streamofdigits

Accelerating scikit-learn is a smart move. At the algorithmic level for every ML use case there is probably x 10 non-ML data science projects. Also, it is good to have a true community framework that does not depend on the success of the metaverse for funding ;-)

The lock-in is an important consideration, but if the scikit-learn API is fully respected it would seem less relevant. It also suggests a pattern for how other hardware vendors could accelerate scikit-learn as a genuine contribution?

those silicon valley gazillionaires have really gone bananas. I guess that's one way of getting rid of them, throw some much money at them that their synapses start firing uncontrollably

> Cable losses along the entire transmission line are estimated between 10 and 12%, but these are justified...

It makes much more sense to connect Morocco to Spain and have electricity produced across North Africa / Europe distributed in the most energy efficient way.

How much time did they actually buy with the meta-shtick?

There is a meta vision (pun) that is bigger than a "leftist vision", in the sense enlightenment and humanism is a very deep well that originates much more than the debate about particular economic system designs, capital formation, ownership and employment contracts etc.

It feels as if abusive societies are the norm (and we have seen that in breathtakingly dark glory with the ascent of surveillance capitalism) but the historical pattern seems to be pointing to the gradual discovery of tools (institutions, behaviors) that eliminate these local minima. Alas it may not be happening fast enough to prevent drifting into a bottomless pit.

The main current issue with the "metaverse", imho, is not who will control it, but is it actually a breakthrough communications technology that is worthwhile developing to its "full" potential? Its "wow" factor feels really gimmicky. I am thinking that if it feels like a gimmick maybe it is a gimmick. But I do acknowledge that a combination of preliminary implementations and not have discovered yet the use cases what would really make it worthwhile may change the picture at a future point.

> 8-12 members who largely do maintenance, watch, and cook

I suppose the "cooking" part can be eliminated once you don't need maintainance and watch :-)

"Watch" is an interesting (and solvable?) challenge. Understanding the sea environment (visually, sonar etc) from the local (ship's) perspective can complement e.g satellite imagery. But there is also e.g. watching against piracy

Maintainance seems the toughest. Unless the engineering is perfected to the point that it is only required at ports.

> Most stories ‘fail’ and have only one or two points

Stories are like startups it seems :-)

(Semi-)Autonomous open sea cargo ships might be an even better use case. One could imagine totally unmanned ships cruising the planet and delivering goods without putting anybody at risk (or subjecting to the long days of confinment). But one might need people on-board for quite some time: eg mechanics when invariably something breaks down

A canal environment is still quite crowded and maybe the economic motivation rather limited but its probably an excellent test bed

its a good read but remarkably it manages not to mention once the fediverse (and mastodon in particular) where alternate strategies are already facing empirical validation.

if they did do a more thorough research of how it is setup they would know that some very simple choices have huge calming effect: e.g., not showing the number of "likes" on the timeline and not allowing "comments" on reposts. and those are just tiny interventions in the scheme of things. having open source codebases that can be forked but still interoperate via activity pub means that a fragmentation, speciation, niche creation will happen organically which will further reduce the phenomenon of irrate digital mobs

its not like people don't have imagination, but a "system" that sucks in XX billions of profit per quarter acts as a black hole: any light-ray of hope is crushed back into its reality distortion field

I agree, thats why the role of the public sector is important to overcome the lack of "immediate" benefit, or more precisely, the lack of immediate pecuniary benefit. Quote: The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

each mastodon instance has different moderation policies. you can setup you own instance and experiment.

you are free not change your mind about social media but please stop throwing around inaccuracies

why don't you try, say mastodon, just for fun. its perfectly usable even though it has been built using many orders of magnitude less resources than these walled gardens

there are many issues around social media that are still unresolved and existing fediverse implementations are not necessarily more advanced in this respect.

but the transparency, evolvability, standards based architecture are all aspects that would much accelerate finding solutions

An example of "wasting EU money" on fediverse development would be useful.

How can switching to social media that are less privacy invasive, less manipulative be "worse".

NB: It is obviously true that the public sector can waste money. Everybody has their favorite examples. This is not the time and topic to debate how to fix the public sector.

the "X"(ML/HMTL/...) universe seems to have been deprecated but lots of boring people out there that need to manage real life complexity seem to wonder the wisdom of the "in crowd"

progress has sometimes a strange "helix" like structure: revisiting and re-using valuable old patterns after fixing their pain points

for chrissake

* just fund some fediverse development as a public good

* make sure its user friendly and easy to setup

* force easy export of social graph

* use your mouthpiece to advertise that an alternative exists and is better for the health of digital life

* done

sometimes it is quite ok if the collective purpose (and purse) steps in and cuts runaway private enterprise to size. even the most red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists admit that corporate interests adapt to the legal and social sandbox they operate in.

stop talking. do

I wonder if the reason HATEOAS is not taken more seriously / developed further is simply the economic / cultural context of the dominant style of software development during the past decade (centralization, winner-takes-all, command-and-control etc) rather than something intrinsic about the architecture

A decentralized web (as originally imagined) involves countless diverse servers and clients exchanging data of constantly evolving (as in: growing in complexity) semantic structures. What is needed is not inventing a "language to rule all languages" but inventing the dictionary.

If there is an alternative pattern that can somehow enable a truly functional decentralized web please step forward.

assuming you can reach a working temperature differential why not continue deeper with the well? From that threshold depth onwards you can extract heat along a line segment that extends to the ultimate depth (which is pressumably dictated by engineering limitations)

caveat: thinking like a physicist, not an engineer :-)

The "puzzles" will keep pilling up. One year there will be no insects, the next year it will be a horror movie.

Global human-made mass now exceeds all living biomass [0]. We are basically simply pushing the rest of the biosphere to a corner. It responds as the immensely complex, adaptive, system that it is: unpredictably.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5

is surface area a fair comparison? A deep well should be able to extract all along its length

There is a certain truth to that, in that modern digital technology (from digital networks, to data centers to satellites orbiting constantly above Earth) makes it easier than ever to collect and process a lot of very detailed data about everybody and everything

But modern technology has also made it very easy to rob or kill people in large numbers and we (generally) don't do that.

Whether "privacy is dead" or not is not a technological question, it is a moral, political, economic and social structure question. Legislation that is aligned with what society wants (or should want) and is thus enforced can be very effective.

If we resign and normalize the current status quo there will be nobody to blame for the dystopia but us.

"we" as in everybody :-), in particular in our capacity of shaping legal frameworks and regulation

maybe there reason there isn't more discussion about something so deeply relevant is that we are already in a stage where what is being discussed is pretty much channeled and controlled.

I would imagine if somebody declared "your property ownership is dead, from now on you own nothing" there would be quite a bit more discussion about it.

It is actually more than that. Privacy is exclusively cast as an individual / personal concept. But that is just the basis. If people have no privacy, any organizations, or enterprizes they form have no privacy either.

Privacy is one of the very foundations of social and economic organization. It is deeply connected with ownership and agency. Holding on to a private piece of the information universe is what underpins also all civic and commercial activity.

It is not clear why we still just talk about privacy instead of actually doing something meaningful about it [0]. This is maybe the most glaring example of how modern society has degenerated / cannot solve any of its self-inflicted diseases.

[0] That's obviously not a critisism of the tor project :-), these early pioneers are the saving grace of our society.

intuitively I would agree, but the point of my comment was that intuition might be a poor guide if we want to understand what kind of team and software architectures "succeed".

if you rewind some years microservices was also the word of the day (and probably there were some iconic projects picked to justify...)

Beware of survivorship bias.

Team does X, does not achieve scale, nobody knows about it

Team does X, achieves scale, X is the new sliced bread

Incredibly powerful summary of a dismal state of affairs. How did it come to that?

I feel we are massivelly overrating the level of governance, competence and ability to manage our overall "success" as modern societies

This was already quite evident with the financial crisis and came down as a hammer with the pandemic crisis and the ultimate dead-end of the climate crisis.

The denerate, dystopic, digital universe we have evolved into is not perceived as a systemic crisis. Massive data breaches are normalized. The obvious manipulation and influence of political processess the world over are shrugged off. The feudalization of economic life is portrayed as desirable "disruption". But it is really a slow moving car crash and there is no indication we have mechanisms to steer away from the deterministic outcome.

Ironically, it is almost certain that better governance would have to be based on suitable digital tools and networks. There is an alternate Philip K. Dick universe out there but we need some magic quantum tunnel to get to it.

the short-termist, transactional view of society (you are only a good as your last payment, no long-term relation) is not natural, not required and undermines many other adjacent social contracts

publishers should support a lively rss ecosystem (actually evolve next-gen tech based on its principles) and draw revenue on the basis of visibility (and as you say, esteem and influence) this provides

people have always been paying for content. we have normalized the exception and abberation that is the "pay-with-your-private-data" business model

I never thought that I would say this, but Mozilla's failure to evolve empowering user-centric clients from the great initial success of firefox and thunderbird is beginning to look suspect.

Increasingly they look like a tired alibi for a dystopic status-quo

you are giving the massive number of people below the figureheads at the very top an easy pass... government IT is a major, major, segment and technology, protocol etc choices they make can have huge influence.