wh0knows

Curious if you have any links about the rapid progression of robotics (as someone who is not educated on the topic).

It was my feeling with robotics that the more challenging aspect will be making them economically viable rather than simply the challenge of the task itself.

Monorepo != all devs having merge permissions to all directories. Every single large monorepo company will have granular permissions on who can approve PRs into which directories based on team ownership. This is orthogonal to monorepo vs polyrepo.

I don’t think we have a great track record at fully understanding these complex biological systems well enough to engineer life.

The issue is that algorithms are like a casino for your time.

We all know that gambling addicts exist and how destructive it is to their lives, the casino exploits behaviors and gets all their money. As a result people know casinos are dangerous, reasonable people avoid them, are warned about them, and the government forces regulation to reduce their ability to exploit vulnerable people.

Imagine if none of these controls existed and nobody talked about or generally knew that casinos were dangerous. Imagine if the casinos were 100x better at exploiting you and you were forced to walk through a casino every time you leave your house. You’d get a lot more people having their lives destroyed.

So what this video tries to do is important, naming the term, “algorithmic complacency”, allows it to be recognized, discussed, and actively kept in check by users. Ideally regulated by the government as well, just like casinos.

The casino also provides a service, entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with a reasonable person attending, spending some money and being entertained. But we as a society recognize that a company exploiting behaviors to get all of a person’s money, is bad, and try to limit that negative outcome even though we still allow casinos to exist.

Time, attention, and focus is so abstract people don’t even realize they’re spending it, or how modified their behavior has become because of the algorithm’s exploitation. As a result we let companies who are 100x better at manipulation than casinos operate without so much as mentioning they’re doing it, and steal increasing amounts of a user’s time.

Crowdsourced reviews often provide objective information that is not offered by the restaurant. Sometimes the omission is unintentional, but more importantly, independent reviews will write negative things that a restaurant never would. A restaurant won’t tell you there’s cockroaches running across the floor, or that it takes 30 minutes after being seated to place a drink order.

It is interesting from a space-faring species perspective. By the time we can embark to other planets/asteroids our biology might require us to lug around significantly more technology just to survive.

Citymapper shows this in their transit directions. They tell you the best part of the train to get on and the best subway entrance/exit.

I think it’s not entirely accurate to say that we “learn” to walk from a zero state. It’s clear that our DNA has embedded knowledge of how to walk and it develops our body appropriately. Our brains might also have preconditioning to make learning to walk much easier.

Music or sports are more interesting to investigate (in my opinion) since those specific actions won’t be preprogrammed and must be learned independently.

The same way we build abstractions for language in order to perform “telepathy” it seems like for music or sports we build body-specific abstractions. They work similar to words within our own brain but are not something easily communicated since they’re not tied to any language, it’s just a feeling.

I think it’s an interesting point that quite often the best athletes or musicians are terrible coaches. They probably have a much more innate internal language for their body that cannot be communicated easily. Partially, I think, that their body is more different than others which helps them be exceptional. Or that weaker athletes or musicians need to focus much more on lessons from others, so their body language gets tied much closer to human language and that makes it much easier for them to then communicate the lessons they learn to others.

This neglects the first reason listed in the article for why you would use a lock.

Efficiency: Taking a lock saves you from unnecessarily doing the same work twice (e.g. some expensive computation). If the lock fails and two nodes end up doing the same piece of work, the result is a minor increase in cost (you end up paying 5 cents more to AWS than you otherwise would have) or a minor inconvenience (e.g. a user ends up getting the same email notification twice).

I think multiple nodes doing the same work is actually much worse than what’s listed, as it would inhibit you from having any kind of scalable distributed processing.

The copters can fly into a net suspended from the airship, rather than needing to gain all the altitude themselves.

This is pure speculation, but is it possible that Android never would have been successful (or as successful) if they did not bow to the carriers? By taking carrier-friendly positions they built a symbiotic relationship that resulted in the carriers being happy to promote their phones.

I don’t believe that necessity will dictate our ability to create these technologies, the challenges are significant. Capitalism adjusting for reduced supply and greater demand by increasing pay is something more plausible as it has proven to work constantly.

I don’t think we’re anywhere near the level of general robotics and intelligence that would obsolete human labor. None of the most labor intensive industries have been able to fully automate, agriculture, mining, construction, healthcare, none are close to taking humans out of the loop. Not only does the technology need to exist, it needs to be cheaper to develop and operate than the low income human it replaces.

An anecdote does not prove that RealPage doesn’t have a greater impact in other markets… That’s just not how logic works. You also fail to consider that rents may have fallen further if RealPage was not in use.

This definitely requires some citations. There is no evidence that you are presenting that supports the 2-5% claim. I don’t think you are fully understanding the impact of price collusion or the suit presented here. The DOJ very clearly thinks this is anticompetitive.

Palantir runs on the customer’s own cloud, or a major cloud provider of the customer’s choosing in the region of their choosing. There’s no data aggregation/sharing across customers, it works similar to AWS.

Inputs to standard libraries will obviously never NPE if you pass in a non-null value. For outputs, a lot of standard collection .get() calls are unnecessary when you’re working with small collections or Optionals, where you simply use stream, filter, ifPresent.

Or simply wrap the return with Optional.ofNullable, checkstyle will not accept it if you don’t.

Usually you’re using a lot of Optional and Streams, so the collection method returns null inside a .map() and you don’t need to think about it. To be clear, it is handled by the checkstyle rules at compile time, so you won’t accidentally forget.

If you properly handle not returning/using nulls in your checkstyle rules and don’t allow nulls to be deserialized anywhere (forcing the use of Optional), then you can pretty much eliminate NPE.

I can’t remember the last time I encountered one by using the proper compile time checks. It does need to be enforced organization-wide, and not partially with annotations, but if you can make that change then you can code in Java without the mental overhead of null.

If you have insufficient material how can you capture the king? Checkmate is by definition one move before forced capture of the king, the game doesn’t change by making it end one move later.

Given domains are not encrypted I’m not sure this holds true. Attackers can already target financial websites, messaging websites, etc…

My primary mechanism to load books on my Kindle is via emailing ePubs, granted, I'm probably in the minority of users but I couldn't ask for an easier workflow.

Aren’t these taxations generally regressive given poor people spend ~100% of their income and ultra rich people spend <1%. So you’re taxing the poor person on all of their money but barely taxing the rich person.

Yes, I mean the amount that the cost is inflated by is much greater than 4%.

Profit can be manipulated. Creating a giant bureaucracy of overpaid administrators and middlemen can siphon off any amount of money while declaring no profit.

The fare isn’t calculated on the spot though, a base amount is authorized and then only charged later. Not that the plug needs to figure that out immediately but it’s worth noting.

This is a nonsensical argument, the CBP doesn’t know if they will be sold illegally, the same way they don’t know that a company importing corn syrup AND honey is actually going to mix them and sell a counterfeit product. A bottle of corn syrup and a bottle of honey are both legal products, a third-party screen with a hidden non-advertised genuine component is also legal, it’s only afterwards that an illegal product could be made.

It’s impossible for the CBP to know if illegal activity will occur, but you are advocating seizure without due process based on the possibility of a crime.

I think it’s massively problematic that a few select mega corporations with deep pockets get to enforce what products are allowed to be brought into the US with no due process. CBP should train to learn what products to seize, but that training shouldn’t be taught by a self-interested corporation. It increases the barrier to entry of new competitors as you must bribe the CBP to have your trademarks enforced, and the CBP ends up with an unfair focus on one company’s products.

Apple conveniently takes the public stance of user protection, but their real position is that they want to be the only ones who can collect and use their users data.

Speaking as a Canadian who moved to the US for work, I think a huge reason is that if you’re an ambitious Canadian it’s a lot easier to move to the US than trying to make it in Canada.

I can’t speak to the other external factors, but I think brain drain to the US is quite significant.