rhodri

you may have experienced

no amount of good parenting can protect us from real badness

I am a software engineer, and also a luddite. technology destroys jobs. the question is whether that destruction liberates or oppresses. do we fire some workers and overwork others, or find ways to reduce and share the burden and benefits of labour?

When they think like children, talk like children, and act like children, they shouldn't be surprised that they're treated like children.

and does punishing children cause them to behave better?

we sure don't patronize them, think them any less, or dismiss their and so many other people's genuine concerns be it immigration, or crime, or job security

great! perhaps you have been raised well and have managed to recover from emotional trauma you may have experienced in life so far. some people unfortunately have not been so lucky.

Someone is going to build them if they can make a buck doing it, and empathy isn't going to somehow stop that.

the problem is that we are all chasing that buck, rather than imagining what that buck could do

What if there were simply richer tools for users to rate things?

they would be abused by those with underdeveloped empathy to marginalise views that threatened them. emotional problems require emotional solutions.

one point is that most of SV's technology is in the hands of an elite of techno-libertarians and super-rich VCs with various chips on various shoulders.

they have no interest in spreading technology's monetary or possible systemic benefits to the entire population, and indeed a direct interest in accumulating and then exercising political power.

it's a real problem that cannot be explained away through a lack of education, as many over-educated, under-employed and disempowered young (and old!) people directly experience day to day. open-source software and education are steamrollered by the directed power of hierarchy.

nicely written. reconciliation is not like the movies, it requires from us steadfastness and courage in the face of criticism and outright character assasination.

as engineers we spend a lot of time dismissing the ethical or systemic consequences of our work in favour of concentrating on hard problems with deterministic solutions. humanity is more than that, reality is more than that.

there is real, legitimate anger, grief and confusion in the population. if we want to put technology to work for the people, we need to listen to them (us) in all their (our) messy, contradictory beauty/ugliness/realness.

grieving is a process that starts with denial and ends with acceptance.

drawing attention to a deep and abiding ideology here: economics often presents itself as a science describing a universal and indeed physical phenomenon. remember that "the market" as we it is not only an ideal model but a very limited one that vehemently does not apply to most of the world, both inside and outside of California.

"Institutions are organisations or patterns of behaviour built by societies to help solve social or economic problems which the law or private markets cannot fully address."

institutions have existed long before the rule of law, or the existence of private markets.

what he does get right is the fallacy of "ceteris paribus" or "all else remaining equal" that is used in most economic arguments with their limited scope.

Yarn came out this month

we're certainly capable of creating the most complex models – what's interesting about this very human tendency is that the models begin to take on a reality of their own, replacing our actual observations.

we can see this most clearly in our politicians' insistence on their particular model of the economy as their priority, rather than the actual concerns of the citizens they are responsible to.

good observation. makes me think also about the tendency of computers and the internet to actually slow us down in our work!

their general-purpose nature means that our minds take on the additional complexity of context switching as we use our tools for multiple simultaneous tasks, and indeed this generality means that they can be quickly adapted to new contexts. contrast this to specialist tools which, once learned, provide significant increases in efficiency in the specific context to which they have been adapted (including the benefits of increased concentration owing to lack of distraction!) but cannot always be re-engineered easily to suit new contexts.

technology has no purpose. it is a natural phenomenon that arises without any in-built ethics or direction. technology can manifest as a tool (to amplify human potential) or a machine (to replace human labour). the effect of a technology can be influenced broadly, for example by who owns and promotes a technology (open-source vs proprietary models) and which groups in society it is put to use to benefit.

Death makes space for new life, and new strategies. It's a key part of the evolutionary process, and thus of life itself. Yet another sign of the desperate egocentrism of a generation alienated from what it means to live.

not sure why this has been downvoted, it's important to consider divination systems as fundamentally about exploring the psyche and its parameter space (which Jung – one of the fathers of psychology – characterised as archetypes)

So I suppose terrorists are like goths.

I can't imagine a parachute is that useful on a sinking ship

Indeed – illustrates very clearly how governments, institutions and corporations aren't the unified hierarchies they present themselves as, and instead can be many-headed organisms pursuing sometimes contradictory aims. Compare to Samsung and Google suing each other for patent infringement while operating a revenue-share scheme on ad profits.

Most of this bailout money will go straight back to paying interest on the bad loans that caused the crisis. Much of these loans came from banks in the very same Eurozone countries that are imposing this deal onto Greece. So much for European solidarity...

The austerity imposed on the Greek people will shrink the economy and ensure that the next few generations will be labouring in servitude to pay off the debts of the previous generations. The supreme irony in all of this is that Germany was able to thrive after WW2 in part because of the writing-off of more than half of their government debt, something that Angela Merkel has claimed is 'off the table'.

Further reading: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/29/where-did-the-g... https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany-ha...

I'll just leave this here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/29/where-did-the-g...

I think you've misread the abstract. My understanding is that the 10nT field was the control. They talk about 1-10 uT fields causing the observed effect.

Here in the UK I get my decaf coffee through the mail from https://www.pactcoffee.com – it's bloody delicious.

there's some beautiful work here, plus code http://www.complexification.net/gallery/

My opinion is that most of the bad habits of inexperienced programmers are just manifestations of more general youthful hubris and inexperience in the nuances and complexities of life.

I'll add to the list the most extreme form of 'not written here syndrome': 'I didn't write it syndrome'. The programmer sees themselves on missing out on the fun of solving a task by using a library (or reading the relevant framework docs). When experience teaches you that the real misery comes down the line when you need to support your hand-rolled physics engine lacking in tests...

I'd like to see an article titled "Why Get a Quant Job in Finance?"

Don't confuse consumer credit – which is taking out loans in order to buy goods like toasters that will decrease in value – from a business loan – which is a bet that you can add value to what you buy with the loan, and thus earn enough to pay it back (and more, hopefully).

Having a quick look around, I found this blog post from Kiva who helped pioneer microlending in the developing world. The answer seems to be "yes, but credit isn't enough to turn anyone into an entrepreneur": http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/fellowsblog/2013/03/22/how-effec...

As a bit of a rant: the West is generally overburdened with consumer credit. People panic when the value of their house goes below that of their mortgage, which is called negative equity. But (almost) every consumer credit agreement leads to this negative equity. It's mad.

I've found that trying to output audio or MIDI in real-time on the JVM (on Android or PC) is a lost cause, perhaps because of the unpredictability of GC

The appeal of physical pedals is still strong – as is a general aversion to taking a computer on tour with you.

A laptop is seen as unreliable (or unauthentic) by most musicians I've encountered, even though most of those same musicians readily embrace modern technology in the studio.

Some pedals just seem to sound better than comparable software offerings (i.e. http://www.strymon.net/products/bluesky/) which if anything is a testament to the DSP engineers working on them.

Personally, I use a laptop and Akai MPK49 controller keyboard live. I had my first ever crash while soundchecking last Wendesday...

Radical!

Produced something very similar as part of the Cambridge CS degree in 2010. We used ARM's mBed platform (http://mbed.org) to build a set of modular effect classes in C++ that could be chained together and blasted onto a single device to create a signal processing chain.

The 10-bit DAC and Cortex-M0 processor didn't help but we got some very interesting results by using Chebychev distortion.

Here's a picture of me and Scott rocking out: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/group-projects/photos-2010/...