I think he means just in terms of being organized by a mostly-benevolent non-profit organization, which collects some donations to run the servers and implement incremental software upgrades, and doesn't spend all its time trying to sell users' data to advertisers and otherwise "monetize" them.
I think we're fairly lucky that Wikipedia got to its particular niche first; for Wikipedia's many faults, if some corporation had gotten to the idea of "crowdsourced encyclopedia" first, and owned the results, I think the web would be a much worse place. In social networking, a large company did get there first, and I think the web is a worse place for it.
That's true, but since there's not a huge range in ratings, that root-squaring doesn't have nearly as big an effect as the many orders of magnitude difference in popularity. I don't recall the exact numbers offhand, but I think the top-10 movies, out of 17,500, account for fully half the weight.
To some extent, but libertarianism is a lot more market-fundamentalist than the classical liberals were. The classical liberals came from the direction of wanting to create a particular kind of free society, and using market mechanisms as the means to the end, only to the extent that they actually promoted it. Libertarians take the market mechanisms as the end.
Even Adam Smith, for example, probably the most pro-market of the classical liberals, has a pretty thorough discussion in The Wealth of Nations of market failures: collusion between businessmen ("a conspiracy against the public"), monopolies, and so on. Thomas Jefferson thought that the government should strongly regulate corporations to prevent them from becoming their own transnational quasi-governmental entities. Etc.
Uhh, that's not true at all, if we're going to be complaining about words being corrupted here. Conservatism is historically the philosophy of a strong government that is specifically oriented towards protecting (i.e. conserving) the social status quo, public order, respect for tradition, a strong Nation, and public morals. The American founding fathers were mostly liberals in the liberal-conservative debates of their day, which is one reason there's a bit of confusion. Things like the banning of "obscene" literature, sodomy laws, blasphemy laws, anti-Communist laws, mandatory pledges of allegiance, and similar, are continuations of that conservative tradition though.
Trying to recommend unpopular movies is problematic. Is the computer program going to be able to discern under-rated (Glengarry Glen Ross) or just crap (Ishtar)
That is indeed an interesting question, and I think it's what the grandparent meant when he pointed out Netflix's contest didn't really address it. The performance measure Netflix used was root-mean squared error, so every prediction counts equally in determining your error. Since the vast majority of predictions in the data set are for frequently-watched films, effectively the prize was focused primarily on optimizing the common case: correctly predict whether someone will like or not like one of the very popular films. Of course, getting the unpopular films right too helps, but all else being equal, it's better to make even tiny improvements to your predictions of films that appear tons of times in the data set, than to make considerable improvements to less popular films' predictions, because the importance of getting a prediction right is in effect weighted by the film's popularity.
You could look at error from a movie-centric perspective, though, asking something like, "how good are your recommender algorithm's predictions for the average film?" That causes you to focus on different things, if an error of 1 star on Obscure Film predictions and an error of 1 star on Titanic predictions count the same.
If that's his argument, then it would seem that the real conclusion is that Facebook can't build systems as good as Google's, even though they are using the same processor technology.
Google does have approximately 30x as many employees as Facebook, so it's not implausible that they've got a much greater ability to build in-house custom tech.
The part most vociferously objected to isn't the US's role in 1979, but in 1953. Many Iranians think that if the Shah hadn't been installed in the US-backed coup in 1953, Iran would've developed into a modern, secular state, rather than enduring 26 years of repressive rule that set the stage for a revolution.
That also depends on the market. If the widget market is a high-margin business with high barriers to entry (what companies like to call "competitive moats"), then an increase in tax rates will tend to just reduce profits. The profit margins would still be high even post-tax, so there's no reason for companies to exit the business, so supply isn't reduced.
Classical economics basically assumes that costs of goods and services approach their cost of production, plus a marginal profit at the minimum needed to ensure that people will bother staying in the market at all. Many markets don't operate like that ideal, though, and instead have quite high profit margins. In those cases, you can't really directly apply the classical analysis, because conditions are aren't at the equilibrium that it assumes. Instead, you have to analyze the specific factors of the market to figure out why profit margins are high, which will tell you something about whether tax increases are likely to raise prices, or instead reduce margins.
Since companies like AT&T have already indicated their willingness to do unlimited surveillance for the government, even when it violates laws, I don't see how the situation isn't already how you describe.
Is the Linux version of Firefox particularly horrid or something? When using more than 10 tabs or so, my memory usage is typically in the 600mb+ range. It's currently taking 1.1g resident for about 40 tabs. I'm on x86-64, but even if we assume there's a full doubling of RAM usage due to the architecture, that's still 550mb equivalent, which his test never hits even with 150 tabs.
The ACLU is primarily, as you point out, an organization focused on the 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments. This is not a secret to anyone. You may wish they were different, but they are what they are. Are you interested in the liberties guaranteed by those amendments? If so, I don't see a reason not to support the ACLU; it doesn't preclude you from additionally supporting other organizations focused on other civil liberties.
If you have any major organizations in mind that do zealously defend all civil liberties, feel free to mention them. I'm only aware of different sorts of piecemeal organizations. I pick and choose the ones that seem to best cover the range of civil liberties I care most about. In my case, the ACLU and EFF seem to most frequently defend the rights I'm most interested in (especially free speech).
The problem is that Obama is light-years better than any of the totally insane third-party candidates. Ralph Nader? Ron Paul? Chuck Baldwin? I'd rather pick a random guy out of a hat than any of those three incompetent morons.
Gold is also unbacked fiat money, for the most part. Its primary value derives from the perception that it's useful as a value story and currency, i.e. recursive. Its actual utility value, as jewelry, industrial metal, and similar, is substantially lower than its current price. In a major collapse of civilization, it'd be lower still, since jewelry wouldn't exactly be a priority.
Say I had a bunch of actually usable goods, in some post-apocalyptic scenario. Why would I let you have them in exchange for some relatively useless piece of metal? The only conceivable reason is an expectation that that metal would be accepted by others as currency also; i.e. exactly the same thing that backs U.S. dollars.
There are plenty of weapons that can be made out of household items, and western protestors have gotten very good at using them. I think the problem in Iran is that this is really a bunch of idealist students without a lot of planning and organization, not that Iran lacks a 2nd amendment that lets them carry handguns or whatever. Forget handguns; a bunch of molotov cocktails and improvised body armor would be sufficient.
Shooting actual guns is particularly problematic because it involves retaliation. Gray-area violence like molotov cocktails is more effective in many cases, because it can drive back the police without quite seeming to give enough provocation to allow them to shoot into crowds--- while if the crowd is shooting guns at them, all bets are off.
Not quite; San Jose State University is a state university, where students generally pay tuition/fees that amount to considerably less than the cost of their education. Those resources are primarily provided by taxpayer and grant money.
A closer analogy would have been your boss complaining about code that you developed and published on your own time, with your own resources, while away from work.
Considering that it was developed while at the institution, as part of a course taught by the institution, likely using the institution's resources, that seems like a particularly poor analogy. We're not talking about a student releasing some side project they did completely independently.
I agree that this isn't a work-for-hire situation; I was merely responding to the claim that academia is somehow disconnected from the real world, by pointing out that in this case it managed a pretty good simulation of what things would be like if it were the real world.
Actually, a person in a boss-like role issuing stupid and counterproductive directives solely for their own benefit is precisely how reality works, so perhaps the professor here should be commended for inculcating their students in the way the Real World works, rather than clinging to some sort of ivory-tower idealism. Certainly, in Reality, you would have to have several layers of bureaucracy sign off on the code release before you would be permitted to make it public.
It also missed the huge qualitative leap in responsiveness you get by paying someone anything. It's often not a lot---coders on many open-source projects will often offer to do things for "bounties", whose usual range (I've seen a lot of $500-$5000) is of the sort that would get lost in the noise of any major company's budget; we're talking getting a custom feature built to order for less than the cost of a week's business trip. And even when people aren't working for a lot, they see themselves as somewhat indebted to you and responsible for your interests, because they've voluntarily accepted this contract job. If you're not paying them, they have no such sense of obligation.
As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer.
But you can already do this yourself, without the self-serving drama of asking while on the plane and then deplaning in some big show. Nearly all airlines show which equipment will be serving your flight prior to purchase. You can look up information on that model of airliner, and choose not to buy the ticket if its properties aren't in accord with your preferences. People do this for all sorts of reasons already, like "god i really hate 737s".
It's a social problem, yes, but one that historically people who think about voting in a free society have been concerned with. One way to subvert a nominally democratic system is to add social (or physical, or monetary) pressure to vote for or against someone; one way to make that harder is to make the voter unable to prove who they voted for, so they can just say "yeah I voted for you" and nobody can verify whether that's the case or not.
Yeah, that's true; and an addition complication for anything long-term is the lack of any significant amount of data. With the weather, you can try to build, say, hurricane models by feeding data about hundreds of hurricanes, and thousands of other "negative" examples of weather patterns from which hurricanes didn't form. Then prediction models can try to find regularities among those data sets.
With economies we just don't have that much data. If you want to predict a major recession and recovery, for example, we have good data on, something like 4 or 5 of them--- and they happen in totally different eras, among radically different social and governmental backdrops, and are of different kinds. It'd be roughly like trying to build hurricane-prediction models with a sample of one Gulf hurricane, one east-coast Atlantic hurricane, one Hawaiian hurricane, and two southeast Asian hurricanes--- all from different decades and of very different magnitudes. With a data set like that, your hurricane model would not be good; and our recession-prediction models aren't, either.
I think it's not so much that it can't in theory be modeled, as that in practice it's extremely hard---much harder than modeling the weather, which we can barely do accurately out to 5 days. There's somewhat of a gap in expectations when you go from high-level qualitative descriptions of phenomena, like hurricane experts discussing trends in intensity and formation basins, to an implemented, detailed computational model that purports to simulate what "really" happens. The 2nd one usually diverges extremely quickly from what actually does happen, because these sorts of nonlinear systems are very sensitive to slight errors in the model or its initial conditions.
That's fine, as long as people understand its use and limitations; but there's a tendency, especially among the only-sort-of-technical folks who are involved in a lot of areas of business and economic policy, to trust these computer models as more than they are, as if the fact that a "computer simulation" told you it makes it some sort of neutral third-party truth that represents the state-of-the-art in guessing what will happen.
Violation of contracts is more a matter of lack of political power than political power. A large corporation can ignore your contracts at will, unless there is a credible threat of punishment.
Google has two main differences, I think, for now:
1. They're still largely controlled by some fairly idealistic folks, who are now so filthy rich that they aren't that worried about making even more money, so much as using their multi-billion-dollar playground to incubate things they think of as cool. As long as their playground continues making significant profit margins, the third-party investors will probably let them do this.
2. In many of their market segments, their self-interest isn't as badly aligned with openness as it is for some large companies. With Google's resources, they can afford to make open protocols, avoid a walled-garden approach and allow people to move their data in/out, etc., because they're banking on the competitive advantage of, "go ahead, just try to duplicate this... here, we'll even give you the code and the APIs, now good luck coming up with and setting up / maintaining that much computing power for a lower price than it costs us". This is actually a positive marketing tool in some areas, because a few large companies have gotten burned with data locked into proprietary formats from now-defunct companies, so "we can get our data back out of this thing, right?" is something even companies that don't care about open source are asking these days.
I agree with you that it's quite possible these will change. If its profit margins start going down, investors will start demanding more "normal corporation" type of stuff to try to prop them up, and the founders and their lieutenants will no longer have complete freedom to do what they'd like. If people seem like they are starting to move off some of the services, Google will come under investor pressure to try to lock them in, or at least to no longer be so nice about helping customers avoid lock-in.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he means just in terms of being organized by a mostly-benevolent non-profit organization, which collects some donations to run the servers and implement incremental software upgrades, and doesn't spend all its time trying to sell users' data to advertisers and otherwise "monetize" them.
I think we're fairly lucky that Wikipedia got to its particular niche first; for Wikipedia's many faults, if some corporation had gotten to the idea of "crowdsourced encyclopedia" first, and owned the results, I think the web would be a much worse place. In social networking, a large company did get there first, and I think the web is a worse place for it.
That's true, but since there's not a huge range in ratings, that root-squaring doesn't have nearly as big an effect as the many orders of magnitude difference in popularity. I don't recall the exact numbers offhand, but I think the top-10 movies, out of 17,500, account for fully half the weight.
To some extent, but libertarianism is a lot more market-fundamentalist than the classical liberals were. The classical liberals came from the direction of wanting to create a particular kind of free society, and using market mechanisms as the means to the end, only to the extent that they actually promoted it. Libertarians take the market mechanisms as the end.
Even Adam Smith, for example, probably the most pro-market of the classical liberals, has a pretty thorough discussion in The Wealth of Nations of market failures: collusion between businessmen ("a conspiracy against the public"), monopolies, and so on. Thomas Jefferson thought that the government should strongly regulate corporations to prevent them from becoming their own transnational quasi-governmental entities. Etc.
Uhh, that's not true at all, if we're going to be complaining about words being corrupted here. Conservatism is historically the philosophy of a strong government that is specifically oriented towards protecting (i.e. conserving) the social status quo, public order, respect for tradition, a strong Nation, and public morals. The American founding fathers were mostly liberals in the liberal-conservative debates of their day, which is one reason there's a bit of confusion. Things like the banning of "obscene" literature, sodomy laws, blasphemy laws, anti-Communist laws, mandatory pledges of allegiance, and similar, are continuations of that conservative tradition though.
Trying to recommend unpopular movies is problematic. Is the computer program going to be able to discern under-rated (Glengarry Glen Ross) or just crap (Ishtar)
That is indeed an interesting question, and I think it's what the grandparent meant when he pointed out Netflix's contest didn't really address it. The performance measure Netflix used was root-mean squared error, so every prediction counts equally in determining your error. Since the vast majority of predictions in the data set are for frequently-watched films, effectively the prize was focused primarily on optimizing the common case: correctly predict whether someone will like or not like one of the very popular films. Of course, getting the unpopular films right too helps, but all else being equal, it's better to make even tiny improvements to your predictions of films that appear tons of times in the data set, than to make considerable improvements to less popular films' predictions, because the importance of getting a prediction right is in effect weighted by the film's popularity.
You could look at error from a movie-centric perspective, though, asking something like, "how good are your recommender algorithm's predictions for the average film?" That causes you to focus on different things, if an error of 1 star on Obscure Film predictions and an error of 1 star on Titanic predictions count the same.
If that's his argument, then it would seem that the real conclusion is that Facebook can't build systems as good as Google's, even though they are using the same processor technology.
Google does have approximately 30x as many employees as Facebook, so it's not implausible that they've got a much greater ability to build in-house custom tech.
The part most vociferously objected to isn't the US's role in 1979, but in 1953. Many Iranians think that if the Shah hadn't been installed in the US-backed coup in 1953, Iran would've developed into a modern, secular state, rather than enduring 26 years of repressive rule that set the stage for a revolution.
That also depends on the market. If the widget market is a high-margin business with high barriers to entry (what companies like to call "competitive moats"), then an increase in tax rates will tend to just reduce profits. The profit margins would still be high even post-tax, so there's no reason for companies to exit the business, so supply isn't reduced.
Classical economics basically assumes that costs of goods and services approach their cost of production, plus a marginal profit at the minimum needed to ensure that people will bother staying in the market at all. Many markets don't operate like that ideal, though, and instead have quite high profit margins. In those cases, you can't really directly apply the classical analysis, because conditions are aren't at the equilibrium that it assumes. Instead, you have to analyze the specific factors of the market to figure out why profit margins are high, which will tell you something about whether tax increases are likely to raise prices, or instead reduce margins.
Since companies like AT&T have already indicated their willingness to do unlimited surveillance for the government, even when it violates laws, I don't see how the situation isn't already how you describe.
Is the Linux version of Firefox particularly horrid or something? When using more than 10 tabs or so, my memory usage is typically in the 600mb+ range. It's currently taking 1.1g resident for about 40 tabs. I'm on x86-64, but even if we assume there's a full doubling of RAM usage due to the architecture, that's still 550mb equivalent, which his test never hits even with 150 tabs.
The ACLU is primarily, as you point out, an organization focused on the 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments. This is not a secret to anyone. You may wish they were different, but they are what they are. Are you interested in the liberties guaranteed by those amendments? If so, I don't see a reason not to support the ACLU; it doesn't preclude you from additionally supporting other organizations focused on other civil liberties.
If you have any major organizations in mind that do zealously defend all civil liberties, feel free to mention them. I'm only aware of different sorts of piecemeal organizations. I pick and choose the ones that seem to best cover the range of civil liberties I care most about. In my case, the ACLU and EFF seem to most frequently defend the rights I'm most interested in (especially free speech).
The problem is that Obama is light-years better than any of the totally insane third-party candidates. Ralph Nader? Ron Paul? Chuck Baldwin? I'd rather pick a random guy out of a hat than any of those three incompetent morons.
Gold is also unbacked fiat money, for the most part. Its primary value derives from the perception that it's useful as a value story and currency, i.e. recursive. Its actual utility value, as jewelry, industrial metal, and similar, is substantially lower than its current price. In a major collapse of civilization, it'd be lower still, since jewelry wouldn't exactly be a priority.
Say I had a bunch of actually usable goods, in some post-apocalyptic scenario. Why would I let you have them in exchange for some relatively useless piece of metal? The only conceivable reason is an expectation that that metal would be accepted by others as currency also; i.e. exactly the same thing that backs U.S. dollars.
There are plenty of weapons that can be made out of household items, and western protestors have gotten very good at using them. I think the problem in Iran is that this is really a bunch of idealist students without a lot of planning and organization, not that Iran lacks a 2nd amendment that lets them carry handguns or whatever. Forget handguns; a bunch of molotov cocktails and improvised body armor would be sufficient.
Shooting actual guns is particularly problematic because it involves retaliation. Gray-area violence like molotov cocktails is more effective in many cases, because it can drive back the police without quite seeming to give enough provocation to allow them to shoot into crowds--- while if the crowd is shooting guns at them, all bets are off.
Not quite; San Jose State University is a state university, where students generally pay tuition/fees that amount to considerably less than the cost of their education. Those resources are primarily provided by taxpayer and grant money.
Considering that it was developed while at the institution, as part of a course taught by the institution, likely using the institution's resources, that seems like a particularly poor analogy. We're not talking about a student releasing some side project they did completely independently.
I agree that this isn't a work-for-hire situation; I was merely responding to the claim that academia is somehow disconnected from the real world, by pointing out that in this case it managed a pretty good simulation of what things would be like if it were the real world.
Actually, a person in a boss-like role issuing stupid and counterproductive directives solely for their own benefit is precisely how reality works, so perhaps the professor here should be commended for inculcating their students in the way the Real World works, rather than clinging to some sort of ivory-tower idealism. Certainly, in Reality, you would have to have several layers of bureaucracy sign off on the code release before you would be permitted to make it public.
It also missed the huge qualitative leap in responsiveness you get by paying someone anything. It's often not a lot---coders on many open-source projects will often offer to do things for "bounties", whose usual range (I've seen a lot of $500-$5000) is of the sort that would get lost in the noise of any major company's budget; we're talking getting a custom feature built to order for less than the cost of a week's business trip. And even when people aren't working for a lot, they see themselves as somewhat indebted to you and responsible for your interests, because they've voluntarily accepted this contract job. If you're not paying them, they have no such sense of obligation.
The summary says,
But you can already do this yourself, without the self-serving drama of asking while on the plane and then deplaning in some big show. Nearly all airlines show which equipment will be serving your flight prior to purchase. You can look up information on that model of airliner, and choose not to buy the ticket if its properties aren't in accord with your preferences. People do this for all sorts of reasons already, like "god i really hate 737s".
It's a social problem, yes, but one that historically people who think about voting in a free society have been concerned with. One way to subvert a nominally democratic system is to add social (or physical, or monetary) pressure to vote for or against someone; one way to make that harder is to make the voter unable to prove who they voted for, so they can just say "yeah I voted for you" and nobody can verify whether that's the case or not.
Yeah, that's true; and an addition complication for anything long-term is the lack of any significant amount of data. With the weather, you can try to build, say, hurricane models by feeding data about hundreds of hurricanes, and thousands of other "negative" examples of weather patterns from which hurricanes didn't form. Then prediction models can try to find regularities among those data sets.
With economies we just don't have that much data. If you want to predict a major recession and recovery, for example, we have good data on, something like 4 or 5 of them--- and they happen in totally different eras, among radically different social and governmental backdrops, and are of different kinds. It'd be roughly like trying to build hurricane-prediction models with a sample of one Gulf hurricane, one east-coast Atlantic hurricane, one Hawaiian hurricane, and two southeast Asian hurricanes--- all from different decades and of very different magnitudes. With a data set like that, your hurricane model would not be good; and our recession-prediction models aren't, either.
I think it's not so much that it can't in theory be modeled, as that in practice it's extremely hard---much harder than modeling the weather, which we can barely do accurately out to 5 days. There's somewhat of a gap in expectations when you go from high-level qualitative descriptions of phenomena, like hurricane experts discussing trends in intensity and formation basins, to an implemented, detailed computational model that purports to simulate what "really" happens. The 2nd one usually diverges extremely quickly from what actually does happen, because these sorts of nonlinear systems are very sensitive to slight errors in the model or its initial conditions.
That's fine, as long as people understand its use and limitations; but there's a tendency, especially among the only-sort-of-technical folks who are involved in a lot of areas of business and economic policy, to trust these computer models as more than they are, as if the fact that a "computer simulation" told you it makes it some sort of neutral third-party truth that represents the state-of-the-art in guessing what will happen.
Violation of contracts is more a matter of lack of political power than political power. A large corporation can ignore your contracts at will, unless there is a credible threat of punishment.
Google has two main differences, I think, for now:
1. They're still largely controlled by some fairly idealistic folks, who are now so filthy rich that they aren't that worried about making even more money, so much as using their multi-billion-dollar playground to incubate things they think of as cool. As long as their playground continues making significant profit margins, the third-party investors will probably let them do this.
2. In many of their market segments, their self-interest isn't as badly aligned with openness as it is for some large companies. With Google's resources, they can afford to make open protocols, avoid a walled-garden approach and allow people to move their data in/out, etc., because they're banking on the competitive advantage of, "go ahead, just try to duplicate this... here, we'll even give you the code and the APIs, now good luck coming up with and setting up / maintaining that much computing power for a lower price than it costs us". This is actually a positive marketing tool in some areas, because a few large companies have gotten burned with data locked into proprietary formats from now-defunct companies, so "we can get our data back out of this thing, right?" is something even companies that don't care about open source are asking these days.
I agree with you that it's quite possible these will change. If its profit margins start going down, investors will start demanding more "normal corporation" type of stuff to try to prop them up, and the founders and their lieutenants will no longer have complete freedom to do what they'd like. If people seem like they are starting to move off some of the services, Google will come under investor pressure to try to lock them in, or at least to no longer be so nice about helping customers avoid lock-in.