Seriously, this could all be parody, and at this point, no one would be able to tell.
It's kind of like recent decades of of the political process: Take normal political lying, intersperse it with assurances that "Oh, now we're going to make EVERYTHING better - government is not the solution WE ARE... when we're government, that is."... then they get in, and it's like 10x more cynical rules being passed.
That said, pessimism is misleading too. PLENTY of scummy businessmen have dreamt of pushing these same models, but were rejected soundly by smaller customer bases - it just takes longer for Microsoft to fall the same way IBM and other scummy folks did.
Also, for politics, if you look at the ages of yellow journalism in ages past, the populace was truly more deeply ignorant in the past, and the politics even more cynical, with death as a much more common side effect of that cynicism - things are genuinely better, which actually makes it relatively shocking to see some small degree of backsliding towards a less classically liberal path. Despite the 'overton window' of recent decades and news, we're actually amazingly liberal in terms of actual policies, with no real show of that stopping.
But yeah - this crap with windows quadrupling down on their spyware-like 'upgrade' practices is in the same vein - an amazing throwback to scummy ideas I'd thought the 'marketplace of ideas' rejected to soundly everyone should still remember not to use them.
First off, those engines will only run at full power at the very start of the journey, if even then to get to, well, _cruising_ speed, which is around 22 knots, which is around 25 miles per hour. It IS a lot of fuel to use in any case - but per-person, it's not so bad as these blind numbers in headlines.
Bulk shipping by large ship is actually pretty efficient a method of transporting our stuff. Yeah - they often use the nasty fuel when they can get away with it - but in terms of per-unit cost, it really isn't that bad by scale. The entire transportation industry DOES need to get off carbon fuels - but compared to the fuel used to give everyone groceries and trade, the impact of vacation resources isn't that large a cost. People always eat, the extra fuel to eat on this boat isn't a very large extra percent.
I don't think it's terribly productive to label folks taking vacations as wasteful, when really, it's our entire current system that needs to get its resource usage into a sustainable state.
I think if you'd compare it to environmentally 'friendly' activities like touring Alaska's wildlife, it uses far less fuel per person.
Doesn't matter if it's got a wonderfully elegant underlying structure, it's still a FUNGIBLE, TRADEABLE RESOURCE, with a set of mechanisms controlled by PEOPLE.
If a company town somewhere offered the perfect elegant scrip system, where demand is balanced against resources to ensure complete fairness in the system... if people are in control of it, they're going to find some way to exploit their position over others with that system.
Even though it was getting popular, it's still a niche currency, and it was going through a mania stage, like tulips did 300 years ago. It's very instability is an important key to reaching adoption, but also why it would be very difficult to reach large scale in its current form.
The problem is that it's a cryptocurrency - and like town scrips, anyone can invent one. And people are motivated to create them, in order to live at the vortex of managing a currency. But you can't stabilize a monetary system like that, since they're both cryptic and competing.
Even if a government were to create one, its very cryptic nature would make it feel very much like a 'McBuck', a secretly controlled game that feels fed by advertising as much as any real features. All currency is a form of shared manipulation, but cryptocurrencies are a different kind of artifice, in the same way computerized voting is flawed compared to paper voting.
Ah, financial news - a place where you can open make statements like: "Unless the US changes its laws to give me lots of money, I can't help but foresee DIRE, DIRE things happening. Financial catastrophe would be putting it lightly."... and not only is it counted as somehow news, but the richer or more openly lying the person saying it, the more respect it is given.
"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years."
- Gordon E. Moore, April 19, 1965
It's both cost and density, and continued to be so as it crystallized into the transistor doubling every 18 months figure. To double the density, only at exorbitant cost would not really be an increase in accessible technology. It's not just the technology being invented and monopolized, but being rolled out and usable by the entire field. Increasing computational complexity is still the most important part - but cost has always been a part of the idea too.
Specialized processing chips have been several 'generations' ahead in terms of processing per dollar for many decades. In the 90's at least, DSPs were doing audio/video processing much cheaper by performing many machine-level steps simultaneously in one 'cycle' with less power than a general processor, by leaving out the features and cost of a general processor. And all you had to do to use them was test them on a hardware emulator, flash them, then pop them into production test run until you were good enough to deploy. Depending on the chip, they could run on a trickle of power, without active cooling, and match a much most costly general chip for pennies.
I mean, it's how we got cell phones, and LOTS of other things, including most things in a computer that aren't the CPU.
But isn't Moore's law more about transistors per unit cost, rather than performance per cost? Seems like a fundamental misunderstanding in the headline... which seems about as common as specialized chips in modern technology.
Personally I am afraid that once the rich get their solar charging flying death robots and wholly robotized economy theyre gonna off all the serfs who just became irredeemably worthless as anything but fertilizer due to human labour in general becoming obsolete.
Why bother keeping sheep around if they can't grow wool anymore?
Solar charged flying death robots are actually pretty easy to defeat with 99-to-1 odds in your favor. How? Throw crap at them. Or mud. And if there's one thing that us descendants of primates can do, it's hide in, and throw dirt. Yes, drones and the like are ideal for military scenarios with known targets, but they won't stop a mob under cover. Generate enough hobos, and not enough mansions and factories would survive functional to keep the oligarchy running. That and, you know, cheap printed guns and explosives.
Short of hobo-status though, people are still going to gather resources and innovate even with idiotic leaders - tools are constantly made cheaper and more useful. Even the dark ages were chock full of inventions (not even counting torture devices), and we're far too accustomed to peace/resources to go anywhere near that horrible a state in the immediate future without a monumental catastrophe.
I'm thinking innovation scales with population, available tools, recorded experience, and accessible resources - all of which are still increasing.
In fact, almost every measurable aspect of human life is actually improving over time so far.
Combine the increasing effects of the Flynn effect, drastically reduced violence over time, automation, increased health standards, and I can't see how the immediate future won't continue the increase in innovation over time.
Not that this is news of course. It's so not news, that you barely even hear of it - and why it's actually so hard for many folks who don't pay attention to science and statistics to even believe. To most folks, the only science news they hear about the future is climate change and extiction rates - both of which are true, but are NOWHERE near a complete picture that science shows us. We've got a lot to fix, but compared to vast stretches of planetary history where single populations explode and take over the biological landscape, we're doing amazing.
Which is also why the future of innovation is important.
Our prison system seems to be turning increasingly evil - as in, willfully and casually harming others on a consistent basis well beyond their charter of stopping harm to others, for their own benefit.
They're increasingly subverting our political process, in order to take what should arguably be a time of reformation and a path back to society (and improvement of the general welfare), and using is to transform every human into a maximum income machine, including transforming laws to make the process worse. There's occasional noises towards public good in the letter of the rules of these places, but they're getting increasingly privatized and 'efficient' at gathering money.
I understand the ideal - this is where we throw folks who won't follow the rules, who won't respond to fines, a place where we repay unfairness with unfairness, so that we can remain productive. Which would be a fine ideal too, if it didn't cost taxpayers $60,000-$130,000 a year per person for land,buildings, employees,healthcare, goods, administration, etc.. We're basically paying for a rather large professional army, complete with all the logistics, in order to make a large portion of our population feel bad for the rest of their lives, for the most part.
It's part of why I've never understood the common Christian conception of Hell - a place of eternal pain, complete with the equivalent of angels who spend their existences making people feel bad for something they can no longer do anything about.
If the point of this horrible song and dance was to reduce motivation to break rules - then there should be a television in every public space, if not in every home, to show the suffering of rule breakers, to at least justify the lesson that we should be learning from all this suffering. If all these people were paying the cost, for our benefit, then all our children should see their suffering, so all this suffering wouldn't be a waste of both their lives and the time of all the people spending their lives imprisoning them.
Perhaps we don't because we really are all rule breakers. Most traffic studies I've seen find that the average driver breaks around 4,000 traffic laws every year. Proportionally the same with bike riders and pedestrians. And that's just the easily observable stuff. But we don't really enforce our rules, instead we pay people to selectively enforce them, and prosecute infractions in some of the oddest ways possible. Things like 'discovery processes', armies of paid lawyers, laws changing at the request of lobbyists, special courts, judges owning stakes in other parts of the process, and very strange politics and biases everywhere.
If the point of the whole game is to pay the least amount of resources, in order to keep the maximum number of people cooperative and productive, then I think everyone would judge that we're doing this the wrong way. There's a LOT of nations to compare against, and we're having worse results than almost all of them.
The prisons we have now are doing horrible jobs in all regards, and are actively engaged in a process of making things worse. If we're spending all these resources, the cheapest thing to do is to take this large army, and reconcile it with better, more productive, and cheaper goals. It's never going to be cheap or easy, but almost anything is going to be cheaper and easier than the road we're going down now.
You do know that many Steam titles are protected with DRM that only works when Steam works, right? You cannot for example a "Steam backup" of such a title without having Steam connected to the network, because the restored backup is not playable until it has been blessed.
I'm sure that most of the games I've got now are DRM-less, because most of them are indie titles, but there's some variation on that point.
Oh, certainly it IS DRM - but outside of some horrible companies sandwiching DRM inside their own binaries, it's almost a vaccine form of DRM. It's essentially DRM that cures DRM, by:
A) Being so easy to remove/bypass. B) Allowing customers to VERY LOUDLY PROTEST the worse kinds of DRM. C) Generally allowing any number of modifications to programs outside multiplayer (even embracing that formally). D) Allowing refunds (due to competition, but still...) E) Increasingly and aggressively supporting flavors of Linux.
Overall, I'd consider Steam to be very healthy for the environment, and popular for many very great reasons.
It's not like it's shit doesn't stink though - plenty of horrible parts of Steam, but the world is much better for it, warts and all.
Microsoft seems to have had their heart set of giving away the razor kits, but selling the blades with Windows 10.
Unfortunately, their Windows Store appears to mostly be filled with copy-cat apps and intentional scams - and when you DO buy "apps" from the store, you don't get a proper executable to use as you'd like such as you'd get from GOG or Steam.
What Microsoft is promoting is a 'Universal Windows Platform" or UWP. UWP applications aren't proper windows programs that you can freely use as you're used to. Instead, they're packaged in encrypted folders, and are essentially laden down with heavy DRM, like a new-age DIVX format. That means, no modding except for very limited things developers exactly plan for, no true fullscreen for games (borderless windowed is forced for now), very few graphics options, and essentially everything locked to how an "XBox One" would present things, since that is the basic intention, to allow game developers to simultaneously publish without separate testing or development cycles on all MS-owned platforms.
Expect to get a LOT more pressure in that direction, before they give up on this approach, almost exactly the same as happened with the horrible GFWL initiative years back.
Somehow though, there's still going to be SOME game developers that drink the cool-aide on this, and will publish UWP games. I'd say stick with Steam/GOG/etc on the platform of your choice, and politely and constructively complain on their forums if they don't bother to publish an actual PC port of the game.
I've lived in the US all my life - I've shot targets in my backyard when living in Alabama... and I've also looked into a lot of history.
There's a lot of powerful ways to view history - the romantic iconography of a school curriculum, the spectacle and drama of television history, the open bias of newspaper history (seriously, old newspapers are hilarious), and the random suppositions and conclusions of academic history at various levels and locations.
The version I find most compelling probably Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature - where it follows a trail of evidence I always saw hinted at the various levels of history presentation, but almost never really followed through on. That despite our large number of massive deadly conflicts, we really are getting less violent at every level of society. It's not some weak trend either - it's overwhelming and fascinating. But it's not a storyline that gels with most methods of conveying history, so it's something almost no one gets presented.
With that in mind, I find the whole song-and-dance we always go through with guns and appeals to history in our gun culture to be more than a little beside-the-point. Guns in private hands don't ruin everything, and they don't really statistically save that many people either, they just multiply the effect of the crazy people that exist in every society, but all societies seem to be getting measurably less crazy and (Flynn effect) better at abstract thought/problem solving over time anyway. Both the restrictions and the problems of guns are more a sideshow that we will continue to bounce across over time, until they're increasingly meaningless.
Tragedies will continue to happen, and we will continue to over-react to them, but they're all increasingly noise in the overall picture.
It's why I find little jabs like this pretty funny - we at large don't really want to push wild-west sensibilities as much as it might seem to the rest of the world, we just have partisans that want to push their ideals at any cost, as they realistically see their vision of their nation indelibly falling away from their ideals.
So cool - if some of these folks want to march with guns as an expression of their freedom - good on you, have a fun time of it, I suppose. The moment you use that freedom as anyone might fear, however, even your own partisans will come down on you like a mountain of bricks. Even in any events of pure violent fantasy made manifest came about - the society we've grown into at it's most 'conservative' won't support the same things our history allowed, and we're all far too unwilling to give up what our shared peace has given us so far.
I could certainly be wrong - but it's my best view on history/violence/guns I've seen so far.
You want your bits of information, your advertising channel to be worth more money. We get that.
But don't pretend that this is some sacred relationship. It isn't. It's a rancid soup of parasites running the show, and now the programmers who've always known how to filter the stream of data are feeling more and more free to give everyone else the tools to filter out the bits they don't like.
Your bits will still be worth money. Seriously guys - put some MAJOR effort into policing your business relationships - if your adverts are in any way annoying to anyone, it is your fault for being willing to push that on your audience.
Here's a crazy idea... put some buttons on each advert, to allow folks to reject the advert, and charge the ones getting the most down-votes more money for any interaction going forward. Give anyone who shows any solid evidence of tracking or bad scripting say, 10 million downvotes on their record per incidence. Same thing for evidence of suspicious bot activity by any company, or for using shell companies. Boom - you get money, you shame the offenders, you make positive news, and get your adverts competing with eachother for COMMON DECENCY.
But really, the summary is pretty much the article. There's no actual content.
All they discuss is the loose intention. No examples, discussion of how that intention was tested or even challenges in design.
This is barely a sidebar article in a checkout-lane magazine.
What is this, a weakly veiled invitation to discuss sexist issues de jeur? I'm cool with that, I just don't appreciate the tactic - this article is mega-weak.
Alright - I'll give you a better one:
Question: How many angry feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Newsflash: Folks willing to be interviewed on being 'geeky' tend to be gregarious and be quite optimistic about their own potential. Shy/anti-social 'geeks' not measured.
Everyone's got a mixed bag of ignorance and hangups - and folks who self-label as 'geeky' in public are folks who project a willingness to focus and specialize on a small range of subjects that they admire. Many others are going to be shy or antisocial, or unwilling to put up with a 'geeky' label.
BREAKING NEWS: DJs and Rap Artists also found to be frequently narcisistic! 'Fronting' found to be a very helpful form of marketing, and method of promoting causes in a comedic and exaggerated manner.
FURTHER BREAKING NEWS: 'Profesional'-style wrestlers and independent entertainment wrestling groups also found to be overwhelmingly narcissistic, in a fascinating dual dynamic! When in 'face' mode, these entertainers will be narcissistic in a friendly way, and in 'heel' mode, they will be narcissistic in an overly flamboyant and violent way. These modes can change at seemingly random patterns, but usually near the start/beginning of a season.
OMG BREAKING NEWS GUYS: Actors and many others found to be narcissistic! In a similar dynamic to 'entertainment' wrestling, this same form of narcissism seems to be almost everywhere, in most professions with a public facing component. The dynamic of trying to gather a crowd with comedy and drama seems to be steeped with various kinds of narcissism, and reactions to self-overestimation.
It's almost as if people overestimate their own potential in order to motivate themselves to try difficult things, even if it means failure, because they might learn something or motivate others in the process!
We must stop this plague of overestimation before it grows too large! The only logical conclusion to this process will be everyone jumping off buildings because they believe they can fly. Yes. Geeks must not believe in themselves, or our world is doomed!
In other news, journalists frequently post articles they know has misleading information, or false or incomplete versions on of the science they're reporting on, because it builds drama and readership. Oh no - the narcissism is spreading!
The internet is a container for any kind of content. It can hold anything. Saying that people using it can be lazy means nothing.
It's like the whole argument about games and art. Games can contain anything. They have music, creative artistic images, moving digital sculptures, all mixed with varying degrees of audience participation. Whole TV shows and movies are occasionally enclosed in game content. They can be anything, and are made into new things all the time.
The internet is that, and more - it's the combination of whatever anyone chooses to share over certain protocols, and even the protocols can change. It can and likely will become almost anything. Are people using it frequently lazy and ineffective at some tasks? Yes - and people everywhere using virtually all tools are also frequently lazy and ineffective.
Did anyone expect the internet to somehow make people especially efficient or effective at every task? Just because someone reads newspapers, that won't make them any better at journalism - same with internet and activism. More opportunities to learn, but it's not a school, and even specialized schools don't have the greatest correlation in reliably measurable improvement.
The only thing you should expect is that using the internet will likely make some folks better at using the internet. Until the internet changes. Everything else is just bonus.
Scope and scale are funny things. You can only see so small before it gets REALLY hard to see, even using large chains of tools. Same with really big. Same with really slow or fast. But even from what we can observe - our reality has had a LOT of chances to get the roll of the dice to work out - and we happen to live at one level of scope in this universe that allows intelligent life to hang on, in one spot.
However the underlying constants unfold though - it doesn't have to be convenient at every level - just at any particular level. Tweak the rules around, and what we'd count as atoms could be intelligent for billions of years. Tweak it again, and you could have intelligent planetoids with lifespans of hours. Tweak it some more, and it might take a trillion "universes" of stuff to combine to make an intelligent life, in a web where they pop out constantly. It's only anthropically important to us, because we were lucky enough to get intelligence, and don't know how it could work otherwise.
Now I've got to re-watch some Rick and Morty episodes.
Direct-to-doctor marketing? Doctors shouldn't have 'reward' programs for recommending certain brands over others. Then again, the profit motive itself pretty much makes a mockery of the practice of medicine in general. I just don't think the promotion of "awareness" of profitable drugs that this system provides doctors is worth the corruption and fleecing involved.
MST3k typically had 24 episodes a season, and part of the shtick of the series was that it was a relatively cheap production with a small crew licensing movies that cost almost nothing to show.
I get that we're motivating folks to gather together later in their career than before, and 'competing' with other opportunities they have - but if you're going to start up the engine, seems a bit of a shame to pre-plan to shut production down after 12 episodes.
Heck, given the nature of the series, you should really be mixing crowdfunding sources a little. Yes, the Kickstarter is important - but you should connect your stretchgoals to Patreon income also, and permit a couple extra options.
1) After the "pre-funded" Kickstarter episodes, let Patreon income build up funds for future episodes - while still keeping a nice mid-season break and even cast shifts as needed for quality of life.
2) Let the show grow as you go - keep your megacheap ethos/comedy style - but if you find a nice line of comedy, you want to do a special on, let it get a sub-fund and decide how it can fit into the schedule. 100,000 patreon fans contributing 1-10 bucks can get you more than enough when you've already got the set and many other things. That, and likely chances to get secondary income streams.
3) You know you're VERY likely not going to get a really good deal with a cable channel. Don't let the shiny prize of a commercial-pushing income source let you shortchange your audience on things like DRM. Do it for you too - make a show you'd like to make first, compromise where it matters least as you can, and the audience can do more than the promises of any executive. Let us circulate the '.mkv's.
4) Stay cheap, the audience will help. Don't do silly things like commission CGI movies of fantastical comedy scenes as part of your budget. Ask the audience to help, and we will make the stupidest, most hilarious things for you. Use that - USE IT!
"What about all those countries where it mostly does and, um, all of human history, eh?"
"Oh really? Sheesh! Listen - I'll just do a little governing here, and governing there - and BAM - doesn't work anymore. See - governing ruins everything!"
"Doesn't that just mean YOU ruin everything?"
"Wait - wait - I'll prove it some more. Give me more time and I'll REALLY prove it!"
The important thing about being 'observed' is if it has an effect on something else - such as the photons from the laser used to record it.
What is most certainly does NOT mean is that it does anything because a human consciousness is watching the process. A robot or mote of dust could have been 'observing' it (and in effect WAS), and the same effect would happen.
That's what I strongly dislike about the terminology around 'observer' effects. It makes people evoke touchy-feely human awareness stuff, when it's really just referencing microscale interaction events. What matters is that if events occur which COULD matter outside the system, like photons bouncing against the atom, then that's an 'ovservable' event in the context.
In the microscopic landscape of these experiments, we're a distant afterthought - a bacterium would be almost too big to sensibly consider - and trillions of bacteria would barely be observable to us. In other words, it's really not about US, to any sensible interpretation. Psuedoscience is all about us - keep that in mind when you see the sales pitches, as they'll be using the bad interpretation all the time they can.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, this could all be parody, and at this point, no one would be able to tell.
It's kind of like recent decades of of the political process: Take normal political lying, intersperse it with assurances that "Oh, now we're going to make EVERYTHING better - government is not the solution WE ARE... when we're government, that is."... then they get in, and it's like 10x more cynical rules being passed.
That said, pessimism is misleading too. PLENTY of scummy businessmen have dreamt of pushing these same models, but were rejected soundly by smaller customer bases - it just takes longer for Microsoft to fall the same way IBM and other scummy folks did.
Also, for politics, if you look at the ages of yellow journalism in ages past, the populace was truly more deeply ignorant in the past, and the politics even more cynical, with death as a much more common side effect of that cynicism - things are genuinely better, which actually makes it relatively shocking to see some small degree of backsliding towards a less classically liberal path. Despite the 'overton window' of recent decades and news, we're actually amazingly liberal in terms of actual policies, with no real show of that stopping.
But yeah - this crap with windows quadrupling down on their spyware-like 'upgrade' practices is in the same vein - an amazing throwback to scummy ideas I'd thought the 'marketplace of ideas' rejected to soundly everyone should still remember not to use them.
I guess we have to keep relearning those things.
Ryan Fenton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oasis-class_cruise_ship
First off, those engines will only run at full power at the very start of the journey, if even then to get to, well, _cruising_ speed, which is around 22 knots, which is around 25 miles per hour. It IS a lot of fuel to use in any case - but per-person, it's not so bad as these blind numbers in headlines.
http://business.tenntom.org/why-use-the-waterway/shipping-comparisons/
Bulk shipping by large ship is actually pretty efficient a method of transporting our stuff. Yeah - they often use the nasty fuel when they can get away with it - but in terms of per-unit cost, it really isn't that bad by scale. The entire transportation industry DOES need to get off carbon fuels - but compared to the fuel used to give everyone groceries and trade, the impact of vacation resources isn't that large a cost. People always eat, the extra fuel to eat on this boat isn't a very large extra percent.
I don't think it's terribly productive to label folks taking vacations as wasteful, when really, it's our entire current system that needs to get its resource usage into a sustainable state.
I think if you'd compare it to environmentally 'friendly' activities like touring Alaska's wildlife, it uses far less fuel per person.
Ryan Fenton
Doesn't matter if it's got a wonderfully elegant underlying structure, it's still a FUNGIBLE, TRADEABLE RESOURCE, with a set of mechanisms controlled by PEOPLE.
If a company town somewhere offered the perfect elegant scrip system, where demand is balanced against resources to ensure complete fairness in the system... if people are in control of it, they're going to find some way to exploit their position over others with that system.
Even though it was getting popular, it's still a niche currency, and it was going through a mania stage, like tulips did 300 years ago. It's very instability is an important key to reaching adoption, but also why it would be very difficult to reach large scale in its current form.
The problem is that it's a cryptocurrency - and like town scrips, anyone can invent one. And people are motivated to create them, in order to live at the vortex of managing a currency. But you can't stabilize a monetary system like that, since they're both cryptic and competing.
Even if a government were to create one, its very cryptic nature would make it feel very much like a 'McBuck', a secretly controlled game that feels fed by advertising as much as any real features. All currency is a form of shared manipulation, but cryptocurrencies are a different kind of artifice, in the same way computerized voting is flawed compared to paper voting.
Ryan Fenton
Ah, financial news - a place where you can open make statements like: "Unless the US changes its laws to give me lots of money, I can't help but foresee DIRE, DIRE things happening. Financial catastrophe would be putting it lightly." ... and not only is it counted as somehow news, but the richer or more openly lying the person saying it, the more respect it is given.
Well, WELL past the point of poe's law.
Ryan Fenton
Naaaaa nanana nana nana na na na ... Katamari Damaciiiiii...
Perfect song for the car.
Ryan Fenton
Linky
"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years."
- Gordon E. Moore, April 19, 1965
It's both cost and density, and continued to be so as it crystallized into the transistor doubling every 18 months figure. To double the density, only at exorbitant cost would not really be an increase in accessible technology. It's not just the technology being invented and monopolized, but being rolled out and usable by the entire field. Increasing computational complexity is still the most important part - but cost has always been a part of the idea too.
Specialized processing chips have been several 'generations' ahead in terms of processing per dollar for many decades. In the 90's at least, DSPs were doing audio/video processing much cheaper by performing many machine-level steps simultaneously in one 'cycle' with less power than a general processor, by leaving out the features and cost of a general processor. And all you had to do to use them was test them on a hardware emulator, flash them, then pop them into production test run until you were good enough to deploy. Depending on the chip, they could run on a trickle of power, without active cooling, and match a much most costly general chip for pennies.
I mean, it's how we got cell phones, and LOTS of other things, including most things in a computer that aren't the CPU.
But isn't Moore's law more about transistors per unit cost, rather than performance per cost? Seems like a fundamental misunderstanding in the headline... which seems about as common as specialized chips in modern technology.
Ryan Fenton
Solar charged flying death robots are actually pretty easy to defeat with 99-to-1 odds in your favor. How? Throw crap at them. Or mud. And if there's one thing that us descendants of primates can do, it's hide in, and throw dirt. Yes, drones and the like are ideal for military scenarios with known targets, but they won't stop a mob under cover. Generate enough hobos, and not enough mansions and factories would survive functional to keep the oligarchy running. That and, you know, cheap printed guns and explosives.
Short of hobo-status though, people are still going to gather resources and innovate even with idiotic leaders - tools are constantly made cheaper and more useful. Even the dark ages were chock full of inventions (not even counting torture devices), and we're far too accustomed to peace/resources to go anywhere near that horrible a state in the immediate future without a monumental catastrophe.
Ryan Fenton
Let's see...
What is, THE FUTURE, Alex?
I'm thinking innovation scales with population, available tools, recorded experience, and accessible resources - all of which are still increasing.
In fact, almost every measurable aspect of human life is actually improving over time so far.
Combine the increasing effects of the Flynn effect, drastically reduced violence over time, automation, increased health standards, and I can't see how the immediate future won't continue the increase in innovation over time.
Not that this is news of course. It's so not news, that you barely even hear of it - and why it's actually so hard for many folks who don't pay attention to science and statistics to even believe. To most folks, the only science news they hear about the future is climate change and extiction rates - both of which are true, but are NOWHERE near a complete picture that science shows us. We've got a lot to fix, but compared to vast stretches of planetary history where single populations explode and take over the biological landscape, we're doing amazing.
Which is also why the future of innovation is important.
Ryan Fenton
Actual link
Teach me not to preview!
LInk to the classic Simpsons musical, Monorail
Monorail, Monorail, MONORAIL!
I mean, HYPERLOOP!
Seriously though, train systems of all sorts are an important part of an overall transportation network - it's just too appropriate not to post.
Ryan Fenton
Our prison system seems to be turning increasingly evil - as in, willfully and casually harming others on a consistent basis well beyond their charter of stopping harm to others, for their own benefit.
They're increasingly subverting our political process, in order to take what should arguably be a time of reformation and a path back to society (and improvement of the general welfare), and using is to transform every human into a maximum income machine, including transforming laws to make the process worse. There's occasional noises towards public good in the letter of the rules of these places, but they're getting increasingly privatized and 'efficient' at gathering money.
I understand the ideal - this is where we throw folks who won't follow the rules, who won't respond to fines, a place where we repay unfairness with unfairness, so that we can remain productive. Which would be a fine ideal too, if it didn't cost taxpayers $60,000-$130,000 a year per person for land,buildings, employees,healthcare, goods, administration, etc.. We're basically paying for a rather large professional army, complete with all the logistics, in order to make a large portion of our population feel bad for the rest of their lives, for the most part.
It's part of why I've never understood the common Christian conception of Hell - a place of eternal pain, complete with the equivalent of angels who spend their existences making people feel bad for something they can no longer do anything about.
If the point of this horrible song and dance was to reduce motivation to break rules - then there should be a television in every public space, if not in every home, to show the suffering of rule breakers, to at least justify the lesson that we should be learning from all this suffering. If all these people were paying the cost, for our benefit, then all our children should see their suffering, so all this suffering wouldn't be a waste of both their lives and the time of all the people spending their lives imprisoning them.
Perhaps we don't because we really are all rule breakers. Most traffic studies I've seen find that the average driver breaks around 4,000 traffic laws every year. Proportionally the same with bike riders and pedestrians. And that's just the easily observable stuff. But we don't really enforce our rules, instead we pay people to selectively enforce them, and prosecute infractions in some of the oddest ways possible. Things like 'discovery processes', armies of paid lawyers, laws changing at the request of lobbyists, special courts, judges owning stakes in other parts of the process, and very strange politics and biases everywhere.
If the point of the whole game is to pay the least amount of resources, in order to keep the maximum number of people cooperative and productive, then I think everyone would judge that we're doing this the wrong way. There's a LOT of nations to compare against, and we're having worse results than almost all of them.
The prisons we have now are doing horrible jobs in all regards, and are actively engaged in a process of making things worse. If we're spending all these resources, the cheapest thing to do is to take this large army, and reconcile it with better, more productive, and cheaper goals. It's never going to be cheap or easy, but almost anything is going to be cheaper and easier than the road we're going down now.
Ryan Fenton
Oh, certainly it IS DRM - but outside of some horrible companies sandwiching DRM inside their own binaries, it's almost a vaccine form of DRM. It's essentially DRM that cures DRM, by:
A) Being so easy to remove/bypass.
B) Allowing customers to VERY LOUDLY PROTEST the worse kinds of DRM.
C) Generally allowing any number of modifications to programs outside multiplayer (even embracing that formally).
D) Allowing refunds (due to competition, but still...)
E) Increasingly and aggressively supporting flavors of Linux.
Overall, I'd consider Steam to be very healthy for the environment, and popular for many very great reasons.
It's not like it's shit doesn't stink though - plenty of horrible parts of Steam, but the world is much better for it, warts and all.
Ryan Fenton
Microsoft seems to have had their heart set of giving away the razor kits, but selling the blades with Windows 10.
Unfortunately, their Windows Store appears to mostly be filled with copy-cat apps and intentional scams - and when you DO buy "apps" from the store, you don't get a proper executable to use as you'd like such as you'd get from GOG or Steam.
What Microsoft is promoting is a 'Universal Windows Platform" or UWP. UWP applications aren't proper windows programs that you can freely use as you're used to. Instead, they're packaged in encrypted folders, and are essentially laden down with heavy DRM, like a new-age DIVX format. That means, no modding except for very limited things developers exactly plan for, no true fullscreen for games (borderless windowed is forced for now), very few graphics options, and essentially everything locked to how an "XBox One" would present things, since that is the basic intention, to allow game developers to simultaneously publish without separate testing or development cycles on all MS-owned platforms.
Expect to get a LOT more pressure in that direction, before they give up on this approach, almost exactly the same as happened with the horrible GFWL initiative years back.
Somehow though, there's still going to be SOME game developers that drink the cool-aide on this, and will publish UWP games. I'd say stick with Steam/GOG/etc on the platform of your choice, and politely and constructively complain on their forums if they don't bother to publish an actual PC port of the game.
Ryan Fenton
I've lived in the US all my life - I've shot targets in my backyard when living in Alabama... and I've also looked into a lot of history.
There's a lot of powerful ways to view history - the romantic iconography of a school curriculum, the spectacle and drama of television history, the open bias of newspaper history (seriously, old newspapers are hilarious), and the random suppositions and conclusions of academic history at various levels and locations.
The version I find most compelling probably Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature - where it follows a trail of evidence I always saw hinted at the various levels of history presentation, but almost never really followed through on. That despite our large number of massive deadly conflicts, we really are getting less violent at every level of society. It's not some weak trend either - it's overwhelming and fascinating. But it's not a storyline that gels with most methods of conveying history, so it's something almost no one gets presented.
With that in mind, I find the whole song-and-dance we always go through with guns and appeals to history in our gun culture to be more than a little beside-the-point. Guns in private hands don't ruin everything, and they don't really statistically save that many people either, they just multiply the effect of the crazy people that exist in every society, but all societies seem to be getting measurably less crazy and (Flynn effect) better at abstract thought/problem solving over time anyway. Both the restrictions and the problems of guns are more a sideshow that we will continue to bounce across over time, until they're increasingly meaningless.
Tragedies will continue to happen, and we will continue to over-react to them, but they're all increasingly noise in the overall picture.
It's why I find little jabs like this pretty funny - we at large don't really want to push wild-west sensibilities as much as it might seem to the rest of the world, we just have partisans that want to push their ideals at any cost, as they realistically see their vision of their nation indelibly falling away from their ideals.
So cool - if some of these folks want to march with guns as an expression of their freedom - good on you, have a fun time of it, I suppose. The moment you use that freedom as anyone might fear, however, even your own partisans will come down on you like a mountain of bricks. Even in any events of pure violent fantasy made manifest came about - the society we've grown into at it's most 'conservative' won't support the same things our history allowed, and we're all far too unwilling to give up what our shared peace has given us so far.
I could certainly be wrong - but it's my best view on history/violence/guns I've seen so far.
Ryan Fenton
You want your bits of information, your advertising channel to be worth more money. We get that.
But don't pretend that this is some sacred relationship. It isn't. It's a rancid soup of parasites running the show, and now the programmers who've always known how to filter the stream of data are feeling more and more free to give everyone else the tools to filter out the bits they don't like.
Your bits will still be worth money. Seriously guys - put some MAJOR effort into policing your business relationships - if your adverts are in any way annoying to anyone, it is your fault for being willing to push that on your audience.
Here's a crazy idea... put some buttons on each advert, to allow folks to reject the advert, and charge the ones getting the most down-votes more money for any interaction going forward. Give anyone who shows any solid evidence of tracking or bad scripting say, 10 million downvotes on their record per incidence. Same thing for evidence of suspicious bot activity by any company, or for using shell companies. Boom - you get money, you shame the offenders, you make positive news, and get your adverts competing with eachother for COMMON DECENCY.
Blah blah Slashdot + read article blah blah.
But really, the summary is pretty much the article. There's no actual content.
All they discuss is the loose intention. No examples, discussion of how that intention was tested or even challenges in design.
This is barely a sidebar article in a checkout-lane magazine.
What is this, a weakly veiled invitation to discuss sexist issues de jeur? I'm cool with that, I just don't appreciate the tactic - this article is mega-weak.
Alright - I'll give you a better one:
Question: How many angry feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: That's NOT funny.
Discuss.
Newsflash: Folks willing to be interviewed on being 'geeky' tend to be gregarious and be quite optimistic about their own potential. Shy/anti-social 'geeks' not measured.
Everyone's got a mixed bag of ignorance and hangups - and folks who self-label as 'geeky' in public are folks who project a willingness to focus and specialize on a small range of subjects that they admire. Many others are going to be shy or antisocial, or unwilling to put up with a 'geeky' label.
BREAKING NEWS: DJs and Rap Artists also found to be frequently narcisistic! 'Fronting' found to be a very helpful form of marketing, and method of promoting causes in a comedic and exaggerated manner.
FURTHER BREAKING NEWS: 'Profesional'-style wrestlers and independent entertainment wrestling groups also found to be overwhelmingly narcissistic, in a fascinating dual dynamic! When in 'face' mode, these entertainers will be narcissistic in a friendly way, and in 'heel' mode, they will be narcissistic in an overly flamboyant and violent way. These modes can change at seemingly random patterns, but usually near the start/beginning of a season.
OMG BREAKING NEWS GUYS: Actors and many others found to be narcissistic! In a similar dynamic to 'entertainment' wrestling, this same form of narcissism seems to be almost everywhere, in most professions with a public facing component. The dynamic of trying to gather a crowd with comedy and drama seems to be steeped with various kinds of narcissism, and reactions to self-overestimation.
It's almost as if people overestimate their own potential in order to motivate themselves to try difficult things, even if it means failure, because they might learn something or motivate others in the process!
We must stop this plague of overestimation before it grows too large! The only logical conclusion to this process will be everyone jumping off buildings because they believe they can fly. Yes. Geeks must not believe in themselves, or our world is doomed!
In other news, journalists frequently post articles they know has misleading information, or false or incomplete versions on of the science they're reporting on, because it builds drama and readership. Oh no - the narcissism is spreading!
The internet is a container for any kind of content. It can hold anything. Saying that people using it can be lazy means nothing.
It's like the whole argument about games and art. Games can contain anything. They have music, creative artistic images, moving digital sculptures, all mixed with varying degrees of audience participation. Whole TV shows and movies are occasionally enclosed in game content. They can be anything, and are made into new things all the time.
The internet is that, and more - it's the combination of whatever anyone chooses to share over certain protocols, and even the protocols can change. It can and likely will become almost anything. Are people using it frequently lazy and ineffective at some tasks? Yes - and people everywhere using virtually all tools are also frequently lazy and ineffective.
Did anyone expect the internet to somehow make people especially efficient or effective at every task? Just because someone reads newspapers, that won't make them any better at journalism - same with internet and activism. More opportunities to learn, but it's not a school, and even specialized schools don't have the greatest correlation in reliably measurable improvement.
The only thing you should expect is that using the internet will likely make some folks better at using the internet. Until the internet changes. Everything else is just bonus.
Scope and scale are funny things. You can only see so small before it gets REALLY hard to see, even using large chains of tools. Same with really big. Same with really slow or fast. But even from what we can observe - our reality has had a LOT of chances to get the roll of the dice to work out - and we happen to live at one level of scope in this universe that allows intelligent life to hang on, in one spot.
However the underlying constants unfold though - it doesn't have to be convenient at every level - just at any particular level. Tweak the rules around, and what we'd count as atoms could be intelligent for billions of years. Tweak it again, and you could have intelligent planetoids with lifespans of hours. Tweak it some more, and it might take a trillion "universes" of stuff to combine to make an intelligent life, in a web where they pop out constantly. It's only anthropically important to us, because we were lucky enough to get intelligence, and don't know how it could work otherwise.
Now I've got to re-watch some Rick and Morty episodes.
Ryan Fenton
Direct-to-doctor marketing? Doctors shouldn't have 'reward' programs for recommending certain brands over others. Then again, the profit motive itself pretty much makes a mockery of the practice of medicine in general. I just don't think the promotion of "awareness" of profitable drugs that this system provides doctors is worth the corruption and fleecing involved.
Ryan Fenton
MST3k typically had 24 episodes a season, and part of the shtick of the series was that it was a relatively cheap production with a small crew licensing movies that cost almost nothing to show.
I get that we're motivating folks to gather together later in their career than before, and 'competing' with other opportunities they have - but if you're going to start up the engine, seems a bit of a shame to pre-plan to shut production down after 12 episodes.
Heck, given the nature of the series, you should really be mixing crowdfunding sources a little. Yes, the Kickstarter is important - but you should connect your stretchgoals to Patreon income also, and permit a couple extra options.
1) After the "pre-funded" Kickstarter episodes, let Patreon income build up funds for future episodes - while still keeping a nice mid-season break and even cast shifts as needed for quality of life.
2) Let the show grow as you go - keep your megacheap ethos/comedy style - but if you find a nice line of comedy, you want to do a special on, let it get a sub-fund and decide how it can fit into the schedule. 100,000 patreon fans contributing 1-10 bucks can get you more than enough when you've already got the set and many other things. That, and likely chances to get secondary income streams.
3) You know you're VERY likely not going to get a really good deal with a cable channel. Don't let the shiny prize of a commercial-pushing income source let you shortchange your audience on things like DRM. Do it for you too - make a show you'd like to make first, compromise where it matters least as you can, and the audience can do more than the promises of any executive. Let us circulate the '.mkv's.
4) Stay cheap, the audience will help. Don't do silly things like commission CGI movies of fantastical comedy scenes as part of your budget. Ask the audience to help, and we will make the stupidest, most hilarious things for you. Use that - USE IT!
Ryan Fenton
"Government doesn't work - it CAN'T WORK!"
"What about all those countries where it mostly does and, um, all of human history, eh?"
"Oh really? Sheesh! Listen - I'll just do a little governing here, and governing there - and BAM - doesn't work anymore. See - governing ruins everything!"
"Doesn't that just mean YOU ruin everything?"
"Wait - wait - I'll prove it some more. Give me more time and I'll REALLY prove it!"
Or, you know, don't. Both work. He's awesome both cases.
Ryan Fenton
The important thing about being 'observed' is if it has an effect on something else - such as the photons from the laser used to record it.
What is most certainly does NOT mean is that it does anything because a human consciousness is watching the process. A robot or mote of dust could have been 'observing' it (and in effect WAS), and the same effect would happen.
That's what I strongly dislike about the terminology around 'observer' effects. It makes people evoke touchy-feely human awareness stuff, when it's really just referencing microscale interaction events. What matters is that if events occur which COULD matter outside the system, like photons bouncing against the atom, then that's an 'ovservable' event in the context.
In the microscopic landscape of these experiments, we're a distant afterthought - a bacterium would be almost too big to sensibly consider - and trillions of bacteria would barely be observable to us. In other words, it's really not about US, to any sensible interpretation. Psuedoscience is all about us - keep that in mind when you see the sales pitches, as they'll be using the bad interpretation all the time they can.
Ryan Fenton