mortdeus

He isn't the only person who talks about the dopamine driven feedback loops. Chamath Palihapitiya, who was one of the first engineers at facebook, talks about how they all used to gather in meeting rooms and have intense back and forth discussions on how they actually build this thing so that the entire world wouldn't be able to resist adopting it.

He talks about how at the time they really didn't foresee the foreboding future implications of what they were trying to build at the time.

I tend to think Facebook is more like a slot machine than anything else, where you are constantly putting in something of value (your posts, pics, etc) in hopes of getting something of greater value back (likes/shares, friend requests, heated debates, etc).

And just like a Slot Machine you are always left wanting to come back to play some more and even if you do your best to quit facebook, you are always being constantly reminded that of its existence everywhere you go.

Chamath Palihapitiya also talks about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J54k7WrbfMg

So basically what they want is somebody to start working on solving the fake news problem?

Can anybody explain to me why exactly we find it increasingly necessary to try and censor the internet?

I think this does give an incentive to reporters to paint things in a more black or white biased one sided narrative. You can't just have an article that talks about the good and the bad and expect people to feel like they ought to buy or sell whatever is being talked about.

How does this promote fair and factually accurate coverage over the politicized FUD bullshit we are constantly being fed by the media nowadays?

I knew everything was going down hill the second I seen that they weren't going to call it the Apple iWatch.

Like do they not know how important that lower case "i" is for their award winning and trend setting formula!

And I am being serious right now. My ocd is going nuts just thinking about the lost uniformity of the branding. Especially when they still insist on us calling their other products "my iphone, my ipod, my imac, and now we also have to say "my apple watch"?

How do you even tell somebody to pass you your phone, tablet, and watch all at the same time. "Hey man, can you pass me my iphone and ipad. Oh and my APPLE watch. Like do you not realize how much of my life you are wasting when you force me to say one more syllable.

this is neat. I noticed that with this we get Read–eval–print loop for C++. Which would make it really useful in an ide like light table.

Fiat currency is not convenient when it comes to international trade. And it is not convenient as a method of storing large masses of wealth.

The fact is, if you were once super rich in Venezuela and you had all your wealth in stacks of Venezuelan money, now you are no longer rich.

Which is why most rich people in other countries like to exchange their tangible money for other nation's currency. Because in the event that their country's economy goes belly up then at least not all of their money has become worthless.

The problem is that not everybody might be willing to exchange your country's currency for theirs. Which is why the US dollar is the international standard for currency exchange.

The big problem the designer of bitcoin saw is the fact that when one country has the ability to make money that everybody wants, we end up in a situation where that country has an unfair advantage to strong arm other nations into a mode of compliance. Like all the US has to do is say that nobody from the US is allowed to exchange their money for Venezuela's money, nor are they allowed to exchange their money for somebody else's money when said person has a history of exchanging currency with Venezuela.

The fact that a few countries can get away with such behavior, means in the end that countries are placed into an economic ladder and nobody is allowed to take a step up if that comes at the expense of somebody higher up on the rung having to take a step down.

In other words, the US has become a monopoly on all other countries when our dollar is in the middle of international trade.

Bitcoin in theory is supposed to replace the dollar role in this sense where no one nation gains the ability to strong arm other nations into behaving in a way that might be contrary to their best interest.

Are you talking about credit cards or debit cards? There is a big difference when making a comparison to bitcoin.

The reason why bitcoin doesn't have these features is that there isn't a bank sitting between the two parties doing business. To exchange a bitcoin with somebody, you are essentially trading "in cash". When you do business with somebody directly in cash, the same kind of shortcomings are involved, especially when it's not a transaction with a vendor that has a policy that allows you to return and refund the products you bought using cash when you can provide the receipt.

In fact once you lose the receipt, in most places, if they allows you to return the items you bought, they won't give you back your cash. Rather they will give you the ability to exchange what you returned for something of equal value within the store. They still get to keep the cash you gave them in that scenario.

When it comes to being able to dispute charges on a debit/credit transaction, like I said before, that is only because there is a middle man bank that is holding the funds in escrow. While I am not up to date on the way things are currently regulated with regards to bitcoin, there is nothing technologically getting in the way of somebody being able to build a banking/brokerage type system around bitcoin exchange if they wanted such guarantees.

This is another reason why i think all these crypto based startups that are using ICOs as an alt means of funding are totally delusional and devaluing their product. You take all the value out of your platform if you take away the requirement that people must do some form of work to generate wealth. The fact that the platform acts like the Fed and can print their own currency whenever they want, proves that they don't truly get the point of why cryptocurrency is innovative.

I think what people need to realize about cryptocurrencies is that they aren't going to derive their value from being convertible to fiat currency.

Rather cryptocurrencies are going to be revolutionary in the sense of how they can be combined with other technologies.

For example, what if World of Warcraft used a cryptocurrency based system for ingame currency? Where the ingame money was actually finite and that in theory the players in the game could suffer from an economic depression. Or a few players could hoard all the wealth in the game. etc. etc.

The game would be way different than it is now, which is to say that it just emulates an economy, not actually implements one.

This is probably a bad example to get what I am trying to say. So lets imagine a different scenario. Let's say we wanted to build a social network, where we didn't actually want everybody to just be able to say whatever they want without a threat of consequence. What we want is a social network where you have to do something to earn the ability to speak, and once you speak you lose the currency to be able to speak again until you do something once again to earn the ability to speak.

What you have to do in order to earn the ability to act depends on the service in question, but the same basic concept of a cryptocurrency is what underlying the system. In that the platform only has value when the ability to act is a limited and highly valued resource.

I think this is one of the circumstances where if he took the opportunity, it wouldn't be consider favoritism but rather of a strategic necessity considering how John Mccain's admiral father's decision making could be compromised by any risks such decisions could have towards his son's welfare.

Of course there are way more variable involved, but I think his refusal was mostly on the basis of maintaining solidarity with the other POWs. In that situation, I could imagine that one of the few things that would keep me going was knowing that the thing i was fighting for back home wasn't just a delusion.

If the other POWs saw Mccain released for on political reasons, then who is to say that the POWs loyalty to their nation wouldn't have been compromised?

The reason politicians try to dress down is that they want to give off the impression that they can relate to the experiences of most Americans. The general idea being, "How could this person ever promote policy that benefits me, if they don't understand what it's like to be me?"

The irony is that most successful people in the world were rarely ever born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Kerry was actually one of those few candidates that I wished got their shot because his war record wasn't anything less but admirable. John Mccain's war record was far and beyond even his considering his many years being a POW.

They sacrificed so much for this country and yet the people only resonate with the candidates that seem hip nowadays.

there is a pretty good episode on numberphile that explains why dividing by zero is undefined.

Basically the reason why 1/0 = 0 is wrong is the fact that you cant reproduce 1 by taking the answer 0 and multiplying it by 0 to get the number being divided. Which goes on to break a bunch of other fundamental rules of mathematics.

That is to say, if you took 6 / 2 = 3 you can reverse the division by doing 3 * 2 = 6.

However if you have 6 / 0 = 0 and you were to try and reverse it then you would have 0 * 0 != 6. Then you have bizarre circumstance where everything decided by zero logically equals the same thing. Where (2 + 2) / 0 all of a sudden equals (Einsteins laws of gravity) / 0. And there is no logical way to really explain what that is supposed to mean.

Also if you try to use limits to find a solution of f(x) = 1/x where x is defined as the limit of 1 and -1 as it approaches 0 from both sides. You end up with the answer that is even more confusing when you try to graph it.

That is x = +inf and -inf. Which on a graph is represented as two curves where the limit as 1 -> 0 from the positive side of the x axis curves up along the y axis to infinity without intersecting where x=0. And from the negative side where we approach 0 from -1 we end up with a curve that moves down the -y axis without intersecting at 0.

So frankly, n / 0 = 0 just doesn't make sense because just trying to approach it from both sides suggests that the closer you try to move to zero from both sides the further apart the answer moves away from converging together at the origin. Which would be expected if n / 0 = 0 was actually true.

I think mandatory self driving mode in highly congested areas is the more sure fire way to defeat traffic jams. The reason why traffic jams exist in the first place is because of issues that arise from the limitations a human driver poses.

For example, imagine a scenario where somebody from Southern California who has never been to San Francisco is driving up 101 to visit a cousin who just moved to the city. Neither have GPS or phones and are having to get to their destination using a printed out Google Maps sheet.

Now imagine that this driver is on the highway and is in a hurry because they are running late. They don't know where they are really going and all of a sudden they spot that the exit they need to take is in 1/2 mile. And let's assume they made the bigger mistake of thinking it was a good idea to try and get into the city at 5 AM.

So they are now in heavy congestion, but most people are used to this traffic and have no issue maintaining the speed limit. However, the tourist driver needs to catch their exit. So what does she do? Start merging right, right, right, right. And guess what they are in a hurry, so while she is merging right she is having to cut other people off. Otherwise they will miss their exit and be even more screwed.

And therefore she is a contributing force when it comes to the underlying conditions that result in stand still traffic.

There is nothing you can really do about this dilemma. Everybody on the road heading to San Francisco during it's most congested hours are doing so because they have jobs.

It's not like a Carbon Tax is all of a sudden going to cut down on traffic when people need to drive to work in order to make a living. Most people who are on the road, aren't driving without some sort of living necessity in mind at the other end of their destination.

Taxation doesn't promote better behavior. Rather it further penalizes those who can barely afford to drive as it is. And it just further taxes the wealthy which if you add up every last cent the top 50% (because all of that 1% of 1% babble is just a scapegoat to distract who we are really talking about when discussing taxation) already is obligated to pay, it becomes something around 35-50% of all non capital gains earned income. And let's not forget that if you are religious there is often a tithe obligation to tack on to that.

I just don't understand why taxation is always deemed the magical solution to try and curb these kind of issues. The only reason why we should ever have to spend a cent over a universal 15% flat tax, is so the government can use that revenue to start buying back our debt before we are faced with the dilemma that we need to borrow more than we could ever hope to pay the interest on.

blockchain is useful outside the context of cryptocurrencies because it represents a verifiable chain of custody.

For example, imagine how blockchain could solve the problem of a patient who has control of their health records. In the current system we have an issue where anytime you move somewhere away from your doctor, the new doctor you see has to retrieve records directly from your doctor because there is no way to verify that the records you would present to the new doctor are the most up to date records. If your doctor gave you your records from before your last visit, and say during your last visit he wrote into your files that you no longer needed opiates for pain management, but you are addicted and want the pills still. Well if you have outdated records and take them to a new doctor you might be able to still receive the drugs, despite the fact that the doctor that initially diagnosed you took you off them. This is why most states require by law that they obtain records directly from the source. To avoid being able to scam the system.

Now imagine what happens if your doctor dies, his practice is shut down for whatever reason, or for some other reason your records become virtually unobtainable.

What do you do then? Go through the entire process of trying to get a doctor to re-diagnose you for an ailment that has already seen years of therapy and might no longer be as obviously in need of say pain therapy?

It's a problem. And something that blockchain could fix better than just having some federally regulated centralized medical record repository that in it's very nature allows the government or any bad actor a straightforward method to hack into and invade your privacy.

Blockchain allows you to maintain personal and private control of your records, while allowing a doctor to consult the blockchain network of doctors, to verify that the chain of custody of your medical history is up to date.

The main innovation is that blockchain is decentralized and yet still verifiable. A public SQL database is in nature centralized. Even if you were to try and shard it out to everybody in the network you have the difficult time of cross verifying such data heavy records.

I wouldn't say that premium cable is over. Rather before you used to pay $60 + premium channels a month to have cable tv. Now you pay $15+15+15+15+15+15+15 ... + 75 for internet connection that doesn't have data caps.

Personally I think the de-bundling of cable TV and the getting rid of ads (i seriously never understood how we can pay for cable tv and still be forced to watch ads) is a great way for the market to move forward. It shows you that the consumer does ultimately get the final say so.

However, I do not believe that costs are getting cheaper. If anything they are just going to keep going up and up.

Also the crazy level of competition going on right now to produce "service selling" original content, is in my views creating a situation where we keep getting a sub par product out of the deal.

If I was trying to attack somebody through this route, I wouldn't just release all of them containing malware. Rather, I would target 2 or 3 journalists who I wanted to monitor and hope that they wouldn't be wise enough to consider the security implications. Most fans would check out as being okay, which would lessen the suspicion.

The only way you could definitively tell that these fans are compromised is to consequently check every fan out of the bunch.

Whats scary is that many of these USB fans could be just normal fans, but there might be one or two that contain malware that either governments could use to their political advantage.

Judges in the lower circuits are also held accountable to higher circuit judges if they don't interpret the law while taking past case judgement into consideration.

A lower district judge can't overrule a higher judge's opinions.

What if they fired everybody at CNN!? :D <3

I should point out that this doesn't really change the broadband ISP landscape. Time Warner Cable is not apart of Time Warner anymore. All this does is give AT&T a better chance at entering the "original content" space and to take advantage of the fact that streaming providers like Youtube TV and Netflix would need to now pay AT&T for their content.

Honestly I don't think this is all that bad of a move. I'd rather AT&T absorb Time Warner than Comcast.

Maybe this will cause Trump to retaliate by bringing back net neutrality?

"They still have some competent developers working there. The problem is that although they put on a lot of lipstick - they are still dead Evil."

The problem is that they have some competent developers working there, when realistically they need badass talent like Google and Apple has.

Whether or not a company is evil is subject to opinion on what you think a company is meant to do. A company is meant to be profitable.

The only thing I see in this acquisition is that Microsoft want's to improve it hiring abilities and to gain control on a few open source projects like Electron and Atom. Projects that they use for example in VS Code.

Like I wouldn't be surprised if Electron was their only interest because of Web Assembly being on the horizon and the fact that Windows is still the dominant desktop OS, but their web store doesn't deliver like Google or Apple stores because developers attention is already split between Android, IOS, and Web development.

Long story short, Microsoft has a lot to gain by integrating Electron into Windows because to develop for Web is essentially the same as developing for Windows. (in this regard they gain the same edge that ChromeOS has)

Plus the more Microsoft embraces open source the closer we get to a Linux based Windows OS. Which sounds horrifying until you consider that Linux shipping on every computer in the world means all these projects developed for Linux will get to actually see the light of day.

I am starting to feel firefox in a serious way. But im just sooo concerned that their software still sucks. I mean, we ARE talking about a company who thought it was smart to spend time trying to build a javascript OS for mobile.

So let me ask again. When are you guys going to start building firefox from the ground up and make the perfect browser we all deserve?

And if you disagree, please. Present your arguments. I am the person you need to sell right now.

They have $768M and this is the best they can come up with when it comes to improving the state? Fuck, use that money and build the hyperloop like you should have, so we can race the slow as fuck bullet train the state decided to agree to spend billions on; only to find out that they received an overly optimistic bid.

Im just happy that tablets are finally dead. You have a super supped up desktop computer at home sitting on your desk, and you have a relatively supped up smart phone sitting in your pocket when you cant be sitting at your desk.

Where does tablets fit into this scenario?

It doesn't. All tablets do is make app developers think they can somehow make app experiences you can only achieve on the desktop, somehow attainable on the go.

sorry for the bad grammar. kinda tipsy

I've read a little bit about turing machines and there is also a variation that includes what is called an "oracle" machine. Do you know anything about that?

but trying to devise a program that can predict somebody's password without using brute force is a NP problem? Since its hard to discover what the password is, but trivial to check if it lets you in the vault?

I get the reasoning why people aren't sure if P = NP.

Here is another question.

What defines time? And what about a solution?

Consider the fact that in the theory of general relativity we have the twin paradox.

What if I sent a computer on a rocket at close to the speed of light and then on earth I had the same machine running the calculation that takes a million years, and then when the other computer gets back from it's interstellar vacation, I just have the computer ask the other what it's part of the solution is.

According to the computer that flew away the amount of time that it takes to solve the problem can be considered ~P in a way.

My intuition is telling me that this is probably the wrong way to think about time complexity though.