orange_tee

Being required to write a paper in LaTeX, is the least elitist requirement of any profession that I can think of.

Maybe the disconnect here is that they are talking about "innovation" but not necessarily profitable innovation.

There's also something to be said about the kind of innovation that disrupts a whole market, and the kind of innovation that incrementally improves on some process or tool. Maybe another question would be, is there enough of the latter kind of innovation to make up (economically) for the lack of unicorns?

The idea that casual sex serves as some sort of formative process sounds ridiculous. In my mind, sex serves an important role in pair bonding, and casual sex would then inhibit the ability of people to pair bond.

It's probably psychology. For example, myself quite frugal, I would probably not pay explicitly to remove ads. But if you raised my internet subscription by $1.50/month, with the same intent, I wouldn't bat an eyelid.

It's all about putting the price in context.

Yeah well, deep learning is still very far from general artificial intelligence. It just gives you that impression because it's essentially a very advanced parroting system.

The challenge with automating seemingly monotonous human tasks is that often when the human is doing the task, they may be doing it without thinking 99% of the time, but if they have to, they can resort to their human intellect. No deep learning model is going to be able to do that because it does not have any higher intellect to resort to. And more importantly it cannot even know when it is failing.

Since when do you first get people to buy and use your device and only later tell them how the device could become useful in some form or another?

It's a joke that they are trying to push this for self serving reasons, but cannot even come up with one good reason for people to wear them.

Obviously they want to make everyone wear their monitoring cameras though. They could have created and marketed a device only for people who need it, and nobody would have complained if they had done that.

In explaining possible use cases of facial recognition, Bosworth said that Facebook’s smart glasses may help someone recognize someone at a dinner party

What a fucking joke. There is clearly no practical upside to this for the wearer, or the rest of society.

I do not think that solves the question. What is the reasoning behind the assumption that GDP/capita in the UK should be equal to that of the US? And why should it not be equal to say, that of Italy instead?

The author is assuming a certain "natural order of things" and placing the UK a few ranks higher than it actually stands.

I want to know what logic he is using to determine how wealthy countries should be, relative to others.

Well as somebody who has written research software, I don't agree that research software is a "tangled mess". A couple of points,

1. often when I read read software written by profession programmers I find it very hard to read because it is too abstract, almost every time I try to figure out how something works, it turns out I need to learn a new framework and api, by contrast research code tends to be very self contained

2. when I first wrote research software I applied all the programming best practices and was told these weren't any good; turns out using lots of abstraction to increase modularity makes the code much slower, this is language dependent of course

3. you will find it much harder to read research code if you don't understand the math+science behind it

many of those writing software know very little about how to do it

This is just not true. I found in my experience that people writing research software have a very specific skillset that very very few industry programmers are likely to have. They know how to write good numerics code, and they know how to write fast code for super computers. Not to mention, interpreting the numerics theory correctly in the first place is not a trivial matter either.

But the people shouting about the FED debasing their currency are not poor unbanked people in 3rd world countries so I don't see how your comment is relevant.

But why are people so concerned about this whole currency depreciation thing? Only idiots keep their money under the mattress. Anyone with sense has their money invested in assets. I honestly don't get the big deal.

Poor people in poor countries are way more likely to have an Android phone than a Windows PC, or a PC at all for that matter.

I totally agree with you.

The irony is that a lot of people throw away good furniture made from real wood to buy IKEA particle board. As a result of which I can acquire good solid furniture from charity shops and online classifieds for close to nothing.

The same chemical formaldehyde is responsible for the off-gassing from cheap furniture. That smell of chipboard (also called particleboard) that all the new cheap furniture is made of.

I think bitcoin is useful and important enough to be worth several large tech companies.

My thought experiment to verify this is simple: Tomorrow bitcoin disappears. What happens? Tomorrow FAANG disappears, what happens? I don't think it is controversial to say that Bitcoin is NOT as impactful as you are stating. Of course lots of money will be lost, but practically no industry is dependent on Bitcoin so the rest of the world will not notice. So then I am not sure how you can say Bitcoin is so valuable.

Yes bread is served first. But I always thought bread was to be consumed with the rest of the courses. I think the butter thing came later. People got impatient waiting so they started serving butter with the bread so that you can get a bite while waiting. But the original purpose of bread was to be an extra carb along your starter or main depending on what you're having.

But if you try to google if there is any conclusive research that sugar is bad you will find that actually there isn't. For example this is a good review.[1] And a more scholarly review [2].

The truth seems to be that there is no one "bad" food. Of course over consumption of everything is bad. But there does not seem to be any one food that is so bad that there is no safe consumption level.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180918-is-sugar-really-... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-3010.2012...

Why not simply "racists"? They are racists. They are literally trying to reorganize society based on a race theory. They only difference is that it is a different race theory, but they still have the race war mentality of past eras.

Less guns in the world is better for everyone.

If the defenseless had guns they would be able to protect themselves. I am not sure if that would result in more peace or more war, but it would definitely be a more just world.

No, it has nothing to do with that. It's policy driven. The Dutch realized they can get in on what the UK was getting if they swallowed their pride and started speaking more English and allowing English as a language of business.

Germans are too proud and expect the world to start speaking German instead.

I lived in both countries, Germans have equally good English, but you would struggle to use English in official capacity in Germany. Whereas in the Netherlands they are very accommodating, and not because they are kinder. They do this on purpose, cause they know they can (and did in fact) attract a lot of foreign money that way.

I don't quite remember from the original white paper if it was pushed as a feature or just a property of the system. But later proponents certainty try to say it is some revolutionary feature.

Now don't get me wrong. Transparency in the financial system is good. But a public blockchain as is, does not provide any transparency at all.

Now that I am thinking about it, they probably mean something else entirely by transparency. They probably mean, they know the total amount of BTC out there.

All of this shows how the supposed transparency of Bitcoin is useless. The blockchain does not really tell you anything. Price goes up 500%. Nobody knows why. People speculate it is because of Tether or some cabal of Chinese BTC mining tycoons or exchanges faking volume;, or WallSt playing their voodoo with billions worth of BTC.

What other asset has this situation where the reason for the movement of its price is so obfuscated?

Despite claims of transparency, I find the exact opposite is true. Yes all wallets and transactions are public but because these are not tied to identities and are international (i.e. no consistent set of laws that might force owners to disclose their holdings), we know very little from this information.

So we small holders are basically at the mercy of any big whale who might decide to nudge the price up or down for profit. Then on top of that, there are more elaborate plays like Tether and lots of WallSt money doing their voodoo as well.

Which other asset has the property that it suddenly goes to 200% or 50% and nobody has a clear idea why? The whole thing is the opposite of transparent and if you really wanted to store your wealth you would not put it at the mercy of Bitcoin whales.

The discrepancy could be explained by how tax benefits and welfare work between countries. In some countries it pays for a young family to pretend to be a single-parent household to get welfare benefits. In others it is the exact opposite. Also depending on the financial situation it might change incentives. For example in many countries middle class people benefit more from marriage and benefits associated with it than lower class people.

That is not true. For example I hold bitcoin. But I also don't believe that bitcoin will replace the financial system or will serve any real purpose in the future. I am just speculating on its value.

People speculate on loads of assets which have no real life utility. For example, art or classic cars.

That is not necessarily a downside.

Don't understand much about corporate finance. Why would they park $1.5B of their cash? Don't they need it for other stuff? Or will they just borrow an equal amount to use for whatever they need?

Not a BREXITer but the libdems are putting way too much trust in the EU. This can potentially backfire in the recent future when the EU does not perform as well as it should.

When you actually look at the metrics you do not actually see the EU as a whole performing better than the UK and definitely worse than the US and Australia.