zer0gravity

I don't know, maybe this discovery has scientific value. But could it be the sometimes scientists report small "breakthroughs" just so that they keep the funding coming ?

I suppose it takes some open-mindedness to work in porn industry, and apparently that is reflected in their technology too. Makes sense.

It would have been so much easier and fun if the notes were played on hoover not on click. Or even using the keys. And you could activate a specific section by clicking it, or parking the mouse in a certain spot.

This article is hardly about Wikipedia. You can feel the electoral smell from a mile away.

Ok, good point.

But the point that I wanted to make is that a software crash wouldn't explain why the lander behaved as if it was on the ground. So it's more probable that it reached the "on the ground" condition.

If that condition was adequately programmed, the chances that some sensor glitch could have triggered it are quite low. So the probability is higher that it was either badly programmed or maybe someone flipped a bit somewhere ..

It's very strange because, if would have been a glitch that would cause the program to halt unexpectadly, the engines would have remained running. But from the data, it actually entered into "on the ground" state initiating its exploratory procedure.

But what kind of "on the ground" test condition could have made it to do that ?

The fact that it was "designed to decelerate the craft for 30 seconds until it was metres off the ground" but instead it ran only 3, raises many questions. Not to say that there are zillions of ways to actually test that you are on the ground or not..

Technology may help by making it easy for people to host/share their data. But technology is driven by politics. So we kind of need both.

The solution that I see, is transitioning from social media, where people use some centralized service to "socialize", to social infrastructure, where people run their own servers and connect to the servers of their friends making a real social network. IPFS may be a step in this direction.

> we get some good neural networks built and deployed to the edge watching for unusual traffic patterns and disrupt them

I was thinking at this as well. It's probably under active development right now, if not already live for some.

But wouldn't this make the matter worse ?

Besides all the complications associating with billing, wouldn't this create more incentives for those controlling the botnets to use them in a creative way to actually make money from traffic ?

So I'm wondering, what are the implications of this ?

Someone is controlling a powerful enough botnet to do this.

How powerfull is it really ? What else can it do ? Was this just a message or a test ? Or both ?

What would happen if they would point it to google's nameservers ?

What should we expect next ?

People have locks to their house doors but they don't have locks to their minds. Any burglar can come in and plant, not steal ideas, and then people think, hey.. this is my idea, it's in my mind.

Critical thinking, this is the antidote. Protect your mind with critical thinking, and don't let any idea enter unscrutinized. It's better to dismiss it then let it enter unscrutinized. But don't dismiss everything, or you'll develop confirmation bias. Put in the effort to reflect on/research some of them..

A quote from Jack Sparrow ( and I don't think it's a coincidence that it comes form a pirate, but that doesn't make it imoral, as long as it stands the test of reality ) :

"There is no good or bad, it's only what you can or you cannot do".

Everyone will act in it's best interest, according to the possibilites that is has available.

Those possibilites are refined by the feedback from the other members of society.

It all boils down to the play of intrinsic/forced choices.

But remember, AI may change things a lot. It'll not be a problem of you will work so I can sit, but more a problem of you and I will have some machines working for us, so what's left for us to do..

One of the implications I was talking about, is that the human psyche is built to function under survival pressure, when the pressure is removed, then depression may occur. So it's going to be very tricky, unless we train ourselves to function in a different mode.. where we are the masters.

I think I resonate with you.

I think that the number one occupation we should have is to live our lives. The way we do this should be according to our values and not neccesarily to how others think we should.

Now, life has a mechanistic component driven by neccesities and an artistic one driven by ideals, self expression and pleasure.

The promised goal of modern technology was that a large part of the rutined work covering the neccesities of life would be outsourced to machines while humans could occupy themselves with the more pleasurable aspects of life..

I'm not sure if many realize, but in such a world very few would actually work. All the rest will play.

This is what AI will make a reality, and the job market needs a radical reform.

We should all prepare to transition from a work based paradigm to a play based paradigm. If you're doing it already good to you.

The subject is vast and has multiple implications but that's all I could distill in a HN post.

I'm currently watching George Soros's lectures on his reflexivity theory appliend to financial markets [1], where it explains why their evolution is not easy to model due to "human uncertainty principle", which postulates that our actions, based on incomplete and distorted data make things unpredictable.. It makes a lot of sense.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHSEEJDKJho

Looking only at the cost of running a decentralized network is not sufficient. We need to look also at the cost of not running a decentralized network.

Not all incentives have an economic nature, some are political, and I think the latter applies in a greater meassure in the current case.

Just the realization that you give too much power to those running centralized services, may represent the required incentive for people to switch.

The overall material cost to run a centralized vs decentralized service may be comparable, but the political cost is not..

If you come to think at it, logs are app events. You actually want to collect as many events as you can, with respect to performance, and analyze the hell out of them.

You would also get all sorts of benefits, because then you can corelate the app events with user events, and it may be easier to track bugs and unintended behaviour.

Whatever solution you use to store your logs, I would suggest to generate them as events. This will help you to reconcile two important aspects that have been separated for too long, with no real reason : logging and analytics. It may require a little bit more effort but I believe it's worth it.

I've expanded on this idea here [1]

[1] - https://github.com/acionescu/event-bus#why

> I don't think that's what condescending means.

Not a native speaker, so maybe I got that wrong, but this is the definition Google gives: "having or showing an attitude of patronizing superiority.", and this is what I was referring to.

Agree with what you say about the varying degrees of centralization/decentralization throughout history, but don't think that these changes happen out of the blue. Education is usually needed to bring about change and not because people are dumb, but because information doesn't always gets to them easy. So maybe this is what's happening now. You can think of it as a balancing force...

1 . > It is these "decentralized" people who are out of touch, not the ordinary people.

This statement seems a bit condescending, just saying..

2. In my post I'm not trying to make value judgements, but just offer a possible explanation why things are the way they are, and who may have better chances to change them.

3. I don't think that we should/can decentralize everything, but I do believe there is a worrying tendency towards extreme centralization. This may not neccessarily be a bad thing though. The world we live in is the expression of our choices, and if this is the result, then this is the result. We can observe and adjust if we feel the need, by changing our behaviour, if not, then that's that.

So nobody can "give the power back" to anybody, but people can stop giving their power away to others. We all have power, and we manifest it through our actions and choices.

Some say knowledge is power, but in order to gain knowledge you have to make that choice. One can try to educate people about the benefits of hosting their own data, but unless they make the choice to listen and understand it's all for nothing.

I tend to agree with others that posted here, that in general, people are just not interested. It may be too hard for them to grasp the real implications of giving all those informations about them to third parties.. They may also consider that it's too hard to handle all those problems by themselves so they're willing to pay the prices...

I don't think that the change can happen unless the people who do understand, do something about it, but usually these people are more interested to cash in on the ignorance of those who don't...

But "quantum universe" doesn't actually mean that we're working with quanta(s), which translates to infinitesimally small but discrete quantities ?

Aren't Planck constants all about that ?

So by saying this, you're actually saying that we're living in some sort of state machine / cellular automata universe, and in order to understand it, we just have to find the rules of interaction/propagation of the states ?

So maybe combine this with DeepMind's recent breakthrough in human voice reproduction, to build an agent that can translate speech in real time and bye bye human translators too ?

We could ask ourselves why aren't we attempting such a difficult task as space collonisation as a collective entity. Why are we busy fighting each other over limited resources when we could collaborate to build a better future for ourselves..

Well, man is still a teritorial animal driven by instinct, and as any animal, it perceives the unknown as dangerous and it will attempt to stop, in a knee jerk reaction, anyone who will try to change the status quo.

We're still driven by the past, by what we know, than by the future. We're not used to thinking in terms of probabilities and possible outcomes, but Elon does.

This is why most great breakthroughs have been made by exceptional individuals that fought through resistence and brought progress for the rest.

We are still not ready to act like a single consciousness. I wonder if we will ever be..

Sure, downvote me :) , but maybe you will like this:

https://codepen.io/acionescu/full/dnDCx/

“In a sense, we would see that change arises from the structure of the object,” he said. “But it’s not from the object changing. The object is basically timeless.”

I have said it before, the universe is some sort of a cellular automata running on top of matrix shape.

This Jewel thing may represent the possible patterns of nteraction between the cells of the matrix.. but we have to go deeper and try to model something similar so that it exhibits the phisical rules that we observer in our Universe.

So you say, if they behave like cattle, I shall behave like the wolf. Fair enough, there may be some justice in that, but the predator behaviour is the one that brough us where we are in the first place. It's true that it' also the one that gave us our intelligence.

The thing is that one may expect that intelligence would change things, but apparently it doesn't. It's just another tool on the predator's toolbelt. But somehow I just can't settle with this, it seams there should be a middle way..

If Musk is able to do it, then he will beat all the governments from Earth. However, I expect to see a lot of politics in this. It's just too an important of an issue to remain uncontrolled.

I dunno, maybe we should work on our social decision making process as well, not just on technology. Progress is a function of both and we seem to be leaving the social one behind.

Maybe we should be working to transition to a kind of direct democracy, or a more evolved form with the help of technology. Leaving all the power in the hands of a few doesn't seem to do much good in the long run...

Or maybe we should count on Elon to do this as well, as he promised, once he becomes king of Mars...

> Guanxi is how things get done when you don't have strong institutions.

Totally agree.

I am saying that from a point on, guanxi is the reason you don't have strong institutions, precisely because they tend to form close-knit circles of power that prevent the forming of strong institutions. It's a vicious circle.