Disclosure: I am a contractor at the Ethereum Foundation. We have no marketing department and almost everyone there are researchers and developers.
Ethereum is simply growing. Who cares if it is outpacing Bitcoin? Bitcoin might be as big as it needs to be, and if not, more people will adopt it. Forget all of the hype, price discussions, its position vs. bitcoin or other technology. Just check out what it can do for you, either as a technologist or just someone using technology.
Basically, Ethereum offers a vast, shared memory and computation space, secured by cryptography and economics, and this enables smart contracts to run without interference or modification. There are clients enabling users to interact with Ethereum smart contracts, either on their phone or on their desktop. That is all functioning now, and busily powering and even funding dozens of startups.
Under active development by Foundation devs and the community are some new pieces: sharding, faster and cheaper transactions with state channels, off-blockchain file/data storage, real-time signaling, and a decentralized name service.
The broadcast television networks should be worried, too. I am not just talking about the mass customization of media consumption.
With WiMax, any freelancer with a video camera can broadcast live television in competition with the big nets. Check out Mark Pesce's article from today's Slashdot post.
I can see all sorts of problems with folks messing with postmortem bots.
An analagous situation is college students using targeted letters to get scholarships: "Dear Sir, I am a direct descendent of Paul Bunyan who is also suffering from..."
I have this script which will pretend to be me if I do not pass it a secret value once per month. It will cause all sorts of trouble, including emailing old friends revealing messages from the ether.
Actually, this leads to a more practical idea of creating an AI to make sure that your wishes be carried out. Your AI would be financed by a trust and would be legally protected by your last will and testament. The will would state that the AI should be maintained as long as technically possible, perhaps employing programmers to keep it running should no longer run on current systems.
Who knows that use one would put their post-mortem AI to. Perhaps I should leave my old friends alone and program my AI to randomly send money to wacky startups!
I am a perl programmer who joined a Los Angeles gaming startup in 2000. We were acquired by Cantor Fitzgerald in 2001 and six months ago we were moved to an area immediately adjacent to their equities trading floor. I program and deal with unix systems ten feet away from the loudest group of people I've witnessed since my fraternity days.
While I do get along well with the traders, it sounds like a madhouse here until the early afternoon. They use squawk boxes and lound shouts to communicate what they cannot over messaging. They are also constantly joking around to relieve the real stress of what they do. Jerry Springer blasts through at certain times, weird noises, weekly screaming matches.
My music is turned up to the max and I still hear them. It was culture shock at first, but I am fairly productive now.
This is a rough depiction of the last couple of minutes:
"WHAT!... 2700, at 15 on the south side....
ringringring... My ass!... WHOOP WHOOP!... Jerry, 18... GIVE ME A SECOND... I blew it.... I need you to do 20 to help me out... OK!"
Exactly. And the advantage of central identity has strengthened the power of the user communities that are monetized by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Unless there is a successful, open means to federate identification, the small, user-driven sites will continue to be snarfed up by larger sites. The power of a concentrated user bases is a business advantage that leads to concentration of user services.
The real power of federation efforts such as the Liberty Alliance is the ability to create "local" federations. Technology that enables a community of sites to share users will do a lot to protect the independence of smaller operations, while providing them with the benefits of a larger user base.
I predict that, despite the knee-jerk objections to central identity, open implementations of Liberty such as Source ID will be extended into other languages, and rendered more accessible for the smaller sites.
Having just started on a struts/ibatis project in which a relational database is used to populate objects, your explanation really provided me with some great theoretical background.
We were wading through this web tips-submission application for a very popular "law enforcement" television show, and we found that the previous programmer had inserted code which benefitted his garage band. After storing the user's tip, the script was sending the user's information on to High Times magazine so that his band would appear to have a huge fan base.
Just think of all of the pro-hemp email that those poor, watchful grandmothers will receive!
Corporations may also provide the most fertile breeding grounds for intelligent machines, all in the name of cost-effectiveness.
Furthermore, I have long believed that the legal frameworks which protect corporations could enable intelligent machines to gain rights and capabilities that would otherwise not be granted to them. For example, a computer owning property seems absurd. An advanced intelligent machine may act as a defacto owner of property using willing human participants and a tanglement of corporate shells.
Intelligent machines will be given the full rights of humans once they demonstrate their abilities and begin flexing their power. Despite the moral underpinnings of our various societies, groups that have been historically excluded have fought, bought, or protested their way into equality.
Who knows how long it will take for computers to be as capable as we are. However, once a computer or group of computers becomes intelligent and wealthy enough to hire a legal team (not to mention a software development team), things are going to get very interesting.
We should not wait for our creations to force this issue. It would be better to have a framework in place before everyone begins to panic (including the intelligent machines).
The "better than thou" attitude of Seth Schiesel (the NYT reporter) here is remarkable:
Thedeacon is a celebrity. Mr. Stenlund, meanwhile, feels trapped - trapped in a town too far from big cities where big things happen, trapped in a hand-to-mouth existence, trapped in a mean little culture of cheap thrills and fast-food television.
What could drive a reporter to shun their supposed "objectivity" and engage in such social denigration? Was it just making the NYT reader feel good about themselves? "Big" Schiesel appears to have been irked by Thedeacon's interpersonal power in AO, perhaps because a powerful in-game community standing is something which those in the physical world may never attain.
This lack of respect toward emerging cultures and communities is a sign of the irrelevance of the media establishment. A reporter would not be able to get very far with this kind of twisted prejudice toward any given creed, race, or religion. Schiesel's blunt attack on a person who merely loves a new form of expression cannot hide behind the thin moniker of journalism, a profession which the NYT has nearly defined (and certainly destroyed).
While many adults want to shelter our children from anything that may harm them, I would advocate teaching children (at an appropriate age) how to responsibly make use of dangerous tools. These would include using a firearm, various contact sports, martial arts, chemistry, computer security, and so on. Of course, there are morons who will mis-apply their karate or hacking skill, but then there will be many more trained peers to counter them.
If everyone is equally stronger and more knowledgable, the entire system is stronger. The world cannot be populated with softies who leave security to the "experts".
Maybe I am reading too much into a simple duplication, but I wonder if this was intentional:
Once you accept the idea of the multiverse, and that some universes will have immense potentiality for complexity, it's a logical consequence that in some of those universes there will be the potential to simulate parts of themselves, and you may get sort of infinite regress, so we don't know where reality stops and where the minds and ideas take over, and we don't know what our place is in this grand ensemble of universes and simulated universes.Once you accept the idea of the multiverse, and that some universes will have immense potentiality for complexity, it's a logical consequence that in some of those universes there will be the potential to simulate parts of themselves, and you may get sort of infinite regress, so we don't know where reality stops and where the minds and ideas take over, and we don't know what our place is in this grand ensemble of universes and simulated universes.
- JML
Isn't this what they do already?
on
The Searchable Life
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Every information-rich modern convenience will be used by government agencies to protect us from threats and to enforce laws. Its why we hired them, right? As big as the U.S. gov looks, we pay it to do what it does.
We can use our votes to try to limit or shape government, or put our trust and support in advocacy orgs like the EFF. Ultimately, through, it is up to citizens to protect their own data if they feel uncomfortable with the gov knowing what you do every day.
What the gov is collecting together now has been collected and thoroughly analyzed by corporations for years.
I used Parapin a year ago for a small project to control LEDs from linux. I wrote a small app in c to make a set of 8 LEDs blink in patterns. If you can compile and link using gcc, and are willing to do a little work toward understanding the parallel port, you won't have any problems using parapin.
I think the mistake people have made is often to start out with unfounded assumptions about how it should be done - such as assuming that a "drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines" approach is the right direction...
I agree. I would add that there are many visual techniques already present in most every programming language. In perl, a hash can be formed and referenced in a way that is (to me) visual:
my $hashref = {
'ref1'=>{'color'=>'blue'},
'ref2'=>{'color'=>'red'},
};
Compare this to forming the same sort of data structure in java using hashTable. In java, you might approach this by forming instances of hashTable and then individually adding keys and values, one at a time.
Hashtable hashRef = new Hashtable();
Hashtable ref1Hash = new Hashtable();
Hashtable ref2Hash = new Hashtable();
ref1Hash.put("color","red");
ref2Hash.put("color","blue");
hashRef.put("ref1",ref1Hash);
hashRef.put("ref2",ref2Hash);
The perl example is much more self-documenting and "visual" than the java example. Perhaps more can be said for visual techniques with ASCII code?
If you ask me, lets use unicode to create more wacky characters for perl to take advantage of!:)
I saw an early form of this when I was a student at UCLA in the early 90's, especially among Asian students who were more likely at that time to have cell phones.
The behavior began with a lot of evening calls going around among "friends" beginning with the key phrase: "what are you up to tonight?". Sooner or later there would be someone who was up to something! And that activity would start to become the "thing to be doing tonight". I would watch friends initiate (or participate in) the construction of a party or movie outing in minutes. When we got there, a small crowd was always waiting (conversing on cell phones of course). Heh.
Unfortunately, a big draw-back to this was that the smallest complaint in the "swarm net" would lead to a compromised outcome. I saw way too many dumb movies due to this effect, and thus I no longer swarm.
"I call this mode "commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. "
Commons-based peer-production? How about an enjoyable hobby?
While the focus of academic specialization has contributed countless practical ideas to our civilization, people have a very hard time working in new concepts within any given academic paradigm. Why is so uncomfortable for an economist to work in the concept of people having a hobby into his specialty?
Academia needs to work on some intellectual APIs that allow for a more practical invocation of "foreign" concepts within any given specialty. Otherwise, we will continue to slide into the cellular isolation of Vinge's "focus".
I took a test drive at the local Saturn dealership and, well, I was amazed at the smooth (and very powerful) acceleration. I had expected anemic performance and what I got was a rather wild drive through the city. While the need to recharge the battery and small size may be serious drawbacks, the sheer joy of taking this car for a spin really made me think about applying for one.
It is disappointing that electric cars are not yet economically viable. Just take one for a test drive and you will see that there is a lot more work to be done in improving personal transportation.
Restricting extreme views and activities is one of the big challenges for any society attempting to mitigate freedom and security. While we may decry it when a government restricts our God-given rights, we also appreciate when a government keeps us safe from fools who want to screw up our way of life.
Ideally, governments allow greater freedoms while encouraging good citizenship and common decency through education. This is the only mitigation between freedom and security. The United States has generally followed this path, more so than most other countries (although I think that this is being massively undermined by lower standards in grade-school education).
However, the U.S. is lucky in that its population is generally happy, free, educated, and less vulnerable to extremeties such as fascism, whether American, Russian, German, Islamic, or whatever.
A potential drawback to greater freedom is that de facto censorship becomes far more common (i.e. censorship based on the personal views of the owners of information distribution). Censorship happens - it just depends on who is doing it. Instead of the government ordering sites to be shut down, ISPs (and traditional media such as newspapers and tv for that matter) would refuse to "do business" with purveyors of extreme views.
Let the extreme fools talk. Good people will generally refuse to sell them any soap boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclosure: I am a contractor at the Ethereum Foundation. We have no marketing department and almost everyone there are researchers and developers.
Ethereum is simply growing. Who cares if it is outpacing Bitcoin? Bitcoin might be as big as it needs to be, and if not, more people will adopt it. Forget all of the hype, price discussions, its position vs. bitcoin or other technology. Just check out what it can do for you, either as a technologist or just someone using technology.
Basically, Ethereum offers a vast, shared memory and computation space, secured by cryptography and economics, and this enables smart contracts to run without interference or modification. There are clients enabling users to interact with Ethereum smart contracts, either on their phone or on their desktop. That is all functioning now, and busily powering and even funding dozens of startups.
Under active development by Foundation devs and the community are some new pieces: sharding, faster and cheaper transactions with state channels, off-blockchain file/data storage, real-time signaling, and a decentralized name service.
The broadcast television networks should be worried, too. I am not just talking about the mass customization of media consumption.
With WiMax, any freelancer with a video camera can broadcast live television in competition with the big nets. Check out Mark Pesce's article from today's Slashdot post.
I can see all sorts of problems with folks messing with postmortem bots.
An analagous situation is college students using targeted letters to get scholarships: "Dear Sir, I am a direct descendent of Paul Bunyan who is also suffering from..."
- JML
I have this script which will pretend to be me if I do not pass it a secret value once per month. It will cause all sorts of trouble, including emailing old friends revealing messages from the ether.
Actually, this leads to a more practical idea of creating an AI to make sure that your wishes be carried out. Your AI would be financed by a trust and would be legally protected by your last will and testament. The will would state that the AI should be maintained as long as technically possible, perhaps employing programmers to keep it running should no longer run on current systems.
Who knows that use one would put their post-mortem AI to. Perhaps I should leave my old friends alone and program my AI to randomly send money to wacky startups!
- JML
- JML
While I do get along well with the traders, it sounds like a madhouse here until the early afternoon. They use squawk boxes and lound shouts to communicate what they cannot over messaging. They are also constantly joking around to relieve the real stress of what they do. Jerry Springer blasts through at certain times, weird noises, weekly screaming matches.
My music is turned up to the max and I still hear them. It was culture shock at first, but I am fairly productive now.
This is a rough depiction of the last couple of minutes:
- JML
This is more than a corporate-on-corporate war. At stake is the ability to for people to create content and to invent technologies on their own terms.
- JML
Exactly. And the advantage of central identity has strengthened the power of the user communities that are monetized by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Unless there is a successful, open means to federate identification, the small, user-driven sites will continue to be snarfed up by larger sites. The power of a concentrated user bases is a business advantage that leads to concentration of user services.
The real power of federation efforts such as the Liberty Alliance is the ability to create "local" federations. Technology that enables a community of sites to share users will do a lot to protect the independence of smaller operations, while providing them with the benefits of a larger user base.
I predict that, despite the knee-jerk objections to central identity, open implementations of Liberty such as Source ID will be extended into other languages, and rendered more accessible for the smaller sites.
- JML
Having just started on a struts/ibatis project in which a relational database is used to populate objects, your explanation really provided me with some great theoretical background.
I wish that I had the power to mod you up to a 6.
- JML
Some good reading material:
h q.com/sobig-e.htmlh tml
http://www.lurhq.com/sobig.html
http://www.lur
http://www.lurhq.com/sobig-f.
- James
We were wading through this web tips-submission application for a very popular "law enforcement" television show, and we found that the previous programmer had inserted code which benefitted his garage band. After storing the user's tip, the script was sending the user's information on to High Times magazine so that his band would appear to have a huge fan base.
Just think of all of the pro-hemp email that those poor, watchful grandmothers will receive!
- JML
Well said!
Corporations may also provide the most fertile breeding grounds for intelligent machines, all in the name of cost-effectiveness.
Furthermore, I have long believed that the legal frameworks which protect corporations could enable intelligent machines to gain rights and capabilities that would otherwise not be granted to them. For example, a computer owning property seems absurd. An advanced intelligent machine may act as a defacto owner of property using willing human participants and a tanglement of corporate shells.
- JML
Intelligent machines will be given the full rights of humans once they demonstrate their abilities and begin flexing their power. Despite the moral underpinnings of our various societies, groups that have been historically excluded have fought, bought, or protested their way into equality.
Who knows how long it will take for computers to be as capable as we are. However, once a computer or group of computers becomes intelligent and wealthy enough to hire a legal team (not to mention a software development team), things are going to get very interesting.
We should not wait for our creations to force this issue. It would be better to have a framework in place before everyone begins to panic (including the intelligent machines).
- JML
What could drive a reporter to shun their supposed "objectivity" and engage in such social denigration? Was it just making the NYT reader feel good about themselves? "Big" Schiesel appears to have been irked by Thedeacon's interpersonal power in AO, perhaps because a powerful in-game community standing is something which those in the physical world may never attain.
This lack of respect toward emerging cultures and communities is a sign of the irrelevance of the media establishment. A reporter would not be able to get very far with this kind of twisted prejudice toward any given creed, race, or religion. Schiesel's blunt attack on a person who merely loves a new form of expression cannot hide behind the thin moniker of journalism, a profession which the NYT has nearly defined (and certainly destroyed).
- JML
While many adults want to shelter our children from anything that may harm them, I would advocate teaching children (at an appropriate age) how to responsibly make use of dangerous tools. These would include using a firearm, various contact sports, martial arts, chemistry, computer security, and so on. Of course, there are morons who will mis-apply their karate or hacking skill, but then there will be many more trained peers to counter them.
If everyone is equally stronger and more knowledgable, the entire system is stronger. The world cannot be populated with softies who leave security to the "experts".
- James
Every information-rich modern convenience will be used by government agencies to protect us from threats and to enforce laws. Its why we hired them, right? As big as the U.S. gov looks, we pay it to do what it does.
We can use our votes to try to limit or shape government, or put our trust and support in advocacy orgs like the EFF. Ultimately, through, it is up to citizens to protect their own data if they feel uncomfortable with the gov knowing what you do every day.
What the gov is collecting together now has been collected and thoroughly analyzed by corporations for years.
- JML
Hollywood's Hidden Digital Ether
The Birth of a "Tracker"
Where the Network is Today
- James
my $cat = new Cat('Felix');
my $occupants = [$cat];
my $room = new Room($occupants);
$room->kill_occupant($cat);
# is he dead?
$room->status_occupant($cat);
# doh!
- James
Enjoy!
- James
I agree. I would add that there are many visual techniques already present in most every programming language. In perl, a hash can be formed and referenced in a way that is (to me) visual:
my $hashref = {
'ref1'=>{'color'=>'blue'},
'ref2'=>{'color'=>'red'},
};
Compare this to forming the same sort of data structure in java using hashTable. In java, you might approach this by forming instances of hashTable and then individually adding keys and values, one at a time.
Hashtable hashRef = new Hashtable();
Hashtable ref1Hash = new Hashtable();
Hashtable ref2Hash = new Hashtable();
ref1Hash.put("color","red");
ref2Hash.put("color","blue");
hashRef.put("ref1",ref1Hash);
hashRef.put("ref2",ref2Hash);
The perl example is much more self-documenting and "visual" than the java example. Perhaps more can be said for visual techniques with ASCII code?
If you ask me, lets use unicode to create more wacky characters for perl to take advantage of! :)
I saw an early form of this when I was a student at UCLA in the early 90's, especially among Asian students who were more likely at that time to have cell phones.
The behavior began with a lot of evening calls going around among "friends" beginning with the key phrase: "what are you up to tonight?". Sooner or later there would be someone who was up to something! And that activity would start to become the "thing to be doing tonight". I would watch friends initiate (or participate in) the construction of a party or movie outing in minutes. When we got there, a small crowd was always waiting (conversing on cell phones of course). Heh.
Unfortunately, a big draw-back to this was that the smallest complaint in the "swarm net" would lead to a compromised outcome. I saw way too many dumb movies due to this effect, and thus I no longer swarm.
- James
Commons-based peer-production? How about an enjoyable hobby?
While the focus of academic specialization has contributed countless practical ideas to our civilization, people have a very hard time working in new concepts within any given academic paradigm. Why is so uncomfortable for an economist to work in the concept of people having a hobby into his specialty?
Academia needs to work on some intellectual APIs that allow for a more practical invocation of "foreign" concepts within any given specialty. Otherwise, we will continue to slide into the cellular isolation of Vinge's "focus".
- James
I took a test drive at the local Saturn dealership and, well, I was amazed at the smooth (and very powerful) acceleration. I had expected anemic performance and what I got was a rather wild drive through the city. While the need to recharge the battery and small size may be serious drawbacks, the sheer joy of taking this car for a spin really made me think about applying for one.
It is disappointing that electric cars are not yet economically viable. Just take one for a test drive and you will see that there is a lot more work to be done in improving personal transportation.
Restricting extreme views and activities is one of the big challenges for any society attempting to mitigate freedom and security. While we may decry it when a government restricts our God-given rights, we also appreciate when a government keeps us safe from fools who want to screw up our way of life.
Ideally, governments allow greater freedoms while encouraging good citizenship and common decency through education. This is the only mitigation between freedom and security. The United States has generally followed this path, more so than most other countries (although I think that this is being massively undermined by lower standards in grade-school education).
However, the U.S. is lucky in that its population is generally happy, free, educated, and less vulnerable to extremeties such as fascism, whether American, Russian, German, Islamic, or whatever.
A potential drawback to greater freedom is that de facto censorship becomes far more common (i.e. censorship based on the personal views of the owners of information distribution). Censorship happens - it just depends on who is doing it. Instead of the government ordering sites to be shut down, ISPs (and traditional media such as newspapers and tv for that matter) would refuse to "do business" with purveyors of extreme views.
Let the extreme fools talk. Good people will generally refuse to sell them any soap boxes.
- James