sharun

Agree. Also just like in India, if you are crawling around in a traffic jam most of the time what's the point of all that safety? Local cars are designed for local conditions.

I never understood why the Gigafactory is viable with China around. Does this have to do with location of the mines?

How do you know what my corrective ideology is?

Without even knowing that or expressing any kind of curiosity about it, just look at the assumptions you are making about me. Social media is just conditioning us to keep reacting to one another and it doesn't have to be this way.

I haven't made too many comments on HN cause this is the kind of reaction I get all the time. If you are interested here's my fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125904

Yes. Misguided ignorant people are surrounded by misguided ignorant people. If they are supplied bad info on youtube or on a social network, there is no corrective mechanism. It's not complicated to understand. You don't have to believe me the consequences will just keep piling up.

You mean anyone whom you have interacted with can. If you visit India, I can introduce you to people who spend many hours a day on YouTube without knowing how to read. It's not complicated to imagine if you have been around kids. Kids these days do all kinds of things with devices before they have learnt to read or write. The big difference here being there is no parental figure keeping an eye on the kids and what they are consuming.

Most of the underdeveloped world can't and don't get on twitter and make a noise about things they are seeing on YouTube that they might find offensive. The reactions and consequences only once in a while get into the press. I am quite sure there is serious social damage happening on a scale much larger than anyone will admit, as most of these people have no access to help or advice of any form.

What has changed is speed and scale.

If you want to understand what the implications are you need to spend time not with technologists but with ecologists. In nature there is a reason the apex predator doesn't evolve predatory advantages at a faster rate than its prey evolves defensive advantages. These rates grow or shrink in lockstep depending on resource availability. If they don't the ecosystem collapses.

Visit a good library. There are really great ones with lovely reading rooms still all over the place. Totally under used and under appreciated imho.

You could call it version 1.0 of the system Neo uses to learn everything about everything in the Matrix :)

I don't think NLP is necessary though.

If you take a look at the stackoverflow data dump sooner or later every possible variation of a question for a particular answer is going to get asked. Ofcourse there are always new topics that haven't been covered but this is a minuscule portion of the entire data set. I think it's a safe bet looking at Q&A happening on sites like Quora\Reddit etc in a couple years the chances that someone is going come up with a question that no one has asked before is going to be very low.

Wikipedia is missing 2 important pieces.

1. Linkage between all these questions and the content on the site. Currently Google provides this link.

2. A system to communicate to the reader what skill level /pre-reqs they need to fully appreciate/understand the content they are looking at. The UI for such a system already exists in most games.

Once these pieces are in place you are ready to create a very useful Anki deck on anything.

What most people don't realize is the entire mass of human knowledge given the size of most wiki/q&a site dump is about 100-150 GB. Throw in all the edu video content being produced on Khan Academy, NPTEL etc and you get to a 1-2TB. This isn't a big amount of data. All it needs is a learning system built on top of it for it all to be put to good use.

Well Zuckerberg in his infinite wisdom is trying to tell you to be a little more like Kim Kardashian or Trump.

It's like the Engineering teams at Google and Facebook have never heard of Microsoft or Sun or Adobe. There are so many lessons (learnt the hard way) in the evolution of .NET, Java and Flash that these guys seem to be completely oblivious too.

Google, Facebook devs please go spend some time with the language and platform greybeards at Microsoft.

EDIT: Feels like Software Engineering needs a set of Software History textbooks to keep reminding us of what has already been built.

My comment is not about eliminating the feedback loop. It's about delaying gratification.

This is a core feature of any educational system that has arisen across any culture anywhere in the world. Instant gratification does the opposite. This link might help in understanding the point I am trying to make - https://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/conversatio...

The fix is easy.

The root cause is the like/retweet/upvote/view count and the instant gratification it produces.

The social networks like FB/Twitter/Youtube benefit greatly from all their users being addicted to these counts. They know this. Its like a drug they peddle that produces a false high.

So whats the fix?

Rather than giving their users instant feedback and gratification if they just delay it for a bit or change the signaling(ie replace the numbers with color gradients,number less charts etc), most of unintended consequences we see of social networks (like fake news, celeb-worship, attention harvesting, mob rule, re-enforcing echo chambers of hate/rascism etc) will not disappear but get more controllable.

Expecting Google and Facebook to do this by themselves is like expecting Wall Street to self regulate and the NSA to come out with a road map to ending secret data collection. Its not going to happen.

They have to be strong armed, forced and publicly shamed into it. And that is going to happen sooner or later whether they like it or not. Because the consequences are pilling up.

People have been conditioned now for a decade to attach value to their like/retweet/view/karma counts.

It's the core piece of the architecture producing the instant gratification high that everyone is addicted too.

It really is the biggest factor that forces centralization of our social networks. Any decentralization scheme that produces value needs to address it. Most that get proposed don't.

I don't know about corporations having all this wrapped up. There is a lot of pressure on them since 2008 plus one leak after another - Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama, Switzerland etc hasn't made it easy to be tax haven. If they had "won the war" we wouldn't be discussing it here.

people will admit they don't know something

Trump is working hard on changing that misconception.

It's a long list. Google Paul Kennedy.

Rather than heads rolling what will happen is doubling or tripling of budget requests to safeguard the crown jewels, setting up new battalions of watchmen to watch the watchmen and so on.

History tells us as these budgets grow uncontrollably sooner or later the empire runs out of cash to pay the soldier.

Stone degrades faster than bone?

Stone tools have been found that are 2-3 million years old - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool

What goes through the minds of the people at the Pentagon who release such info? Do they see this as some achievement?

The craziest story to me is the building of the Colditz Cock - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colditz_Cock

I mostly use it for offline stackoverflow. Open ended offline wiki journeys have happened but I personally think much less. When online there are many more triggers to send one off on these random walks.

For devs who want to go offline for a bit I recommend Zeal (offline docs) + kiwix (Offline Wikipedia app that also parses stackexchange/stackoverflow dumps) Check their github page.

The entire stackoverflow dump is about 10 Gig.

Centaur chess has been a thing since Deep Blue. I think the problem their future of ai stuff is having is most orgs have no idea which of their zillion problems actually needs this tech. Hopefully this will raise more awareness.

Agree. I think of cancer as the consequences of "bugs in our code". Saying we are going to cure cancer is on par with saying we are going to produce bug free software. That said having spent time around cancer hospitals, things have vastly improved over the last decade or so not just in survival rates, but quality of life post treatment.

As an Indian all I can say is don't even bother addressing western delusions about themselves. Time will be the judge on the quality of innovation a culture built on celebrity worship, instant gratification and mindless consumption can produce.

Another fascinating read is Talking Hands by Margalit Fox about an Arab village in Israel where the deaf are a disproportionate part of the population. A sign language emerged that within a couple generations every hearing member of the village knew.

The solution has been known for a long time. Dismantle the military industrial complex.

Engineers overengineering things when they have no new ideas. That's the entire convergence story

One of the first industries to see automation happen was the textile industry with the invention of the punch card and eventually the power loom.

A hundred fifty years later the (manual) handloom textile industry is still the second largest source of employment in Rural India after agriculture.

So why has automation of the loom not displaced all these weavers? There are many factors and one of the big ones is - automation isn't magic. It doesn't self-fix flaws. It doesn't upgrade itself. Master weavers can.