I’d like to see a literate programming version of GitHub where the community standardizes around an eminently-readable Markdown-like syntax. srcweave [1] looks like a great start.
566 karma · joined June 1, 2013
The plugin’s kaleidoscopic colour functionality visually incentivizes writing in list format constantly. The colours are enjoyable to look at, and you get more of them on your screen each time you indent a list item.
which
- makes you organize your thoughts differently
- because
- the more colour, the better
- e.g.
- you’ll want to write like this
> For four years, Wood, who has a PhD in immunology, served as the executive director of global discovery for Pfizer Animal Health. (His division was later spun off into Zoetis, today the largest animal health company in the world.) One of his responsibilities was to oversee production of vaccines, which can involve infecting living cells with weakened virus strains and inducing those cells to multiply inside large bioreactors. In addition to yielding large quantities of vaccine-grade viruses, this approach also creates significant amounts of animal cell slurry, similar to the product next-generation protein startups want to process further into meat. Wood knew the process to be extremely technical, resource-intensive, and expensive. He didn’t understand how costly biomanufacturing techniques could ever be used to produce cheap, abundant human food.
> ...
> Wood couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In his view, GFI’s TEA report did little to justify increased public investment. He found it to be an outlandish document, one that trafficked more in wishful thinking than in science. He was so incensed that he hired a former Pfizer colleague, Huw Hughes, to analyze GFI’s analysis. Today, Hughes is a private consultant who helps biomanufacturers design and project costs for their production facilities; he’s worked on six sites devoted to cell culture at scale. Hughes concluded that GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.
> ...
> “After a while, you just think: Am I going crazy? Or do these people have some secret sauce that I’ve never heard of?” Wood said. “And the reality is, no—they’re just doing fermentation. But what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, we’ll do it better than anyone else has ever, ever done.”
How will your approach to lab-grown meat achieve cost competitiveness?
[1]: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...
What do you suggest Japan does to “reverse course” if not sacrifice the very things which create its remarkable culture?
Perhaps it’s the rest of the world’s cancerous, unsustainable focus on growth which is the problem here, not countries like Japan which don’t overvalue economic might at the cost of social cohesion.
Better to have a culture worthy of defense than to defend a cultural wasteland.
Population growth figures aren’t a good indicator of societal healthiness. We can’t afford to mistake wealth for safety.
If Japan is the “sick man of Asia”, the whole world is sick.
Interesting choice of words for a monetary instrument which can be arbitrarily inflated or seized by third parties.
And this doesn’t even touch on the political risk inherent to “national” monies.
I’m more worried about democracy than I am about a seeming decline in critical thinking skills. The latter is more than likely just a flawed perception created by the internet giving the masses a voice they’ve never had before. As for the former: the very fact we perceive “our critical thinking skills” to be in decline based on the musings of the masses is evidence of the perils of democracy.
All we can do is educate consumers about the benefits of a whole food plant-based (WFPB) diet.
I challenge anyone to watch both The Dominion [1] and Forks Over Knives [2], and not walk away from the experience at least semi-curious about WFPB.
PoS security relies on the integrity of the stake — and the integrity of the stake relies on the “security” of the PoS system. It’s an intractible circularity problem.
Yes, a large sample of recent altcoins have shipped PoS, but this is no more relevant to a PoW v PoS security debate than a modern top 40 “hit songs” chart is to a debate over Beethoven v Bach.
Because Ethereum was founded by early Bitcoiners to raise bitcoin for themselves, and the technology always came second to the pursuit of self-enrichment. Software projects can never lose their soul. If the soul was rotten from the very beginning, as the saying goes: “garbage in, garbage out”.
I sincerely doubt if any of the inventors of the marketing phrase “web 3” ever thought it would come to this: where their investors are so desperate for yield that they begin taking the term seriously. Not that it matters to the founders of Ethereum, many of whom have long since become secretive Bitcoin billionaires.
The Ethereum project is best described as a series of cynical courtship displays designed purely to bootstrap the “network effect” for their newly created confidence game called ETH, which in 2014 they sold to — to borrow their own legal terminology — “philanthropists” in exchange for “donations”. A process they swore up and down bore no similarity at all to a securities offering.
People not privy to the way cryptocurrency works are shocked to find the various buzzwords hatched by the Ethereum people for their own self-enrichment in the described legacy era of ICOs turn out to be a whole lot of nothing. They shouldn’t be shocked, they should be embarassed for lowering themselves to investing in such a system, or angry if they did so in ignorance.
If the product is self-enrichment, not technology, then when the “technology customer” — who has, invariably, invested money — starts losing money during a bear market, the vendor has a de facto failed core product on their hands in addition to a ruinous reputation from their prior unscrupulous peddling of a technological dud.
Walled garden ecosystems have a fairly obvious downside — ultimately someone has to get disproportionately enriched and empowered. By using the word “somehow”, you insinuate it’s actually hard to see this.
In a world where the pool of capital allocated into crypto is hyperconcentrated in the hands of a tiny number of elite investors who employ teams of analysts to scour the web for opportunities to rapidly take advantage of, those people don’t matter.
This is also why no modern cryptocurrency investor can realistically be considered “early”, anymore. The only thing early about crypto is the general maturity levels of its technology, which arguably doesn’t matter to valuation based on the reality we see play out in the crypto markets on a daily basis.
Even assuming the Ethereum people finally ship SPV support following moxie’s critique of their infrastructure, they still don’t have even so much as a rudimentary desktop wallet designed for air gapped spending which isn’t a literal web extension.
There has well and truly never been a more deserving poster child for the phrase “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”, than Ethereum. If there’s one societally valuable thing Ethereum can be credited for doing, it’s laying bare that cryptocurrency valuation really is just a Keynesian beauty contest with absolutely no fundamentals whatsoever. The entire cryptocurrency space consists of pure and simple confidence games, all of them claiming to be anything but.
As someone who was in a Covid-free region of Australia all throughout the pandemic, I’ve seen first-hand what happens when borders are reopened. Local businesses are far less harmed from closed borders than they are from people avoiding clustering in indoor areas — either out of an abundance of caution for their health, or to avoid becoming a “close contact” of a Covid-19 case and then being forced into quarantine. Once borders reopen, associated mask mandates give everyone needless anxiety, while the hospital system beginning to buckle becomes a constant source of fear.
Closed borders allowed Australia and New Zealand to perform better economically than more permissive countries, and allowed their residents to live life like it was still 2019.
Permissive countries like America merely pretended to allow life to go on like it was 2019, while their conservative media exported tone deaf rationalizations for permissiveness to AU & NZ residents who were on average far better off than they were. The American media’s attempts at guilting antipodeans for closing themselves off to the world were laughed off as completely bizarre — most people were all too happy to allow the rest of the world to think they were doing it tough living their happy, blissful, Covid-free lives behind impenetrable borders.
AU & NZ would probably have at least another year of normal life left to live if their governments had directed international arrivals to quarantine in dedicated facilities in remote locations rather than in retrofitted hotels smack dab in the center of major urban areas.
We could use something like multi-signature Git commits [1] to enforce repo integrity. Clients could cross-check the signatures against an approved list published by foundation members. Anyone who co-signs an unapproved fork of the foundation’s repo could have their shares in the foundation slashed.
Post a ledger containing $JPEG balances to the Git repo, and require prospective foundation members obtain N JPEGs to apply for membership.
The ledger would operate at a snail’s pace, but “blockchains don’t scale”. We’d just need someone to design the “L2” of Git.
This would seem to contradict your earlier statement:
> [Crime is] much more a result of the gross economic disparity found in America than any "far left" policies.
The reason this can’t be true is China and Sweden have comparable wealth disparity to the US, yet vastly better public safety outcomes. If “gross economic disparity” were as predictive of crime as you claim, surely China and Sweden would have comparable crime rates to the US, irrespective of social programs. The fact they have much lower crime rates than the US disproves economic determinism along this axis.
See also: https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/
> Besides, many of the current problems of the bay area could be solved by building denser housing and better public transportation. The whole region would be improved if so many of the NIMBYs weren't opposed to "Manhattanization".
High crime and political instability are California’s biggest issues. Fixing “the markets”, be it the housing market or Wall Street, is unlikely to be a panacea for this. America’s problems go much deeper than markets, and it may already be too late to course correct.
Chimera [2] is also worth watching.
The point is to preempt a power vacuum threatening social order, e.g. imagine if Japan didn’t have a police force.
> Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily.
I don’t disagree, nor did I claim to. However, I’d be curious to know whether you’d prefer all police be replaced by robots and drones which perfectly upheld the law. For many, that’s an even scarier thought than imperfect, human policing.
Awarding a well-marked group with some measure of public accountability the right to use violent countermeasures for the protection of life and property in a geographic area facilitates commercial trade and societal advancement.
However, the “garbage-in, garbage-out” phenomenon applies to policing, which makes it less of a silver bullet. A certain amount of criticism lobbed at police forces in America can be reduced to hysteria over police being unable to turn lead into gold.
Police were able to catch the murderer when he (literally) shot himself in the foot shortly thereafter… during a second home invasion in the Hollywood Hills [2].
> What exactly would police have done in any of these situations to prevent them from happening?
What if threatening would-be criminals with prison wasn’t an effective deterrent anymore? Singapore employs corporal punishment [3] in addition to prison, and I’d be interested in reviewing any studies examining whether swift corporal punishment delivered early in life for minor offenses (e.g. bullying) could be shown to prevent future criminality.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-01/jacqueli...
[2]: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-06/murder-c...
> whole point of a fixed supply is to make money exclusive
In this case, it’s to obviate the need to take your inflationary funbucks to what is essentially a casino, or otherwise park it in residential property in the hopes of not getting debased.
[1]: http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...