care about humans at all http://bawabali.com/bali-heritage-dog/2585-2/

I wonder if they lost the genes that the study identified as causing hyper-sociability, or if they still have it but the phenotype is suppressed for various reasons (e.g. environmental)

Great idea. I noticed that the right arrow key works great for quickly skipping a book I don't like, but if I accidentally push it there's no way to go back (back button and left arrow key don't work at all)

I think the point is that the label of “terrorist” is often forced upon those using justified force against a violent oppressor.

To use an example from American history, the American revolutionaries (AKA “patriots”) were almost certainly seen as terrorists from the perspective of Great Britain and its loyal subjects.

Hmm... I wonder if this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

I'm not sure this is just IBM lacking the vision to see their older employees for the value that they truly hold, rather, they're just following the path of least resistance. I see this same sort of scenario playing out in other companies across the globe too; why should any company be innovative enough to value and empower older workers when they can just exploit young, naive talent?

How do we prevent this exact same vicious cycle from playing out all over again in 25-30 years when Millennials are the grey-haired ones with an inability to "innovate" or "connect" with the younger generation? If anything, with the rapid pace of technology only accelerating over time, future generations will become irrelevant "old heads" on an even shorter timeline.

He opened our eyes to the mysteries of black holes; a black bar is only fitting.

I started casually researching cryonics after reading the WaitButWhy article on it https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html and I'm recently leaning towards more towards a "why not?" mindset but I'm not yet fully convinced.

The purely logical, rational side of me wants to say "why should I make an assumption that 21st century norms about the inevitability of death will hold true or are even valid at all?" so I should just do the least presumptuous thing and get frozen.

But on the other hand, what does the quality of life look like for a 21st century human reanimated in 2300 or 2500 or whatever? If history (or Black Mirror) tells us anything, at best, I'll live out my immortal life as some sick museum exhibit/circus curiosity, with no possibility of the kind embrace of death unless some rebellious young person happens to take pity on me.

But that's also assuming humans keep on being Sapiens and don't transcend their present biology/mindset.

But then, of course, how lonely is it to live in a world where I'm one of the last humans tethered to my un-enhanced, primitive biology?

And so on...

Agreed. Even the very early results in UBI have shown it to be extremely promising for those hit hardest by poverty, and shows a novel rethinking of the problem.

Using AI to attack the fundamental problem of human QoL vs. automation/efficiency/profits is just continuing to escalate a never-ending arms race.

Go to its center?

Why is a wheel even useful? Sounds like a solution in search of a problem. I remember the good old days when we didn't even think about needing wheels for all the made up problems we've created for ourselves.

Honestly though, just replace wheel with AI and that's exactly what most non-techie people I know think about AI. Humans probably haven't changed that much since 4000 BC.

I believe the pink plane comment is a reference to Alan Kay’s idea that there is an entire “blue plane” of ideas that lie orthogonal to the “pink plane” that people live/think in, that only becomes unlocked with a change in perspective (“looking up”). He talks about it in his How To Invent the Future talk.

https://www.startupschool.org/videos/11

https://www.startupschool.org/videos/12

This was incredibly fascinating and made me recall why I loved studying genetics in school so much. Really good speaker/storyteller and absolutely hilarious (especially his answer to the one woman who kept trying to shit on gene therapy). Thanks for sharing.

I've been using Zappa https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa for a few side projects and even at work, and you can definitely set up a robust version-controlled, CI + UAT + CD pipeline if you have the discipline.

* Dev: develop inside Docker container identical to Lambda environment https://github.com/lambci/docker-lambda

* CI: test via Jenkins/GoCD/Travis/CircleCI, inside docker

* Staging: deploy to staging host on merge

* UAT: against staging env, break build if any user-facing tests fail

* Prod: deploy exact same package we deployed to Staging

> People can insist that Tesla is effecting some positive changes in the world, but it seems to me that mostly they have been good at repackaging and reselling the tech of other companies in creative ways.

I've seen this critique leveled at Apple and it makes more sense there (the Mac borrowing heavily from stuff they witnessed at Xerox PARC and the original iPhone just doing what a lot of other phones at the time were doing, except simpler and more mass-adoptable), but what evidence do you have for this applying to Tesla? Even if you admit that battery technology improvements that made EVs viable were implemented elsewhere, the entire automotive industry was 100% behind the combustion engine before Tesla, and now almost every car company is building EVs. This isn't merely Tesla effecting "positive change in the world", they proved that EVs were manufacturable, that the public wanted it, and solved numerous obstacles to actually bring it to market. The EV would literally not exist (to the public) in 2017 if not for Tesla. How is that merely repackaging tech?

Really cool! Looks like it stopped working at some point today though.

Excuse my ignorance on FDWs but how does this work with respect to DB constraints? For example, if a postgres column is supposed to be a date, but it's not a properly formatted date, does it throw an error at query time? Or is everything treated as a varchar/text?

>They remove all the real details, even the context, and just present you a well crafted narrative that has no basis in reality.

I don't normally comment on political topics, but who are you talking about here? Is the "they" in this sentence RT or Twitter? Both have huge incentives to misrepresent facts to make themselves look good.

>Except nothing changes because the general public has already been conditioned to want to be lied to daily and just moves on to the next fake-news story.

Sounds about right. I just assume both parties are lying here.

But a game like Pac-Man is intuitively understood by the average human because it’s fundamentally a “human” game - designed by humans, gives humans dopamine and other chemical hits in a way that we might even perceive as “fun”. Imagine a game that requires lots of computation and no human-friendly interface - a machine would obviously “learn” the rules a lot faster.

The more evidence we uncover, especially the research around Alpha Go Zero (self play with a specific objective in lieu of millions of years to develop keen general intuition) the more it feels like “human-like” intelligence is not some incredible holy grail of general intelligence but an emergent property of any reasonably directed algorithm.

Another random thought, but cro magnon man comes to mind as a human-like intelligence that proved simply not as cunning or vicious as human intellect and was outcompeted and stamped out. Imagine if we were to discover the AI equivalent of cro magnon intelligence - would we be quick to dismiss it as subpar and “not general enough” even though it emerged through the same algorithm (natural selection)?

So, more like https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/edge/ ?

I enjoyed reading this. Question for patio11 or others more knowledgeable about this - could a chatbot similar to the one being used to fight traffic tickets be useful in keeping a paper trail and putting the fear of god into banks/CRAs when this happens? Because why not automate this, especially for people who aren't as articulate/level-headed/organized, who might otherwise bungle it?

This paragraph makes no sense to me:

> First, some context. Before 1928, countries had the legal right to wage war. If one state claimed to be victimized by another, international law permitted it to use force to right the wrong. International law also gave countries the right of conquest, meaning they could benefit from war by keeping its spoils, territory and, in some cases, people. The right of conquest did not depend on whether the conqueror was in the right. As long as it claimed to have been a victim, no matter how flimsy its argument, the conqueror became the new legal sovereign. It’s easy to see how the right to wage war could be, and was, abused.

First, it's saying prior to 1928, war was OK if the initiator was victimized or it simply wanted to annex a new place. Then it says the victors needed to make up a "flimsy" pretense of victimization in order to keep its winnings. They used to make up flimsy arguments for why they were doing the right thing before 1928, and still do after 1928 (cf. Russia "protecting" its people in Crimea). What part of the "law" actually changed?

The idea that you can group everyone into 2k+ cohorts of differing tastes sounds like a good way of attacking the problem (though it feels a bit like spaghetti sauce taken to the extreme https://ed.ted.com/lessons/malcolm-gladwell-on-spaghetti-sau...). Personally, though, I think IMDb score is way more predictive of my enjoyment than their recommendation engine has ever been. Nine times out of ten watching a show that is below an 8.0 is a complete waste of time for me - I'll hate it even if it comes up as a 99% match for me. Conversely, I'll watch a show totally out of my wheelhouse that I know nothing about (cf. The Grand Tour) if it's good television. I figured there would be a cohort of people who watch good things of any type but maybe not - maybe there is, I just haven't been placed in it for whatever reason.

I've definitely felt this sort of emotion before, but it doesn't seem all that difficult to explain to me. Consider how easily von Neumann was able to solve problems that even his genius-level peers considered extremely difficult. Of course things that seem intractable to one person might seem obvious/trivial to someone with vastly higher intelligence. Not saying that von Neumann:his peers :: you:your mom, but I imagine this phenomenon is at least partially to blame.

In my experience, record & playback tools (like Selenium IDE) generate test code that is a lot more fragile than tests written in code from scratch. I suppose if no one knows how to write anti-fragile tests or it takes way too long, then using a tool like this is a step up. But keep in mind that you may be trading one problem (no one wants to write tests) for another (what the hell are these autogenerated tests even doing? this isn't a regression, it's a feature! etc.)