dhoulb

“or, perhaps more usefully, be equipped with a battery that’s 30 times smaller.“

Please no-one tell Jony.

Excession is an outstanding book.

(But note to others: Consider Phlebas or Look to Windward are better starter books if you’ve not read any!)

What a horrible moan fest of an article.

The trypophobia comparison is nonsense and the author is obviously just trying (and failing) to include a memey word in the hopes of minor virality.

And it’s always fun to hear ‘reveal the algorithm’ as though it’s KFC’s blend of spices.

Also complaining about the societal impact of bad content, then complaining that good content is sometimes inaccurately caught in a filter is just insane. The filters are either too strict or too soft, they can’t be both at the same time (human reviewers follow rules just like algos).

I broke at ‘not smiling in photos’.

(Obviously unlikely given the offshore-ness of ot all.)

Only scenario I can think of for those kinds of numbers is a big bank or hedge fund buying in.

I’ve definitely noticed tech, especially tech press, getting much more political and negative in the last few years.

I don’t really know if it’s the WHOLE of tech (or just how it’s reported), but it definitely feels like a downer right now.

As a tech liberal dreamer, it’s totally getting to me.

I want to read about interesting new solutions to problems, but at the moment it seems mostly like negative press about Uber.

Obviously it’s responsible to call it when conpanies do bad things, but is tech really unethical on the scale of pharma or agrobusiness or fast food? Doesn’t seem so. ( I get that they’re tech press so they’ll only report on tech, but context would be nice).

Feels like the optimism is gone?

Seems like a reasonable way to prevent overly-broad fishing by law enforcement. If they have a warrant they can request information through legal channels.

The raids are just theatre.

I’d imagine the employees aren’t told why they’re paging the number, just that they should.

The page might also trigger other processes such as alerting council, that they have the right to do.

So possibly not as risky?

I did the same and filled it with things that are relevant to me, and now my ads are generally enjoyable — things I might not have otherwise known about.

There was a lot of cruft in there from the early days when it was easy to like everything. But after the cleanout my ads are definitely better.

Yeah this seems like the most reasonable option.

Even not having service trade isn’t a great disaster. Companies with sizeable EU revenue can just set up a European subsidiary (in Ireland, etc) to conduct business in Europe from the UK (or anywhere).

(Though I accept it’ll be a pain for e.g. finance companies which the EU requires to be based within the EU,)

Startups eespecially aren’t held back by these rules right now, they just sell everywhere in USD (and at some point when they’re big enough create an EU subsidiary).

The goods thing would be a real issue, if everything on supermarket shelves became 1.5x as expensive. So as long as that’s solved it’ll be fine.

Probably not a novel thought, but what if appearing in the sky over, say, a 100 year period beginning with the discovery of nuclear technology (or earlier) is a way of ‘warming up’ contact races so we don’t die of shock when they land?

It wouldn’t be unreasonable. Any advanced race wouldn’t need to observe at close distance, and wouldn’t need to be detectable.

They may just wamt to sow a little ‘openness to big ideas’ into us. Look at the amount of alien literature and scifi movies there are? I guess it’s working.

Yeah, and didn’t the Pentagon say they’d lost track of $6.5Tn in spending or something? This is nothing compared to that.

This article expressed a lot of what I’ve been mulling for years.

I must’ve spent hours of my life poring over the Wikipedia HTTP Response Codes page, looking for the most expressive error code for my situation. It’s barmy.

Is the last part about licensing true (or sourced from somewhere)? Surely Amazon could just drop the Cast library into their iPhone and Android apps and they’d be all set? I can’t see Google stopping them (well maybe they would now it’s escalated, but they wouldn’t have last year.)

I assumed not supporting Cast was just an excuse not to stock Chromecasts etc on Amazon.

BTW I totally agree with the frustration of the Cast protocol not being more open, a tonne of cool standalone ‘browser on TV’ usecases like screensharing/dashboards/multiscreen aren’t possible on Chromecast (and it sucks). I assume they’re under a load of pressure from MPAA type groups to keep it locked down. (As though the TV is some holy box that must be protected.)

That’s a really great point!

YouTube is probably the best placed brand in the whole market to offer a true OTT cable replacement. And Amazon wants to own that market with Channels.

Amazon would do anything to kill YouTube’s chances of making that happen, so I guess Google is firing some early warning shots!

I had been wondering why they were both so uppity about £30 dongles, but if they’re pre-competing for the £1000 a year cable market then it makes absolute sense!

It’s 100% available in the UK. Bought one officially from Amazon. Not imported.

I love everything you said.

It’d be so easy to structure a clean experiment to test this. Bad science sucks.

Yawn, nonsense.

They obviously just used deep learning to predict these were the kind of people who would want to do a cheesy video, and predicted cat food was an obvious topic they’d pick.

Yeah, I totally should’ve phrased that bit more carefully

The clearer, fuller argument would would be: if something terrible was to happen to Earth it would be objectively better (though obviously still a tragic and nightmarish event) if we only lost 95% of living humans vs losing 100%.

Also though it might also be worth a teensy bit more risk of near-complete wipeout to gain a backup. (e.g. the risk of migration to Mars causing economic or political issues back here that cause a terrible war or something). It’d be crazy hard to do the maths on that though.

You would also kind of assume though that as long as a tiny percentage lived, they would turn a lot more people than are currently alive over a few 1000s of years? So even if the worst happened the ethics would eventually balance out.

Given the amount of really really bad stuff that could happen to humans on Eart (disease, asteroids, super volcanos, sea level change, nuclear war, etc) having 5% safe somewhere else sounds like a great situation to be in. Doubt we’ll get there though.

Tough crowd.

I mean, two of them have pledged to give away their wealth, and the other is actively seeking ideas to do so.

If they’re giving it away anyway, what’s the problem?

I guess if you’re in that lower 50% of the US, it might sorta suck that Gates is sorting out renewable energy and malaria and not just directly giving you money? But it’s possibly a little repugnant to complain about it?

(Although I fully acknowledge it isn’t ACTUALLY poorer folk complaining about it, it’s moderately well off journalists fake-complaining about it to rile up other moderately well off folks on the internet.)

I got into a conversation once that I think frames this well. We had WILDLY different views on whether going to Mars was a good idea (like, violently polar opposite views). The strength of our disagreement surprised me.

I was arguing that we should “race to Mars”, mainly because the value of having a second planet dramatically increases the odds of survival for our the human race, as a whole. Thus Mars is one of the highest importance activities we could possibly be focusing on.

My friend was countering that all the rich people escaping to Mars made them not care about Earth and their fellow citizens, and was just about the most abhorant act he could think of.

He’d rather see everyone die together on Earth than a small group people live (at least it’d be fair). I’d be happy to sacrifice 95% of the humans alive today as long as some live somewhere (I’m ambivolent about who they are, I presume there’s a formula to be found?).

I think my view is more that of Silicon Valley/entrepreneur/programmer types. These people (me, etc) want the best long term outcome and will take big actions towards that, even knowing it’ll cause some short term pain.

I don’t think ‘regular’ people think like that. They generally care more about the people around them, their own pain, their tribes, their cities, etc. (But not at all about trillions of as yet unborn humans.)

I think it’s easy to label Silicon Valley as “unethical monsters” who’re out for themselves. But Assuming we’re talking about the crime of “innovation without regard for effects” (as opposed to ACTUAL rulebreaking, like theft, assault, fraud, which I assume the Valley is no worse for than anywhere else in the world), the intentions of entrepreneurs aren’t evil or unethical, they just care more about the survival of the entire race than, today’s people.

I also think a lot of hackers/builders/entrepreneurs, for all the optimism they have about growth and innovation, are simultaneously very realistic/pessimistic about all the various ways our race is fundamentally screwed, and kinda recognises they need to be more powerful and have more resources in order to do anything about that.

Startups are more about “getting us out of this fine mess were in” than money.

Uncanny valley triggered.

It’s obviously bots.

Frustrating the number of commenters who jumped to the “Facebook is evil” conclusion immediately.

This is from nearly a month ago. It’s also outrage crap.

I agree HTML in its entirity is not a great way to store data, but a SUBSET of HTML is often pretty efficient.

Storing a paragraph where words might be bold or italic — a string of HTML’s pretty great for that, compared to some convoluted JSON thing, and can pretty easily be converted to other formats if needed.

Even a list of paragraphs with mixed occasional lists etc. HTML is still pretty friendly at that point.

I think where HTML strings outlive their usefulness is when you start mixing in <div> <iframe> <script>, nested sections. The string starts becoming unpredictable at that point and you have to worry about side effects.

But for use cases where you want a small whitelisted set of tags, I think HTML is great.

... sounds expensive

There may be a place for those people — i.e. where a fast confident decision is actually better than a thoroughly discussed ‘correct’ decision.

Those people, in my experience, are usually pretty comfortable taking big risks (on their spotty information), which can be useful.

But if you’re the second kind of person, working with the first kind would be infuriating. So if long term happiness was your goal you’d probably want to work for organisations that encourage careful collaborative decision making.

Basically, if you’ve recognised in yourself that you don’t like these people, avoid them (and places they’d be drawn to).

I can’t think of any way you could ‘bring them down to size’, etc, that wouldn’t just bring more pain.

That was well dealt with. Especially the part about deleting all long-press recordings from the servers. Very thorough Google!