treelovinhippie

At my last job, something I tried to push unsuccessfully was a company-wide automation initiative.

Imagine a company-wide incentive structure for automation whereby if you automate 90-100% of your job, you receive massive bonuses. If you completely automate your job, the bonus could be the entirety of your annual salary as a single payout. Or perhaps a combination of bonus and equity.

So now you're out of a job. But if you can automate other jobs in the organisation, you also get bonuses.

Eventually the majority of the company becomes automated, hopefully generating the same or greater revenue and value for customers, with less overhead costs. Which is great for any stakeholders who can continue to receive revenues, but terrible for employees. So it would be good to include some kind of equity and/or revenue sharing model. The sell could then be "hey, let's all work together to automate this company, we'll get bonuses for doing so, and when the whole thing is automated we can continue to receive income while sitting on the beach".

Super excited for the potential of DAOs to reshape the world.

Something I've been thinking about with any blockchain technology is that it will likely end up sitting on top of the current Internet platforms, but still behind the scenes and hidden from both enterprise and consumers.

If so, will new blockchain-based startups disrupt industries and create their own competing consumer services, or will the incentive to dramatically cut costs (labour mostly) push existing industries to transition their operations to run on a blockchain?

eg the average user should never come across the word "bitcoin", they just continue to transact and pay with "dollars" as they already do. But behind the scenes, the entire financial system operates on a blockchain.

eg2 existing companies looking to cut costs could automate much of their staff by transitioning their core database and systems to run on a blockchain. However all customer-facing UI and interactions would operate as normal. A company like Uber could run entirely on the blockchain as a DAO, and have a small team responsible for maintaining the consumer-facing apps

No idea sorry. I was just chatting with this CEO at a networking event back sometime in 2011-2012. I'd been playing with the face.com api for facial recognition and he was interested in using it to automatically blur faces in these photos of car passengers. Being told that those cameras under overpasses were taking and storing photos of every car that passes by really stuck with me.

It's happening in Australia too. I spoke to a CEO of a company here a few years ago which provides software and services to the government and RTA/RMS. There are cameras setup under overpasses which automatically take photos of each individual car and it's passengers.

In this particular incident their company was tasked with processing all of those photos to identify/track a guy who had murdered his wife and was on the run. Sure enough the system had snapped a pic of him driving, with his dead wife in the passenger seat.

A good use of the tech in that scenario, but I'm sure it's being used for mass surveillance as well.

Portable adjustable standing desk: http://zestdesk.com/

Cloud laboratory is so cool. I've also thought you could launch some amazing startups off the back of Wolfram Alpha language. But yeah quite a steep learning curve

I hope it was Twitter via an acquisympathy (new phrase, I think it'll catch on)

26. $3k in the bank.

Has it always been a black screen? Could just be a fake test from someone like Urthecast to see what kind of demand a live stream would generate on launch

If there is attribution, how is this any different to what Instapaper and Pocket and any RSS/content aggregator do? Why does printing it out suddenly become copyright infringement?

Sounds similar to http://www.locationally.com/

Damn, must be worth at least $10m I would think. Sell it to Cadbury. They own a trademark on the color purple.

It's owned by this guy, Jeff Abrahamson, currently a software engineer at Google, London:

http://fr.linkedin.com/pub/jeff-abrahamson/1/414/5 http://jeff.purple.com/index_en.html https://twitter.com/Jeff_Abrahamson

1.4MB file. I don't think it worked lol

What's always bugged me is why is there no Chrome browser on the Chromecast?

Is there going to be any premining or are they intending to fund the entire mission of the initial 350,000 coins donated to MarsOne?

Any guess on the total storage capacity in that rack and comparison to a similar sized magnetic storage?

So now only Google will know everything about you...

There's worse leaks to come. There are hardware-based backdoors in 90+% of the Tier1 routers. The whole Internet is basically bugged.

Didn't Zuck say recently that the actual numbers weren't concerning, and that they're aware they are past the "cool" stage and instead want to move on to become the social fabric of the Internet, much like a utility.

I've always thought Reddit as a community and platform was massively under-leveraged. So what other problems do Redditors have?

My Reddit experience these days seems to be nothing more than using RES to scroll through images. I miss the good old days of in-depth discussions that were across the site and not just pushed into subreddits.

The university in my local area is trying to do the same thing: they spend all of their time writing funding proposals for a new 3500m2, three-storey, $20m shiny glass incubator building in an area where the startup ecosystem is maybe 2 years old, and has zero angel/VC or mentor networks.

The people behind the project are all academics and have never launched a startup in their lives. They can't even fill a trial "incubator" (that is nothing more than a coworking space) they started two years ago that has a legal maximum of 25 people due to stairwell access. At any given time, there are maybe 6-8 people in there.

Meanwhile the entire startup community is like "WTF mate"!

James Burke is brilliant. I uploaded the full Connections series last year (they had already existed on another channel but were split into 10min vids): http://www.youtube.com/JamesBurkeConnection

Have been wanting to get an API at the local university, but facing similar issues others have mentioned in that guidebook. The administrators spew security concerns, but really they're just worried that students will build better services for each other using access to open data, and thus eventually put them out of a cushy job.

Looks awesome, is this useful for 3D printing? I noticed it supports STL. I'm actually hosting a largish (100-150 person) hackathon in Wollongong (hour south of Sydney) next weekend: http://hackagong.com

We're including a 3D printing competition as part of it and will have 8 printers over the weekend for competitors. Would love to somehow get a beta access hookup for competitors. Surely beats FreeCAD or TinkerCAD

There's a free shuttle bus route in Wollongong (hour south of Sydney) which is also starting to be adopted in Sydney. Buses loop the CBD and outskirts, and arrive every 10-30mins: http://www.wollongong.com/travel-info/free-shuttle-bus.aspx

The ultimate thing would be for a cryptocurrency to be based on thoughts/comments/ideas, but nobody has quite cracked how to quantify the value of those yet. So the best idea in this space I've managed to get to so far is to have the network process big data to find meaningful patterns.

Not only could the value of the big-data-backed cryptocurrency grow in value off the speculation, you could charge companies to upload/stream their data into the network and essentially have a giant distributed supercomputer processing it and searching for patterns. Then share a percentage of any revenue with the miners as an added bonus.

I feel we're already at the point where more data is produced than our ability to process, understand and extract useful insights from that data. And the rate at which global data is produced appears to be on a never ending exponential growth curve.

So in one swoop you could lay the foundations for a global distributed currency whilst harnessing the collective computing power of the Internet to solve humanity's problems, gain tremendously powerful insights into human behaviour at all levels from micro to macro, make us more efficient as a species and eventually the potential to become the global AI that feeds off all data streams; constantly feeding in, being processed, recorded, analysed, and subsequently feeding the computed knowledge into agents that make real-world decisions and actions.

If anyone has thoughts, skills or interest in this... hit me up.

True, just that "XXX,XXX homes currently connected to the Australian Government's NBN initiative, will have 1Gbps speed enabled by the end of the year" is a bit long for a title. I've made a small title edit :)

Here's the NBNCo targets:

June 2013 - 661,000 "passed or covered" and 92,000 premises with active service

June 2014 - 1,681,000 "passed or covered" and 551,000 premises with active service

http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/nbn-co-corporate-pl...

Greatest pyramid scheme ever.

Is there any way someone in the developer program can confirm how accurate this emulator is?

And ironically it's the higher-quality, higher bandwidth-intensive artsy videos that are uploaded there.

Google should buy them out, though I'm sure they've already gone down that path.