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tgb29

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Facebook Dating 7 years ago

When I was in high school, back before the news feed, Facebook was the best way to flirt! Go to someone’s page and post a comment — it was was so casual. Too bad Facebook killed it when they started broadcasting everything you post.

Paypal has taken thousands of dollars from me and won't let me access my account with a pre-paid phone. It's hard, but avoid them if you can. I inherently distrust Facebook's Libra project because of Paypal's involvement.

It's very possible this initiative will be low impact. Most people don't care about currency -- they just want to spend their money in the terms they're used to.

My one concern: if the libra's value is based on a basket of assets, will US users still see the value in terms of USD? Will French users see their value in Euro? Will the value of my USD change based on the basket of securities backing libra?

I just want an easy solution to send money cross borders. Someone in Mexico right now owes me $80 and there's no easy way to do this. If she could send it to me through WhatsApp with a near zero fee I'd see the value in libra.

Beyond Meat S-1 7 years ago

So great to see all these recent IPOs coming from tech investments and innovation. California is making the Stock Market for everyone much stronger.

So who's responsible for the poor execution of the military initiative in Iraq? Was it predetermined to be a failure or could there have been a more successful outcome?

Predicting events is one thing, but there are certainly better ways to predict the results of policies.

By 2010, the administration I wrote this memo for would totally squander America's opportunity to lead the free world. Not learning from the US-MX war of 1840s or the Vietnam war of 1960s, we embarked on a costly and disastrous military initiative in Iraq. We destroyed privacy with the Patriot Act and crashed the global economy in 2008.

I've been in SF for 6 months and it's the best city I've ever lived in. Walking is one of my favorite activities and I can get everywhere by foot. A bus line on every street or $5 Lyft if I need to move quicker. The weather is amazing. There's a tech-first culture with hundreds of free events everyday.

I doubt you've had a chance to explore the city district-by-district if you think it's soulless.

There are many homeless people but they don't bother anyone and they're a product of the city's open culture.

There is no court system in China to handle dispute resolution —- at least not like what exists in the US. I asked a businessman in China about dispute resolution recently, and he said it’s inconsistent and every province does it differently. There is a reason why in China many of the biggest businesses are located near where the government is located.

IBM, Microsoft, and AWS each have private Blockchain solutions that can be launched in under an hour. It’s not easy to build your own network, and it might not have a native currency, but I’ll use one of these solutions if the business case requires privacy and permission controls. Public Ethereum is an amazing invention for many reasons, but asking users to pay for their transactions is a tough sell from a UX perspective.

Investing in crypto currencies because you believe in blockchain technology doesn’t make sense. Any good use case I’ve thought of doesn’t require public chain.

So why invest in a specific crypto? How is Bitcoin fundamentally more valuable than Ethereum? How are either fundamentally more valuable than EOS? As a currency or store or value, each have essentially the same properties. Leaks in the ecosystem, like scam ICO and products like Tether only siphon money from the market. At least gold or silver doesn’t have this problem.

I don't have a good answer, but if I were to restart the internal dialogue now, it would be: if I were to die tomorrow, would I be ok with this? I remind myself that every human is statistically insignificant, meaning, I could achieve the highest success and still be forgotten within a few years, decades, or centuries later: life has been around for billions of years, humans for a couple hundred thousand (still debatable). In short, my purpose could end tomorrow, or I can fulfill my purpose and never get recognized for it. If this is the case, why set goals and be ambitious?

What's been motivating me recently is the thought of all the people who ever cared about me. Would making all these people proud when I achieve my goals be enough to push me further?

I haven't figured out the personal part, but learning more about the potential of computers has been inspiring. To be able to understand and contribute to their advancement has made me excited.

Our circumstances are different, but I'm going through a similar phase, and the last few weeks I've thought mostly on the idea of self-motivation. I'm asking myself what does this really mean and what makes it sustainable? Seeing that you're doing this too reassures me, and it shows me that you've also identified the issue.

The question I'm asking today is: how do I define my purpose in life?

It may be that your true goals in life are different than the ones you set when you were 20. You're not a stupid idiot by any means, and it seems like if wanted to coast the rest of your life you're setup to do so. Be proud of getting to this point because most never will. But if you're looking for deeper fulfillment, you'll need to either set new goals or redefine the purpose for the next phase of your life.

My hypothesis is that when I resolve my purpose, I'll have stronger incentives for self-motivation.

Defining purpose is hard and it's interwoven with your world view, thoughts on religion, death, etc., but you have to start somewhere.

I still haven't found a good talk or essay about how exactly 'AI' will change anything. The only obvious difference is shifts in wealth.

The Google Duplex appears to be a great breakthrough. But what happens if it's sold and deployed? More wealth to an already wealthy Google. Low income earners who can barely make it as a receptionist will be out of work. In the restaurant example, owners cut costs and possibly earn more -- which is great for these types of operators. But as someone who wants to schedule an appointment, my life doesn't change.

Google also just released auto complete and response emails. How does something like this change my life?

Any drastic change in AI is abstract and hypothetical, based more in science fiction than reality. In the 1940s, with advances in Nuclear research, it was thought that nuclear power for energy would change the world. 70 years later, we're still using over 80% fossil fuels. Not a great example, but I'll hold this line about 'AI' until I'm convinced otherwise.

[dead] 8 years ago

I saw the Paypal CEO give Rutgers commencement today. He talked about how in 10-15 years the world will be entirely different because of AI and computers with trillions of transistors. He didn't mention how it would be different though.

I struggle to see how life could really be so different. I haven't read of any concrete examples of how faster computers will lead to a singularity. Wealth will change hands and economic inequality will continue to increase, but that's about it. Maybe it'll be different if research in genetics, nanotech, and energy are driven by advanced algorithms. There's still a lot we don't know about the human brain.