ldp01

As someone who lives in the Oceanic region, reading this, my thoughts/fears jump to how this will affect the balance of power between the US and China, which I believe helps ASEAN and Aus/NZ to live in a state of relative self-determination at the moment.

Are armies of cheap robots likely to shift the balance of power in favour of the large established super-powers or smaller nations? Or would they have an effect such as rendering the US Pacific Fleet redundant? It will be interesting and scary to watch it all play out.

> I don't think that a failed artist would lose out on basic needs because of money.

How many former humanities students do you know?

If success just means being happy with yourself then sure, go for it. However this is a retreat from what OP stated: "The World Belongs to Those Who Create VS Those Who Don't".

If we are restricting ourselves specifically to artists then, for an average person, becoming a materially successful artist requires capital investment and an appetite for risk (or a lack of understanding of the risks). The capital investment will most likely come from parents in the form of education, food, security, etc.

Becoming a successful artist without any of that support sounds like a horrible all-or-nothing proposition with no fall back position. (You have no capital if you fail because you didn't hedge your bets with a steadier/less fulfilling career).

Fair enough, but I think it's a simplification of how life really works for most people.

For the average person, the choice to become a successful artist isn't a trade off between more money and more satisfaction. If they fail to become successful they will significantly lose out in terms of life's more basic needs, because they won't have enough money.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, I would love to agree with OP. But I don't think human society is there yet.

There's truth to this post but overall I think it's pretty naive.

In a capitalist system the world belongs to those who own and have spare capital to invest vs. those who rent.

Being very good at creating things is a potential pathway from renter to owner, but so is being very good at maintaining things, or managing people, etc. Anything which you can be paid a lot of money for will do.

I think PG is making a subtly different point to whether or not free speech should be allowed... He is asking how the architecture of a platform can be used to shape speech without the need for direct moderation.

This is where I just gave up and just started using Vim plugins wherever possible.

Edit: He calls out IDEs as a place you can't use Vim. But I think most widely used IDEs tend to have Vim plugins...

You can get most of the social benefits without throwing away the notion of privacy.

In the West, all sorts of data are already available to those with legitimate interests. Traffic data is used to optimise city planning; police can track your phone, with a warrant; power networks read your smart meter and so on. The key difference to the situation described in the OP is that there are controls around it.

In terms of reaping the benefits of AI, a willingness to discard privacy isn't as important as building the capability in data collection, warehousing, analytics, and so on. A lackadaisical attitude to privacy such as handing everything over to the private sector will just make it easier to commit all sorts of crimes: identity theft, blackmail, stalking, etc. Rather than a structural advantage to the Chinese system, it sounds more like technical (legal?) debt that may take years to pay back once it's acknowledged that privacy controls actually have a legitimate purpose.

Wait, isn't a credit rating already a measure of (financial) trustworthiness?

What kind of parameters can the government record which would actually make a credit rating more reliable?

I'm ignorant as to existing implementations but the system I heard of to solve this is:

Your car or charger module has electricity spot prices available to it and you can select a strategy for it to automatically follow.

E.g.

* Rapid charge (charge battery, ignore price)

* Economise (charge battery at low price)

* Make money (charge/discharge according to price to profit from the difference)

Mario Kart Wii seemed to take rubber-banding way too far in general.

Mario Kart 8 feels way more balanced in that sense. You don't need to deliberately hang back until the last lap anymore, and the distribution of items feels much more reasonable.

I get what you mean now. I think I mentally auto-corrected the sentence on the first pass and never really considered the literal meaning.

Clicking! I wrote a powershell script for Windows which mimicks the autoclick functionality which Ubuntu has in it's accessibility options. I also added double/triple clicking by twitching the mouse a bit.

It takes some getting used to but I feel it helps avoid forearm soreness.

The grain of truth behind the article is that if you move into a new position with more responsibility you will likely receive a good jump in pay. And conversely if you stay in the same position your pay rate is likely to stagnate or rise with inflation at best.

But the author has conflated this basic principle with changing companies, which I believe is a false statement in general. The effectiveness of changing company as a strategy to increase pay will vary wildly across industries and professions.

Parts of the analogy are certainly correct...

Mechanical parts wear out from use, whether they are animal or machine. Animal parts will heal to an extent and may require a minimum level of use to stay healthy, but they still wear out.

After looking up the definition of garden path sentence... I'm not sure this fits the bill.

It doesn't look like a misleading statement to me. Unless you mean it's missing a comma after '2000'?

I think the point he's trying to make is that countries spend millions on public image regardless of their human rights records. There isn't a meaningful correlation until we have examples of countries with good human rights records which aren't spending millions on their public image.

For some industries it makes sense. Rail and power networks use their own physical infrastructure as they have specific latency and reliability requirements for protection and signalling systems and it's convenient to just build their own comms networks alongside their other infrastructure.

> Two ideas come to mind. First, maybe this is because electricity has gone far beyond "pervasive" into "fully invisible". Second, maybe this is because software is inherently more complex and can't be made fully invisible.

I think your second point is the correct one.

Software eats itself as much as it eats anything else. This is the purpose of compilers and high level languages. To someone coding in a high level language, C code, assembly, and the electronic hardware itself are all reduced to invisible infrastructure. (That's the idea anyway, leaky abstractions notwithstanding).

So, I would argue low level software is often already invisible in the sense that it is hidden behind the abstraction of higher level languages or user interfaces. But the definition of "low level" changes as more advanced software is created, so it's forever a moving target.

Champion!

May I ask, what was your background prior to moving into coding? A different technical field or trade?

I'm not much of a gardener but the idea of measuring the moisture level seems ill-conceived... Namely because you are measuring at only a single point in your 3D region of soil, and you don't know what range of moisture should be maintained without experimentation.

Using our guy's own sawtooth model of watering/drainage, it would make more sense to just water at fixed intervals and experiment with the frequency to see if the plant grows.

Still a fun project!

> Then why do I frequently get confronted by the religion of "inherent truth in math" and we keep teaching our children math made overly convoluted and unintuitive by the "rigorous" crowd? Pretending that this is only a minority is not helpful in quashing the damage done by magical thinking in mathematics.

Are you able to expand on this point?

In my experience I have not heard of children learning rigorous mathematics. Grade school kids learn arithmetic. High school kids learn some calculus and probability (at most). This curriculum is practical for those going to uni or a technical trade. (although the way it's taught is critical to be of any use. If I were a science teacher my class would just build arduino projects all day!)

Your reference to magical thinking seems to be the opposite of what I would consider rigour... I would associate magical thinking with an economist or engineer building a sprawling quantitative risk model and then justifying billion dollar decisions with it. Later realising a small logical error has invalidated their conclusion or that they have overfit their data etc. (Just for example...)

We use math as a framework for reasoning about physical reality. When doing this we assume that the logic of our math holds for physical reality and that we can use it to make useful predictions. If a mathematical theory has held up so-far then that is evidence that it will continue to. It's not a guarantee, but it is evidence.

>Its central dogma is thou should prove everything rigorously.

>To me, that's the entire point. You prove things rigorously so that (among many other reasons) when someone considers trying to square the circle, you can point them to the proof that the circle cannot be squared.

This. Those defending mathematical rigour are a minority almost everywhere except a school of mathematics. There is no shortage of people trying all the slap-dash ways of doing things.

From an engineering perspective... Mathematics looks like an add-on to natural language designed to express precise concepts in the simplest possible way. (Simple != easy, of course).

In a scientific or engineering context mathematics evolves naturally whenever the requirement for precision exceeds the capability of the available language and you have the right folks around to develop it.

I find it hard to accept that this is a real problem... Managing a business using only group chat just sounds incompetent. Even when I get together with a couple of buddies to do a project we will use a combination of communication/collaboration tools.

Even in my office I've never met anyone with a problem flipping between the correct communication technology for whatever task.

We switch pretty seamlessly between,

* Email (with Outlook's calendar feature for organising meetings).

* Face to face meetings, (formal/informal, presentations, etc)

* Instant Messaging for time wasting but also for quick answers too. Almost always 1-on-1.

* Telephone for awkward but super useful communication with field crew.

* Atlassian's Jira. This is a recent addition and directly addresses many of the flaws of using email for coordinating projects. There are probably heaps of similar solutions out there, but I am enjoying this one.

The more channels the better!

It does seem quite bizarre. The Finkel Report[1] sums up pretty well why coal isn't competitive. It can't keep up with the rapid changes in demand caused by existing intermittent generation.

> "Rapid changes in power output from VRE generation need to be balanced with generation technology that has the ability to increase (ramp up) or decrease (ramp down) power output at the same time. Gas-fired generators have the ability to ‘fast ramp’. Most of Australia’s coal-fired generators do not"

In America the EIA's latest energy outlook projects a (gentle) decline in coal usage out to 2040. This is a pretty conservative government agency.

I really don't understand the obsession with coal.

[1] - http://www.environment.gov.au/energy/publications/electricit...

[2] - https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/

> "Power lines are natural monopolies. Traditionally they were all government owned. Jeff Kennett privatised Victorian networks, but until very recently, distribution networks in other states, such as NSW and Queensland, have remained government owned, with regulated pricing."

This author sounds confused. An electrical network operator is a regulated monopoly whether it is government or privately owned. The regulation may be good or bad, but it is independent of who owns the assets.

And why is it a surprise that building ANY sort of distribution network is inefficient in the third most sparsely populated country in the world[1]? At least in the West there is now a strong push for standalone power projects with a view to decommissioning some of the redundant infrastructure.

[1] - https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_popul...

You've reminded me of a pretty good blog post on this subject by Nassim Taleb. I think it's basically the same phenomenon you are getting at in your post but he tries to explore the idea generally.

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

100Mbps on FTTN? That's not bad!

I'm holding my breath for when the NBN finally rolls through my area. Even 25Mbps would be acceptable at this point.

I had a chuckle today when I saw a restaurant in the Perth CBD was using a Vividwireless 4G modem. I would have thought the middle of the city at least would have a decent wired connection.

It sounds like the crux of the issue is connectivity is now fast, reliable, and cheap. Employees don't need to waste time commuting anymore, so they don't.

Now spare a thought for those of us sweating in the digital wasteland that is Australia.

Every so often I have to walk over to my fridge and nudge my 4G modem to improve the signal strength. I have a script running 'round the clock to reset the darn thing if the connection drops completely (this somehow it fixes it). I need the 4G connection because the copper wire to my house is so broken it can no longer support an ADSL signal.

Fibre is apparently coming in like... 2019? It is expected to run at a maximum of 25Mbps.

Needless to say, remote work is not exactly on the cards.