Who would have guessed that the first foldable screens would not be ready for prime-time, rushed out as they were in desperate hope of being the next killer feature to drive up plummeting smartphone sales?
When I was a child, when I wanted to fold something, I made paper airplane. I had some killer designs, too, some of which I now wish I had written down.
Having got that out of my system at an appropriate age, my own definition of "early" adopter is anyone who buys a foldable phone in the next ten years.
But actually, the vast majority of these people are late adopters—anyone past the age of twelve—compared to my paper airplane heyday when I was nine years old.
> "log in and see content relevant to your interest"
That sure as hell sounds like creating echo chambers to me — which is exactly the opposite of what is needed for meaningful discourse.
It's hard to jump in with an insightful comment if your moral compass has forgotten what the words originally meant; in that condition, at best you're chasing your own tail.
Interest:
1) something that arouses attention
2) advantage, benefit
3) business, company
Behind door number two, our "interests" are succeeding in life: becoming competent in our professions and avocations; achieving financial security; having family you enjoy spending time with—who all enjoy the best possible health.
The shell game performed by the advertising industry is to substitute "interests" with "irritations".
* You're irritated when your dish soap fails to cut through grease. * You're irritated when you laundry soap leaves ring around the collar. * You're irritated when your TV has 500 channels, and the only channel with something good on is the premium channel for which you have yet to subscribe.
———
What the mindfulness literature teaches is that our emotions are structured so that petty irritations flare up. Ideally, you stop and shake the tiny pebble out of your running shoe. Problem solved. However, if you sit for five minutes and actively stare at the cigarette, your desire to smoke the cigarette will actually subside, because this entire class of impulse is transient.
The purpose of advertising is to belay the transience. But the effect of each individual advertisement is also transient, and so the battering "belay" baton can only work if the advertising is unbelievably persistent, to the point of ubiquity in the human physical environment. This project is now complete to such an extent, that many people no longer even track the different between their irritations (and the surrounding micro-decisions) and their long-term interests (larger goals in life).
There's this meme that the Internet knows everything about you. And this is true, if you define your self as your exposed bundle of irritants, through which you can best be manipulated during micro-decisions. (Purchasing a $50,000 pick-up truck qualifies as a large micro-decision; whereas purchasing further education from the most appropriate graduate school would be a small macro-decision.)
———
I have my personal computer rigged so that I receive almost no advertisement. (Low financial profile, obscure software environment, combined with many plug-ins, and hundreds upon hundreds of ad hoc User CSS fragments.)
YouTube this morning tried to force me to watch a Grammarly ad. (I turned down the physical volume control and attended another screen for 60 seconds; if the ad blinks too much, I attend to another screen moved to a different desktop.)
The Grammarly ad featured an example of how the program can assist the writer in turning large woolly sentences into short, punchier sentences. Problem: I don't write large woolly sentences in the first place. I write large sophisticated sentences, because large sophisticated sentences are better at conveying attitude to readers who put in the mental effort to read between the lines.
———
I would have more readers (I'm pretty sure), if my writing was less cognitively demanding. But I'd communicate less over all.
Laszlo Bock's book Work Rules: Insights from Inside Google (2015) says that productivity is governed by a Pareto distribution: the amount you communicate goes up exponentially with the intelligence and sophistication of the readers you reach. Nothing communicates more effectively that feeding a smart reader a smart idea. Here's the problem (part II): smart readers have already read all the short, pu
It now occurs to me to add that anyone in possession of 1001 unscrupulous tools has his own nearly insuperable side-channel management issues, should he not want to advertise his arsenal of assholery far and wide.
Little Red Riding Hood: Oh Granny, what a dark hoodie you've got!
Little Red Riding Hood: Oh Granny, what a lot of 2FA dongles are sticking out through the hole in your hoodie pouch!
Devilishly difficult to implement in practice, because what you are proposing is the elimination of all side channel information leakage from the browser to the web host.
I don't think anyone reasonable is not proposing to eliminate all side-channels. 90% of the time, making this observation amounts to scope creep. What sensible people actually propose is to eliminate the fat side channels that are so plump and juicy that anyone who comes along could exploit them with incidental nonchalance.
What you are aiming to do is minimize the fat channels, and leave only the thin channels, so that anyone who is entirely serious about exploiting this kind of information keeps a well-thumbed copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of Side Channel on his bedside table.
It's almost impossible to pull of the innocent "who, me?" routine when thick editions of Side Channel Monthly are cascading onto your unkempt desk out of your unkempt in-basket, while you pour over unboxing your spanky new ACME Side Channel 9000 with 1938 festive das Blinkenlights.
Once the multitudinous side channels become sufficiently thin, the jackbooted thug of maximum entropy analysis is forced to weave all the delicate threads back together again in full flagrante regalia. The threads can not be eliminated. But the weaver can be forced to possess 300 different lock picks, each and every one sourced from the Ruhr valley.
I'm so sorry I hit you. I won't do it again, I'll change. It won't be like all the other times. I don't really mean to hurt you. I'm only doing this because I care about you. And you have to admit you brought this on yourself to some extent. Without me you'd be nothing, no money, no way to survive.
You've deliberately missed the entire point, and I'm not even going to credit you for the irony in doing so.
The point of the article was to contemplate how the whole sometimes differs from the sum of its parts, and how this can be more difficult to spot than other forms of pathology, some of which are so blatant that any idiot could cut and paste the standard template at the drop of a pin (with no value add, other than to accelerate the inevitable decline in debate, which is apparently a great sport, whose audience has an insatiable appetite for the same old, impossibly fluid cut-and-paste wrist motion).
You can see the internals of this in Work Rules: Insights from Inside Google 2015 by Laszlo Bock.
Google uses a fairly standard management practice from the school of management by objectives. Their specific version goes by the name of Objectives and Key Results (OKR), by way of John Doerr, an American venture capitalist toiling away in obscurity at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Doerr's 15 minutes of fame occurred when he declared the forthcoming Segway as possibly more important than the Internet. (But then Jeff Bezos also piled on to say that entire cities would be built around this new technology, and his weird gush didn't turn into a CLM, so why should we harsh on Doerr?)
The conjoined piece of the puzzle is the Key Performance Indicator (KPI). As I recall it, this is the performance metric component of the OKR. How do you really know you've nailed your OKR? How do you know that Jesus loves you? Because the KPI tells you so. (Jesus is variously Gates, or Jobs, or Zuckerberg, or Bezos, or the Brin–Page twins.)
Jesus loves me this I know For the Bible tells me so Little ones to Him belong They are weak but He is strong
Jesus loves me this I know For the Bible tells me so Little ones to Him belong They are weak but He is strong
Yes, Jesus loves me Yes, Jesus loves me Yes Jesus loves me, for the Bible tells me so
This little ditty was much part of my childhood (and that's not even the half of it, there are more verses; plus, I swear at the stately pace of our steadfast church organist, it outplays Bohemian Rhapsody by an entire B side). Gives a young person plenty of time to contemplate the true nature of intellectual rigour, should the young person be so inclined, as I certainly was.
In any event, under the creed of management by objectives, the KPI is your corporate bible, because everyone needs to know if Jesus still loves you.
The key to the KPI is that it feigns quantitative assessment: e.g. increase Chrome browsers installs by 2% of the previous quarter.
Well, this is indeed quantitative, but it's microscopically quantitative, and it really doesn't give a damn what bodies you crawled over. Hence, it's a powerful corporate tool.
The Googles are required to carry their own cross, by which I mean that they invent their own OKRs and KPIs, to which they become immediately nailed. These crosses are all erected on a high hilltop for all to see: they are part of the (internally) public corporate directory, from top to bottom. Everyone sings in unison: always look on the bright side of growth.
So if you're a Googler who has nailed himself or herself to the cross of 2% installation growth, quarter over quarter, and a month into the quarter you're only tracking for a 1.5% installation growth, it's time to pull out your giant OOPS! stick. "Hey, I know, throw a scare banner up on searches for 'Firefox'".
This isn't the moral temperament of the typical Google employee (it would be clos
So why should I care if I have voting rights, when I don't exercise them?
Why should America have nuclear bombs if it doesn't launch them?
And on the other side, many things in this world that can't presently be fixed could be fixed if fewer people took your attitude. It still wouldn't be a panacea, but it would be better.
Nothing good comes from punters sleeping on their powers, however small. Good decisions generally derive from high engagement of all stakeholders, and not so much from round-file target practice. If everyone made it their business to take their small responsibilities seriously, it would tilt how the initial share offerings were structured in the first place.
The other vantage point, I suppose, is that tyranny knows best: that tightly held control is a feature not a bug. This is a serious empirical question. It could actually be a locally superior strategy to invest in corporations where the control rests primary in a despotic overlord likes Gates, Ellison, or Zuckerberg who really couldn't give a shit how their behaviour impacts society, so long as the enterprise grows. It's also true in game theory that locally superior often equates to globally nasty. This is the central lesson of prisoner's dilemma: I make a higher rate of return by buying shares in a tyrannical corporation, but if we all do the same, then everybody wallows in collective cynicism about how every corporation and public institution seems to be primarily in the business of making shit flow downhill.
What ethnographers have discovered is that in some racially homogeneous western democracies (primarily Scandinavia), that the pendulum sometimes tips the other direction: they look around and say "hey, we're all pretty much the same here; why should we all conspire to make shit flow downhill for a 0.1% higher rate of financial return in the short run?"
Back in America, this isn't the dominant thought process. Everyone is struggling for a buck, and no-one sneezes at an extra 0.1% in the short run. But then the collective mass of shit flowing downhill causes the collective outcome to not be so great after all, and people are angry, because they thought they had successfully sold their souls for that extra 0.1%, and everything was going to be great again, and now even the devil has reneged on the deal.
The human capacity for explanation tends to run in reverse. Most of our psychological justifications are retconned.
What can the mind summon up to buttress the ego after losing the game of prisoner's dilemma on a grand scale? Social parasites. It would have all worked out exactly as planned, but for the parasites sucking the social tit dry. Where do social parasites incubate? They're the losers kicked to the curb in a world run by the Gateses, and Ellisons and Zuckerbergs. Now, the losers will get kicked to the curb in pretty much any system, but there's a huge difference in the harshness of the curb they land on.
The general idea on the right is that the harsher the curb, the more people will fear landing on the curb, and the less it will happen.
Empirical evidence does not bear this out. Actual human behaviour when nearing a curb of no recovery is to double down on high risk behaviour. People don't become more responsible; what they do instead is pull their goaltender, and hope to save their sorry ass by some minor miracle with an extra attacker on the ice in the final minute. Of course, this only works out in a minority of situations. Some of these people do go on to regain their status in the productive middle class. But more go on to be twice as hopeless, and twice as desperate, with half as many viable options remaining to pick themselves back up again.
So you can't afford physiotherapy for that pain in your wrist after you were downsized? But you do finally land another job in the industry six months later, of hustling hard in the gig economy, only now that pain in your wrist is chronic instead of transient. What doesn'
Fragmentation is the virtue that allows new developers to show up and scratch their own itch. Once upon a time, that was vaunted as the defining virtue of unpaid collaboration. When you start tilting the landscape towards "one size fits all" the surface area of viable itch-scratching decreases immensely.
These values live in fundamental tension.
Consolidation brings you economy of scale, diversity brings you new ideas, and satisfies the edge cases without loading every possible complication onto the consolidated effort. All the good times in open source happened when the community was large enough to support consolidation and diversity at the same time.
At my biblical age, I can still see within seconds whether a UHD BluRay conveys a true 4k image or is just a cheap 2k upscale.
I can still tell the difference, but I simply don't care. An idiot behind a ludicrously expensive camera is still just an idiot behind a camera. I can almost always tell if there's an idiot behind the camera within five minutes, regardless of video format.
More generally, camera = script + casting director + DP + director + editor, these being the core of the essential creative team (costumes, sets, and special effects are plus items, but not essential).
The talent component is complex. You don't always need Tom Hanks. I've seen many productions featuring five people you've never heard of who hit it out of the park (for a small value of "park", minus the preposterous spectacle we're usually sold instead of a competent story).
Oh, and where did these venereal infections come from? First-world horn dogs from Alpha++ world metropolises from the same imperialist nation that compromised these people for centuries, whose "shithole" countries are even now being promoted as sexual-tourism hot spots.
If we stopping immigrants from arriving, we would reduce the number of infections transmitted from immigrants to America to pre-existing American citizens.
If we stopping sexual tourists from leaving, we would reduce the number of infections transmitted from Americans to people living in other nations.
But we're not actually going to build either wall, because global civilization is not a bubble enterprise.
People move around. That's a fact of life. How did H. luzonensis get to the Philippines? Somehow I don't think they flew in on a Dreamliner.
Considering how often during my MERE 10 minute commute from home to work and back again, and I see people screwing with their phones at nearly every light.
Few pedestrian fatalities happen with the car at a complete stop.
I've been known to text "ten mins" to someone I'm about to meet while stopped at a red light (where I arrived early) with my foot firmly planted on the brake pedal.
I would resent anyone making the presumption that I'm "screwing around" because I glanced down for 5 s. It takes more total attention to break open the spout part of the white plastic lid on most take-out coffee cups (which I've also done while stopped at a red light with my foot firmly planted on the brake pedal).
Screwing around with your phone after the light has changed can cause others around you to behave differently and this can lead to accidents that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Do just about anything with your phone while in a moving vehicle is asking for trouble, but then again, once you get into your later years, merely adjusting your focal distance long enough to read any instrument on the dashboard is also asking for trouble (focal length adjustment gets way slower as you age).
It's entirely possible for exponential growth to slow while your linear growth accelerates.
From the perspective of the whale, you might want to use the former; from the perspective of what the whale is swallowing, you might want to use the latter.
I consider psychometrics as largely valid, in its modern form, unlike many critics clinging to the Flynn affect or other small anomaly.
But I would say we remain far too fixed on isolated intelligence (all the better for picking winners, which we so love to do).
How much of our intelligence is embedded in our relationship to our physical and social environments is vastly underestimated by most people. This needs to change, and finally a research avenue capable of moving the rock.
Pretty good, by the standards of 2018 TED. Many new questions, ultimately no new theories of any real depth, and mostly a lot of excited "more research needed".
Toxic content is newspeak for facts or opinions that we do not like.
That's one definition. Here's another one: Toxic content is content that elevates cynicism to a grand principle of life.
I've never been particularly concerned about toxic content on YouTube, so long as they move it to the back of the magazine rack, where the more extreme content has always been slightly sequestered from innocent eyes. (In real life, back in the seventies when this was still a thing, the biggest dissuasion from checking out the back of the shop was the caliber of men—it was always men—that you generally saw drifting in that direction.)
If the core value system is cynicism and outrage, market your own crap, and don't expect YouTube's algorithms to do it for you.
Only it turns out that cynicism and outrage is also damn lazy.
Most of the people consuming this content are just looking for an easy way to wind themselves up into a satisfying outrage or a smug indignation. They generally won't lift a finger to dig further into the back story, and they won't a finger to find this content, either, if it doesn't come barrelling down their automatic feed.
Some people will continue to seek out this same content on a deliberate basis. And those people will be hardly affected by this new algorithm, whatsoever.
(Demonitization is a somewhat different issue, but I'd argue that most mainstream advertisers have never intended to associate themselves with this kind of content, and the brief period where you could monetize this was a historical aberration.)
If I were a judge and someone tried to convince me that a criminal was already incarcerated because he chose to hide, I'd have the guy committed due to extreme stupidity.
Because you're a vengeance whore, and you think deterrence has nothing to do with this, and the bottomless public purse should fund arbitrary justice sadism with no social cost-benefit analysis whatsoever. No sane person in this world envies Assange's living arrangements for the past seven years, much of which was spent with the social status of an unwelcome house guest.
Is an addition year of incarceration likely to change Assange's morality in any significant way? Highly unlikely.
Is an additional year of incarceration likely to deter others from following the same glorious path in life? Extremely marginal.
If they put him away on something substantial, that's a whole different ballgame, because justice must be served. But if they don't, another pittance of different captivity, at this point, is just a leech on the public purse.
It took me a few minutes to get to the nub of the matter.
If you're mentally reading the notation d^2 y / dx^2 as the second derivative of y divided by dx squared, you're doing it wrong.
Because what this notion really intends to mean is d(d(y)/dx)/dx, which as the paper points out is a different order of operation.
A more compact notation less misleading than the traditional d^2 y / dx^2 might be (d/dx)^2 dy, which expands via two repeated function applications to d(d(y)/dx)/dx, with the underlying operations now in the right order.
Calculus was never my best thing, so I might be all wet, but it seems to make sense.
I never liked the dx/dy notation much, regarding it more as a cryptic code than anything conceptually helpful (when its not cryptic, it's not helpful, because that's the common case you already know).
With the right lambda notation (riffing on what I proposed above) the fundamental operator nature of d() could be correctly expressed, even if you don't want into these algebraic manipulations, which mostly strike me as far too detailed and tedious.
What I celebrate most in YouTube is the death of the channel. I've never "subscribed" to one damn thing.
Obviously, if you find someone who produces smart content, it's nice to be able to browse that person's back catalogue. But you can do that with Andy Warhol, too, and he never had a "channel", he just had whatever he had made up to that point.
Channels are the natural domain of lazy, content-consuming slobs. Honestly, should what you watch next be a function of your recent viewing history? Only if questions pertaining to fresh material remains insufficiently answered.
But many people seem to prefer the girl-next-door algorithm. If the girl-next-door to the girl-next-door is even prettier, you continue to incrementally change your address: hill-climbing algorithm, one back-yard fence at a time.
Or you could head to a street cafe in the center of Paris, and skip all these silly "channel" increments.
We still haven't imaged a black hole. All we've managed to do is image a black hole's accretion disk.
In addition, LIGO has captured a few brief snapshots of black holes getting jiggy. But I'd wait another year on that one, until we're extra sure that the sophisticated LIGO software isn't taking phantom snapshots of it's own software-filter afterimage.
Perhaps you should begin by schooling the Hillbillies in the community hot tub whom you persistently engage what it means for modern science to "image" something. Just for starters, atomic force microscopes are blind as a bat (though really damn good at Braille).
The underlying premise of bitcoin is that a diverse and decentralized population of users maintain the blockchain.
FTFY.
The theory of Bitcoin is much narrower: * if you achieve diverse and decentralized in the real world, you're in a good place * mechanisms exist within Bitcoin to encourage (but not guarantee) this outcome
In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky discusses suitcase words—words that contain a variety of meanings packed into them, such as conscience, emotions, consciousness, experience, thinking, morality, right, and wrong.
"Diversity" is just such a word: there's a potentially unlimited number of columns in the spreadsheet where diversity could collapse. (If there's a thing, there's diversity of the thing—or not.)
Diversity and performance culture rarely go hand in hand. Have you looked at F1 lately? Apart from the decals and colouration, only an aficionado can even tell the cars apart.
Seattle Slew sired 1,103 named foals, of which 537 (49%) were winners and 111 (10%) were stakes winners.
Diversity culture, as practiced in 1001 Arabian Nights.
If you didn't see the ASIC overlords looming on the horizon right out of the starting gate: wake up Little Susie, your recognizance is shot.
Those who had scored worst to start with showed the largest improvements.
Definitional frame of regression to the mean.
If it had been the other way around—older adults with the best scores improved the most relative to their younger controls—then we would know for sure this was a real thing, because that result would have run entirely counter to the pear-shaped grain of mediocrity restoration.
You missed improvements in event localization to enable traditional astronomy to zoom in on neutron star mergers with an electromagnetic signature. This includes a wide-aperture radio facility (IIRC) and an improved algorithm to search the probable area. Plus, if they have all three facilities in good working order, they get a smaller statistical banana in space to start with (perhaps to improve again once the Japanese facility begins to participate, which I think is slated for later in the year).
You would have to remove things from it, not just keep adding every paradigm from every other language.
You're addressing inherent simplicity: simplicity that inheres in the object itself. Inherent simplicity is overrated.
Not so simple: maintaining your own fork of a major development language, because a recent major release— in pursuit of round-fingered, bent-legged enlightenment—gored your ox on a multi-million-line code base.
Our quest for simplicity is quite primal. It's often just a power move to demonstrate that you occupy the summit of the power hierarchy. Because your vaunted simplicity usually amounts to making something ugly (but very, very real) into somebody else's ugly (and very, very soul-destroying) daily slogathon.
The C++ culture is what you get when there's an iron-clad social contract that Peter does not rob Paul.
The direct consequence of this is that nobody can stand on the summit and gloat about their immensely refined slickitude (to hell with the peons working the actual trenches).
As has been remarked once or twice in the history of Slashdot, C++ lacks any semblance of pointy summit of slickitude; no—father forgive me, for I have sinned—C++ lacks any possibility of a semblance of so much as a stubby, manicured outcropping of soapbox sainthood.
The only other language I know with a similar value system is Perl 6.
It doesn't help that the purveyors of Perl 6 provide few hints as to what you should actually do with the language, besides the facile answer of whatever you want. Perl 6 is multi-paradigm, maybe omni-paradigm; it claims to support object-oriented programming, functional programming, aspect-oriented programming, array programming, and (good old) procedural programming.
It's a new language, and not just a cleaned-up version of Perl 5, any more than English is German minus the umlauts.
Knowledge of previous versions, alas, won't get you very far. By the same token, prejudices regarding the preceding incarnations don't necessarily hold today's water.
The difference between C++98 and C++11 is roughly the same thirteen years that the Perl 6 development effort went almost entirely offline. Perl 6 probably shaved off no end of warts to achieve its grand synthesis of becoming all things to all people (forsaking mainly performance, though this is prudently localized—in many cases—to quality of implementation). Meanwhile, C++ dragged its crufty ass through tens of millions of battle-hardened hours in the deep trenches. Will Perl 6 ever achieve the quality of implementation required to obtain a community of critical mass, to justify the immense implementation burden? This remains hard to judge.
Yes, you can shoot yourself in the foot, if your team is some random unit of random grunts.
But if your team is elite, and cares about being elite, you just don't shoot yourself in the foot on a daily basis, and you don't shoot your teammates in the foot hardly ever, and you go into the worst battles with the best people, and mostly you come back out alive. With C++, there's no such thing as bad weather, there's only bad clothing. The clothing is your job. Other languages do have bad weather—tasks for which the language is fundamentally unsuited—and then there's no clothing at all that will save you, and then you're fucked.
If the guy you're sitting beside has recently graduated from a puppy mill, and has no respect for the game, you probably want to steer clear of C++ with a vengeance of extreme scorn.
If the guy you're sitting beside has recently graduated from an ivory tower—with a raging case of L
Advertisers started demanding that their ads only show up on videos that the advertiser agreed with the content in the video.
The advertiser is the customer in this story. That mainstream advertisers were ever monetizing PewDiePie in any way is the only real anomaly in this YouTube story.
Google is not even an advertising company. They're an advertising display company. They own the billboards, not what goes on the billboards. Apart from their own needs, Google has no advertising creative team whatsoever.
Brand management has been a big deal for most of recorded history.
In Pompeii, circa 35 CE, a manufacturer of fish sauce branded his amphora which travelled across the entire Mediterranean.
And it only snowballed from there.
You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.
— Dr Strangelove
The only amazing thing here is the PewDiePie escaped the wrath of the Coca-Cola company for as long as he did.
Slashdot Mirror
You're on the same page as feminist theorists who say that rape isn't about sex, it's about violence and domination.
On the other hand, maybe rape is about sex, for some of the rapists, some of the time.
When I was a child, when I wanted to fold something, I made paper airplane. I had some killer designs, too, some of which I now wish I had written down.
Having got that out of my system at an appropriate age, my own definition of "early" adopter is anyone who buys a foldable phone in the next ten years.
But actually, the vast majority of these people are late adopters—anyone past the age of twelve—compared to my paper airplane heyday when I was nine years old.
It's hard to jump in with an insightful comment if your moral compass has forgotten what the words originally meant; in that condition, at best you're chasing your own tail.
Interest:
1) something that arouses attention
2) advantage, benefit
3) business, company
Behind door number two, our "interests" are succeeding in life: becoming competent in our professions and avocations; achieving financial security; having family you enjoy spending time with—who all enjoy the best possible health.
The shell game performed by the advertising industry is to substitute "interests" with "irritations".
* You're irritated when your dish soap fails to cut through grease.
* You're irritated when you laundry soap leaves ring around the collar.
* You're irritated when your TV has 500 channels, and the only channel with something good on is the premium channel for which you have yet to subscribe.
———
What the mindfulness literature teaches is that our emotions are structured so that petty irritations flare up. Ideally, you stop and shake the tiny pebble out of your running shoe. Problem solved. However, if you sit for five minutes and actively stare at the cigarette, your desire to smoke the cigarette will actually subside, because this entire class of impulse is transient.
The purpose of advertising is to belay the transience. But the effect of each individual advertisement is also transient, and so the battering "belay" baton can only work if the advertising is unbelievably persistent, to the point of ubiquity in the human physical environment. This project is now complete to such an extent, that many people no longer even track the different between their irritations (and the surrounding micro-decisions) and their long-term interests (larger goals in life).
There's this meme that the Internet knows everything about you. And this is true, if you define your self as your exposed bundle of irritants, through which you can best be manipulated during micro-decisions. (Purchasing a $50,000 pick-up truck qualifies as a large micro-decision; whereas purchasing further education from the most appropriate graduate school would be a small macro-decision.)
———
I have my personal computer rigged so that I receive almost no advertisement. (Low financial profile, obscure software environment, combined with many plug-ins, and hundreds upon hundreds of ad hoc User CSS fragments.)
YouTube this morning tried to force me to watch a Grammarly ad. (I turned down the physical volume control and attended another screen for 60 seconds; if the ad blinks too much, I attend to another screen moved to a different desktop.)
The Grammarly ad featured an example of how the program can assist the writer in turning large woolly sentences into short, punchier sentences. Problem: I don't write large woolly sentences in the first place. I write large sophisticated sentences, because large sophisticated sentences are better at conveying attitude to readers who put in the mental effort to read between the lines.
———
I would have more readers (I'm pretty sure), if my writing was less cognitively demanding. But I'd communicate less over all.
Laszlo Bock's book Work Rules: Insights from Inside Google (2015) says that productivity is governed by a Pareto distribution: the amount you communicate goes up exponentially with the intelligence and sophistication of the readers you reach. Nothing communicates more effectively that feeding a smart reader a smart idea. Here's the problem (part II): smart readers have already read all the short, pu
It now occurs to me to add that anyone in possession of 1001 unscrupulous tools has his own nearly insuperable side-channel management issues, should he not want to advertise his arsenal of assholery far and wide.
Little Red Riding Hood: Oh Granny, what a dark hoodie you've got!
Little Red Riding Hood: Oh Granny, what a lot of 2FA dongles are sticking out through the hole in your hoodie pouch!
"not" in the opening sentence was somehow left over from my immoderate first attempt. No good deed goes unpunished. My bad.
I don't think anyone reasonable is not proposing to eliminate all side-channels. 90% of the time, making this observation amounts to scope creep. What sensible people actually propose is to eliminate the fat side channels that are so plump and juicy that anyone who comes along could exploit them with incidental nonchalance.
What you are aiming to do is minimize the fat channels, and leave only the thin channels, so that anyone who is entirely serious about exploiting this kind of information keeps a well-thumbed copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of Side Channel on his bedside table.
It's almost impossible to pull of the innocent "who, me?" routine when thick editions of Side Channel Monthly are cascading onto your unkempt desk out of your unkempt in-basket, while you pour over unboxing your spanky new ACME Side Channel 9000 with 1938 festive das Blinkenlights.
Once the multitudinous side channels become sufficiently thin, the jackbooted thug of maximum entropy analysis is forced to weave all the delicate threads back together again in full flagrante regalia. The threads can not be eliminated. But the weaver can be forced to possess 300 different lock picks, each and every one sourced from the Ruhr valley.
You've deliberately missed the entire point, and I'm not even going to credit you for the irony in doing so.
The point of the article was to contemplate how the whole sometimes differs from the sum of its parts, and how this can be more difficult to spot than other forms of pathology, some of which are so blatant that any idiot could cut and paste the standard template at the drop of a pin (with no value add, other than to accelerate the inevitable decline in debate, which is apparently a great sport, whose audience has an insatiable appetite for the same old, impossibly fluid cut-and-paste wrist motion).
You can see the internals of this in Work Rules: Insights from Inside Google 2015 by Laszlo Bock.
Google uses a fairly standard management practice from the school of management by objectives. Their specific version goes by the name of Objectives and Key Results (OKR), by way of John Doerr, an American venture capitalist toiling away in obscurity at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Doerr's 15 minutes of fame occurred when he declared the forthcoming Segway as possibly more important than the Internet. (But then Jeff Bezos also piled on to say that entire cities would be built around this new technology, and his weird gush didn't turn into a CLM, so why should we harsh on Doerr?)
The conjoined piece of the puzzle is the Key Performance Indicator (KPI). As I recall it, this is the performance metric component of the OKR. How do you really know you've nailed your OKR? How do you know that Jesus loves you? Because the KPI tells you so. (Jesus is variously Gates, or Jobs, or Zuckerberg, or Bezos, or the Brin–Page twins.)
This little ditty was much part of my childhood (and that's not even the half of it, there are more verses; plus, I swear at the stately pace of our steadfast church organist, it outplays Bohemian Rhapsody by an entire B side). Gives a young person plenty of time to contemplate the true nature of intellectual rigour, should the young person be so inclined, as I certainly was.
In any event, under the creed of management by objectives, the KPI is your corporate bible, because everyone needs to know if Jesus still loves you.
The key to the KPI is that it feigns quantitative assessment: e.g. increase Chrome browsers installs by 2% of the previous quarter.
Well, this is indeed quantitative, but it's microscopically quantitative, and it really doesn't give a damn what bodies you crawled over. Hence, it's a powerful corporate tool.
The Googles are required to carry their own cross, by which I mean that they invent their own OKRs and KPIs, to which they become immediately nailed. These crosses are all erected on a high hilltop for all to see: they are part of the (internally) public corporate directory, from top to bottom. Everyone sings in unison: always look on the bright side of growth.
So if you're a Googler who has nailed himself or herself to the cross of 2% installation growth, quarter over quarter, and a month into the quarter you're only tracking for a 1.5% installation growth, it's time to pull out your giant OOPS! stick. "Hey, I know, throw a scare banner up on searches for 'Firefox'".
This isn't the moral temperament of the typical Google employee (it would be clos
Why should America have nuclear bombs if it doesn't launch them?
And on the other side, many things in this world that can't presently be fixed could be fixed if fewer people took your attitude. It still wouldn't be a panacea, but it would be better.
Nothing good comes from punters sleeping on their powers, however small. Good decisions generally derive from high engagement of all stakeholders, and not so much from round-file target practice. If everyone made it their business to take their small responsibilities seriously, it would tilt how the initial share offerings were structured in the first place.
The other vantage point, I suppose, is that tyranny knows best: that tightly held control is a feature not a bug. This is a serious empirical question. It could actually be a locally superior strategy to invest in corporations where the control rests primary in a despotic overlord likes Gates, Ellison, or Zuckerberg who really couldn't give a shit how their behaviour impacts society, so long as the enterprise grows. It's also true in game theory that locally superior often equates to globally nasty. This is the central lesson of prisoner's dilemma: I make a higher rate of return by buying shares in a tyrannical corporation, but if we all do the same, then everybody wallows in collective cynicism about how every corporation and public institution seems to be primarily in the business of making shit flow downhill.
What ethnographers have discovered is that in some racially homogeneous western democracies (primarily Scandinavia), that the pendulum sometimes tips the other direction: they look around and say "hey, we're all pretty much the same here; why should we all conspire to make shit flow downhill for a 0.1% higher rate of financial return in the short run?"
Back in America, this isn't the dominant thought process. Everyone is struggling for a buck, and no-one sneezes at an extra 0.1% in the short run. But then the collective mass of shit flowing downhill causes the collective outcome to not be so great after all, and people are angry, because they thought they had successfully sold their souls for that extra 0.1%, and everything was going to be great again, and now even the devil has reneged on the deal.
The human capacity for explanation tends to run in reverse. Most of our psychological justifications are retconned.
What can the mind summon up to buttress the ego after losing the game of prisoner's dilemma on a grand scale? Social parasites. It would have all worked out exactly as planned, but for the parasites sucking the social tit dry. Where do social parasites incubate? They're the losers kicked to the curb in a world run by the Gateses, and Ellisons and Zuckerbergs. Now, the losers will get kicked to the curb in pretty much any system, but there's a huge difference in the harshness of the curb they land on.
The general idea on the right is that the harsher the curb, the more people will fear landing on the curb, and the less it will happen.
Empirical evidence does not bear this out. Actual human behaviour when nearing a curb of no recovery is to double down on high risk behaviour. People don't become more responsible; what they do instead is pull their goaltender, and hope to save their sorry ass by some minor miracle with an extra attacker on the ice in the final minute. Of course, this only works out in a minority of situations. Some of these people do go on to regain their status in the productive middle class. But more go on to be twice as hopeless, and twice as desperate, with half as many viable options remaining to pick themselves back up again.
So you can't afford physiotherapy for that pain in your wrist after you were downsized? But you do finally land another job in the industry six months later, of hustling hard in the gig economy, only now that pain in your wrist is chronic instead of transient. What doesn'
Fragmentation is the virtue that allows new developers to show up and scratch their own itch. Once upon a time, that was vaunted as the defining virtue of unpaid collaboration. When you start tilting the landscape towards "one size fits all" the surface area of viable itch-scratching decreases immensely.
These values live in fundamental tension.
Consolidation brings you economy of scale, diversity brings you new ideas, and satisfies the edge cases without loading every possible complication onto the consolidated effort. All the good times in open source happened when the community was large enough to support consolidation and diversity at the same time.
There are no easy solutions here.
I can still tell the difference, but I simply don't care. An idiot behind a ludicrously expensive camera is still just an idiot behind a camera. I can almost always tell if there's an idiot behind the camera within five minutes, regardless of video format.
More generally, camera = script + casting director + DP + director + editor, these being the core of the essential creative team (costumes, sets, and special effects are plus items, but not essential).
The talent component is complex. You don't always need Tom Hanks. I've seen many productions featuring five people you've never heard of who hit it out of the park (for a small value of "park", minus the preposterous spectacle we're usually sold instead of a competent story).
If we stopping immigrants from arriving, we would reduce the number of infections transmitted from immigrants to America to pre-existing American citizens.
If we stopping sexual tourists from leaving, we would reduce the number of infections transmitted from Americans to people living in other nations.
But we're not actually going to build either wall, because global civilization is not a bubble enterprise.
People move around. That's a fact of life. How did H. luzonensis get to the Philippines? Somehow I don't think they flew in on a Dreamliner.
Few pedestrian fatalities happen with the car at a complete stop.
I've been known to text "ten mins" to someone I'm about to meet while stopped at a red light (where I arrived early) with my foot firmly planted on the brake pedal.
I would resent anyone making the presumption that I'm "screwing around" because I glanced down for 5 s. It takes more total attention to break open the spout part of the white plastic lid on most take-out coffee cups (which I've also done while stopped at a red light with my foot firmly planted on the brake pedal).
Screwing around with your phone after the light has changed can cause others around you to behave differently and this can lead to accidents that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Do just about anything with your phone while in a moving vehicle is asking for trouble, but then again, once you get into your later years, merely adjusting your focal distance long enough to read any instrument on the dashboard is also asking for trouble (focal length adjustment gets way slower as you age).
It's entirely possible for exponential growth to slow while your linear growth accelerates.
From the perspective of the whale, you might want to use the former; from the perspective of what the whale is swallowing, you might want to use the latter.
I consider psychometrics as largely valid, in its modern form, unlike many critics clinging to the Flynn affect or other small anomaly.
But I would say we remain far too fixed on isolated intelligence (all the better for picking winners, which we so love to do).
How much of our intelligence is embedded in our relationship to our physical and social environments is vastly underestimated by most people. This needs to change, and finally a research avenue capable of moving the rock.
TED: Juliet Brophy on Homo naledi — March 2018
Pretty good, by the standards of 2018 TED. Many new questions, ultimately no new theories of any real depth, and mostly a lot of excited "more research needed".
That's one definition. Here's another one: Toxic content is content that elevates cynicism to a grand principle of life.
I've never been particularly concerned about toxic content on YouTube, so long as they move it to the back of the magazine rack, where the more extreme content has always been slightly sequestered from innocent eyes. (In real life, back in the seventies when this was still a thing, the biggest dissuasion from checking out the back of the shop was the caliber of men—it was always men—that you generally saw drifting in that direction.)
If the core value system is cynicism and outrage, market your own crap, and don't expect YouTube's algorithms to do it for you.
Only it turns out that cynicism and outrage is also damn lazy.
Most of the people consuming this content are just looking for an easy way to wind themselves up into a satisfying outrage or a smug indignation. They generally won't lift a finger to dig further into the back story, and they won't a finger to find this content, either, if it doesn't come barrelling down their automatic feed.
Some people will continue to seek out this same content on a deliberate basis. And those people will be hardly affected by this new algorithm, whatsoever.
(Demonitization is a somewhat different issue, but I'd argue that most mainstream advertisers have never intended to associate themselves with this kind of content, and the brief period where you could monetize this was a historical aberration.)
Because you're a vengeance whore, and you think deterrence has nothing to do with this, and the bottomless public purse should fund arbitrary justice sadism with no social cost-benefit analysis whatsoever. No sane person in this world envies Assange's living arrangements for the past seven years, much of which was spent with the social status of an unwelcome house guest.
Is an addition year of incarceration likely to change Assange's morality in any significant way? Highly unlikely.
Is an additional year of incarceration likely to deter others from following the same glorious path in life? Extremely marginal.
If they put him away on something substantial, that's a whole different ballgame, because justice must be served. But if they don't, another pittance of different captivity, at this point, is just a leech on the public purse.
It took me a few minutes to get to the nub of the matter.
If you're mentally reading the notation d^2 y / dx^2 as the second derivative of y divided by dx squared, you're doing it wrong.
Because what this notion really intends to mean is d(d(y)/dx)/dx, which as the paper points out is a different order of operation.
A more compact notation less misleading than the traditional d^2 y / dx^2 might be (d/dx)^2 dy, which expands via two repeated function applications to d(d(y)/dx)/dx, with the underlying operations now in the right order.
Calculus was never my best thing, so I might be all wet, but it seems to make sense.
I never liked the dx/dy notation much, regarding it more as a cryptic code than anything conceptually helpful (when its not cryptic, it's not helpful, because that's the common case you already know).
With the right lambda notation (riffing on what I proposed above) the fundamental operator nature of d() could be correctly expressed, even if you don't want into these algebraic manipulations, which mostly strike me as far too detailed and tedious.
What I celebrate most in YouTube is the death of the channel. I've never "subscribed" to one damn thing.
Obviously, if you find someone who produces smart content, it's nice to be able to browse that person's back catalogue. But you can do that with Andy Warhol, too, and he never had a "channel", he just had whatever he had made up to that point.
Channels are the natural domain of lazy, content-consuming slobs. Honestly, should what you watch next be a function of your recent viewing history? Only if questions pertaining to fresh material remains insufficiently answered.
But many people seem to prefer the girl-next-door algorithm. If the girl-next-door to the girl-next-door is even prettier, you continue to incrementally change your address: hill-climbing algorithm, one back-yard fence at a time.
Or you could head to a street cafe in the center of Paris, and skip all these silly "channel" increments.
We still haven't imaged a black hole. All we've managed to do is image a black hole's accretion disk.
In addition, LIGO has captured a few brief snapshots of black holes getting jiggy. But I'd wait another year on that one, until we're extra sure that the sophisticated LIGO software isn't taking phantom snapshots of it's own software-filter afterimage.
Perhaps you should begin by schooling the Hillbillies in the community hot tub whom you persistently engage what it means for modern science to "image" something. Just for starters, atomic force microscopes are blind as a bat (though really damn good at Braille).
FTFY.
The theory of Bitcoin is much narrower:
* if you achieve diverse and decentralized in the real world, you're in a good place
* mechanisms exist within Bitcoin to encourage (but not guarantee) this outcome
Unpacking Suitcase Words — 2009
"Diversity" is just such a word: there's a potentially unlimited number of columns in the spreadsheet where diversity could collapse. (If there's a thing, there's diversity of the thing—or not.)
Diversity and performance culture rarely go hand in hand. Have you looked at F1 lately? Apart from the decals and colouration, only an aficionado can even tell the cars apart.
Diversity culture, as practiced in 1001 Arabian Nights.
If you didn't see the ASIC overlords looming on the horizon right out of the starting gate: wake up Little Susie, your recognizance is shot.
Definitional frame of regression to the mean.
If it had been the other way around—older adults with the best scores improved the most relative to their younger controls—then we would know for sure this was a real thing, because that result would have run entirely counter to the pear-shaped grain of mediocrity restoration.
You missed improvements in event localization to enable traditional astronomy to zoom in on neutron star mergers with an electromagnetic signature. This includes a wide-aperture radio facility (IIRC) and an improved algorithm to search the probable area. Plus, if they have all three facilities in good working order, they get a smaller statistical banana in space to start with (perhaps to improve again once the Japanese facility begins to participate, which I think is slated for later in the year).
You're addressing inherent simplicity: simplicity that inheres in the object itself. Inherent simplicity is overrated.
Not so simple: maintaining your own fork of a major development language, because a recent major release— in pursuit of round-fingered, bent-legged enlightenment—gored your ox on a multi-million-line code base.
Our quest for simplicity is quite primal. It's often just a power move to demonstrate that you occupy the summit of the power hierarchy. Because your vaunted simplicity usually amounts to making something ugly (but very, very real) into somebody else's ugly (and very, very soul-destroying) daily slogathon.
The C++ culture is what you get when there's an iron-clad social contract that Peter does not rob Paul.
The direct consequence of this is that nobody can stand on the summit and gloat about their immensely refined slickitude (to hell with the peons working the actual trenches).
As has been remarked once or twice in the history of Slashdot, C++ lacks any semblance of pointy summit of slickitude; no—father forgive me, for I have sinned—C++ lacks any possibility of a semblance of so much as a stubby, manicured outcropping of soapbox sainthood.
The only other language I know with a similar value system is Perl 6.
Evan Miller: A Review of Perl 6 — 13 August 2017
The difference between C++98 and C++11 is roughly the same thirteen years that the Perl 6 development effort went almost entirely offline. Perl 6 probably shaved off no end of warts to achieve its grand synthesis of becoming all things to all people (forsaking mainly performance, though this is prudently localized—in many cases—to quality of implementation). Meanwhile, C++ dragged its crufty ass through tens of millions of battle-hardened hours in the deep trenches. Will Perl 6 ever achieve the quality of implementation required to obtain a community of critical mass, to justify the immense implementation burden? This remains hard to judge.
I've long taken a Band of Brothers attitude toward C++.
Yes, you can shoot yourself in the foot, if your team is some random unit of random grunts.
But if your team is elite, and cares about being elite, you just don't shoot yourself in the foot on a daily basis, and you don't shoot your teammates in the foot hardly ever, and you go into the worst battles with the best people, and mostly you come back out alive. With C++, there's no such thing as bad weather, there's only bad clothing. The clothing is your job. Other languages do have bad weather—tasks for which the language is fundamentally unsuited—and then there's no clothing at all that will save you, and then you're fucked.
If the guy you're sitting beside has recently graduated from a puppy mill, and has no respect for the game, you probably want to steer clear of C++ with a vengeance of extreme scorn.
If the guy you're sitting beside has recently graduated from an ivory tower—with a raging case of L
The advertiser is the customer in this story. That mainstream advertisers were ever monetizing PewDiePie in any way is the only real anomaly in this YouTube story.
Google is not even an advertising company. They're an advertising display company. They own the billboards, not what goes on the billboards. Apart from their own needs, Google has no advertising creative team whatsoever.
Brand management has been a big deal for most of recorded history.
And it only snowballed from there.
The only amazing thing here is the PewDiePie escaped the wrath of the Coca-Cola company for as long as he did.