sentientmachine

Windows 8 came across as a kind of entertainment toy device that focused on content consumption and advertisement delivery embedded right in the start menus.

Removing the silly game could be part of Microsoft's agenda to undo the damage that Windows 8 did to its image, and rebrand itself as a "Windows OS is for getting work done" tool, rather than a novelty 'yon dungeon' video game where you try to swipe, swirl, shake, and charm your way through the 7 steps everyone must do to get to the control panel.

So let me get this straight, your mom died from alcohol and I still here you defending it? I guess I tripped your cognitive dissonance algorithms, your genetic line can't simultaneously be 'good' and the thing that caused great damage in it also good. So the defective party must be the one pointing out the truth in the situation.

The fact that its addictive and damages people. That should be the illegal thing: using a factory to make things that people get addicted to and it harms them.

People 1000 years from now are going to look at us in the way we look at witch trials. Likt wtf bro? Why don't you go making bombs that get set off on a hair trigger and just lay them around? They only hurt once in a while if you get them close to your face.

Wtf really? Well you see, it was addictive! And... We really liked it! mmm hmmm. I can think of better defenses for the witch trials.

Cross between ad hominum and straw man. He compared my argument to cars growing on trees the said ha! Look how silly you are. Cars don't grow on trees!

Hmmm you don't say. Can we get back to the argument now?

Because your sorry butt marches into our emergency room after you screw yourself up. Taking away extra nice things that could have been. And since we can't drop you off on a deserted island to get rid of you for damaging the rest of us, the next best thing is to try to influence your behavior so you don't damage yourself now.

Its the same thing you do when you find a skunk roaming the house, you either get a broom and shoo it away, or restrict its freedom so at least it doesn't spray anything. What the fuck gives you the right to put the skunk in a box? The right of the others to remain un-sprayed by twitchy tailed skunk.

If I was there when they decided to poison the factory alcohol. I would have advised against it. You'll never hear the end of it. All the victims will blame you for the damage taken, because it was more than they expected.

I'd say ratchet up the poison in 1 percent increments once every two months. Then the people seeking damage would receive the expected amount of damage, and everyone gets exactly what they want.

1.Damage for the damage seeker, no big surprises.

2. Prohibition for the prohibition seeker, just takes a bit longer

An interesting analogy. However the victim in this case simply failed to take a precaution vs willfully went out the way to seek damage.

Punishing people with deadly force for not taking precautions is unauthorized by my calculations. The manufacturer of the air bag would be liable for all damage taken.

My compassion is earned by the victim at hand, not given away by individuals who like to appropriate other men's resources such as yourself.

Health benefit? I'll be sure to tell the kids who's mothers drank during pregnancy that their obvious and life crippling birth defects that nugget of truthiness.

Tell me again how much alcohol stimulates GDP and promotes health in our emergency rooms? To the tune of negative 120 billion annually and overloaded emergency rooms treating throngs of out of work alcoholics needing treatment for alcohol related problems?

Health benefits. Yeah right. Sure you get a dollar, but you lose 1000. Look at the big picture.

It should be legalized and then if you take it, it goes on your record, so next time you try to get a job the hiring company can decide based upon the reputation of potheads, whether or not to hire you.

You know an argument is good when the opposing party resorts to ad hominem. First you must explain where I have made a mistake, you pea brain.

I don't disapprove of drinking poison. Its the people drinking poison who are disapproving of the decision to make poison poisonous. The phenomenon to explain is why the blame is quickly shifted from people drinking poison and getting hurt, to intelligent people who allowed it to continue.

Its part of the "shift blame onto the non idiots" agenda in america. Someone get hurt by being stupid? Then find the nearest responsible person and make him pay up to remedy everything.

I've got a better idea. How about we laugh at the idiots being idiots and try to encourage the poisoners to at least ratchet up their poisoning poison more slowly. As to make the dying idiots once again the responsible party by choosing to get hurt by drinking poison.

Lets suppose some company hired scientists at great expense to make 10w30 motor oil incredibly addictive. Maybe they put some new chemical nobody heard of into it. Anyway, people are drinking it and getting sick and dying from it left and right.

The motor oil is normally for cars, but the increased sales as a recreational drink is boosting sales. You try to prohibit people from drinking motor oil, but they do it anyway. So you go to the motor oil factory and make the motor oil significantly more poisonous.

People have been dying from this normally, but now faster than ever because the motor oil makes you gag and puke, but they force it down anyway because YOLO.

I find it hard to believe the guilty party here is the people who made the poison more poisonous. Addiction increases cognitive dissonance, making people adhere to incomplete and inaccurate models in order to justify making a villian where none exists and making a victim where none exists.

What Snowden did, or more specifically what the faceless, unaccountable and un-nameable NSA directors did was what George Orwell was trying to capture in his famous novel.

The notion of thoughtcrime and crimethink being the punishable event in the minds of the people. Where people are afraid to research something because of the perception that the secret unaccountable police will come take you away if you give the idea too much thought. And there is nothing you or anyone can do about it because the entity doing the enforcing is completely hidden. Even asking for the names of the directors and writing about what they've done is crimethink. Thinking about or asking for the document describing which thoughts are crimethink is also crimethink.

But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event. If your neighbor is thinking about how to make a bomb, or how to kill someone, or how to commit suicide, or how to defraud and deceive others, wouldn't it be better if the secret police put a stop to it there?

We could live in a post-crime society. Where everyone is un-corruptable and all humans treat each other as lovingly as we treat our own bodies. The problem with this is that the secret police only enforce the rules of the rulers, which has a thicker script for the lower classes than the upper classes.

Also watch out for a bait and switch on Airbnb. I'm actually sitting in a nice apt now from airbnb. So I am happy with it. But there is another host who is trying to get me for an $1800 cleaning fee. What happens is you book a room in advance for a month. Then the host waits until 12 hours before the point of no cancelation to say "its not available but there is another one for a lot less cost that is a lot worse.". You say no before the cutoff window but then he lowers the cost to bargain basement levels. You accept. And he accepts by booking a different apartment under the haggling text message agreement. Naturally you move to requisition the disagreement as he said he would. But he stalls until the last minute and unsweetens the deal until you cancel. Boom. He has your money and can point to the fine print and his strict cancellation policy that the trouble he went through to clean the room and get it " fixed up" justifies the $1800 charge for a room I didn't set foot in.

Moral if the story. If you don't get prompt reply and if any changes occur after booking. Stay away from that host. They are fishing for free money playing the rules of Airbnb.

Airbnb is supposedly going to get back to me about this disagreement, and there is a ticket to deal with it. But its been 5 days after the event and I pinged them twice with email. My other option may be to contest the charge on my credit card. Scammers are everywhere that rules and large sums of money can be found. And many of those scammers will be right there along side you jockeying for victimhood status.

"Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it?"

The moments before I fall asleep is when I sometimes can get a glimpse of how the machinery of reading and thought work under the hood. It looks like a computer program that runs thousands of commands in parallel, and it's not controlled by the command-giver between your ears.

There is a shutdown process that occurs when you fall asleep, to most people it's like a switch where it goes from totally on to totally off, but I've come to see it like a janitor walking from room to room in a large building and flicking off lights in each room one after another.

And you can change the order of the shutdown procedure to keep the command-giver in your mind awake until last, and watch what happens that requires your thinking mind to go away while it brings up new processes. The most fascinating part is those 4 seconds before falling asleep. Where you get the halting of ordinary thought, and the machinery that does deep learning rumbles to life one by one, in various order.

It's hard to describe, one thing I see, it all operates in parallel. And it's like a democracy. It's not a line of execution, it's everything all at once. All experiences being dumped into modified networks to solve for objectives. If a superior model is found to map input to motor output, the new model is made dominant. We do learning during the day, but the model generation that glues it all together happens at night. And you can watch it do its work in those moments before sleep.

One way to help the government establish tight controls over what kinds of programs you can run on any of your computers is to implement a single point of control and a single point of failure for the internet through ISP's. That way any programs anywhere that don't follow the agency's lead have to do their work without internet connectivity, or proportionally throttled speeds.

Then when these devices come closer and closer to who we are and what we think, the government will have the proverbial "internet delete button" for ideas and programs that should not be running through human minds or their devices.

The government wants backdoor and root access into the computer in everyone's pocket. This is for the best because the government is deeply concerned about the health and wellness of every single citizen.

How about we turn it around, and give the people guaranteed rights and root access into all of the smartphones of the senators, politicians, and lobbyists doing secret deals and bribes so that the civilization can help reign in rampant corruption that is destroying this country? I get a feeling this alternative "society wellness program" would get quietly blocked. Since when did the government become responsible for health and wellness? I thought government was only responsible for a few things that the free market could not do for themselves?

Whack-a-mole legislation on the internet isn't working, people just route around the damaged parts, what we need is a centralized government internet white list. A constantly updated list of things anyone can do, or any particular person can do, rather than a list of things that are illegal.

The programmer recruiting industry is counter productive, adding less than no value to the people who need coders as well as the the programmers who want to work. Less than no value means they are a net drain on society, as worthless as hiring people to dig holes in the ocean.

These recruiter tactics would be acceptable for food service jobs though. There you would need to find a candidate with a high tolerance for complete bullshit.

The entire programming recruiter industry can be replaced by the following:

Throw a party with free drinks and food, of the people who show up, present a coding test on the board and the first 10 people to submit a correct solution gets on the short list.

And if you are so poor and can't do that (HR is vetoing), just do a basic coding test online. Of the people who submit correct answers, short list the best ones.

But perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps social skills are more important in programmers than coding skill.

Perhaps it's a good idea to have random take downs of the internet in large areas for extended periods of time so that there is more motivation for people to create a second, non-centralized single-point-of-failure single-point-of-control internet.

We have to prepare for the inevitable future reality where many layers of government can terminate the internet connection of any person based on what content they are providing, or what service they are serving.

When an evil agent discovers the power to shut down my internet connection, or the internet connection of an entire area based on what people are doing on it, it is only a matter of days or weeks before that power is wielded to expand their power and create money from thin air through it. If the internet is to become a medium through which people think through, it must be as reliable and un-stoppable as two people talking and listening in a private room.

I guess we should give up on trying to keep the definition of the word "Hacker" as "brilliant programmer and technical expert".

We can't continue going around calling ourselves "Criminals", and that when we do a brilliant piece of work on an intractable software problem that we really "Hacked" it together, meaning we broke the law to steal it and kept all the money for ourselves.

The word "Hacker" has got to go, it is the same as the word "Criminal", "Burglar" or "Felon" now.

You say Executive pay is not an asset. So if an executive owns the deed to a house, you'd agree that's an asset, but if the executive maintains a skill to be hired for 200k/day, that this is not an asset?

Doesn't an executive's ability to convince a company to pay 200k/day fluctuate based on market forces just like how people price homes or tulip bulbs?

The vast majority of drivers also think they are in the top 10% of good drivers.

The mistake stems from the fact that brains have a really hard time viewing themselves from the perspective of others.

But still, making your app/service compatible with IE6 is a hassle for you and preventing you from doing a better job in other areas which harms your profits.

Perhaps we can take the hit for you. We could cause your customers to stop using IE[6-8] by specifically not fixing the sites to be backwards compatible. Your users will note that although your site still works in IE6, every other site won't. Then if we can drive down the 10% IE6 users of your site to 1%, then will you stop spending time making things compatible for it?

Ownership means a few things, it's the right to use, and the right to deny use of, and if someone opposes you on your rightful usage or denial, then the unlimited fury of a thousand policemen are available to correct the other person.

You said the HOA doesn't own anything, actually they do "literally own" a portion of the thing that people pay for when buying a house. The right to deny use of your property for subletting (like airbnb). And if you don't comply, the policemen hit you with sticks until you do.

You said the HOA doesn't own anything, they own you, the human unit living in the home via dues. They also own a guarantee of income to whatever human unit lives in that house, that is a higher quality item to own than having ownership of say a cat or car. and the fact that your home serves as security for whatever liabilities the HOA corp board chooses to incur, HOA-burdened property represents a liability rather than an asset. It's a secondary level of government that resembles a banana republic.

There is also a continuing misperception that HOA corporations are miniature democracies. They are not. They have none of the protections for individual rights. So what if 50% of the neighbors don't like something. Majority rule might be fine for setting pool hours for the HOA corp's pool, but majority rule is not a democracy and it is not appropriate for what happens between the bedroom walls of "your" or more specifically "their" home.

The disputes that develop over the propriety and interpretation of restrictions is another cesspool. If there were no HOA corp, the disputes would tend to simply be differences of opinion. Natural barriers to litigation include the cost of litigation and the uncertainty of the outcome. However, the board members of an HOA corp bear no personal responsibility for financing litigation and are driven as much to harm fellow residents as they are to win. If they can cost a homeowner $20,000 and up, then their egos are satiated even if their HOA corp loses. The management companies profit from accusations of violations. The HOA attorney is likewise more concerned about provoking and maintaining the dispute for profit.

Which is why HOA's lower property values significantly by lowering the pool of available buyers.

Some people own their own home and still can't use Airbnb because their HOA (Home Owner Association) made a rule that you can't sublet your house. And if you are found in abayence of this rule, they can fine you any amount they want per day, and then if you still don't comply, they can sell your house and kick you out of it.

So people who have houses with an HOA, they don't technically own their house, they are just borrowing it from the HOA while paying the taxes, insurance, and doing all the work for them to keep the house up.

With Communism, a person's job is determined by an external power. How is the dealer network telling Tesla that they can't sell their car in NY not an example of communism?

Put down that microscope citizen. I've already told you, you are a cashier, cashiers don't use microscopes. Microscopes are for scientists. You can't be a scientist. Get back to your station. Don't make me taze you.

Imagine if government had the power to flick a switch place perfect earplugs and blinders on every human everywhere for a time for some political agenda.

I wonder how far men would go (short of just killing people) to suppress the right for people to think, in order to suppress some information floating around in the public space.

Would you flick that switch, to power down an entire nation of drones, just to prevent them from finding out that you did something evil?

Take care you NEVER give other men the right to shut down your brain from afar. It WILL be used against you.

But couldn't such an act be repealed as "enabling the terrorists" and be rendered inert?

How far does a government agency have to go in breaking law before the military is deployed to put boots on the ground to reel in the agency back under the rule of law?

I'd like to think that if agencies started hiring their own armies and created their own version of law enforcement zones from other countries, and started killing people who opposed them, that someone would actually do something to stop that... right?

You don't ban pool halls because mafia members wink and nudge to each other all the time there.

Banning the pool hall is not going to deter the crime. And banning links in chatrooms by making it illegal will not do anything either.

The problem is not the criminal, it's the guy trying to classify the criminal. Just because the baby is in the bath water has a little dirty water on him, doesn't mean we bag up the baby and throw it out.