HN user
As I've said before, you'll have to ban me then, if you really believe I'm a negative contribution.
I'm not going to stop responding in reasonable, human, and direct ways to comments.
I'm also going to note, yet again, your highly biased enforcement:
Nothing to someone who did insult me, just random dog-piling based on your whims because you happened to notice an emotional outburst.
That's terrible community management.
Could you tell me what personal attack that would be?
I actually outlined why I thought they were wrong, and shut your mouth is clearly attached to not making subjective statements about other people's belongings (which, I absolutely stand by as inappropriate) -- so yes, an angry but on-point comment is better than just throwing out "lolsux" uselessly, or in the case above, based on wrong information.
That you disagree with my assessment that angry lead-ins to detailed responses to people insulting your things are appropriate, but feel insulting other people's belongings (while providing incorrect and useless tech advice) is appropriate -- or even constructive?
Because that's what you did say. (:
I (as you mighy expect) disagree with your assessment of what makes a functional community.
The second part of your example is a statement of opinion, not fact -- so it's not really the same thing at all.
I run full Windows 10 on a tablet (dual core, 2GB RAM), and it's pretty amazing to me how many websites that have no reason to run slow completely fail on it.
I can only imagine it works fine on dev machines with much faster quad+ cores and 64GB of RAM or whatever.
Just as an aside, it's done a lot to have the tablet be my primary "fiddle-at-home" machine: keeps me really conscious of resource limits, including ones I normally don't think of like screen size. (Most websites render terribly in landscape on a 10" tablet.)
Excellent blog post!
And if anyone is looking for the book (like I was), this seems to be a more recent edition (with better availability):
https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/14516638...
Society is not a force of nature such that its decrees carry the weight of natural law.
People can (and often should) resist what society decrees, because it's only through that dynamic tension of conflicting forces in society that we can reasonably advance.
I believe it is a good thing that there are things society has deemed unacceptable and acknowledge that I give up some of my absolute freedoms to live in such a society.
You buried the lede -- your whole post is really dressing up why we shouldn't resist a societal decision you personally heavily agree with, while not giving real credence to people who disagree with you.
Pitching society-uber-als when society has made the choice you like is really cheap partisanship.
Freedom of expression is not foundational. Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or engaging in targeted and repeated harassment does not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right.
These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts is just begging the question.
Sure, if you force people to behave a certain way, the conflict can be avoided.
The problem stems from the fundamental fact that a very small percentage of people are assholes, a faction of people are intent on forcibly silencing and harming assholes for being assholes, and a faction of people are intent on not permitting that second group of people to do so.
That's the problem: two groups of people are prepared to use force to enact their contrary visions, while a third (relatively small group) is catalyzing the conflict.
[Subordinates] are used to being dominated and condescended. If you talk to them as respected individuals, you usually get respect back. It also gives more weight to the times you have to be more assertive.
This is actually pretty good advice for any time you're trying to manage people -- and kids are just little people.
I agree, but poking holes in why they're excluded is important, because it let's you have this exchange --
"You can't argue with the math!"
"Well, hold on now, I think you left a whole bunch of things out!"
If you don't know where the problem in the math is, despite there being an extremely obvious problem, many people will ignore your objections. That's why they use math, to paper over their obviously poor behavior.
Being able to strip that bare is useful.
They have relatives, friends, aesthetic preferences, social obligations, religious beliefs, and other things that "do not compute" in mathematical models.
They compute fine -- most models are just "lying with math" by excluding the value of those things from their calculations.
It's not different than a friend who ignores those things when using words -- of course it doesn't make sense why you don't move if you don't account for the full value of where you are at present.
I think if we accounted for the destroyed social value that most of these economic models have inflicted, it would be the obvious massive negative that most people anecdotally tell. I think it's very telling how rarely you see these kinds of things modeled in economic theory despite how obviously part of the way humans value things they are.
Economics is merely institutionalized fixation on money, and produces precisely the psychopathic models you'd expect from that.
I think it takes less than most of us imagine -- but more than most of us are capable of organizing.
If you wanted to build complexes to stimulate the economy, you'd probably need on the order of... $100M in buildings, and another $100M in endowments for operating expenses/grants/risky loans.
So 200M is a lot, but it's also only the retirement wealth of 100-200 upper-middle class families, of which there will be thousands per major metro (and perhaps a million or so across the US).
I think it's mostly a logistics problem -- in those million families, there are probably 10,000 that are interested in resettling to the middle of the country and would be willing to move half of their wealth into local investments on a generational scale (while keeping the other half in say, the market).
That means we could do 250-500 self-sustaining mixed-use complexes backed by endowments for operations costs, which is probably enough to target 50-100 towns.
The question becomes the organizational aspects of those people finding each other, building trust (between each other and with the involved communities), and finding the appropriate legal instrument to manage the money on that scale.
These are all much harder problems than finding money or media attention.
Integrity is always an option, but it's definitely not always an easy option.
Here's some anecdata:
I've been that shitbag without integrity, it's not actually any easier. (I actually think it's much harder.) Whatever energy you think you're saving by just going along with it, whatever profit you think you're getting out of it -- you're spending way more than that on maintaining the status quo.
I think a lot of the materialism and obsession with things like nice houses stems from the fact that when we step out of the shower and look in the mirror -- when we make eye contact with ourselves for that moment -- we're forced to admit that we just don't like the person we see. So we make the decorations around that moment nicer, obsessively, as if that will somehow change the encounter. This feeds into a cycle of needing every bigger fixes at ever greater expense to yourself, digging you deeper and deeper into dependence on it.
Whatever amount I'm "losing" in pay is worth it to change that reaction when I see myself -- to make the only required relationship in my life healthy and vibrant instead of toxic.
That said, I actually make more by being a trustworthy human that cares about the consequences of what he does, because it turns out that there's a) a need for that, since selfish behavior rapidly turns destructive in an organization and b) apparently a shortage of people willing to take the "easy" path.
People have been trying that, for at least a few decades.
Do facts like almost every American wants a more fair system change it? No, because the governing structure has itself been corrupted after decades of abuse.
Therefore, it seems the most effective means of causing change -- given that what you suggest has failed for decades -- would be to cause direct financial harm to those who are actively corrupting the system for their benefit, as that changes the calculus for them and incentivizes stopping.
This is a downright civil way to do that when society breaks down -- the poor used to just stab people over bad tax law.
We frequently receive reports from community activists and other social media users who were blocked from commenting on an agency’s Facebook page, or prevented from contributing to a community discussion prompted by an officials’ tweet, or have faced similar barriers to participation in public debate. We receive reports about how governmental officials manipulate social media comments to exclude opposing views to create the impression that hotly contested policies are not contested at all. And we realize, in seeing how agencies use social media to quickly disseminate emergency information during the recent spate of natural disasters, that the ability to receive such messages can be a matter of life and death.
This is really the crux of why it's a First Amendment issue -- because that amendment is meant to protect discussion from that sort of manipulation by government.
If you were correct, then women should have economic parity with men. They don't.
Every statistic I've seen seems to indicate that modulo life choices that seem correlated with gender (ie, on average women prefer different things to men, though individuals vary greatly), there is economic parity between men and women (in most developed nations, but I'm most familiar with the US).
There are some very real issues with the direction that women are steered by society, but there are also some real issues that men face (eg, school, legal system, etc).
However, there's also a non-trivial number of women (in places like the US) who blame sexism for the consequences of choices they've had to make in life between things that they want, and seem to treat it as an affront to their gender that they're not treated as catered princesses by the world -- getting to have every want. And then hide that behind talking about "economic parity".
The exact details may vary a bit, but the feminization of poverty is a phrase in our lexicon for a reason.
Doesn't this mostly have to do with poor women being forced to carry the economic burden of many children in developing nations?
It's also definitely not a common term to use -- which makes me think that you likely have a biased view from hanging out in a very polarized, niche crowd.
But I feel pretty worn down and hopeless of late.
As a fellow human, are you sure you're not inventing a narrative that's worse than the truth, and then stressing yourself out battling phantoms? (This is something I do all the time, on issues small to large.)
There are real issues in the world -- quite serious ones, at that. But modern charities and other social purpose organizations deploy weaponized psychology meant to send you into an emotional state in order to boost their funding (or membership, but really power), and the consequence of everyone doing this "for the right reasons" is a completely toxic society, polarized in righteous anger over every issue to the point its emotionally burnt out and fragmented. This habit has even been exploited by foreign states to attack the nation. (True for virtually every country, and definitely all of the European and "Western" ones.)
This is quite possibly the best of times on any of those issues, so instead of worrying about how you're going to feed every woman in Africa with too many kids (hint: you won't), just try to focus on what's the next small step that you can take to fix one of the issue a little. Then do that.
That's something you can actually do right now, won't exhaust you even if you have to do it for the rest of your life, and would completely fix the problem if everyone would just stop panicking and do that.
Late reply, but I think there's a second harm to throwing out generalists in addition to what you outline:
Specialists aren't as good as generalists at integrating the work of specialists across domains (almost by definition). A lack of generalists can then lead to a situation where specialists are all making locally good moves, but the overall direction is negative -- something akin to Simpson's paradox (though, in the other direction).
If you look at per energy expenditure, I'd argue that "webcams for pets" or "delivery for X" are probably delivering more value per unit energy used, because of relative efficiency.
I think the implication is that "free" is being quoted from elsewhere and the author doesn't necessarily agree that it is without cost just because such cost is not denominated in dollars.
So Google deployed malware against... tens of millions of people?... in order to steal confidential data for profit, by bypassing security mechanisms on those devices as they interacted with Google servers, exceeding authorized access, and using installed code to track the activities of people against their efforts to raise technical barriers?
That sounds like an international criminal act on a scale most malware authors would wet themselves over.
It's also not surprising that the public is getting fed up with the wanton criminality that seems to be embodied by modern capitalism.
That was connecting on to the previous paragraph, and contrasting with pre-authorization through a payment network -- I meant a direct transfer of currency from customer to merchant, instead of using a financial institution as an intermediary to vouch for you having money.
Digital currency isn't competing with credit card networks, it's competing with ACH.
ACH transfers take days; wire transfers take minutes to hours and cost tens of dollars. There's ever possibility of running a digital currency that can clear transactions on the order of minutes with minimal cost. Bitcoin isn't well suited to that, partially because it hasn't been managed well.
A credit card would still pre-authorize against a balance at an institution, but it would settle between the customer and merchant bank on the same schedule (when the merchant cleared their transactions for the week) or faster (eg, on the order of minutes). That makes credit cards considerably closer to cash (fast) than what they are now, like checks (slow).
And for people who wanted it to settle immediately or treat it like cash, they could make a direct transfer, and have it clear on the order of minutes. (Not great for coffee, but something like buying a car.)
Digital currencies can be those things, they're just not.
How accurate does that need to be...?
100ms? 10ms? 1ms? 100us?
It's actual a real problem with people who are moderately good at math:
They sabotage explanations to laypeople by incorrectly nitpicking technical details because they hear informal language that sounds similar to something they know, and rush to regurgitate that fact as a "correction" without really understanding the conversation -- and will insist on doing so unless you use language too sophisticated for the audience you were trying to reach in the first place.
This actually happens with nearly every field, I just experience it most with math -- it's probably related to Dunning Kreuger or whatever.
C'est la vie.
I run one as a malware blocker, because if I don't then my computers get attacked at least once a day, often by reputable sites.
It's probably more important than an antivirus for stopping malware.
It's precisely the N that I was talking about:
I discuss how seeing 100 steps of a sequence with regular behavior gives you a better sense of its asymptotics than seeing 3 steps, and then how you can generate some steps of that sequence as a mental model.
The N that is changing is the number of dimensions, both in comparing which model gives better asymptotic intuition and in terms of constructing a phase space by adding a dimension at a time.
I'm actually unsure how you could think there's an N that's not dimension, given that the only values discussed (or changing) were dimensions.
Did I not use fancy enough language when making a point to laymen, so you assumed you knew more than me and took a really uncharitable read so you could "correct" me?
It's because we think in 3D, so we only really see three steps of exponential growth.
If we thought in 100D, we might have a better sense for it, because we'd be able to see a hundred of them.
This is pretty clearly talking about getting a better sense of the asymptotic behavior in number of dimensions, and having a better intuition if you see a hundred steps than if you see three. The three steps of exponential growth mentioned are in transitioning from a single cube, to a line of 10 cubes, to a grid of 10x10 cubes, to a block of 10x10x10 cubes. But that's sort of where we tap out, because we're so heavily wired for 3D -- if we dealt with 100D, we'd have 100 such steps we could intuitively observe, and so have a better sense of asymptotics.
This is further seen in that the exercise is based on increasing the number of dimensions to explore the growth of the space as the dimensionality changes. It's literally adding more and more terms to a product space, and so clearly dealing with issues about dimensionality.
You're simply wrong, and incredibly uncharitable in your interpretation.
Further, geometric growth isn't a power law -- it's exponential growth. So the person asking the question was indeed confused, regardless of the fact you're wrong about what I was talking about. Geometric series are r^1, ^2, r^3, etc while a power law will look like 1^x, 2^x, 3^x, etc. Asking if an exponential growth is "just geometric growth" is being confused -- they're the same thing.
Honestly, it's just a mash-up of a few Buddhist ideas and a few math ideas:
You can model what you're doing as a phase space, which is the product space of the state of each thing you control. This generally has a lot more dimensions than three. (You see this in robotics; a 5-axis CNC has a 5 dimensional phase space for position (5 axes of motion), plus a few more dimensions for things like speed and coolant flow.)
That mashed up with the meditation idea of starting with your focus on something really small -- the soles of your feet, for instance -- and drawing it up your body until you can feel all of it.
If you do the two, you can slowly draw yourself into awareness of higher and higher dimensional phase spaces, which shows you a curve of exponential growth.
Well, okay -- I also followed Terry Tao's excellent advice on dealing with higher dimensions, to stop trying to picture math and start trying to find systems that expressed it in what they did. You can often get a feel for a system doing something more complex than what you can directly picture.
Why has the government taken such a hands off approach?
Because it's something like win-win-win for them?
1. They don't stifle a new technology for no reason.
2. They can always regulate it later, with the added bonus that they'll be able to stick a bunch of people they want to investigate with non-compliance charges for failing to register at the appropriate time. Similarly, how many people do you think are doing their taxes right on BTC? Easy arbitrary audit material if you can ever link their accounts.
3. I'm not sure the government is opposed to digital money that leaves an immutable, public record of cryptographic witnesses to transactions. The pseudo-anonymity isn't worth much against a pervasive global adversary watching all the pipes. They link the BTC to your actions, the keys to your machine, and you may as well have signed a confession.
So there's little incentive to act quickly and lots of incentive to give the radicals into BTC a chance to slip up on OPSEC.