stanfordkid

I was responding to the OP not your comment, which is getting at the same point more tersely.

There is a component of the Gaia hypothesis which seems anthropomorphic, but this is a reductive way of understanding the theory.

The way you need to understand it is that most natural systems implement homeostasis on multiple scales, and information transferred between organisms has a somewhat communicable nature because organisms evolved and competed within a shared environment -- e.g human beings proteins are responses to environmental conditions.

This is done in America mostly for tax evasion purposes. Most larger buildings run by a real entity allow for bill pay, it's mom & pop landlords that usually ask for cash.

Our society is not organized collectively -- so you don't really give a shit about your co-workers kids. This is the origin of all the anxiety. You would not worry about sacrificing your time to help them, if you knew them.

It is a simple fix, if companies were formed more like actual communities. Unfortunately, with specialized labor, this is pretty much impossible.

There is a great book, called, "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", by a french psychoanalyst and philosopher duo, Deleuze and Guetarri. They get into why this organizational structure often lead to a profound disconnect by consolidating aspects of production into silos, as described above.

Yes. There should be metrics around how effectively such a disaster is cleaned up. Profitability is not the only thing that is a metric -- as I stated in my original post.

The military budget is $700 billion, as stated in the article. They probably spend more than $15mm on toilet paper for a single Airforce base.

The problem is that the metrics are wrong... government organizations should be run like businesses, but the ways in which people are measured and rewarded should not be profitability, but impact. Businesses that are run to maximize revenue seldom do it... instead they make bad short term decisions. Businesses that use metrics like engagement and satisfaction as maximization criterion, inevitably maximize revenue as a side-effect. The same should be applied to government -- even more so.

I support this right. It is a fundamental human right. With cameraphones everywhere the space around us is becoming polluted -- panopticonic -- in many senses.

Pair this with a cultural climate who's standards are changing so quickly -- anyone can be taken out of context.

Everyone get's angry when "an elite" does something ... well they are still human. My hope is that they make this process easier so that every human being can enjoy the freedom of not having their life documented and observed at every moment.

Utilizing biomarkers that are indicative of disease progression for discriminating against massive numbers of people -- for things like employment, healthcare and the like.

The thing people don't realize is that laws are highly ineffective against this sort of thing... as machines and algorithms are fed data and made to output numbers ... even the implementers don't totally understand what exactly is leading to discrimination.

Thank you. I'm all for the Simone de Beauvoir flavor of feminism. I understand that women want more power, even if it is in a corrupt system -- but the problem I have with "Lean In" feminism is that it serves as cover for exploitation... it is, in our cultural zeitgeist, somehow "okay" for a black woman like Condoleeza Rice to bomb Iraqis -- does blackness and femininty now serve as the perfect mask and disguise for capital and oppression?... should we not elevate our consciousness towards an overarching view of the system?

Yes, the industrial system was not built for women... it was built to make cheap knick-knacks... which has no relation to having babies. It is indifferent to women, not beneficial by design to men... the scape-goating is counter-productive, and behind the male mask -- falls to deaf ears. That is my point.

I will give two quotes from Baudrillard -- UBI is great, but it won't solve the spiritual problems of the west, nor it's obsession with eliminating death -- a compulsion borne of a constant internal struggle with nihilism.

“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”

― Jean Baudrillard

“You have to try everything, for consumerist man is haunted by the fear of 'missing' something, some form of enjoyment or other. You never know whether a particular encounter, a particular experience (Christmas in the Canaries, eel in whisky, the Prado, LSD, Japanese-style love-making) will not elicit some 'sensation'. It is no longer desire, or even 'taste', or a specific inclination that are at stake, but a generalized curiosity, driven by a vague sense of unease - it is the 'fun morality' or the imperative to enjoy oneself, to exploit to the full one's potential for thrills pleasure or gratification.”

― Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures

I think we need to move past the genderization of capitalism (an abstract force) into "patriarchy" -- Capitalism has no interest in gender, age, or pretty much anything relating to human qualities. The trending force for capitalism is to have humans automated away -- let alone be given free money to have a baby.

I actually find the notion of "patriarchy" incredibly sexist -- were not men the canaries in the coalmine -- the original victims -- for the dehumanization of capitalism?

I happen to support capitalism as a means of production -- but it should be understood as an abstract, inhuman force like an optimization algorithm. "Patriarchy" is a red herring.

This reminds me of BASES at Stanford. I think it is a cool way to learn about startups, but personally, while at Stanford, I found it to be filled with prestige-oriented careerists... with that being said, I think it would be phenomenal if these kids succeed -- sometimes I just lament the time of youth being wasted worrying about the future instead of enjoying the intellectual life of the academie -- history and the big questions of humanity and it's future.. not how to make the next quick buck. Sometimes I feel kind of sad Stanford often nourishes and encourages this market focus... because I felt it so deeply myself as a student there, esp coming from an under-privileged background.

I think we know very little about psychology and how individual vs cultural human consciousness is.

Like... Samurai’s and self-immolating monks are human.

Post-enlightenment, post-Kant, social sciences treat man as an individual unit “homo-economicus” — nothing could be further from the truth.

If you don't understand the value of TileDB, you probably haven't dealt with the data that it is meant to model.

Using something like MongoDB for genomic or sparse geospatial data is incredibly cumbersome.

The access patterns for analytical applications making use of the above data types are spatially collocated ... the subsequent implication of this is that data needs to be stored in ways that are geometrically optimized on the file-system.

Consider a dataset which assembles information regarding terrain ... you collect a measurement using a laser. Some areas you use a laser scanner that is very dense (high number of samples per square km) ... in another you sparsely sample it. This results in a huge multi-dimensional array... this is well understood by people collecting the data. TileDB is built for this type of use case... "complex" data is ambiguous.

It's unclear to me that a techno-industrial society will not inevitably yield extreme alienation for a large proportion of the population -- who do not understand it's basic under pinnings.

Most kids can barely pass algebra. We here on hacker news have intuitions for how the algorithms that influence things work... the average person does not. When they hear about "fake news", "artificial lungs", "bioengineering", "drones" -- they don't see it the same way we do -- I see a cultural shift towards angst and fear of the power of technology.. that is warranted.

Even something as simple as birth control has profound influence on us as a species as well as our culture -- to which we are still adapting.

When one looks at other late-stage post-modern capitalist countries (e.g Japan) -- you see similar developments of asexuality as we are beginning to see here in the states.

This is the real problem with BLM -- they wanted a sound bite, he didn't give it to them so they attacked him.

I actually think it's a positive thing that the media system is being shaken. Society puts way too much trust in shit that is posted on twitter.

I feel the same way about cancel culture on twitter -- it is bad in the short term, but if it incentivizes people like Yann Lecunn to leave it -- it reduces the importance of the medium itself.

I think his ideas and cultural critiques are a little more complicated than that — his book Island in particular is worth reading — it is the ideal mirror to the dystopia he describes in brave new world.

Essentialism is a moral critique. If you stick a tiger in a small cage it doesn’t breed — that is an objective observation rather than a moral critique. Huxleys argument is of the same nature — that society is becoming a cage to natural impulse and instinct.

1. If needed. I think I over-reacted in saying send a SEAL team out there. But I think in such situations, if this is a sort "gangster" situation -- we should seek diplomatic action and recourse -- esp if it is a foreign entity. 2. This is a horrible travesty. We are too deep in bed with the Saudi's

What a tragedy. If this has ties to any foreign business or government entity, I truly hope that the U.S government and military forces take swift and lethal action.

Sometimes I feel like this is the sort of thing where the justice system and public media just don't work... send some SEALS to knock out whoever did this. It reminds me of the type of thing that happens with central american drug lords.

I wish the article talked about such political issues instead of the weird sort of implied schadenfreude with regards to his material possessions and postings on instagram.

It applies to technology organizations though. I think being a smart engineer is very important when making architectural decisions -- but this is not always the bulk of the actual work. Lazy people tend to want to minimize total effort of the organization too.

Yeah, 30hp is a lot, esp considering the weight is reduced.

Surely they are innovating on the printing techniques themselves beyond off the shelf stuff (or having partnerships with the makers of the equipment).

If they can get the process reproducible and consistency up, I don't see why it couldn't be productionized

I really do think a "google maps" for police activity needs to be created -- including every single arrest, prosecution , subsequent legal claim... you should be able to rate police officers like restaurants on Yelp

This debate is stupid. No one understands what is going on in modern geopolitics of the middle east -- including policy czars, and especially your or I. Probably not even the US government. These are gigantic state sponsored operations with foreign governments (e.g Russia), militant organizations.

As an example -- consider that ISIS was shipping ~$160 million in crude oil via smuggling routes to China. Even with all our power, it is not trivial to track such things.

What I am saying is that there are interests here that are enormous and impossible to understand.. some not even based upon nation-state and totally a-political.

The fact that you believe you have a definitive assessment regarding the gas attacks reveals your naivete.

Take a look at the history of the Assad regime and how we destabilized the region by funding his opposition. Take a look at the history of Egypt or Libya over the past 40 years. One day Gadaffi was an American hero, the next day we are cheering for his downfall. Sensationalist stories of rape/murder/torture being spread through the media. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Look at the sort of stuff we spread during the Gulf War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

This is all to say -- neither of us really knows what we are talking about. But you seem to have a very "good vs. evil" approach to the world that is naive at best.

what type of double speak is this? They literally sell data integration products with a specific focus on defense and police departments.

What you're implying is that someone that sells uranium to people that build bombs is just "a chemical supplier" .... like yeah the essence of what they are doing is the same, but the implications are totally different.

All whilst being propped up for decades by the USA for geopolitical objectives??!

It's not an accident that one of the stupidest, most theocratic countries in the middle east receives the most weapons and support from the USA.

We don't want a strong middle east. This is why countries like Iran, Lebanon, Syria are labelled as "terrorist".

It’s basically saying: forget the systemic issues (big pharma) and focus on the petty ones by surveilling everyone.

Right. But the data tool is designed to be integrated across municipalities via a shared schema -- this fundamentally changes the efficacy of the data -- it makes the data more valuable.

Palantir Gotham is used by the LA police department and the data integration creates new capabilities -- even if they keep the data. At the end of the day there will always be a trade-off between crime and surveillance. Palantir explicitly sides with surveillance.

It really doesn't matter who owns the data etc. The moral position of Palantir is very clear: that it supports surveillance.