Rather surprised that there was no reaction to the insanity manifested on Kickstarter. That much enthusiasm to escape from reality? Something is wrong there.
Oh well. At least I can hope that the overfunding will cause the project to implode like Diaspora. Hopefully without any suicides attached. Great idea that went away quietly because Kickstarter money took their eye off the ball... Leaving us with the Facebook problem and the need for the FFF solution.
Took me a while to agree with the "funny" mods, but what's with all the conflict mods?
Overall I'm disappointed that this is the only funny modded comment. I would have thought the topic had more humor potential. I'm guessing the players take themselves and their game too seriously?
Interesting comment and even more interesting that it got modded as interesting. I do think it's a bit simplistic. Also too bad the ACs can't read or understand your sig, eh?
I actually think there's a more general problem here, and I even proposed and discussed a more general solution approach with some people on WIkipedia. I am NOT surprised that nothing came of it. However, I would say that it was somewhat useful for me in terms of understanding the underlying symmetries more clearly.
I'm not sure for which dimensions the anti-hero of this story should receive negative reputation. However I think he should have a enormously negative reputation even relative to other lawyers. Dickishness of the highest caliber should not produce PROFIT.
P.S. I think the same approach has some relevance to Slashdot, but there is even less chance of Slashdot significantly improving. At least Wikipedia has some money to play with.
For (2), I should have continued the 2-digit sequences past "12" to show the next deletion... That part's obvious, but I'm still wondering about how to order the digits for maximum shortening with full coverage at each n.
Good comment (and I was surprised that many of the other modded comments were also pretty good), but the scale of the competition also needs to be considered. Or you could word it in terms of how many losers there are (which was barely mentioned in the discussion).
I'm going to use a kind of evolutionary metaphor here. In the state of nature, you need merit (including good genes) and effort to succeed (by surviving), but you also need a lot of luck. A sufficient amount of bad luck will kill you, but in most cases you survive until you get to the average lifespan, after which in most cases you don't. (Yes, that's a gross oversimplification and mathematically inaccurate, but I'm trying to keep it simple. Obviously you have to weight it over time and also consider the span of reproduction.)
What we have now is a kind of bizarre cancerous state of corporate nature. In most cases we wind up with a few humongous winners and ALL of the competitors get destroyed or eaten. How many companies actually matter now? Four or five? And what's to stop the trend from continuing until it's all a single corporation? (If I were a gambling man, my money would be on Amazon to ultimately buy out Google...) Doesn't matter that many of the losers had real merits before they got crushed.
The essence of #1 is that there can only be one #1. Unless we do something, the scale of the competition is going to render everything else (and everyone else) utterly irrelevant. No limit on the number of losers.
Think of the harm as an opportunity cost. Linux and OSS could be vastly more successful than they have EVER been.
In CSB terms (per my longer comment), I think it would be better if the corporate sponsors were just matching the charity shares donated by other users (AKA the donors who are not concerned (AKA obsessed) with profits and non-charity share prices).
What will these tools actually do, and how will they be better than just using some website?
On the one hand, I think the story shows that they (the Linux Foundation (which surprises me by continuing to exist (and to claim relevance))) sort of understand the problem, but on the other hand, it sounds like they still see it from the developers' perspective rather than holistically.
The fundamental problem is that time is valuable for EVERYONE. Yes, that includes the time of the developers, too, but not just them.
I think it is easier to respond in the form of a proposed solution approach that considers more of the involved parties. Drum roll, please. <ratatatatatatat> This is a job for a CSB! (Charity Share Brokerage)
Developers should be able to look for existing projects they want to work on. I put that first because the less glorious projects of maintenance and support need higher priority than they're getting. If the programmers want to create glorious new software, that's okay, too, but... The programmers should estimate up front how much time it's going to take and how much they want to be paid for that time. One of the most important jobs of the CSB will be the make sure the proposed projects are feasible in such ways as budget and schedule and resources (human and otherwise) and testing, too. Don't forget the testing.
On the users' (AKA donors') side, they should be able to find projects to support. Actually, a lot of time that may involve guiding the users to projects that support features the users want to continue using but that are in imminent need of funding. New features should be offered, too, but the key aspect is that unless there are enough donors who want to commit their money to support the feature (or to create the new feature), then nothing should happen just on hopeful speculation. For the users, the most important tasks of the CSB would be making the project proposals visible and assessing the results of the projects so that the results can be reported to the donors (and the world). That calls for making sure that each project has clear success criteria.
By the way, the free riders are NOT a problem. As long as ALL the costs are covered satisfactorily, they are just part of the donor pool. Or you could say that one metric of success is how many free riders become donors over time. (And yes, the loss of donors will slow you down, but that mostly means you need better projects to attract more donors--and at the same time you still know which projects are so crucial that they are getting the donors.)
Time's up and I'm flogging a dead horse anyway, but I still bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG. It's all IOttMCO, eh?
Thanks for the link, though I expected to be RickRolled. IMDb says it got 7.4 stars out of 10, but it doesn't sound interesting enough to read the quotes. (And why doesn't the trailer use upper case to make the URL more memorable?)
However now I think you're actually accusing me of some sort of irrationality. Either that or you're projecting from the human tendency to see patterns where none exist.
In contrast, as I understand the situation, I believe there are different degrees and even kinds of randomness. I'm pretty sure that the digits of pi have a high order of randomness, but my hypothesis is that some irrational numbers are quite different from others in terms of their randomness. Let me try to clarify with two examples of strange irrational numbers:
(1) A more-zeroes number: Start with 0.1. At each iteration, you add a string of zeroes that is one longer than in the previous step, followed by a 1 to separate it. This irrational number would start 0.101001000100001000001... This irrational number is completely determined and shows an obvious pattern (and thus seems to lack randomness) but cannot be represented by any pair of finite integers.
(2) A quick-coverage number: Starting from 1, for each positive integer add all of the strings of that length. (I've used base 10 for the example, though any base will work.) Easiest to do it in order, though you could actually make it shorter (in terms of string coverage) by considering the incidental overlaps (and still shorter with clever sequencing). This irrational number would start with 0.012345678900010203040506... (The shortened version might start 0.012345678900203040506.... where "01" has been removed from the 2-digit strings because it appeared earlier and "02" reuses the second "0" from "00".)
These examples are algorithmic rather than formulaic. The first one cannot be assessed by the kind of metric used in the OEIS sequence I cited ( https://oeis.org/A036903 ), whereas the second one would have extremely low values, far below the statistical predictions if the digits were random.
What is it about pi that makes some people think it is fascinating?
Purely serendipitous, but recently I was actually doing some thinking about pi. Actually I was just using pi because the digits were conveniently available. My first line of analysis led to https://oeis.org/A036903, which begins 32, 606, 8555, 99849, 1369564, 14118312, 166100506, 1816743912, 22445207406, 241641121048, 2512258603207... It's hard to follow their explanation, but the 32 is where the first 0 appears, which is the last 1-digit sequence (base 10), 606 is where the last 2-digit sequence appears for the first time, and so on.
What I was actually looking for was a characterization of the randomness of an irrational number, pi in this case. There is a formula that predicts the values of A036903. It is (10^n)*(ln(10^n)) for (n-1)-digit sequences. There was also a diversion into binary representations and the corresponding sequences and formula (though the binary version of A036903 is apparently not in the OEIS).
I don't think this is meaningful, but I did find it curious that for the case of pi 7 of the first 8 decimal predictions were low, while 5 of the 10 binary predictions were low and 5 were high. At least I can't imagine what meaning those results might have.
After some thought, I would now reword my original question as "What are the characteristics of irrational numbers that come closest to (or farthest from) the predicted values?
I would also make one randomness prediction: The last number that completes each series (for any irrational number) should be random. In other words, it was completely random that 0 was the last digit to appear for the 1-digit sequences, and the same degree of randomness should apply for the last 2-digit value, etc.
(However that did give me a really weird idea... It would be possible for almost all of the four-digit (decimal) sequences to appear before the final 3-digit sequence appeared. It would then require at least 37 more digits to finish the 4-digit sequences. (Actually slightly less than 37 digits is possible if the overlaps were arranged carefully.) I think anything approaching such extremely short gaps would be extremely weird--but still random and should be discovered if enough irrational numbers are studied hard enough.)
My initial reaction to this story was to wonder how irrelevant this is from a real world perspective. The actual universe is not flat. Made me wonder how many decimal places actually apply to reality. I'm guessing that it's a larger number somewhere out between galaxies... Here on earth, probably less than 10 digits of pi are significant, and fewer than that if you were on Mercury.
Seems to make more sense to calculate an irrational number that has some rational relationship to the real world. How about e? I guess that means February 7th should be e day?
Recently I was actually doing some thinking about pi, but it was purely a coincidence and I just used pi because the digits were conveniently available. Eventually led to https://oeis.org/A036903 which begins 32, 606, 8555, 99849, 1369564, 14118312, 166100506, 1816743912, 22445207406, 241641121048, 2512258603207...
What I was actually looking for was a characterization of the randomness of an irrational number, pi in this case. There is a formula that predicts the values of A036903. (It is (10^n)*(ln(10^n)) for n-digit sequences. Or is it for (n-1)-digit sequences? I'd have to check my notes... (Guess why I switched from math to computer science.)) There was also a diversion into binary representations and the corresponding sequences and formula (though the binary version of A036903 is apparently not in the OEIS).
Not meaningful, but I found it curious that for pi 7 of the 8 decimal predictions were low, while 5 of the 10 binary predictions were low and 5 were high. At least I can't imagine what meaning those results might have.
After some thought, I would now reword the question as "What are the characteristics of irrational numbers that come closest to (or farthest from) the predicted values?
The point no one seems to be addressing is the chaotic mismanagement of the grounding. The planes continued to fly for several days. If there was a REAL emergency, then they should have been grounded as soon as the second crash removed any doubt. Instead, we went from a state in which there was no emergency to a state in which there was an emergency, but nothing changed in the real world at that time.
Yes, I am saying that Trump's mind is nothing. As in nothing to see there.
I was actually surprised to see that much of the Slashdot discussion was actually substantive, though I expected more mention of fly-by-wire planes. From that perspective it's still a software issue, but I'm not yet certain that Boeing has really gotten to the bottom of it.
There was a related discussion in the discussion of the related survey... Now I'm hung up on the ultimate "safe" airplane with controls like an elevator. Just push the button and take a nap...
I think the Subject: pretty much sums it up, but...
Solutions, are there no solutions?
My favored approach would remain some strong form of MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) to let me filter in favor of people who are not actually wasting my time.
A modicum of politeness for strangers? You must be new around Facebook.
Longer Subject: should have been "Can historical problems be solved or only experienced?"
That would be a really funny version of history if (1) I knew nothing about history, and (2) It wasn't part of your delusional thinking (that leads to the conclusion in your sig). Main responses are (a) Open your eyes (unless you're a troll, in which case you are probably paid not to talk about those self-evident truths) and (b) Accept that the situation has changed since the 1700s.
If you actually want smaller government, then you need to focus on what drives the government to be bigger. My own theory is that the main drive has become excessively large corporations, corporate cancers that were not really conceivable in those days (even though the East India Company did exist and could have been seen as a warning of sorts). In terms of solutions, the parts of government that deal with corporations could be smaller if the corporations themselves were smaller and less dangerous--which would also have the pleasant side effect of increasing freedom (per my sig).
As regards support for third parties, it will never work under the winner-take-all system that is hard-coded into the Constitution. It could be fixed through the brilliant innovation (at that time) of a (major) Constitutional Amendment, but we've reached the point of internal division where we can't do that, either. I'd prefer evolution, but change is going to happen, and if the paths to evolutionary change remain blocked, the alternative is rather horrible and messy to contemplate--and there is no certainty that the outcome will be better than the prior mess.
More desperate searches for insight and humor on today's Slashdot. Not actually surprised by the lack of humor, since the topic doesn't seem to offer much. (The recent topic about the unbootable left shoe produced the best jokes I've seen in a long time, so it's still possible.)
The insight I was looking for involves weighing the interests of all the parties. For example, the customers have interests in quality and price and convenience, which is often reduced to "best value" in the typically simpleminded way. Shareholders have been officially defined to have only one interest, the maximum return on investment, which again masks a pile of complications, but mostly the opinions (or delusions) of other investors (or suckers) who might want to buy the same shares and the trade-off between immediate dividends and investments in the future. High level managers (CxOs) get to make those decisions, though are influenced by how much of the money they can divert into their own pockets. (Carlos Ghosn offers an interesting example. I'm reasonably certain he felt that he was well worth every penny re received.)
Each worker (below CxO level) also has interests, but most workers have almost no leverage as individuals. There are a few superstars, but most workers can easily be replaced. Unless there is some counterbalance, such as a union, this situation of atomic workers results in a race to the bottom, where the other interests crush the workers' interests.
The resulting problem is that the workers are also customers, and if succeed in minimizing their earnings you fail in getting their business. They don't have any money to buy the products you are making. When you drive their wages low enough, they can't even afford the essentials such as food and shelter.
Government has interests, too. Sometimes it wants to keep its citizens alive, even when corporate cancers like Amazon and Facebook don't care so much.
Then we get into the crisis of hyper-productivity by robots. Seems to make the shareholders happy, but the robots tend to be the worst customers of all.
Okay, now I know some more of the keywords to search for...
"Possession is 9 points of the law." If Facebook has possession of the data, YOUR data, then the 9 points is on their side. Actually you're lucky if you can claim one point on your side. If you want to take back possession of YOUR own data, you have to prove that the possession should change, and the basic operation of the law is to presume the possessor is in the right.
"Follow the money." Now about the abuse of YOUR personal information. That follows from where the money moves. Facebook wanted to become a valuable company, and the only valuable thing they had was YOUR personal information. Of course they are going to sell it. The only questions are trivial, such as how to repackage YOUR personal information for maximum value and how to disguise the abuse.
I would actually go a bit farther and say that the companies that failed to follow the money hard enough were the same companies that Facebook crushed. The reward for not sufficiently and aggressively abusing YOUR personal information was death. The only real threat to Facebook is some company that figures out better ways to do it. Amazon, that's your cue?
You left the key word out of your comment. It's censorship and the key question is why Facebook gets to play gawd.
I've actually seen some evidence that makes me think Facebook is actually playing a broad game against many categories of political activity. I'm inclined to agree when the sources are professional trolls, even if they're not working for Putin, but the collateral damage counts, too. The trolls actually have the strongest motivation to game the system and push the limits, whereas the innocent people with opinions (even opinions I agree with) are more likely to get mowed down like grass.
I think the problem with Apple is that it is hard to define their market share in a way that captures their real dominance. According to The Four that is because they are deliberately overcharging their small market share by appealing directly to the suckers gonads.
On the general topic, I like the idea of breaking up the giant corporate cancers into true competitors. However I have reservations about letting the government make the decisions in any direct way.
I would prefer to see indirect incentives via pro-freedom tax policies. The basic idea is that excessive market share limits choice, so it is better if the companies divide themselves to make sure there are sufficient REAL choices in the market. (Contrast with Microsoft's FAKE choices, but at least MS understands the problem.) Don't think of it as a punishment for success, but rather think of it as an incentive program to make sure the best ideas get reproduced into more competitors.
Smaller companies also makes it easier for the companies with bad ideas to die. No more too-big-too-fail companies. Plus the government can be smaller if the companies it has to regulate are smaller.
At the same time, too many competitors can also make it hard to exercise freedom in the form of meaningful choice. We're not smart enough to handle too many options, so we become too subject to manipulation. The optimum locus of choice is probably around 5, according to the research on how we think.
Actually I felt the website was absurdly simpleminded considering what they claim they want to do. However, I also felt disappointed that my question about the dimensionality of reputations was not selected, presumably because it considered too many complexities...
Actually, I don't remember exactly how I worded the question, but in terms of your [DogDude's] concern about simplicity, my suggestion was that the basic rating of positive or negative should be easy, but it would only act as a weighting factor to increase the power of other dimensions. It would be up to the more motivated and industrious people to make those efforts in specific dimensions, but they would thereby define the direction (and base magnitude) of each person's reputation in the higher dimensional space.
To me the trickiest part is how to adjust the weight between positive and negative evaluations on any particular dimension. You could also see it as a question of motivation, in that people are biased more strongly against their fears and negative outcomes in general. Therefore I believe that negative ratings should require extra work. For example, if you want to challenge the accuracy of someone's claim about facts, you would have to provide evidence (and disputed claims would call for an adjudication mechanism, too).
This branch reminded me of my first so-called smartphone, though I don't even remember what the flavor of that year was. Not smart, but at least I've recovered from the nightmares.
My theory is that Microsoft got over-biased to YUGE during the period when they were planning ahead for next year's hardware. At that early stage, there really were large functional improvements at a Moore's-Law pace, so it was a competitive advantage to think big, but Microsoft was never able to learn about thinking small. If there is such a thing as corporate DNA, then small is not part of Microsoft's.
Just finishing The Four now, where Scott Galloway gives some pages to Microsoft's successes and failures. He still considers Microsoft as a possible 5th (in Chapter 9), but mostly dismisses them. I think he's just being polite and showing his age. He even mentioned IBM a few times without being completely dismissive.
The reason to limit it to 3 to 5 at one time is because too many choices becomes overwhelming. Once that happens the choices are rarely free, but usually influenced by irrelevant factors, or even manipulated. However, that is also addressed by replacing the funded projects with others (rather than letting the project collect the excess jackpot donations (like the ones that destroyed the Diaspora alternative to Facebook)).
If a project can't attract sufficient donors, then that's fine, too. Don't forget the schedule should include the funding period (to insure relevance), and if a project can't attract enough donors by that deadline, then the wannabe donors can just pick some other project. The CSB could even offer suggestions for related and still unfunded projects when it notifies them them their preferred project was never sufficiently funded. The failure to attract donors also indicates that there is something wrong with the proposal. It might be too small a niche or need other reconsideration and rewriting, but that's fine, too. Maybe they'll have better luck after some more planning.
Okay, now I feel I'm being dragged back to square one... Of course much of the problem is that this is so old to me that my viewpoint is jaded (and I take it for granted, too). Much of this goes back before I ever heard of Kickstarter, though now I see the CSB (charity share brokerage) as a solution to the most glaring problems of crowdfunding. Underneath it's really a human freedom thing, per my sig, and the REAL problem is that we human beings aren't very bright. Therefore we need to figure out ways to keep things simple enough at each stage of the decision process so that we can exercise the most freedom in the most meaningful ways?
Rather than try to clarify the muddles with OSS or Chrome, I think it might be better to branch to (what I now see as) an "easier" application area, journalism. It's basically the same mechanism used in a different way. (At least that's how I see it now...)
Imagine you watch a news video about a social problem. Following the video are 3 to 5 project proposals related to solving that problem. Viewers of the video would have an option to pledge a "charity share" to a project, where the CSB is already holding the money. The CSB would make sure that each proposal is complete in terms of schedule, budget, resources, testing (if it involves software), and success criteria. Only after a project gets sufficient buy-in from wannabe donors will the money start to flow. The CSB would also be responsible for applying the success criteria to the actual results and reporting on them so the donors and the public can know what happened. The CSB earns a (budgeted) fraction for their project-management support (and the journalists earn a share for clarifying the problems and for reaching the wannabe donors).
The 3 to 5 limit is actually the key to controlling the flow. On the one hand, it reflects how many ideas we can hold in our minds at one time, but on the other hand it reflects the prioritization and editorial guidance. As each project gets funded, it should be removed and replaced with a still pending project. I even think the journalists themselves should be included in the prioritization process on the grounds that they are sincerely concerned and have above-average expertise, though the final "voting" is still going to the donors who decide to support or not support a particular proposal.
You don't want to get me started on all of the problems with Ubuntu. Many years since I've been able to recommend it to anyone. I'm not even saying that the big donor made any of the huge mistakes that have doomed so many such projects to early oblivion. It's more that his priorities are wrong from a real world perspective, at least for the parts of the real world that I live in. One of my theories is that he's been overly influenced by his programmers, who push for flashy new stuff (mostly because it's more interesting to do), while the features I'd pay for are much more pragmatic. I would want less new stuff and more fixing of the important day-to-day stuff.
Your second paragraph mostly indicates that you have quite limited understanding of my suggestion, but you either don't care enough to ask for clarification or don't know the questions. Insofar as this discussion is probably timing out (as Slashdot does things), I feel like this is a parting attempt to be clear. It isn't me or my little bit of money that matters, but rather the groups of wannabe donors who share similarities with me (or with each other without me). If a sufficient number of donors want to pay for slight improvements in the speed of the browser, then that's fine and dandy, though the real point of my suggestion is that the actual results get reported back to them (as well as to the public).
Slashdot Mirror
Rather surprised that there was no reaction to the insanity manifested on Kickstarter. That much enthusiasm to escape from reality? Something is wrong there.
Oh well. At least I can hope that the overfunding will cause the project to implode like Diaspora. Hopefully without any suicides attached. Great idea that went away quietly because Kickstarter money took their eye off the ball... Leaving us with the Facebook problem and the need for the FFF solution.
Took me a while to agree with the "funny" mods, but what's with all the conflict mods?
Overall I'm disappointed that this is the only funny modded comment. I would have thought the topic had more humor potential. I'm guessing the players take themselves and their game too seriously?
Interesting comment and even more interesting that it got modded as interesting. I do think it's a bit simplistic. Also too bad the ACs can't read or understand your sig, eh?
I actually think there's a more general problem here, and I even proposed and discussed a more general solution approach with some people on WIkipedia. I am NOT surprised that nothing came of it. However, I would say that it was somewhat useful for me in terms of understanding the underlying symmetries more clearly.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik...
I'm not sure for which dimensions the anti-hero of this story should receive negative reputation. However I think he should have a enormously negative reputation even relative to other lawyers. Dickishness of the highest caliber should not produce PROFIT.
P.S. I think the same approach has some relevance to Slashdot, but there is even less chance of Slashdot significantly improving. At least Wikipedia has some money to play with.
For (2), I should have continued the 2-digit sequences past "12" to show the next deletion... That part's obvious, but I'm still wondering about how to order the digits for maximum shortening with full coverage at each n.
Good comment (and I was surprised that many of the other modded comments were also pretty good), but the scale of the competition also needs to be considered. Or you could word it in terms of how many losers there are (which was barely mentioned in the discussion).
I'm going to use a kind of evolutionary metaphor here. In the state of nature, you need merit (including good genes) and effort to succeed (by surviving), but you also need a lot of luck. A sufficient amount of bad luck will kill you, but in most cases you survive until you get to the average lifespan, after which in most cases you don't. (Yes, that's a gross oversimplification and mathematically inaccurate, but I'm trying to keep it simple. Obviously you have to weight it over time and also consider the span of reproduction.)
What we have now is a kind of bizarre cancerous state of corporate nature. In most cases we wind up with a few humongous winners and ALL of the competitors get destroyed or eaten. How many companies actually matter now? Four or five? And what's to stop the trend from continuing until it's all a single corporation? (If I were a gambling man, my money would be on Amazon to ultimately buy out Google...) Doesn't matter that many of the losers had real merits before they got crushed.
The essence of #1 is that there can only be one #1. Unless we do something, the scale of the competition is going to render everything else (and everyone else) utterly irrelevant. No limit on the number of losers.
Lucky I read this article.
I'll judge it on its merits.
Judging by the lack of funny comments, it obviously came up short.
Think of the harm as an opportunity cost. Linux and OSS could be vastly more successful than they have EVER been.
In CSB terms (per my longer comment), I think it would be better if the corporate sponsors were just matching the charity shares donated by other users (AKA the donors who are not concerned (AKA obsessed) with profits and non-charity share prices).
What will these tools actually do, and how will they be better than just using some website?
On the one hand, I think the story shows that they (the Linux Foundation (which surprises me by continuing to exist (and to claim relevance))) sort of understand the problem, but on the other hand, it sounds like they still see it from the developers' perspective rather than holistically.
The fundamental problem is that time is valuable for EVERYONE. Yes, that includes the time of the developers, too, but not just them.
I think it is easier to respond in the form of a proposed solution approach that considers more of the involved parties. Drum roll, please. <ratatatatatatat> This is a job for a CSB! (Charity Share Brokerage)
Developers should be able to look for existing projects they want to work on. I put that first because the less glorious projects of maintenance and support need higher priority than they're getting. If the programmers want to create glorious new software, that's okay, too, but... The programmers should estimate up front how much time it's going to take and how much they want to be paid for that time. One of the most important jobs of the CSB will be the make sure the proposed projects are feasible in such ways as budget and schedule and resources (human and otherwise) and testing, too. Don't forget the testing.
On the users' (AKA donors') side, they should be able to find projects to support. Actually, a lot of time that may involve guiding the users to projects that support features the users want to continue using but that are in imminent need of funding. New features should be offered, too, but the key aspect is that unless there are enough donors who want to commit their money to support the feature (or to create the new feature), then nothing should happen just on hopeful speculation. For the users, the most important tasks of the CSB would be making the project proposals visible and assessing the results of the projects so that the results can be reported to the donors (and the world). That calls for making sure that each project has clear success criteria.
By the way, the free riders are NOT a problem. As long as ALL the costs are covered satisfactorily, they are just part of the donor pool. Or you could say that one metric of success is how many free riders become donors over time. (And yes, the loss of donors will slow you down, but that mostly means you need better projects to attract more donors--and at the same time you still know which projects are so crucial that they are getting the donors.)
Time's up and I'm flogging a dead horse anyway, but I still bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG. It's all IOttMCO, eh?
Thanks for the link, though I expected to be RickRolled. IMDb says it got 7.4 stars out of 10, but it doesn't sound interesting enough to read the quotes. (And why doesn't the trailer use upper case to make the URL more memorable?)
However now I think you're actually accusing me of some sort of irrationality. Either that or you're projecting from the human tendency to see patterns where none exist.
In contrast, as I understand the situation, I believe there are different degrees and even kinds of randomness. I'm pretty sure that the digits of pi have a high order of randomness, but my hypothesis is that some irrational numbers are quite different from others in terms of their randomness. Let me try to clarify with two examples of strange irrational numbers:
(1) A more-zeroes number: Start with 0.1. At each iteration, you add a string of zeroes that is one longer than in the previous step, followed by a 1 to separate it. This irrational number would start 0.101001000100001000001... This irrational number is completely determined and shows an obvious pattern (and thus seems to lack randomness) but cannot be represented by any pair of finite integers.
(2) A quick-coverage number: Starting from 1, for each positive integer add all of the strings of that length. (I've used base 10 for the example, though any base will work.) Easiest to do it in order, though you could actually make it shorter (in terms of string coverage) by considering the incidental overlaps (and still shorter with clever sequencing). This irrational number would start with 0.012345678900010203040506... (The shortened version might start 0.012345678900203040506.... where "01" has been removed from the 2-digit strings because it appeared earlier and "02" reuses the second "0" from "00".)
These examples are algorithmic rather than formulaic. The first one cannot be assessed by the kind of metric used in the OEIS sequence I cited ( https://oeis.org/A036903 ), whereas the second one would have extremely low values, far below the statistical predictions if the digits were random.
What is it about pi that makes some people think it is fascinating?
Purely serendipitous, but recently I was actually doing some thinking about pi. Actually I was just using pi because the digits were conveniently available. My first line of analysis led to https://oeis.org/A036903, which begins 32, 606, 8555, 99849, 1369564, 14118312, 166100506, 1816743912, 22445207406, 241641121048, 2512258603207... It's hard to follow their explanation, but the 32 is where the first 0 appears, which is the last 1-digit sequence (base 10), 606 is where the last 2-digit sequence appears for the first time, and so on.
What I was actually looking for was a characterization of the randomness of an irrational number, pi in this case. There is a formula that predicts the values of A036903. It is (10^n)*(ln(10^n)) for (n-1)-digit sequences. There was also a diversion into binary representations and the corresponding sequences and formula (though the binary version of A036903 is apparently not in the OEIS).
I don't think this is meaningful, but I did find it curious that for the case of pi 7 of the first 8 decimal predictions were low, while 5 of the 10 binary predictions were low and 5 were high. At least I can't imagine what meaning those results might have.
After some thought, I would now reword my original question as "What are the characteristics of irrational numbers that come closest to (or farthest from) the predicted values?
I would also make one randomness prediction: The last number that completes each series (for any irrational number) should be random. In other words, it was completely random that 0 was the last digit to appear for the 1-digit sequences, and the same degree of randomness should apply for the last 2-digit value, etc.
(However that did give me a really weird idea... It would be possible for almost all of the four-digit (decimal) sequences to appear before the final 3-digit sequence appeared. It would then require at least 37 more digits to finish the 4-digit sequences. (Actually slightly less than 37 digits is possible if the overlaps were arranged carefully.) I think anything approaching such extremely short gaps would be extremely weird--but still random and should be discovered if enough irrational numbers are studied hard enough.)
My initial reaction to this story was to wonder how irrelevant this is from a real world perspective. The actual universe is not flat. Made me wonder how many decimal places actually apply to reality. I'm guessing that it's a larger number somewhere out between galaxies... Here on earth, probably less than 10 digits of pi are significant, and fewer than that if you were on Mercury.
Seems to make more sense to calculate an irrational number that has some rational relationship to the real world. How about e? I guess that means February 7th should be e day?
Recently I was actually doing some thinking about pi, but it was purely a coincidence and I just used pi because the digits were conveniently available. Eventually led to https://oeis.org/A036903 which begins 32, 606, 8555, 99849, 1369564, 14118312, 166100506, 1816743912, 22445207406, 241641121048, 2512258603207...
What I was actually looking for was a characterization of the randomness of an irrational number, pi in this case. There is a formula that predicts the values of A036903. (It is (10^n)*(ln(10^n)) for n-digit sequences. Or is it for (n-1)-digit sequences? I'd have to check my notes... (Guess why I switched from math to computer science.)) There was also a diversion into binary representations and the corresponding sequences and formula (though the binary version of A036903 is apparently not in the OEIS).
Not meaningful, but I found it curious that for pi 7 of the 8 decimal predictions were low, while 5 of the 10 binary predictions were low and 5 were high. At least I can't imagine what meaning those results might have.
After some thought, I would now reword the question as "What are the characteristics of irrational numbers that come closest to (or farthest from) the predicted values?
Read what I wrote.
If you cannot understand, then feel free to ask for clarification.
If you have nothing to say about it, then perhaps you should say nothing.
The point no one seems to be addressing is the chaotic mismanagement of the grounding. The planes continued to fly for several days. If there was a REAL emergency, then they should have been grounded as soon as the second crash removed any doubt. Instead, we went from a state in which there was no emergency to a state in which there was an emergency, but nothing changed in the real world at that time.
Yes, I am saying that Trump's mind is nothing. As in nothing to see there.
I was actually surprised to see that much of the Slashdot discussion was actually substantive, though I expected more mention of fly-by-wire planes. From that perspective it's still a software issue, but I'm not yet certain that Boeing has really gotten to the bottom of it.
There was a related discussion in the discussion of the related survey... Now I'm hung up on the ultimate "safe" airplane with controls like an elevator. Just push the button and take a nap...
I think the Subject: pretty much sums it up, but...
Solutions, are there no solutions?
My favored approach would remain some strong form of MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) to let me filter in favor of people who are not actually wasting my time.
A modicum of politeness for strangers? You must be new around Facebook.
Longer Subject: should have been "Can historical problems be solved or only experienced?"
That would be a really funny version of history if (1) I knew nothing about history, and (2) It wasn't part of your delusional thinking (that leads to the conclusion in your sig). Main responses are (a) Open your eyes (unless you're a troll, in which case you are probably paid not to talk about those self-evident truths) and (b) Accept that the situation has changed since the 1700s.
If you actually want smaller government, then you need to focus on what drives the government to be bigger. My own theory is that the main drive has become excessively large corporations, corporate cancers that were not really conceivable in those days (even though the East India Company did exist and could have been seen as a warning of sorts). In terms of solutions, the parts of government that deal with corporations could be smaller if the corporations themselves were smaller and less dangerous--which would also have the pleasant side effect of increasing freedom (per my sig).
As regards support for third parties, it will never work under the winner-take-all system that is hard-coded into the Constitution. It could be fixed through the brilliant innovation (at that time) of a (major) Constitutional Amendment, but we've reached the point of internal division where we can't do that, either. I'd prefer evolution, but change is going to happen, and if the paths to evolutionary change remain blocked, the alternative is rather horrible and messy to contemplate--and there is no certainty that the outcome will be better than the prior mess.
More desperate searches for insight and humor on today's Slashdot. Not actually surprised by the lack of humor, since the topic doesn't seem to offer much. (The recent topic about the unbootable left shoe produced the best jokes I've seen in a long time, so it's still possible.)
The insight I was looking for involves weighing the interests of all the parties. For example, the customers have interests in quality and price and convenience, which is often reduced to "best value" in the typically simpleminded way. Shareholders have been officially defined to have only one interest, the maximum return on investment, which again masks a pile of complications, but mostly the opinions (or delusions) of other investors (or suckers) who might want to buy the same shares and the trade-off between immediate dividends and investments in the future. High level managers (CxOs) get to make those decisions, though are influenced by how much of the money they can divert into their own pockets. (Carlos Ghosn offers an interesting example. I'm reasonably certain he felt that he was well worth every penny re received.)
Each worker (below CxO level) also has interests, but most workers have almost no leverage as individuals. There are a few superstars, but most workers can easily be replaced. Unless there is some counterbalance, such as a union, this situation of atomic workers results in a race to the bottom, where the other interests crush the workers' interests.
The resulting problem is that the workers are also customers, and if succeed in minimizing their earnings you fail in getting their business. They don't have any money to buy the products you are making. When you drive their wages low enough, they can't even afford the essentials such as food and shelter.
Government has interests, too. Sometimes it wants to keep its citizens alive, even when corporate cancers like Amazon and Facebook don't care so much.
Then we get into the crisis of hyper-productivity by robots. Seems to make the shareholders happy, but the robots tend to be the worst customers of all.
Okay, now I know some more of the keywords to search for...
Too bad Diaspora imploded, eh?
"Possession is 9 points of the law." If Facebook has possession of the data, YOUR data, then the 9 points is on their side. Actually you're lucky if you can claim one point on your side. If you want to take back possession of YOUR own data, you have to prove that the possession should change, and the basic operation of the law is to presume the possessor is in the right.
"Follow the money." Now about the abuse of YOUR personal information. That follows from where the money moves. Facebook wanted to become a valuable company, and the only valuable thing they had was YOUR personal information. Of course they are going to sell it. The only questions are trivial, such as how to repackage YOUR personal information for maximum value and how to disguise the abuse.
I would actually go a bit farther and say that the companies that failed to follow the money hard enough were the same companies that Facebook crushed. The reward for not sufficiently and aggressively abusing YOUR personal information was death. The only real threat to Facebook is some company that figures out better ways to do it. Amazon, that's your cue?
You left the key word out of your comment. It's censorship and the key question is why Facebook gets to play gawd.
I've actually seen some evidence that makes me think Facebook is actually playing a broad game against many categories of political activity. I'm inclined to agree when the sources are professional trolls, even if they're not working for Putin, but the collateral damage counts, too. The trolls actually have the strongest motivation to game the system and push the limits, whereas the innocent people with opinions (even opinions I agree with) are more likely to get mowed down like grass.
I think the problem with Apple is that it is hard to define their market share in a way that captures their real dominance. According to The Four that is because they are deliberately overcharging their small market share by appealing directly to the suckers gonads.
On the general topic, I like the idea of breaking up the giant corporate cancers into true competitors. However I have reservations about letting the government make the decisions in any direct way.
I would prefer to see indirect incentives via pro-freedom tax policies. The basic idea is that excessive market share limits choice, so it is better if the companies divide themselves to make sure there are sufficient REAL choices in the market. (Contrast with Microsoft's FAKE choices, but at least MS understands the problem.) Don't think of it as a punishment for success, but rather think of it as an incentive program to make sure the best ideas get reproduced into more competitors.
Smaller companies also makes it easier for the companies with bad ideas to die. No more too-big-too-fail companies. Plus the government can be smaller if the companies it has to regulate are smaller.
At the same time, too many competitors can also make it hard to exercise freedom in the form of meaningful choice. We're not smart enough to handle too many options, so we become too subject to manipulation. The optimum locus of choice is probably around 5, according to the research on how we think.
Actually I felt the website was absurdly simpleminded considering what they claim they want to do. However, I also felt disappointed that my question about the dimensionality of reputations was not selected, presumably because it considered too many complexities...
Actually, I don't remember exactly how I worded the question, but in terms of your [DogDude's] concern about simplicity, my suggestion was that the basic rating of positive or negative should be easy, but it would only act as a weighting factor to increase the power of other dimensions. It would be up to the more motivated and industrious people to make those efforts in specific dimensions, but they would thereby define the direction (and base magnitude) of each person's reputation in the higher dimensional space.
To me the trickiest part is how to adjust the weight between positive and negative evaluations on any particular dimension. You could also see it as a question of motivation, in that people are biased more strongly against their fears and negative outcomes in general. Therefore I believe that negative ratings should require extra work. For example, if you want to challenge the accuracy of someone's claim about facts, you would have to provide evidence (and disputed claims would call for an adjudication mechanism, too).
Several old laptops here would benefit from much less Win10 bloat. Will they offer me the option on a build upgrade?
You seem to be talking about my Linux boxen? Mostly started life as XPers.
This branch reminded me of my first so-called smartphone, though I don't even remember what the flavor of that year was. Not smart, but at least I've recovered from the nightmares.
My theory is that Microsoft got over-biased to YUGE during the period when they were planning ahead for next year's hardware. At that early stage, there really were large functional improvements at a Moore's-Law pace, so it was a competitive advantage to think big, but Microsoft was never able to learn about thinking small. If there is such a thing as corporate DNA, then small is not part of Microsoft's.
Just finishing The Four now, where Scott Galloway gives some pages to Microsoft's successes and failures. He still considers Microsoft as a possible 5th (in Chapter 9), but mostly dismisses them. I think he's just being polite and showing his age. He even mentioned IBM a few times without being completely dismissive.
The reason to limit it to 3 to 5 at one time is because too many choices becomes overwhelming. Once that happens the choices are rarely free, but usually influenced by irrelevant factors, or even manipulated. However, that is also addressed by replacing the funded projects with others (rather than letting the project collect the excess jackpot donations (like the ones that destroyed the Diaspora alternative to Facebook)).
If a project can't attract sufficient donors, then that's fine, too. Don't forget the schedule should include the funding period (to insure relevance), and if a project can't attract enough donors by that deadline, then the wannabe donors can just pick some other project. The CSB could even offer suggestions for related and still unfunded projects when it notifies them them their preferred project was never sufficiently funded. The failure to attract donors also indicates that there is something wrong with the proposal. It might be too small a niche or need other reconsideration and rewriting, but that's fine, too. Maybe they'll have better luck after some more planning.
Okay, now I feel I'm being dragged back to square one... Of course much of the problem is that this is so old to me that my viewpoint is jaded (and I take it for granted, too). Much of this goes back before I ever heard of Kickstarter, though now I see the CSB (charity share brokerage) as a solution to the most glaring problems of crowdfunding. Underneath it's really a human freedom thing, per my sig, and the REAL problem is that we human beings aren't very bright. Therefore we need to figure out ways to keep things simple enough at each stage of the decision process so that we can exercise the most freedom in the most meaningful ways?
Rather than try to clarify the muddles with OSS or Chrome, I think it might be better to branch to (what I now see as) an "easier" application area, journalism. It's basically the same mechanism used in a different way. (At least that's how I see it now...)
Imagine you watch a news video about a social problem. Following the video are 3 to 5 project proposals related to solving that problem. Viewers of the video would have an option to pledge a "charity share" to a project, where the CSB is already holding the money. The CSB would make sure that each proposal is complete in terms of schedule, budget, resources, testing (if it involves software), and success criteria. Only after a project gets sufficient buy-in from wannabe donors will the money start to flow. The CSB would also be responsible for applying the success criteria to the actual results and reporting on them so the donors and the public can know what happened. The CSB earns a (budgeted) fraction for their project-management support (and the journalists earn a share for clarifying the problems and for reaching the wannabe donors).
The 3 to 5 limit is actually the key to controlling the flow. On the one hand, it reflects how many ideas we can hold in our minds at one time, but on the other hand it reflects the prioritization and editorial guidance. As each project gets funded, it should be removed and replaced with a still pending project. I even think the journalists themselves should be included in the prioritization process on the grounds that they are sincerely concerned and have above-average expertise, though the final "voting" is still going to the donors who decide to support or not support a particular proposal.
You don't want to get me started on all of the problems with Ubuntu. Many years since I've been able to recommend it to anyone. I'm not even saying that the big donor made any of the huge mistakes that have doomed so many such projects to early oblivion. It's more that his priorities are wrong from a real world perspective, at least for the parts of the real world that I live in. One of my theories is that he's been overly influenced by his programmers, who push for flashy new stuff (mostly because it's more interesting to do), while the features I'd pay for are much more pragmatic. I would want less new stuff and more fixing of the important day-to-day stuff.
Your second paragraph mostly indicates that you have quite limited understanding of my suggestion, but you either don't care enough to ask for clarification or don't know the questions. Insofar as this discussion is probably timing out (as Slashdot does things), I feel like this is a parting attempt to be clear. It isn't me or my little bit of money that matters, but rather the groups of wannabe donors who share similarities with me (or with each other without me). If a sufficient number of donors want to pay for slight improvements in the speed of the browser, then that's fine and dandy, though the real point of my suggestion is that the actual results get reported back to them (as well as to the public).