valas

You complain that the bar keeps getting raised. Is there some good write up by someone who believes AGI is possible and how it might look like? I.e. what is your definition of the bar where you will say 'now, this is AGI'?

I can confirm that I keep seeing Economist's predictions re China debt not pan out, though I started paying attention only ~10 years ago.

Do you have any books to recommend on China's financial system to help give perspective alternative to western default take?

$3.6B is at peak valuation. The actual contributions maybe much lower?

"read some Marx"... do you have some book in mind? Perhaps some good summary? I hear Capital is hard to parse.

So far my experience in trying to distill Marx is that he did reasonable assessment of the state of affairs at the time (i.e. identifying main classes in society of 1800s), but then his prescriptions of what to do (socialize means of production) did not work out anywhere. Maybe I'm reading wrong books.

How do you invest in gold?

I agree that the number of games compared to established platforms is small.

But what can you expect? This is a new entrant, all the new platforms faced similar issues. Some overcome it, some didn't, we'll see how it goes here. For what I know, Google already invested a lot and has deep pockets.

The article does not support the title. The facts also do not support the article.

Stadia launched with 3 indie games, one of them exclusive. In just the last week they added 3 more indie-ish games (Spitlings and 2 titles from SteamWorld). They also announced at least 4 more indie-ish titles to land soon (Lost Words, 2 more SteamWorld titles, and Stacks On Stacks). So how can one claim that indie developers are not porting games to Stadia? At least some clearly do.

Speaking of Business Insider - in my personal opinion, they are a click factory. They'll write anything that drives clicks, just look at their landing page. "Stadia is DoA" drives clicks and Business Insider wrote quite a few articles to that extent. They know how to run business.

Speaking of this specific article: if devs and 'executives' believe Google is not serious about Stadia, why no-one agreed to speak on record? Is it possible that that these contacts actually think there is a path forward for Stadia and they don't want to burn bridges? Or maybe these industry contacts are imaginary?

Disclaimer: happy Stadia user, playing indie games on it and confused when someone says that indies are not porting games to Stadia.

Looking at the overflowing hospitals in Wuhan, I'm preparing for the possibility of being mildly sick at home and not being able to get a bed in the hospital. The best hope is then that somehow we reduce chance of cross-infection inside the family. For that I got:

- Oxygen/HR meter ($15 @ Amazon) to monitor when oxygenation drops real low so that we know we have to get to ER and staying at home is suicidal.

- Some medical gloves, some masks (not hoarding - I think we have ~50 cheap masks from the time Bay Area was full of smoke).

- A ton of tissues and toilet paper.

- UV lamps to disinfect rooms.

- Basic staple foods to last for quite a while.

It's quite likely I won't be able to prevent cross-infection, but at least I've tried.

Transparency is good and all, but there is anther way. In most advanced economies professional bureaucracy figures out the costs. Ordinary folks focus on getting healthy, not on costs.

Perhaps you are right --- Amazon would not be punished in this way.

But likely you are right for different reasons than you think?

US government can put US executives in jail. I'm sure it would put them in jail. You have to remember what happened here: ZTE was caught, paid penalty and promised to be nice, then they reneged on their promise, lied about it, and got caught again.

Feds in fact just recently put VW executive in jail for even lesser offense. US government has no such jail-time leverage with Chinese companies, there is no extradition agreement, so the only leverage US has, it used.

"it would be as slow as conventional rail" - citation?

Even Reason Foundation (which is as biased as it gets - it's funded by Koch brothers and ideological critic of almost any government investment) claim SF to LA times will be 3:30 to 4:40, which is faster than any train today.

Is it really more environmentally 'sustainable' to live in a van than in an apartment in a dense city? Don't we get economies of scale in cities?

It's quite possible the security firm was asked to audit their systems, but not asked (or paid) to fix them.

What do mean by 'loosing control of their business ... to their employees'?

Disclaimer: I worked on this technology.

I agree, article could be improved.

In a nutshell, Espresso system allows (logically) centralized, fine-grained control of how bits leave Google's network. Specifically, each server has a tailored (for that server) routing table that allows the server to select a specific port on a specific peering router for a given packet to exit to. The routing tables are updated very often and fast (e.g. to remove references to links that went down).

This makes it very easy to move bits around. You want to shift 42.2% of link X traffic to link Y? Just update some routing tables in end hosts. It also allows for different applications to the same destination to use different exit links (e.g. low latency - exit somewhere close, high bandwidth - exit where we have bandwidth). Bonus benefit: router can be simpler, it doesn't need to do any routing anymore, it just needs to follow instructions on each packet on which port to forward the packet to.

Does it make it more clear? Ask me anything.

Google's response: https://www.blog.google/topics/public-policy/responding-camp...

Bigger picture is that agents conventionally get 6%, which is obnoxious in the Internet age. Sure 1% maybe is not much, but anything that helps to squeeze that industry is great. No?

Try Google search for "TPP impact study". There are quite a few reputable studies done. According to [0], the impact to the US would be small and positive when compared to baseline no-TPP scenario (e.g. 0.07% employment gain, 0.23% real income gain, 0.15% higher GDP, etc).

[0] https://www.usitc.gov/press_room/news_release/2016/er0518ll5...

Many are upset about proposed dispute resolution regime ('suing'), but is it much different from how WTO works? AFAIK in WTO countries sue other countries on behalf of their corporations [0]. BTW, your first citation is an opinion piece by Elizabeth Warren who is far from impartial in this debate.

[0] https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_by_countr...

Was that Apple vulnerability actively exploited in the wild during the delay?

Why rumors are "a huge problem" in China?

Is it because common folk is too easy to fool? If so, wouldn't April's fools day improve critical thinking?

What sort of transparency would satisfy you in this case?

On which specific part?

E.g. networking research has ton of these kind of papers: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2006/estan06achieving...

They never go beyond modeling and simulation because, if you read such works, you can see that it is extremely hard to adopt such schemes.

Even between ISPs and content providers they endup with just 2-3 major pricing Tiers, because the added benefit if accounting more tiers is diminishing: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2011/papers/sigcomm/p...

Someone: can you explain why Swiss National Bank could not sustain keeping the value if Frank low against Euro? It seems like the only thing they need to do is to purchase more Euros with Francs they print, right?

I usually see the opposite, where the country, like Russia for example, is unable to keep its currency high, because they don't have enough foreign currency reserves to buy their own national currency.

That would not work. Most users don't care/don't know about about QoS, nor they want to learn. There was/is a ton of research on user-driven QoS, micro-payments, per-flow reservations, etc. etc. The result: there is no nice or simple scheme to a) expose QoS knobs to users b) align incentives of ISPS/ContentProviders/Users for micropayments, c) affordable equipment that can do per-user crediting across the Internet.

Yea, not sure why you are getting downvoted. Could anyone comment why downvotes? All sounds like reasonable advice (except that, of course, numbers like 85/15% is a bit handwavy, but I don't think author meant them to be precise).

Funny how UFO incidents diminished with advent of cellphone video/photo recording technology.

How do you define a "lie"?

It is full of misinformation and omission of fact which then creates a false narrative. There are a few options then:

a) Assange is omitting important facts intentionally (which I don't think is the case). In this case you can call this misinformation a "lie".

b) Assange truly believes in the narrative and honestly thinks the important facts are not that important. In this case, well, he is a bit of a lunatic...

Some examples of omission/misinformation:

1. DARPA funding. He omitted that perhaps 30-50% of all PhD students in one or another way get DARPA funding.

2. "$2M contract with NSA in 2003". He omitted that Google was selling it's "Search Appliance" left and right in 2003 and NSA was just a small fish.

3. "Caught redhanded with handing petabytes of data... via PRISM". He forgot to mention that Google was bound by law to comply with NSL and warrants and was one of the first ones among all the companies to push for more transparency.

4. "Google Maps are shopped to Pentagon". He forgot to mention that Google sells access to maps to everyone and Pentagon is just a small fish.

5. When talking about lobbying, he stops explaining why Google lobbies. It doesn't lobby for more contracts, like Lockheed, it lobbies for less regulation in search ;-)

I could go on.

Overall, I would say, the Lockheed-Google analogy is deeply flawed. Just follow the money. Google does not care for government contracts - virtually all of it's revenue is from ads. The key asset for Google is user trust, which as you can see, is very hard to retain. If user trust is lost, Google is toast. Why would it then have any incentive to bed with the government?

Disclosure: I work for Google. I sit next to security folks (not physical security, mind you). Everyone I know here is super super pissed about Keyscore, wiretaps, NSL, etc.

The original story tries to implicate Google in opening their servers for "full take" data feed.

XKeyscore was a program to analyse data siphoned from wiretaps. This is what caused that infamous ppt slide "SSL Removed Here ;-)" which, among other reasons, caused Google to start encrypting all of the inter-data center links.

Google and Facebook long ago stopped asking (or at least now they discourage their interviewers from asking) puzzle-like questions in their SWE interviews.