Maybe I was misunderstood. "Coders," as in someone who has taken a few classes and can write a bit of code, might not learn critical thinking, but decent developers tend to have it. And yes, it's absolutely an asset to pretty much all jobs, and unfortunately lacking in most of them.
We are hopefully experiencing a shift away from a management class over workers who are regarded as more or less machine like: don't think much, butts in seats, head down, follow this simple procedure. Adults should be capable of doing a job well with a minimum of oversight, leaving a reduced number of administrators to do actual administration: all the busywork that could get in the way of doing the actual job.
Coders yes. However, the "what will break this" thinking is a critical skill for someone I'd consider a developer. It's also a critical skill for a good manager, but most of them seem to be missing it.
Such as when a big project got set up here and someone said things like "you'll want to do x, y and z because otherwise A, B and C are going to go wrong." Someone wanted more positive thinking. Today I actually went to a meeting with a bag of popcorn, to hear about how A, B, and C have gone catastrophically wrong.
I've never understood why first class want to get on first. I fly a lot, and occasionally I accidentally demonstrate enough loyalty that I get to preboard. Yuck. Lounge in the... lounge with power and wifi until the last two people are in line to board, then stroll over and walk on. Sit down, plane leaves.
"There's no evidence to back this up, and plenty of evidence to the contrary"
You're correct that lottery winner studies show that giving people overwhelming (and publicity-attracting) wealth all at once is bad. See also large inheritances. But there are also studies that show giving people reasonable amounts of money directly, whether in foreign aid or developed country social programs, has better outcomes than giving them strings attached money or food stamps, etc. Also, it is certainly wealth transfer to the government, which redistributes it, and in most socialized countries that strategy has led to narrowing of both the income and standard of living distributions.
I'm not sure how to respond to your "not so." That math is quite simple. If you put $X in your mattress, i.e. it does not generate income, as I stipulated, then in a year it will have $X*(1-y) of equivalent buying power, where y is the rate of inflation. You are correct, if you take that capital and invest it in some way, it produces income, but that is taxable and subject to redistribution.
You're thinking about today. The article is about thinking about tomorrow.
Your example of delivering stuff is a good one. How do we do it today? We hire some bag of meat to pick up boxes (we use boxes so bags of meat have conveniently shaped objects to deal with) and move them where they need to go. It's not exactly a cognitively challenging task.
There are already robots that can do that. They're a little clunky, but they've improved impressively rapidly. There's zero reason to think that in the very near future they won't be perfectly functional in that role. Barely any AI beyond basic navigation required.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but it happened already. Scroll to the top of this very page. See those ads? They're schmoozing you. They're cleverly designed, previously by psychologists, now by machine learning models, to schmooze you. And they're getting rapidly better.
There probably will always be a need for hook... er, salespersons to do some in-person schmoozing of the odd whale who's both a bit old fashioned and important enough to demand it. The vast majority though? They've been on the way out for years.
Income redistribution leads to wealth redistribution over the long term, if you do it properly. Most "socialist" states have reasonable inheritance taxes or equivalent, and inflation means that if your wealth isn't generating an income it will evaporate away.
I'm not so sure about that. If you look at the supporters of minimum basic income, lots of the really prominent ones are... tech billionaires. These people are in the field, they know what's coming, and they're also smart enough to realize that Marie Antoinette didn't have such a good retirement.
Being rich is awesome. Being too rich, while a lot of people are too poor, is not.
The other possible issue is that AI need not necessarily increase the wealth gap. It will certainly make many things much cheaper, which means the amount of wealth increases. We sort of assume most of those gains will go to the wealthy, because that's how it's always worked before, but by making things cheaper AI also lowers barriers to entry. It could return market economies into some semblance of what they were envisioned to be: systems where if you aren't making things or providing services for a reasonable margin then someone else will come along and outcompete you.
They did actually. Far fewer people per capita are employed in construction, manufacturing, mining, basically all primary and secondary industries, than used to be.
The excess has moved to tertiary, service industries. This used to be an absolutely tiny sector, and is still fairly small in undeveloped economies, but in developed countries it's often 2/3+.
People not in the know always think technological "secrets" are harder to figure out than they are. Once you know something is possible and have some hints about how it's done, the "secrets" usually don't stay secret very long.
Now you can find all kinds of videos on YouTube illustrating how to build nuclear bombs. Complete with things like "the interstage material, FOGBANK, is classified, but based on available documents it is likely a type of aerogel...."
I don't disagree with you that they're making an important point, but I think their error is more than semantic.
Dropping the semantics, they assert that Facebook did something technologically superior. They didn't. Facebook won because they were in the right place at the right time with something that passed the bar of minimal functionality. The reason they're so dominant is that social networks, by their nature, benefit from central coordination. The one that all your friends are on is the one you want to be on. Facebook, AIM, the phone book, town halls, social clubs, that one friend you have who likes planning parties and getting everyone together.
That's the fundamental issue that any new social network proposal has to address, not technological superiority. Especially the present one, which is proclaiming the benefits of decentralization.
When the US was restricting export of public key cryptography, geeks used to print the equation on t-shirts. The only technology that's even been kind of successfully restricted is nuclear, and that's mostly worked by restricting physical equipment rather than knowledge.
No need. There are a bunch out there. People didn't like them. And with good reason: centralization is convenient and allows easy discoverability.
Every once in a while someone comes along and decides they're going to invent the next social network app and it will be way better than Facebook because something something, and won't be abusive at all (how are you going to pay for it?). This one just has blockchain!
At least the idea of an open Facebook has merit, even if it seems to be impractical. A block chain seems like about the worst possible way of storing social network data, so this particular incarnation of the idea doesn't seem to have any redeeming value at all.
The open protocol is pretty much http. There used to be things like ftp as well, but http won. All the examples you mention use it exclusively.
The apps are harder. There are some open ones, but they're pretty much flops. There used to be quite a few successful commercial ones though. Then Facebook bought them all.
The original comment was "outpaced the capabilities". I don't think any of the closed solutions, much less the ones that are popular now, outpaced any capabilities. It's not exactly difficult to send a picture or text over http, or make a decent gui for it, despite the evangelizing about "our wonderful technology." The winners outpaced the others in popularity.
Yup, that right there is what I mean. "Git is an scm... it has nothing to do with a blockchain...." Git is an scm, yeah. But scm is a description (and a very high level one at that) of what it does, not what it is or how it works.
The heart of git is a tree-type data structure where every node on the tree contains a database transaction. A transaction in a generalized database framework is anything that modifies the database. In git, those transactions are changes to the documents you're tracking (the "diffs" you mentioned*). But the nodes also contain other things... your name, e-mail address etc. Oh, and two more things: each node in the git tree contains the SHA hash of the previous node, and the SHA hash of itself including the hash of the previous node. This data structure is called a hash tree, or Merkle tree. The defining characteristic of such a tree is that, because each node's hash depends on the hash of the previous node, you can't change a node, or it's connections, without changing all the downstream nodes, and the integrity of the whole thing is pretty quick to verify. Is this sounding suspiciously familiar yet?
So back in 1991 some comp sci dudes were playing around with some ideas involving lists of records and timestamps and hashes and stuff (your spidey sense should definitely be tingling now....). A year later they wrote this paper about using Merkle trees to collect records together into blocks and make the whole thing more efficient. Then, a decade or so later, this guy Szabo cooked up an idea he called "bit gold" that was supposed to use these chains of hash-secured records as a kind of ledger, as the basis for a payment system. Fast forward another few years and somebody using the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto" wrote some stuff about "block chains" (yes, whoever he was, he had a functional spacebar) and using them as a ledger system....
Anticipating the pedants, the currently sexy implementations of block chains have a wee problem with deciding who gets to add nodes to them, a problem which (usually) isn't shared by git. So if it makes you happier, imagine that I post my github address on Slashdot and whoever guesses the password gets to make a change to the repo, at which point I change the password to something else, et cetera. And we all periodically vote about whether each other's changes are shit or not.
* unlike other scms, git doesn't actually store diffs, it stores snapshots of changed files.
Ooh, I hope they'll go for reducing the rewards and benefits. Those programs should be flat out illegal.
They won't of course. But then, it's really not as much of a slippery slope as you seem to think. The fees get too high, and people switch to some new system. At least, they do here, but YMMV.
To me, Apple provides a service that is well worth 0.15%. The bank is pushing it pretty hard with their 2% + 20% interest + abusive tactics to get people into permadebt. I'm kind of curious though... Apple edged their way into the music business, got a bit of leverage, and used it to bully the music industry into being a bit more reasonable. Can they do that with banks too?
Why thank you. I think kids do have a natural advantage in this area because the world is new to them and they're still learning what's possible and what's not. But we also tend to get old and bitter, and I think a lot of that is simply losing our sense of wonder and possibility.
You might enjoy this:
I watched the Honest Trailers review of Kong (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saTFPCuQfvw).
The director is part of the episode, and seems like the best kind of director: a big kid who thinks movies are awesome (and also knows a lot about them). There was a comment about the "Kong drama," so I went and looked it up, and found this article:
Yup. Right there is the difference. The Honest Trailers people love movies and their criticism is hilarious. I watched most of the CinemaSins rant about Kong. Don't. It was terrible.
Instead of posting something content free, except an appeal to your own authority, why don't you say something at least worth further conversation? What is it you think git has or is lacking that makes it not a blockchain implementation?
Slashdot Mirror
The point of the study is effectively to refute the first line of the summary:
"What is it about human learning that allows us to perform so well with relatively little experience?"
Answer: we don't perform well in those circumstances. We all have many years, or decades, of experience to draw on, and we do.
Our current computers, including our quantum computers, work VERY far from the theoretical minimum computational energy.
Maybe I was misunderstood. "Coders," as in someone who has taken a few classes and can write a bit of code, might not learn critical thinking, but decent developers tend to have it. And yes, it's absolutely an asset to pretty much all jobs, and unfortunately lacking in most of them.
We are hopefully experiencing a shift away from a management class over workers who are regarded as more or less machine like: don't think much, butts in seats, head down, follow this simple procedure. Adults should be capable of doing a job well with a minimum of oversight, leaving a reduced number of administrators to do actual administration: all the busywork that could get in the way of doing the actual job.
I stayed far away, and now they're afraid to ask me to fix it. I applied my can-do attitude to projects that have a chance of success.
Lucky too. If they'd asked me earlier I probably would have gotten involved. I save injured birds and stray cats too.
Coders yes. However, the "what will break this" thinking is a critical skill for someone I'd consider a developer. It's also a critical skill for a good manager, but most of them seem to be missing it.
Such as when a big project got set up here and someone said things like "you'll want to do x, y and z because otherwise A, B and C are going to go wrong." Someone wanted more positive thinking. Today I actually went to a meeting with a bag of popcorn, to hear about how A, B, and C have gone catastrophically wrong.
I've never understood why first class want to get on first. I fly a lot, and occasionally I accidentally demonstrate enough loyalty that I get to preboard. Yuck. Lounge in the... lounge with power and wifi until the last two people are in line to board, then stroll over and walk on. Sit down, plane leaves.
"There's no evidence to back this up, and plenty of evidence to the contrary"
You're correct that lottery winner studies show that giving people overwhelming (and publicity-attracting) wealth all at once is bad. See also large inheritances. But there are also studies that show giving people reasonable amounts of money directly, whether in foreign aid or developed country social programs, has better outcomes than giving them strings attached money or food stamps, etc. Also, it is certainly wealth transfer to the government, which redistributes it, and in most socialized countries that strategy has led to narrowing of both the income and standard of living distributions.
I'm not sure how to respond to your "not so." That math is quite simple. If you put $X in your mattress, i.e. it does not generate income, as I stipulated, then in a year it will have $X*(1-y) of equivalent buying power, where y is the rate of inflation. You are correct, if you take that capital and invest it in some way, it produces income, but that is taxable and subject to redistribution.
Sure, that must be why everyone is desperate to sell your data (and buy it). Because it doesn't work at all.
I prefer wire cutters myself....
Humans are bad at understanding exponential growth.
You're thinking about today. The article is about thinking about tomorrow.
Your example of delivering stuff is a good one. How do we do it today? We hire some bag of meat to pick up boxes (we use boxes so bags of meat have conveniently shaped objects to deal with) and move them where they need to go. It's not exactly a cognitively challenging task.
There are already robots that can do that. They're a little clunky, but they've improved impressively rapidly. There's zero reason to think that in the very near future they won't be perfectly functional in that role. Barely any AI beyond basic navigation required.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but it happened already. Scroll to the top of this very page. See those ads? They're schmoozing you. They're cleverly designed, previously by psychologists, now by machine learning models, to schmooze you. And they're getting rapidly better.
There probably will always be a need for hook... er, salespersons to do some in-person schmoozing of the odd whale who's both a bit old fashioned and important enough to demand it. The vast majority though? They've been on the way out for years.
Slashdot seems to concentrate a certain elite who have forgotten the lessons of history. Like that one.
Income redistribution leads to wealth redistribution over the long term, if you do it properly. Most "socialist" states have reasonable inheritance taxes or equivalent, and inflation means that if your wealth isn't generating an income it will evaporate away.
I'm not so sure about that. If you look at the supporters of minimum basic income, lots of the really prominent ones are... tech billionaires. These people are in the field, they know what's coming, and they're also smart enough to realize that Marie Antoinette didn't have such a good retirement.
Being rich is awesome. Being too rich, while a lot of people are too poor, is not.
The other possible issue is that AI need not necessarily increase the wealth gap. It will certainly make many things much cheaper, which means the amount of wealth increases. We sort of assume most of those gains will go to the wealthy, because that's how it's always worked before, but by making things cheaper AI also lowers barriers to entry. It could return market economies into some semblance of what they were envisioned to be: systems where if you aren't making things or providing services for a reasonable margin then someone else will come along and outcompete you.
They did actually. Far fewer people per capita are employed in construction, manufacturing, mining, basically all primary and secondary industries, than used to be.
The excess has moved to tertiary, service industries. This used to be an absolutely tiny sector, and is still fairly small in undeveloped economies, but in developed countries it's often 2/3+.
People not in the know always think technological "secrets" are harder to figure out than they are. Once you know something is possible and have some hints about how it's done, the "secrets" usually don't stay secret very long.
Now you can find all kinds of videos on YouTube illustrating how to build nuclear bombs. Complete with things like "the interstage material, FOGBANK, is classified, but based on available documents it is likely a type of aerogel...."
I don't disagree with you that they're making an important point, but I think their error is more than semantic.
Dropping the semantics, they assert that Facebook did something technologically superior. They didn't. Facebook won because they were in the right place at the right time with something that passed the bar of minimal functionality. The reason they're so dominant is that social networks, by their nature, benefit from central coordination. The one that all your friends are on is the one you want to be on. Facebook, AIM, the phone book, town halls, social clubs, that one friend you have who likes planning parties and getting everyone together.
That's the fundamental issue that any new social network proposal has to address, not technological superiority. Especially the present one, which is proclaiming the benefits of decentralization.
When the US was restricting export of public key cryptography, geeks used to print the equation on t-shirts. The only technology that's even been kind of successfully restricted is nuclear, and that's mostly worked by restricting physical equipment rather than knowledge.
No need. There are a bunch out there. People didn't like them. And with good reason: centralization is convenient and allows easy discoverability.
Every once in a while someone comes along and decides they're going to invent the next social network app and it will be way better than Facebook because something something, and won't be abusive at all (how are you going to pay for it?). This one just has blockchain!
At least the idea of an open Facebook has merit, even if it seems to be impractical. A block chain seems like about the worst possible way of storing social network data, so this particular incarnation of the idea doesn't seem to have any redeeming value at all.
The open protocol is pretty much http. There used to be things like ftp as well, but http won. All the examples you mention use it exclusively.
The apps are harder. There are some open ones, but they're pretty much flops. There used to be quite a few successful commercial ones though. Then Facebook bought them all.
The original comment was "outpaced the capabilities". I don't think any of the closed solutions, much less the ones that are popular now, outpaced any capabilities. It's not exactly difficult to send a picture or text over http, or make a decent gui for it, despite the evangelizing about "our wonderful technology." The winners outpaced the others in popularity.
Yup, that right there is what I mean. "Git is an scm... it has nothing to do with a blockchain...." Git is an scm, yeah. But scm is a description (and a very high level one at that) of what it does, not what it is or how it works.
The heart of git is a tree-type data structure where every node on the tree contains a database transaction. A transaction in a generalized database framework is anything that modifies the database. In git, those transactions are changes to the documents you're tracking (the "diffs" you mentioned*). But the nodes also contain other things... your name, e-mail address etc. Oh, and two more things: each node in the git tree contains the SHA hash of the previous node, and the SHA hash of itself including the hash of the previous node. This data structure is called a hash tree, or Merkle tree. The defining characteristic of such a tree is that, because each node's hash depends on the hash of the previous node, you can't change a node, or it's connections, without changing all the downstream nodes, and the integrity of the whole thing is pretty quick to verify. Is this sounding suspiciously familiar yet?
So back in 1991 some comp sci dudes were playing around with some ideas involving lists of records and timestamps and hashes and stuff (your spidey sense should definitely be tingling now....). A year later they wrote this paper about using Merkle trees to collect records together into blocks and make the whole thing more efficient. Then, a decade or so later, this guy Szabo cooked up an idea he called "bit gold" that was supposed to use these chains of hash-secured records as a kind of ledger, as the basis for a payment system. Fast forward another few years and somebody using the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto" wrote some stuff about "block chains" (yes, whoever he was, he had a functional spacebar) and using them as a ledger system....
Anticipating the pedants, the currently sexy implementations of block chains have a wee problem with deciding who gets to add nodes to them, a problem which (usually) isn't shared by git. So if it makes you happier, imagine that I post my github address on Slashdot and whoever guesses the password gets to make a change to the repo, at which point I change the password to something else, et cetera. And we all periodically vote about whether each other's changes are shit or not.
* unlike other scms, git doesn't actually store diffs, it stores snapshots of changed files.
Ooh, I hope they'll go for reducing the rewards and benefits. Those programs should be flat out illegal.
They won't of course. But then, it's really not as much of a slippery slope as you seem to think. The fees get too high, and people switch to some new system. At least, they do here, but YMMV.
To me, Apple provides a service that is well worth 0.15%. The bank is pushing it pretty hard with their 2% + 20% interest + abusive tactics to get people into permadebt. I'm kind of curious though... Apple edged their way into the music business, got a bit of leverage, and used it to bully the music industry into being a bit more reasonable. Can they do that with banks too?
Why thank you. I think kids do have a natural advantage in this area because the world is new to them and they're still learning what's possible and what's not. But we also tend to get old and bitter, and I think a lot of that is simply losing our sense of wonder and possibility.
You might enjoy this:
I watched the Honest Trailers review of Kong (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saTFPCuQfvw).
The director is part of the episode, and seems like the best kind of director: a big kid who thinks movies are awesome (and also knows a lot about them). There was a comment about the "Kong drama," so I went and looked it up, and found this article:
http://www.indiewire.com/2017/...
Yup. Right there is the difference. The Honest Trailers people love movies and their criticism is hilarious. I watched most of the CinemaSins rant about Kong. Don't. It was terrible.
Instead of posting something content free, except an appeal to your own authority, why don't you say something at least worth further conversation? What is it you think git has or is lacking that makes it not a blockchain implementation?