calafrax

> CAPTCHA solution is the most robust one captcha solving services are very cheap so captchas are basically useless for anything of value.

There are a variety of methods that can be deployed:

1) request fingerprinting - browser request headers have arbitrary patterns that depend on user agent. matching user agent strings with a database of the request header fingerprints allows you to filter out anyone who is not using a real browser who hasn't taken the time to correctly spoof the headers. this will filter out low skill low energy scrapers and create higher costs.

2) put javascript in the page that tracks mouse movement and pings back. this forces scrapers to simulate mouse movement in a js execution environment or reverse engineer your ping back script. this is a very high hurdle and once again forces much more computationally intensive scraping and also much more sophisticated engineering effort.

3) do access pattern detection. require valid refer headers. don't allow api access without page access, etc. check that assets from page are loaded. etc.

4) use maxmind database and treat as suspicious any access not from a consumer isp. block access from aws, gcp, azure, and other cloud services offering cheap ip rental.

That is good advice from a technical standpoint but from a legal standpoint creating security features that prevent scraping gives you a clearer cause of action against scrapers so if someone starts making a lot of money off your content you get leverage to force them to pay for it.

Ultimately people guess and judge each other based on what they think each other's salaries are even if they don't know.

Hiding information only creates confusion and prevents markets from operating efficiently.

There is no legitimate economic justification for salaries being secret. Only tradition and superstition.

Right. Ethereum is just a medium for recording a contractual agreement. Using ethereum should not make contracts any more enforceable in the eyes of the law.

In many cases I would assume the opposite will occur: plaintiffs will claim that there was no contract formation because because the technical mumbo-jumbo of computer code is incomprehensible to a layman.

I suspect that courts will react quite favorably to this argument seeing as how they have a natural interest in maintaining their jurisdiction.

Do you have used cars in Europe? The US is flooded with used cars and you can get something much better than this for $4000.

> The Swarm City Core team is more committed than ever to the development of Swarm City. The real value of our token lies in the community, and the technology the developers are creating. Black hat hackers, vulnerabilities, and bugs will not stop us from creating the decentralized sharing economy our community and the world craves.

What?!? That seems like a pretty relaxed response for someone who just lost 8m dollars.

> You achieve reliability with erasure codes, not with more replication

If nodes are not trusted then replication has to play a major roll.

It doesn't matter how you mix up the data. You still have to store it somewhere and if that somewhere is a random untrusted stranger you will need to copy your data to a lot of random untrusted strangers in order to have kind of reliability.

Yeah, you are getting paid a few cents to act as a proxy for criminals. Somehow I don't think this will catch on with the general public any time soon.

There is another macro-economic issue here:

With a decentralized trustless system you have to assume a higher failure rate for nodes than with a central trust based system.

If you assume a higher failure rate you have to replicate data more extensively to achieve reliability.

If you have to replicate data more extensively then decentralized will always be more expensive than centralized.

right, and releasing the source code is giving a map to criminals to allow them to hack it.

The "no security through obscurity" theory is not entirely true in the real world.

When you push up the cost (money and skill) of a hack then hackers will attack weaker components and so the likelihood of a hack is smaller.

This code is highly secure and would require an enormous amount of specialist knowledge, equipment, and time to extract, analyze and exploit.

The effort involved rules out rational profit motivated individuals because the costs are too high and there are plentiful opportunities for lower cost exploits.

No company releases the source for their DRM code except to legitimately interested parties in controlled circumstances and that is the correct policy from a security perspective.

It is interesting that no one with money believes that democracy is a credible way to run a business and yet people still believe it is a credible way to run a government.

Fun fact: the US Constitution has exactly ZERO uses of the word "democracy" in it.

None of these companies is anywhere close to a monopoly on food.

Cargill might be big at 100B+ revenue (global) per year but US food expenditures are 1.5T+ per year, so even a company as huge as Cargill is capturing < 10% of the US market. Hardly a monopoly.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditures.asp...

Yes, waste is reduced on the consumer side, but there is also enormous waste in the supply chain and retail.

https://www.wired.com/2016/07/us-throws-away-much-half-food-...

The packaging waste with some meal kits is a negative but they also eliminate a lot of food waste which is a positive.

The traditional food distribution system is massively wasteful but all of that waste is hidden so it is easier to ignore.

> I think over next few years we would see a total implosion of meal-kit industry

I don't think so. Meal kits are a niche business fighting against mass market competitors already so nothing changes with the Amazon entry.

If anything having an established player like amazon advertising meal kits increases market awareness and gets people interested.

No one is going to have a monopoly of the food business, ever. It just doesn't work that way.

Not unemployable but less likely to be employed.

Long term employment is very important to increasing productivity as a software engineer. The first 6 months is just learning existing systems, so from 6 months to 12 months doubling productivity is normal.

As you work longer you build more infrastructure that supports future productivity gains so from 12 months to 24 months you should be able to double your productivity again.

After 24 months your productivity is so much higher than newer employees that you can continually invest time in developing tools and infrastructure to enhance your productivity so your productivity continues to grow.

When there is a recession there will be unemployment for software engineers so a certain percentage will not be able to find work.

These job hoppers are the lowest skilled since they have never learned how to develop their productivity over the long term and they will be demanding the highest salaries based on their past experience so they are the least likely to be employed.

This attitude is horrible just like the Forbes article.

This situation is only happening because of bubble cash and a lot of inexperienced leadership with too much money on their hands.

Once the bubble pops you will see all of these people with a resumes full of 6-12 month stints and outrageous salary expectations working at Starbucks (if they are lucky) and everyone who puts in years for reasonable salaries still employed at profitable companies.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

My point is that in this key area it is impossible to do better than nature since nature is already perfect.

I am suggesting that the assumption that humans are generally able to do 1000X better than nature may be flawed if nature can already do the most important things so well.

It is important to note that this is the launch retail price.

AMD's design is cheap and high yield so they can cut prices a long way.

The key thing that this hits on is that it is bad engineering to replace a simple system with a vastly more complex system for the same task.

The correct approach, which the author points out, is to leave the simple system in place and then layer the more complex system with its additional features on top in a way that when it fails it does not break the base level system.

On the same topic, it might be good to keep POTS around, just in case we ever want to make an analog phone call again.

> humans will eventually do it a thousand times better.

From an energy conservation perspective nature is perfect. It is impossible for humans to do better than nature when it comes to conserving energy, which is a pretty key problem, so it seems a little optimistic to think that humans can do 1000X better than nature at very many things (or any?).

This is a kind of "end of history" argument that assumes no further advances can happen. I just don't buy it.

We will invent new things to do. Or, god forbid, maybe just spend some time relaxing and enjoying life instead of working ourselves to death.

There is good reason to think that ML style techniques won't work.

The problem is that computers have long since surpassed human computational capabilities by orders of magnitude but the increased computational abilities don't make them much more intelligent.

For a computer to identify objects in a picture, with sub-human accuracy, it must be trained on a dataset of billions of photos and get massive amounts of human feedback to tune its algorithms.

The human mind can perform the same task with a sample data set many orders of magnitude smaller.

This would tend to indicate that the mechanism being used by ML is not the same mechanism as the brain uses or is vast inferior by many orders of magnitude.

The further computational power increases without producing intelligence the less likely it is that raw computation can produce intelligence.

My argument is speculative except that technological progress has always led to increasing generalized prosperity in the past.

The adjustment periods have been on the scale of generations though so you can definitely have localized decreases in well being for large segments of the population due to technological change.

> automation is eradicating our jobs. But — unlike in the past — new ones aren’t being created to replace them

He presents no evidence to support this claim, and it is most likely false.

If you remove resources from some sector, and people become unemployed, but total resources were increased due to improved efficiency then those displaced people will more than likely figure out how to get some of those resources rather than starving to death.

> But... we will

that is a belief. not a fact.

These things are not "intelligence" though. they are gimmicks that can only be applied to a very limited range of problems.

These advances are advances but they do not prove that general ai is possible.

I am not saying that the business is not profitable. I am just saying that Yandex is going to take it all.

If Yandex can take Uber's stake, which is worth billions as you say, they would be stupid not to, and they can, so they will.

They own a minority stake in an entity that has to pay Yandex for infrastructure, licensing rights and advertising which Yandex controls.

So this entity racks up a lot of debt (to Yandex) while making transfer payments to Yandex and then in a few years: "whoops, bankrupt!"

Now the equity holders (Uber) get wiped out and the company re-organizes and sells its assets (to Yandex) to pay off its debts (to Yandex) and Uber gets nothing.

Oh, NO! That's not legal! That's not fair! Good luck in Russian court buddy.

They are losing everything. They are burning another $225M to forestal the inevitable and pretend like it is not a complete loss but it is only a matter of time.