Let's try to keep our plans based in reality instead of some pro-crime pothead's wet dream.
What plan? You plan to vote for someone who ran on "hope & change" and then just smirked and said "nah, not really", because the alternative is completely nuts, you know, just like Bush got re-elected because Kerry sucked?
That is what you call a plan? You just consume what others plan. They get into office on some promise, and you have exactly zero ways to hold them accountable.
This isn't realistic, it's theatre. Just like your portraits of alternatives are.
The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there's a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!
You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.
But let's say an inspired mathlete proves me wrong. There's a brilliant hack that fixes all the issues I've raised and we go ahead and build the Platonic social graph. What can you actually do with it?
Well, one thing we've seen is that machine-readable lists of friends make it much easier to launch social sites. Letting a thousand startups bloom is one of the big justifications in Fitzpatrick's essay. But is removing this friction a good thing? It is admittedly annoying to have to re-follow people every time you sign up for something, but it also forces the authors to make the site appealing enough to get us over that hurdle. We're already starting to see apps whose first act is to suction down our contact list and spam our various accounts with invites without bothering to woo us at all. I can't imagine having open API access to the social graph is going to improve that.
In other domains, a big graph would be good for recommendations, but friendship is not transitive. There's just no way to tell if you'll get along with someone in my social circle, no matter how many friends we have in common.
But one thing you can do is mine a huge amount of information about my friends and infer things about their interests, income, social status and tastes. And then maybe you can use that information to bring them valuable news and offers, or help them digitally engage with their favorite brands.
Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph.
Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.
Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It's as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender).
We're used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it's worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?
We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage - we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they've built to document your entire online life.
Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?
Just because the rest of the world demands Big Brother doesn't mean you have to. You and your friends can do whatever you want. The internet just routes your packets. What you do with them is up to you.
Nah. What others do is important. If anybody but me watched TV 24/7, or slowly unlearned to read or write sentences longer than 140 characters, how would I be able to have a decent conversation about fuck all? To me that's like saying you can swim anywhere you want, where the bucket is poured is not your concern. Sure, it seems like that, for a while, but it's not like that in the long run,, so even if it wasn't so extremely selfish to say it doesn't concern you, it would still be short-sighted.
We weren't just developing satellites, we were developing ICBMs and the only way to get that many top level engineers on it was by doing something the engineers found interesting, which was a brilliant approach. A much smaller number of engineers already interested in weapons production was all that was needed to do the minor conversions in the tech.
Don't mistake not knowing any history for being able to just guess and get it right.
What? That's just more words for "cold war masturbation". Don't mistake despising history with not knowing it, and bloat with additional information.
Getting to the moon was just a matter of work, we had known for a long time how to build rockets, what the formula for gravity was, how strong different fuels are, etc. But we don't have any material, even a theoretical one, that could make a small scale neutrino detector that was efficient enough to be useful in realtime, all day communications. So a bazillion engineers wouldn't help. Regular materials would need too much mass, nothing known has enough. So even just trying every known material would be pointless.
I say give it a few hundred years.
Again, it's awfully nice of you to basically just repeat what I said, but I don't get the point, other than that you just felt the need to play pretend-refute. I appreciate that, now run along:P
Yeah, and I also didn't get the bit about replacing salt with seaweed... wtf? Oh well.
If less meat gets consumed, there will be more food available to humans overall, since the ratio of food used to food gained (by converting plants etc. to meat via e.g. feeding a cow) is about 10.
And IIRC, that is true for every layer. Plants to cow, cow to humans = 100 times less effective than, say, humans doing photosynthesis directly:D
What hostility, what unasked question? I've been pondering this stuff since I'm a teenager, I'm just not easy to surprise.
If you however question if the conscious is something beyond the brain or still resident in the brain, and seek to find if it is limited to the brain, then it doesn't.
As I said, everything is everything... the "problem" with that is, it doesn't make much sense to speak of individuality then, either.
As for free will, even if it is an illusion, it is sufficient as you get to ask and answer you own question of meaning.
My point was, even though everything that can be learned about neurology seems to utterly destroy most notions we have about ourselves and our decisions, we still have them. We go further and further away from just being, and coming up with objecties and properties to "possess", and "narratives" and all that nonsense. So yeah, let's ponder our mortality. I have great trust we won't fatfinger it. We already applied our rational brain to economics and politics, let's do this now.
From the summary:
"including near-death experiences and the impact of belief in an afterlife on human behavior."
Notice what they have in common? Both are about living people. The latter is actually a joke. Why not include "the history of folkore about immortality?" That's also "studying an aspect of immortality". I'm not opposed to questions, I'm opposed to shallowness:P
from the article:
"If you believe in reincarnation, how can the very same person exist if you start over with no memories?"
You see, even comedians are more insightful than that.
"I suppose it would be nice if reincarnation were a reality, but I have problems with the math. At some point, originally, there must have been a time when there were only two human beings. They both died, and presumably their souls were reincarnated into two other bodies. But that still leaves us with only two souls. We now have nearly six billion people on the planet. Where are all the extra souls coming from? Is someone printing up souls? Wouldn't that tend to lower their value?" - George Carlin
There. Done. Tomorrow we'll talk about Noah's Ark.
Everything is everything, and there is no hostility in that. The notions we have, what we call humans and how we consider ourselves - that won't disappear, because it never existed in the first place. A needle isn't hostile to a bubble, the tension in the bubble is hostile to reality.
Never will happen. too hard to do don't care what anyone says.
"We couldn't" != "We thought we couldn't". We've had science fiction about going to other planets all through the fucking 19th century. It was more feasible to them than detecting neutrinos cheaply and on a large scale is now.
But that doesn't even matter: WTF is the point of going to the moon? It was more a cold war masturbation thing than anything else. Satellites are awesome and can be helpful, going to the moon (or Mars) is just random and silly.
Same for neutrino fucking trading. Neutrino bombs on Wall Street, and we might have a worthwhile idea on our hands. But no wait, you can't joke about that, that gets you flagged as a terrorist, because we're making such awesome progress. Like going to the fucking moon, bleh. The idea that this will be hailed as some milestone achievement for a long time, if not forever, is scary to me. It's almost as if we hadn't spend thousands of years on a planetoid and couldn't possibly imagine one might also be be on another one. *groans* I blame television. If there hadn't been such a circus around it (which kinda still goes on, the way you proudly point it out, lol), nobody would remember or care about the moon landing.
if someone steals your Cell Phone and you have no other way of getting a message out, does that mean the message disappears.
Well, yes? If you write a text file, save it locally, and then destroy harddrive, CPU and RAM Chips, that text file is pretty much gone.
If you arrange a bunch of sticks in a pattern, and then destroy the sticks, and/or disperse them -- where has the pattern gone?
Nobody would even ask that. But that's because we don't care about a bunch of squiggly lines formed by sticks on some beach in the middle of nowhere, do we. But when that own personality is that pattern, ohhhh, it's such a mystery, where does that pattern go... it has to go somewhere...
The question of course is, is this applicable to the consciousness... I dunno. And even if it is, do we want to apply it? Personally, I (think I) know for a fact that everything is everything, that nothing we do will change the outcome, which will be nothing/everything, and that free will may very well be a complete illusion. I (think I) know that, but I consider it more noble to pretend otherwise. I have no arguments for this, I just do. It beats the alternative; Nietzsche warned of nihilism for a reason, it sucks:P Though of course there is another way to look at it, too:
"We feel free to express ourselves because we are ready to fade into emptiness. When we are trying to be active and special and to accomplish something, we cannot express ourselves... So we have enjoyment, we are free."
-- Shunryu Suzuki
Same input, much better result ^_^
But while I'm rambling: What I wonder about is *real* AI. Since the 90's I'm waiting, I'm convinced that actual AI wouldn't do squat, since thorough computations would show the end result to be the same, heat death of the universe. So yeah, we could build this city and then wait until it decays, or we could just not bother. Kinda like Marvin from HGttG, but without the pain in the diodes and nagging ^^
But of course, we'll create it in our own image, so that won't happen, it will happily slave on, like a dog that never gets tired of fetching stick. Then we'll start to worship it, because it's bigger than us individually, just like we already worship the herd. It will be great:/
Didn't Jesus let them kill him on purpose, so he could respawn 3 days later as a further demonstration of him being (endorsed by) the admin? But yeah, it's hard to make sense of it going just by a bunch of server logs which may have been tampered with.
I'm sure you could do the same with Microsoft and other presentations. I'd love to see it. But still, that doesn't mean Apple isn't full of it.
But then again, "brands" are concepts by and for fucked up people to begin with. Crap in, crap out. Hate is pointless, but shrugging off any and all brands is pretty much a requirement if your mind is to ever leave the purely receptive stage.
Do zombies go by smell? Because in that case peppering the walls with bullets where you detect silhouettes will just help them find you quicker, and smelling nice just makes it worse:/
I on the other hand won't have to change a thing. I'll just sit here like I always do, quietly, reading slashdot covered in a thick crust of dead skin and feces, waiting to get last post. I'm ready!
Well yeah, there's that ^^ But as I said, I don't think it counts as cheating, since he wasn't really fragging anyone... IIRC he mostly warned of the impending crash of the server they were on, while handing out the access details for the new one ("the admin's private server has many slots") to those who agreed to installing punkbuster and having their score reset. He exploited glitches to get the attention of players for that purpose, sure, but I'm not sure that sounds as cheating?
3rd post, and you still only moan about strawmen. What a fascinating surprise!
"There is zero evidence that future PCs are going to be Microsoft locked."
You simply ignore this:
"Their tactics match their Nazi goal."
They do. There's your "evidence" - it involves homework, sure. So? Do the homework. And you know what, "nazi" is simply shorter than "totalitarian", and that in turn is from THEIR internal memos and public statements, it's not an exaggeration at all.
If you had the capacity or the will to get the point, you already would have. But you'd play with strawmen. Which, incidentally, doesn't insult me at all, it's just boring.
I meant the "fuck you", and why not. If that pisses you off so much, what the fuck, did we meet? If not, what is it to you? Can you not accept having met with disapproval from a perfect stranger, that you have to project and flaunder about with unintentional irony such as "whatever makes you feel better"? This is just sad, and it's not even about Microsoft, more about the kind of dumb fucking person who would stand up for them.
As for "who started the insults":
just another paranoid, scaremongering tactic being employed by the Linux fanboys.
I'm none of the above, yet I am literate and have an attention span and whatnot. You're either a shill or a useful idiot -- so you preemptively insult anyone, and that is where you're stuck at. Bluffs and barking. Pitiful.
Thanks for the demonstration though, keep it up. Lest we forget.
I hope cloning food is one of those glitches that will end up as a feature someday, like rocket jumping. At any rate, since he shared the bread and fishes with all on the server, I wouldn't call it abusing the bug, especially since they were all just idling anyway, there wasn't a match in progress at that time.
Nice rationalization for a wallhack there. Personally, I think even in the case of a zombie apocalypse you have to have *some* standards. Otherwise, what is the difference between you and a zombie?
I've got nothing? You mean like the thing that you didn't address, but keep throwing fits about, "A PC in every home, running Windows?" You're like a little kid who thinks it cannot be seen because it has the eyes covered -- just because you are unable or unwilling to, you know, catch up, doesn't mean I don't know what I know.
It just means it's STILL waiting there to be addressed by you, if you could just stop crying for a second:D
That's not paranoia, that's literacy plus attention span. Also, you're mistaking stupidity for manlyness. But hey, make the best of what you got, right? Right.
The problem lies in taking the judgement of others more seriously than reflection and criticizing yourself. Modern herd man has no self and is just flapping in the breeze. But of course, it's not polite to point that out towards a specific individual. We can all agree that it's generally a problem, or a problem of other people, but beyond that... "who are you to criticize me?"
Yet the more grounded and peaceful you yourself become, the easier it is to notice wobblyness in others, and I think if one keeps that up long enough, they might also find a way to criticize without making the other feel bad, that is, without them feeling attacked. There is a way of calmly stating things with strong, yet cleaminded conviction, that is pretty much impossible to fuck with.
We don't like to be criticized, but who doesn't love being schooled in a way that may be harsh in that it breaks previously held beliefs, but is still well-meant? We all do and receive that in little ways all the time (when someone pressed the wrong button at the elevator, it's no biggie to press the right one while smiling at them, is it.. and when someone dropped something, they also don't mind if you point that out to them, or even pick it up for them). It's just when it comes closer to the ego, or even lack of self, when it all can get hairy fast. But the principle is the same IMHO.
My slashdot post history proves what a shitty hypocrite I am when I say the above things, but they're still true as far as I can tell.
Slashdot Mirror
What plan? You plan to vote for someone who ran on "hope & change" and then just smirked and said "nah, not really", because the alternative is completely nuts, you know, just like Bush got re-elected because Kerry sucked?
That is what you call a plan? You just consume what others plan. They get into office on some promise, and you have exactly zero ways to hold them accountable.
This isn't realistic, it's theatre. Just like your portraits of alternatives are.
right back atcha.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duopoly
older, but always a good read:
http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/
Nah. What others do is important. If anybody but me watched TV 24/7, or slowly unlearned to read or write sentences longer than 140 characters, how would I be able to have a decent conversation about fuck all? To me that's like saying you can swim anywhere you want, where the bucket is poured is not your concern. Sure, it seems like that, for a while, but it's not like that in the long run,, so even if it wasn't so extremely selfish to say it doesn't concern you, it would still be short-sighted.
There are no higher values than peace, justice and praise of God in Judaism.
Not that you know anything about it, other than that you hate Jews. Now do you.
"Koranimals"? You have some valid points, which you completely spoil with that kind of crap. Way to.. whatever the fuck that was :(
What? That's just more words for "cold war masturbation". Don't mistake despising history with not knowing it, and bloat with additional information.
Again, it's awfully nice of you to basically just repeat what I said, but I don't get the point, other than that you just felt the need to play pretend-refute. I appreciate that, now run along :P
Yeah, and I also didn't get the bit about replacing salt with seaweed... wtf? Oh well.
And IIRC, that is true for every layer. Plants to cow, cow to humans = 100 times less effective than, say, humans doing photosynthesis directly :D
What hostility, what unasked question? I've been pondering this stuff since I'm a teenager, I'm just not easy to surprise.
As I said, everything is everything... the "problem" with that is, it doesn't make much sense to speak of individuality then, either.
My point was, even though everything that can be learned about neurology seems to utterly destroy most notions we have about ourselves and our decisions, we still have them. We go further and further away from just being, and coming up with objecties and properties to "possess", and "narratives" and all that nonsense. So yeah, let's ponder our mortality. I have great trust we won't fatfinger it. We already applied our rational brain to economics and politics, let's do this now.
From the summary:
"including near-death experiences and the impact of belief in an afterlife on human behavior."
Notice what they have in common? Both are about living people. The latter is actually a joke. Why not include "the history of folkore about immortality?" That's also "studying an aspect of immortality". I'm not opposed to questions, I'm opposed to shallowness :P
from the article:
"If you believe in reincarnation, how can the very same person exist if you start over with no memories?"
You see, even comedians are more insightful than that.
"I suppose it would be nice if reincarnation were a reality, but I have problems with the math. At some point, originally, there must have been a time when there were only two human beings. They both died, and presumably their souls were reincarnated into two other bodies. But that still leaves us with only two souls. We now have nearly six billion people on the planet. Where are all the extra souls coming from? Is someone printing up souls? Wouldn't that tend to lower their value?" - George Carlin
There. Done. Tomorrow we'll talk about Noah's Ark.
Everything is everything, and there is no hostility in that. The notions we have, what we call humans and how we consider ourselves - that won't disappear, because it never existed in the first place. A needle isn't hostile to a bubble, the tension in the bubble is hostile to reality.
Haha, saved by a typo from going to Gitmo, woot.
"We couldn't" != "We thought we couldn't". We've had science fiction about going to other planets all through the fucking 19th century. It was more feasible to them than detecting neutrinos cheaply and on a large scale is now.
But that doesn't even matter: WTF is the point of going to the moon? It was more a cold war masturbation thing than anything else. Satellites are awesome and can be helpful, going to the moon (or Mars) is just random and silly.
Same for neutrino fucking trading. Neutrino bombs on Wall Street, and we might have a worthwhile idea on our hands. But no wait, you can't joke about that, that gets you flagged as a terrorist, because we're making such awesome progress. Like going to the fucking moon, bleh. The idea that this will be hailed as some milestone achievement for a long time, if not forever, is scary to me. It's almost as if we hadn't spend thousands of years on a planetoid and couldn't possibly imagine one might also be be on another one. *groans* I blame television. If there hadn't been such a circus around it (which kinda still goes on, the way you proudly point it out, lol), nobody would remember or care about the moon landing.
Well, yes? If you write a text file, save it locally, and then destroy harddrive, CPU and RAM Chips, that text file is pretty much gone.
If you arrange a bunch of sticks in a pattern, and then destroy the sticks, and/or disperse them -- where has the pattern gone?
Nobody would even ask that. But that's because we don't care about a bunch of squiggly lines formed by sticks on some beach in the middle of nowhere, do we. But when that own personality is that pattern, ohhhh, it's such a mystery, where does that pattern go... it has to go somewhere...
The question of course is, is this applicable to the consciousness... I dunno. And even if it is, do we want to apply it? Personally, I (think I) know for a fact that everything is everything, that nothing we do will change the outcome, which will be nothing/everything, and that free will may very well be a complete illusion. I (think I) know that, but I consider it more noble to pretend otherwise. I have no arguments for this, I just do. It beats the alternative; Nietzsche warned of nihilism for a reason, it sucks :P Though of course there is another way to look at it, too:
"We feel free to express ourselves because we are ready to fade into emptiness. When we are trying to be active and special and to accomplish something, we cannot express ourselves... So we have enjoyment, we are free."
-- Shunryu Suzuki
Same input, much better result ^_^
But while I'm rambling: What I wonder about is *real* AI. Since the 90's I'm waiting, I'm convinced that actual AI wouldn't do squat, since thorough computations would show the end result to be the same, heat death of the universe. So yeah, we could build this city and then wait until it decays, or we could just not bother. Kinda like Marvin from HGttG, but without the pain in the diodes and nagging ^^
But of course, we'll create it in our own image, so that won't happen, it will happily slave on, like a dog that never gets tired of fetching stick. Then we'll start to worship it, because it's bigger than us individually, just like we already worship the herd. It will be great :/
as opposed to? how are chrome or IE better?
Didn't Jesus let them kill him on purpose, so he could respawn 3 days later as a further demonstration of him being (endorsed by) the admin? But yeah, it's hard to make sense of it going just by a bunch of server logs which may have been tampered with.
Same goes for empty hearts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx7v815bYUw
I'm sure you could do the same with Microsoft and other presentations. I'd love to see it. But still, that doesn't mean Apple isn't full of it.
But then again, "brands" are concepts by and for fucked up people to begin with. Crap in, crap out. Hate is pointless, but shrugging off any and all brands is pretty much a requirement if your mind is to ever leave the purely receptive stage.
Do zombies go by smell? Because in that case peppering the walls with bullets where you detect silhouettes will just help them find you quicker, and smelling nice just makes it worse :/
I on the other hand won't have to change a thing. I'll just sit here like I always do, quietly, reading slashdot covered in a thick crust of dead skin and feces, waiting to get last post. I'm ready!
Well yeah, there's that ^^ But as I said, I don't think it counts as cheating, since he wasn't really fragging anyone... IIRC he mostly warned of the impending crash of the server they were on, while handing out the access details for the new one ("the admin's private server has many slots") to those who agreed to installing punkbuster and having their score reset. He exploited glitches to get the attention of players for that purpose, sure, but I'm not sure that sounds as cheating?
3rd post, and you still only moan about strawmen. What a fascinating surprise!
You simply ignore this:
They do. There's your "evidence" - it involves homework, sure. So? Do the homework. And you know what, "nazi" is simply shorter than "totalitarian", and that in turn is from THEIR internal memos and public statements, it's not an exaggeration at all.
If you had the capacity or the will to get the point, you already would have. But you'd play with strawmen. Which, incidentally, doesn't insult me at all, it's just boring.
I meant the "fuck you", and why not. If that pisses you off so much, what the fuck, did we meet? If not, what is it to you? Can you not accept having met with disapproval from a perfect stranger, that you have to project and flaunder about with unintentional irony such as "whatever makes you feel better"? This is just sad, and it's not even about Microsoft, more about the kind of dumb fucking person who would stand up for them.
As for "who started the insults":
just another paranoid, scaremongering tactic being employed by the Linux fanboys.
I'm none of the above, yet I am literate and have an attention span and whatnot. You're either a shill or a useful idiot -- so you preemptively insult anyone, and that is where you're stuck at. Bluffs and barking. Pitiful.
Thanks for the demonstration though, keep it up. Lest we forget.
I hope cloning food is one of those glitches that will end up as a feature someday, like rocket jumping. At any rate, since he shared the bread and fishes with all on the server, I wouldn't call it abusing the bug, especially since they were all just idling anyway, there wasn't a match in progress at that time.
Nice rationalization for a wallhack there. Personally, I think even in the case of a zombie apocalypse you have to have *some* standards. Otherwise, what is the difference between you and a zombie?
I've got nothing? You mean like the thing that you didn't address, but keep throwing fits about, "A PC in every home, running Windows?" You're like a little kid who thinks it cannot be seen because it has the eyes covered -- just because you are unable or unwilling to, you know, catch up, doesn't mean I don't know what I know.
It just means it's STILL waiting there to be addressed by you, if you could just stop crying for a second :D
That's not paranoia, that's literacy plus attention span. Also, you're mistaking stupidity for manlyness. But hey, make the best of what you got, right? Right.
Microsofts sole goal is "A PC in every house, running Windows." Their tactics match their Nazi goal. How's that for FUD? Fuck you.
The problem lies in taking the judgement of others more seriously than reflection and criticizing yourself. Modern herd man has no self and is just flapping in the breeze. But of course, it's not polite to point that out towards a specific individual. We can all agree that it's generally a problem, or a problem of other people, but beyond that... "who are you to criticize me?"
Yet the more grounded and peaceful you yourself become, the easier it is to notice wobblyness in others, and I think if one keeps that up long enough, they might also find a way to criticize without making the other feel bad, that is, without them feeling attacked. There is a way of calmly stating things with strong, yet cleaminded conviction, that is pretty much impossible to fuck with.
We don't like to be criticized, but who doesn't love being schooled in a way that may be harsh in that it breaks previously held beliefs, but is still well-meant? We all do and receive that in little ways all the time (when someone pressed the wrong button at the elevator, it's no biggie to press the right one while smiling at them, is it.. and when someone dropped something, they also don't mind if you point that out to them, or even pick it up for them). It's just when it comes closer to the ego, or even lack of self, when it all can get hairy fast. But the principle is the same IMHO.
My slashdot post history proves what a shitty hypocrite I am when I say the above things, but they're still true as far as I can tell.
And you post posts that say *zero*. Talk more.