RickHull

Note, this is from the creator of Ruby's Rack https://github.com/rack/rack

Which section of the essay reads "only I and my buddies should run Athens"?

Fair enough, but there is a structure and pattern to independent thinking relative to the universe of things we care about. By analogy, consider John Boyd's OODA loop. He broke down goal-seeking behavior into a 4 part loop: Observe Orient Decide Act.

Now, some numps decided that they would then teach people to be better thinkers by having them step through this loop deliberately. i.e. We will teach you to reach your goals but first you must Observe. Next Orient, blah blah blah. This is not what John Boyd was teaching. Everyone does the OODA loop naturally. But if you break down goal-directed behavior into the OODA loop, as an analysis tool, you can find the techniques that are particularly effective versus those that aren't working very well. And if you can find things that speed up an OODA loop, or compromise your opponent's OODA loop, you can have outsized success with an otherwise "dull tactic".

PG's essay is kind of like that. He's saying: here's how I think about independent thinking, how to recognize it, where it works, and where it doesn't. It's mostly descriptive and analytical, but nuggets of prescription are sprinkled in there as well. It's written for himself, in that it helps him organize his own thoughts, but primarily it is written for the benefit of his audience. It will glance off people uninterested in accepting its ideas but benefit those are similar to him in important ways. He's not "telling them how to think independently" but helping them be more effective in the use of that tool.

Ha, you jest, but you bring up a subtle point. There are degrees and dimensions of similarity. For example, two people who uphold a principle of freedom of speech may nonetheless completely disagree on any particular issue. But they are very similar in an important way.

Do you value independent thinking? If so, what part of the article did you most disagree with?

For those railing against this essay, who feel that PG is fluffing himself up and patting himself on the back like a nerdy middleschooler -- you've missed the big point, badly. PG writes unapologetically, directly, and simply, and this may pattern match to a naive middleschooler, but you are letting your base instincts cover up the fact that PG is wise, has earned his stripes, and is sharing his wisdom, unapologetically, directly, and simply.

He knows exactly the kind of backlash he will receive and is prompting you for it intentionally. He's not writing for you or to you, and he cares not a whit what you think.

He's writing to and for people like him, trying to help them put words and clear thought to vague understandings and apprehensions they've been wrestling with.

He's not self-aggrandizing but student-aggrandizing, as the headmaster of a school of thought that he values deeply. If you hate the headmaster or his style or the school of thought, that's wonderful, but it's not at all relevant to his aims. I hope this sheds some light on the bigger picture for those unaware.

We built this city on TensorFlow!

> except the narrowest of uses like decryption, compression

These seem like broad use cases to me. Also consider ETL and database applications. Time series, finance, machine learning, search engines. It seems like the primary benefit is in terms of latency and minimizing data bussed to the main CPU.

Title has a typo: What's so exciting about Postgres

Yes, it looks like the author confused Charles' last name with that of Aaron Swartz who is also mentioned. RIP The Internet's Own Boy

This feature doesn't seem live in my web browser. Iceland still looks like the old version.

If they have deprived you of your discovery, then theft. If you retain your discovery, then copyright or possibly patent law.

Actually, the US is probably the best country for COVID-19 treatment due to the number of ventilators per capita. 52 ventilators per 100k residents. Italy has only 5 per 100k. Not sure what Norway has.

https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/predicting-america...

Actually, the website does cover this in the '''Q&A''' section:

> What is a chosen-prefix collision?

> A classical collision (or identical-prefix collision) for a hash function H is simply two messages M and M’ that lead to the same hash output: H(M) = H(M’). Even though this security notion is fundamental in cryptography, exploiting a classical collision for attacks in practice is difficult.

> A chosen-prefix collision is a more constrained (and much more difficult to obtain) type of collision, where two message prefixes P and P’ are first given as challenge to the adversary, and his goal is then to compute two messages M and M’ such that H(P || M) = H(P’ || M’), where || denotes concatenation.

> With such an ability, the attacker can obtain a collision even though prefixes can be chosen arbitrarily (and thus potentially contain some meaningful information). This is particularly impactful when the hash function is used in a digital signature scheme, one of the most common usage of a hash function.

> You can't just say production is a better use of resources than consumption

We're not talking about resources though -- capital is "the means of production". It's not the final good which is consumed. Capital, in the case of an Iowa corn farm, is neither the corn itself nor a choice about how to distribute the corn. Capital would be the land underlying the farm, the "seed corn", the farming implements, and the funding (liquid capital, e.g. money, credit, debt) for the operation. The farm employees and owners are ostensibly human capital but are usually considered separate from "capital" in general.

One way to allocate this capital is Zimbabwe or South Africa style, which says give it to the needy. Or Venezuela style which says give it to the public (i.e. government). Again, the question of capital allocation is distinct from the question of consumption good allocation, though the answers tend to be highly correlated.

> The real question is what's the best trade-off between expanding productive capacity, and producing consumer goods?

In general, expanding productive capacity results in producing more consumer goods. Any "lag" concerns are trivial, which would be the only tradeoff here. The best thing for people lacking in consumer goods is to produce more goods by expanding productive capacity. What's the real alternative? How would you propose to allocate capital towards people in poverty?

When we get to free nanoreplicators, that will be great in terms of raising living standards for everyone, and this entirely consistent with capital theory, particularly in terms of maximizing consumer welfare. It will be hard to "make a living" as a producer in such an economy, but no one needs to "make a living" beyond pushing the button on their nanoreplicator.

Everyone consumes. It's the basis of the economy. The producers produce that which is consumed. The best thing for consumers is for producers to produce more goods at lower cost.

If one of those goods is a bicycle, then the highest use might be for a nominal consumer to use it to kickstart a delivery service and join the ranks of net producers. The revenue generated by his service, or credit extended on the expectation of future revenue, can allow him to outbid a pure consumer from purchasing the bicycle as a leisure device, leisure being a lower use than that of delivery.

Rationally can be understood to mean something like:

* Put goods to their highest use

* Allocate capital to those who can produce more rather than consume it

In general, nothing is given to anyone. Increasing capital (i.e. by a single individual or within a single firm) is quite difficult and getting moreso every day. If 1% of the population is a super-producer, 9% are regular producers, and 90% are largely consumers, then the consumers are best off when the 10% producers have most of the capital. Allocating capital to consumers starts fun and ends poorly.

Those surprised tend to measure success by intent rather than consequences.

Evil is an interesting choice of words to mean not wrong and impressive...

Not even this is sufficient any more. They now have a "verbatim" search, but I think even then some terms can be ignored -- terms which are not conventional "stopwords" like the.

> That’s how cartels get power in the first place, but once they’re there, they’re in the business of preserving revenue streams and territory and thus power.

An anarchocapitalist would note that this is straight out of the statist playbook. What distinguishes cartels from roving bandits that pivot to stationary? It's hard to lay the blame for this on capitalism per se.

Can you elaborate? Say Alice and Bob are market makers. They are colluding on some target price, say $10k. What's the spread, how does the trading proceed, and what is the effect on fairness and the public?

> My outrage isn't directed at your moral failings,which are unfortunately all too common, but at your intellectual failures.

Would you care to enumerate the moral failings of mine which you have identified? Or is this just an indiscriminate attack?

> You are misrepresenting the status quo when you're insinuating that some "establishment" conspiracy will be suppressing the usefulness of violating fundamental rights, such as assumption of innocence, in their quest to defend "political correctness".

I have made no such statements nor insinuations. There is no conspiracy. If this is the only such intellectual failure of mine which you have (mis)identified, then I suggest you recalibrate your moral outrage meter and try a less scattershot approach to fighting ideas and messengers which make you uncomfortable.

As to the rest of your statements, I think I agree with them mostly. We should not violate fundamental rights including the presumption of innocence particularly. I agree with prohibitions on torture on moral grounds and not simply consequential grounds.

I have not missed the essential message of the Enlightenment and in fact uphold such ideals as a core part of my identity. So in summary, I reiterate my concern that your outrage is indiscriminate and scattershot, and you have misunderstood my position and statements.

I don't think jerf is saying that the increased prevalence of witch hunts is an argument levied against the internet. I'm pretty sure jerf is an enthusiastic supporter of the internet. Nonetheless, the increased prevalence of witch hunts which is enabled by the internet is lamentable and worth addressing.

Really? That just seems like a dispassionate accounting of facts. There are such things as political correctness and establishment dogma, and these things constrain large scale social programs. I don't see the hysteria or moral outrage as such.

> If you're cheering for guilt by association to make a comeback just because the evil establishment thinks it's a bad idea, I'm at a loss of words.

I'm not cheering for anything. I'm pointing out that machines may have a distasteful view of the world and that this will be a stumbling block for using them effectively.

> Any other fundamental freedoms you'd like to abolish because smart people happened to think they are good ideas? Presumption of innocence? Habeas corpus? The 5th amendment? Suffrage?

I'd appreciate it if you could tone down the hysterical moral outrage, particularly when aimed in my direction.

There will be a big hurdle of political correctness when the machine spits out answers that don't conform to establishment dogma -- e.g. https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/02/machine-learning-and-human...

Chris Stucchio writes about this in depth: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_...

Yeah -- "inescapably"? Tyler Cowen would call this mood affiliation.

Um, so why should Facebook be baked into the ROM?

I've been using https://hakiri.io/ for this on my ruby github projects[1].

[1] https://github.com/rickhull?tab=repositories&type=source&lan...

Because it explains the behavior of the security guards, presuming they didn't "get the memo" about a small group of people with fake-looking badges that are actually legitimate.