Overall, it's a good article, but I really hated a few bits:
If you have been wearing glasses for years, like me, it can be surprising to discover that you perceive the world thanks to a few giant companies that you have never heard of.
Speak for yourself, numbnuts.
In the process, optical retailers learned the strange fact that for something that costs only a few pounds to make (even top-of-the-range frames and lenses cost, combined, no more than about £30 to produce), we are happy, happier in fact, when paying 10 or 20 times that amount.
I should point out that the current movie era, dominated by cartoon tent-poles, is based on network effects. Remember those? We used to discuss them on Slashdot back in the day.
As movies gained international markets, there was a marked effect on the quality of your typical movie, which I've dubbed Dialogue for Dummies. The strong, silent protagonist of the 1950s made a splashing comeback, simply because it was easier to dub into a dozen major international markets. Witty repartee does not translate. Subtleties are inevitably Lost in Translation.
The second effect is that this particular style of movie-making was garnering ever and ever larger budgets. The increase in the special effects budget helped to retain the traditional English-language markets (America, the Commonwealth, and its lingering enclaves—mainly English-speaking regions of Eastern India) due to far inferior dialogue and story line.
I watched Incredibles 2 the other night, and I managed to enjoy it, because I've learned how to best tune out the plot, and there's so much going on visually, you can actually pick out where all the intelligence formerly devoted to the script went to ground.
This is why almost all tent-pole humour is now visual there's nothing to lose in translation, and people who care about the lame plot will barely even notice it's also in there (so they don't end up feeling left out). Plus it's hard for reviewers to write about the visual humour, because it's usually aggressively sub-verbal (quirky nods to artistic conventions from decades past) so it can't even be pointed out to the dunderheads with any great force that they're definitely missing the best part.
Long ago, I didn't suspect the word "globalization" spelled the end for intelligent dialogue in film, to be replaced by a bag of seventeen colour-coded hammers, each endowed with a distinctive visual style and unique superpower, to be "shown not told" to a tedious extreme not even replicated by 1980s television which presumed you had been off watching two other channels during every commercial break, and thus recapped every recap twice over.
My most fascinating movie experience recently was watching Isle of Dogs (2018) more or less back-to-back with Up (2009). Both movies feature talking dogs. One of these films was widely misunderstood by idiots to be a grievous grievance-studies pillory of Japanese cultural tropes, never mind that the Japan represented in this movie was painstakingly constructed out of the whole cloth of how American culture actually encodes Japan (surely the Japanese have the same naive cultural encoding of America, which this movie invites you to contemplate, if you're not already lathering about the primacy of the thing, rather than the primacy of the perception of the thing). Because of the current tent-pole phenomena, the younger generation seems to be well on the way to forgetting that the primary subject matter of creative fiction is reality as refracted through perception.
I think Wes Anderson explores the world of meta-attention, which is why he's not a great story teller on his own terms. But none of these tent-pole movies have a great story, either. Incredibles 2: bitter orphan v. smarmy orphan, a kind of orphan Rashomon story (neither of whom has forgotten their original name, but I guess you can't have everything). No, it hasn't really been done before—except the "orphan" part, which has been done to death.
Wes does a great job of engaging the hypertrophic alternate attention I've had to cultivate merely to make it through your average five-star tent-pole movie (I won't even touch a four-star effort).
I just simply don't understand the importance of Wes Anderson's films. Anderson often tells the story of an upper class white family who has no real conflict in their lives except for
Cue the counter-narrative that the troll bombs were an inside job, furthering two parallel agendas: * to drive insta-guerrilla publicity for the movie * to discredit word-of-mouth review
In the almost-as-large-as-life MCU, this wouldn't even count as a least mustard-seed of a standard-issue dastardly plot.
This is ridiculous. There's lot's of remaining capacity for people to vote with their wallets. What prevents this from working (much of the time) is the collective action problem: in the moment of truth, the vast majority of the consuming public dials into the narrowest of all "what's in it for me" explanatory frames.
Many people actually prefer to purchase from apex predators, because then you are certainly among the "in" crowd (soon to become an "inn crowded" into a manger of dung and straw, but this takes actual foresight to suss out).
I never purchase anything of personal significance from an apex predator without a premeditated exit strategy.
It takes actual work to rise above tribal heuristics. If everyone else does this work, then you don't have to. Hence evolution has not designed us to reliably do this work.
There are two kinds of IQ tests: Raven's progressive matrices (in the laboratory) and the abuse of small words (in real life).
Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student on shoddy evidence four months before she was set to graduate.
Massive fail.
Everyone here who has never seen anyone get the right answer on shoddy evidence, raise your hands. Those of you with your hands down, you may continue to consume News for Nerds.
The rest of you I'd like to see after class. Please bring a small, packed suitcase, and your favourite air-miles card, so I can credit you for all the catapult miles lovingly bestowed.
Changing the clocks twice a year impacts the body's natural rhythms and is associated with a spike in heart attacks, strokes, and traffic collisions each year, according to the Washington State Department of Health's impact review.
All the evidence I've seen on time-change related effects suggests that none of these effects are on the margin, viewed in annual aggregate. This is like banning the straw toss in Saudi Arabia, because every fistful of straw lofted into the air kills six camels (these are not healthy camels, destined to survive another month).
If we implemented the time change as six steps of ten minutes over a week, the spike almost certainly vanishes.
Now that 70% of the population—and nearly 100% of people under the age of forty—get their primary time signals from cellphone towers, a progressive regime could be implemented with little difficulty. So let's get rid of the thing because the implementation of the thing poses annoying problems. Not always a bad line of reasoning, but let's be honest about what this actually is: hardly anyone who is getting anywhere near the recommended level of sleep has a heart attack over rising an hour earlier than normal.
We carry canaries into a coal mine precisely because they're good at croaking under the least duress.
I've always viewed this kind of ridiculous medical argumentation as the tagline in a Save the Canaries campaign—probably sponsored by the paramedical profession—who really don't like getting up an hour earlier than normal on the busiest day of the year.
[*] medical profession : paramedical profession:: mariner : submariner
The implication here is that after being forced to work so hard, they spend the entirety of extra non-work time (which is not compensated) recovering from the extra work.
If you do the math that way, this is actually a net loss, as represented.
But any formulation that puts a non-zero (or non-negative value) on the extra non-work time exposes this for the passive-aggressive grousing it probably is.
I've never believed in the Randian uberfable of the lazy dragging civilization into the mud, though I do believe that the industrious value their time on this earth positively 23/6.
[*] Modulo misguided, heroic medicine. Once upon a time, we feared doctors because they couldn't save you, and now we fear doctors because they can save you—as evidence by your withering shell—when they probably shouldn't.
Linearity is good, and shares traded (effectively) as a real instead of an integer would probably be a good thing.
But who votes the share?
If a blockchain aftermarket is not endorsed by the corporation, then the shares get voted in the same old way: as integers.
If the share (or share block) is voted by majority within the share, that just makes things less linear than they were before. (Now a person with the Levi stake—0.501—is essentially exercising a voting power that is twice his or her economic exposure).
[*] Once upon a time, Levi 501s were the biggest meme since Woodstock, but I guess they died and went to Etsy.
Or you could solve the majority voting problem with employ stochastic dithering: a fair cryptocoin is flipped—on the blockchain almost certainly—so that every partial vote has an equal, pro-rated chance of voting the whole share (or share block). How the share's registered entity is compelled to recognize the internal coin flip (and vote accordingly) is another small problem to solve.
With stochastic dithering, you can make a lot more problems quasi-linear than ever before. The fair voting problem under a collective coin flip is almost impossible to implement without something like a blockchain to establish collective verification. Many, many things in this world would function better if the governance regime were closer to linear (non-linearity = more politics, almost assuredly, every time).
I tend to regard the stochastic nature of stochastic dithering is a feature, and not a bug, as it prevents micro-planning down to the last penny: the problem tilts from "how can we twist one last arm?" to "how can we twist one more arm, to reduce the lingering margin of uncertainty?". The first algorithm is accomplished by aggressive divide and conquer (henchman tactics, best pursued by being more of a dick), the second algorithm is accomplished by bulk persuade (cogent advocacy, best pursued by being less of a dick).
Cryptocurrency bachelorhood: mostly worthless.
Crytocurrency wedded to stochastic dithering: finally worth welcoming into the family in a big way.
Bright-line systems with their non-linear winner-take-all politics are potent dickhood incubators. Moths have never flocked to a flame along the pure, minimum-time geodesics of dicks to a bright line.
Today's justification for censorship is that it for health reasons but who knows if tomorrow it will be for political reasons?
It's not censorship to shift dubious information to a place where the consumer has to lift two fingers instead of one, just as it wasn't censorship to confine pornography to pornographic magazines, and to make the consumer trudge an entire city block to the nearest newsstand (who was on his way for fresh smokes or a letter stamp to begin with).
If you can't even manage two clicks, no fin soup for you.
As it should be.
Similarly, it's not censorship when YouTube demonitizes your channel because it's politically hard-edged, depriving you of a large audience of lazy people who won't make two clicks to express their independent viewing preferences.
In the perfect world, lazy people would face a bland diet, all of the time.
On the other hand, if you're alert enough to look for something that's not already lying at your feet, then you're possibly alert enough to question what you find there. It's at least a good start.
If READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE is required to simply read a few files from a private configuration directory, the Android security model sucks beyond all possible comprehension.
Which it might. I would know this already for a real OS, only in this case I'm too afraid to even begin to peek under the hood.
I stopped installing apps years ago for precisely this reason: what you don't know can hurt you; I don't want to learn the Android security model without brain bleach, and I don't want to learn the Android security model with brain bleach, either.
For at least a decade, there has been one major reason to stick with spinning rust. Hint: it's inside your pants, and it probably folds in half.
I've read that YouTube costs $6b per year to operate. If you don't think they'd shit their bloomers over another flood in Thailand, that's only because it's not your $6b outflow.
Do you really think YouTube is storing video of your drunken frat party on spendy SSD, long term?
You'll never once convince me that an "error" that benefits people in power is anything of the sort. Seen it way, way too often.
All you manage to do with that attitude is cloud the difference, so that the real schnooks wind up pickled in the same barrel with the clueless, the clumsy, and the unfortunate.
The schnooks truly love this service you're providing, by parking your C.R.M 144 Discriminator under a shady tree, may it rust in peace.
Furthermore, the phrase "benefitting the people in power" provides immense scope to pluck hypothetical advantages out of your ass, unconstrained by harsh reality.
The only way to effectively police malfeasance is to be attentive and astute to the difference. This takes actual cognitive labour. There are no handy shortcuts. You can't just spread cynicism over a bagel with lox and call it a day.
Even Sesame Street makes hay with the distinction between the clumsy and the conniving.
Who's the least plausible character in all of literature? The supervillain, for whom the toast always falls butter side up, and then the butter doesn't even melt in his mouth. For precisely this reason, the entire MCU universe functions as infantile wish fulfillment.
I'll take my villain black please, with a 10-gallon black hat, an immaculate longhorn mustache, a private volcanic island, and orphanage bona fides grimmer than death.
This shtick would be far more compelling if the homicide squad ever took a day off in any major urban center that didn't sink without a trace into a vast ocean, 7000 years ago.
Friend of Sacagawea would certainly be better than an entire administration populated with the Friends of Sergei, but I can't say this heavy-handed proclamation compels blind allegiance.
Most serious of all is the underlying equation of false equivalence: that just because these companies are all humongous (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) means they all deserve the same regulatory scrutiny—and the same remedy.
Besides, unless we regain net neutrality, their pie is doomed to shrink, anyway.
Would sure be nice if this was couched in terms of principles, instead of merely pointing fingers at all the towering suspects.
The National Vulnerability Database is by design a lagging indicator: not lagging by great expanses of time, but lagging enough for the truth to pull its boots on.
Besides, as the vilest writer has his readers, so the greatest liar has his believers; and it often happens, that if a lie be believ'd only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it.
Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceiv'd, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect...
— Jonathan Swift, 1710
It's no great feat to scoop a lagging indicator, as the swift had already figure out, 300 years ago.
In one of several unsupervised methods the researchers posit, they first extract a feature representation -- a set of techniques for automatically discovering the representations needed for raw data classification -- on a target training dataset using the aforementioned feature extractor.
My comprehension regressed upon encountering this sentence.
A Nova Scotia court threw the company a lifeline this week, granting it a 45-day extension that prevents creditors from filing lawsuits against it until mid-April.
This prose is pure, unadulterated, snotty-nosed imbecility.
Imagine the botched Apollo 13 stir had happened instead on Apollo 8.
A Lunar Module was not used on the Apollo 8 mission but a Lunar Module Test Article which was equivalent in mass (9027 kg) to a Lunar Module was mounted in the spacecraft/launch vehicle adapter as ballast for mass loading purposes.
And then mission control radios up: "hey, we found a way to add another 24 hours to your failed main oxygen supply." But, sorry, they didn't find a way for the astronauts to live inside the Lunar Module Test Article, leaving them up the lifeline without a paddle.
That hoary "lifeline" cliche is less serviceable here than a boomerang on Loonie Tunes.
There aren't many black people where I live, and when I do encounter a black person, especially a very dark person, it is definitely more difficult at first to accurately read facial expressions.
This is probably a combination of my environment, my long relationship with my keyboard in a dark room, and a side order of actual physics (optics).
Terry Gilliam did some insider flighing in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)—mainly Robin Williams's head flying around on a Roman dinner plate (about as useful as the source code to Windows calculator).
Robin's expression is slightly on the mirthful side in this one, even by his own standards. Anything to do with Uma Thurman's brief nude scene, in her filmic debut?
Google's calculator, with it's magic unit conversions, is a different beast, whose source code would have some actual value.
They have their own goals, and they simply do not feel safe from us.
The worst part of this tripe is the underlying dichotomy that having your own goals is inimical to answering to any other power.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the right hates evolution, on the whole, more than the left.
The message from evolution is this: not only does each individual organism have its own goals (a biological theorem on exact par with the non-existence of perpetual motion machines), but it's highly instructive to granularize this theorem all the way down to individual genes.
Fitness, in evolutionary biology, means the ability to thrive in your environment. And what is your environment? For a gene, it's all the other genes coexisting in the same organism, all the genes coexisting in related organisms, all the genes coexisting in supportive ecology, and a lot more. For an individual, it's your natural environment and your social environment.
The social environment is not to be messed with: this is why we have an evolutionary fascination with Survivor-style dramas, in which the ultimate punishment is being voted off the island (hot damn, we love us some punishment).
People on the right sometimes spurn social parasites by name (when it's not to risky to draw direct attention to the importance of the social environment), but they also encode this pervasive, throbbing fear in the klaxonic call to arms "free rider", in which formulation the importance of the social environment is indirect and unstated, but is not one tiny whit lessened in conception.
Socialism is a slippery slope with no feasible exit point. Even in the most extreme libertarian utopia, the social environment remains immensely powerful (and subject to almost all of the same rules of ecological self-organization). What you gain is making the villain more diffuse. Uncle Sam has left the building (but his fingers are still in your pockets, though you now label this "voluntary" association through contract). Trust me, those voluntary associations through contract will largely amount to offers you couldn't refuse. (The powerful shall remain powerful, and resistance shall remain a risky pain in the ass.) And it will be harder than ever to complain about this, because Uncle Sam has left the building, and the same old forces of extraction are now amorphous and spread thin. Under radical libertarianism, prostitution will no longer be illegal—the only question that remains is from what age of consent, if any—because those are conceptually individual transactions. But what about the pimps? The prostitutes shall surely demand that they need their pimps, because life is pretty bad when the mean don't police the mean (these being people most highly invested in the idea that they answer to no social construct but main force itself). Yada yada, libertarian ubiquity all around, and the pimps shall rule the earth.
Government is largely the idea that is we put all the pimps into a single giant bucket in the center of town, and at least forced them to answer to the electorate—some of the time—we could at least reduce this nasty, intrinsic aspect of the social order to a dull roar.
Government at scale is called the state, and the state retains the instruments of main force (it wouldn't be a giant bucket of pimps, otherwise). These instruments mainly being the police, the army, and the black swarm of TLAs.
Of course the TLAs answer to society (via the executive branch). Otherwise, we'd have extreme libertarianism by breakfast tomorrow. The only reason to have the government at all is to keep them minimally answerable to something.
It's the most interesting part of the whole equation: we put the pimps into a barrel in the center of town to better keep an eye on their abuses of power, but then they convinced us that their essential function of keeping us "safe" (we're all cowering prostitutes, deep down) is t
I've decided, for no good reason, that the term AI should only be used when describing an intelligence that works just the same as a human.
Unfortunately, human intelligence is insufficient (so far as we can tell) to evaluate the predicate "just the same as a human". Which makes things very simple, until we have actual wetware clones that not even Blade Runner can tell apart from the "real" thing.
I've refused to use the term "AI" in my own notes since the 1980s. I've been using "AC" instead (for artificial cognition). They're basically the same thing, only for AC, Roger Penrose doesn't show up to tell you that you're doing it wrong (I found the central thesis of The Emperor's New Mind extremely annoying, even if the book was entertaining on other levels).
Beyond "shoo, Roger, shoo", at the end of the day terminological obsessions don't buy much. Prepare to sleep alone.
The good ones are ready to vote with their feet at a moments notice.
If you can trust Laszlo Bock's book, Work Rules: Insights from Inside Google (2015), Google had a very aggressive policy of matching compensation to achievement so as to retrain their best employees.
His comment on bands: if all the corporation in SV decide to trap people in bands, the best people will simply reprice themselves on the open market every two years. That said, the argument that you're exceptional probably doesn't make itself without a concerted push from the employee side.
No matter how progressive a shop might be, rarely is anyone going to force you to demand what you're worth. In fact, people in charge might make a concerted effort to ensure that no-one else ever helps you along by accident:
Wikipedia editors revolt against board appointment of Arnnon Geshuri
Eric:
On this specific case, the sourcer who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour. We are scrubbing the sourcerâ(TM)s records to ensure she did not contact anyone else.
In general, we have a very clear "do not call" policy (attached) that is given to every staffing professional and I reiterate this message in ongoing communications and staffing meetings. Unfortunately, every six months or so someone makes an error in judgment, and for this type of violation we terminate their relationship with Google.
Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs. This was an isolated incident and we will be very careful to make sure this does not happen again.
Thanks, Arnnon
This finally got back to Steve, who affixed a happy face, and passed it along to the unindicted co-conspirators within his own HR department.
Slashdot Mirror
Sam Knight: The spectacular power of Big Lens — 10 May 2018; 8700 words
Overall, it's a good article, but I really hated a few bits:
Speak for yourself, numbnuts.
Speak for yourself, numbnuts.
I should point out that the current movie era, dominated by cartoon tent-poles, is based on network effects. Remember those? We used to discuss them on Slashdot back in the day.
As movies gained international markets, there was a marked effect on the quality of your typical movie, which I've dubbed Dialogue for Dummies. The strong, silent protagonist of the 1950s made a splashing comeback, simply because it was easier to dub into a dozen major international markets. Witty repartee does not translate. Subtleties are inevitably Lost in Translation.
The second effect is that this particular style of movie-making was garnering ever and ever larger budgets. The increase in the special effects budget helped to retain the traditional English-language markets (America, the Commonwealth, and its lingering enclaves—mainly English-speaking regions of Eastern India) due to far inferior dialogue and story line.
I watched Incredibles 2 the other night, and I managed to enjoy it, because I've learned how to best tune out the plot, and there's so much going on visually, you can actually pick out where all the intelligence formerly devoted to the script went to ground.
This is why almost all tent-pole humour is now visual there's nothing to lose in translation, and people who care about the lame plot will barely even notice it's also in there (so they don't end up feeling left out). Plus it's hard for reviewers to write about the visual humour, because it's usually aggressively sub-verbal (quirky nods to artistic conventions from decades past) so it can't even be pointed out to the dunderheads with any great force that they're definitely missing the best part.
Long ago, I didn't suspect the word "globalization" spelled the end for intelligent dialogue in film, to be replaced by a bag of seventeen colour-coded hammers, each endowed with a distinctive visual style and unique superpower, to be "shown not told" to a tedious extreme not even replicated by 1980s television which presumed you had been off watching two other channels during every commercial break, and thus recapped every recap twice over.
My most fascinating movie experience recently was watching Isle of Dogs (2018) more or less back-to-back with Up (2009). Both movies feature talking dogs. One of these films was widely misunderstood by idiots to be a grievous grievance-studies pillory of Japanese cultural tropes, never mind that the Japan represented in this movie was painstakingly constructed out of the whole cloth of how American culture actually encodes Japan (surely the Japanese have the same naive cultural encoding of America, which this movie invites you to contemplate, if you're not already lathering about the primacy of the thing, rather than the primacy of the perception of the thing). Because of the current tent-pole phenomena, the younger generation seems to be well on the way to forgetting that the primary subject matter of creative fiction is reality as refracted through perception.
I think Wes Anderson explores the world of meta-attention, which is why he's not a great story teller on his own terms. But none of these tent-pole movies have a great story, either. Incredibles 2: bitter orphan v. smarmy orphan, a kind of orphan Rashomon story (neither of whom has forgotten their original name, but I guess you can't have everything). No, it hasn't really been done before—except the "orphan" part, which has been done to death.
Wes does a great job of engaging the hypertrophic alternate attention I've had to cultivate merely to make it through your average five-star tent-pole movie (I won't even touch a four-star effort).
Why I Hate Wes Anderson — May 2011
Cue the counter-narrative that the troll bombs were an inside job, furthering two parallel agendas:
* to drive insta-guerrilla publicity for the movie
* to discredit word-of-mouth review
In the almost-as-large-as-life MCU, this wouldn't even count as a least mustard-seed of a standard-issue dastardly plot.
Looks like Betteridge has finally met his kryptonite.
Best wishes, Sir Ian: it was nice while it lasted.
This is ridiculous. There's lot's of remaining capacity for people to vote with their wallets. What prevents this from working (much of the time) is the collective action problem: in the moment of truth, the vast majority of the consuming public dials into the narrowest of all "what's in it for me" explanatory frames.
Many people actually prefer to purchase from apex predators, because then you are certainly among the "in" crowd (soon to become an "inn crowded" into a manger of dung and straw, but this takes actual foresight to suss out).
I never purchase anything of personal significance from an apex predator without a premeditated exit strategy.
It takes actual work to rise above tribal heuristics. If everyone else does this work, then you don't have to. Hence evolution has not designed us to reliably do this work.
There are two kinds of IQ tests: Raven's progressive matrices (in the laboratory) and the abuse of small words (in real life).
Massive fail.
Everyone here who has never seen anyone get the right answer on shoddy evidence, raise your hands. Those of you with your hands down, you may continue to consume News for Nerds.
The rest of you I'd like to see after class. Please bring a small, packed suitcase, and your favourite air-miles card, so I can credit you for all the catapult miles lovingly bestowed.
All the evidence I've seen on time-change related effects suggests that none of these effects are on the margin, viewed in annual aggregate. This is like banning the straw toss in Saudi Arabia, because every fistful of straw lofted into the air kills six camels (these are not healthy camels, destined to survive another month).
If we implemented the time change as six steps of ten minutes over a week, the spike almost certainly vanishes.
Now that 70% of the population—and nearly 100% of people under the age of forty—get their primary time signals from cellphone towers, a progressive regime could be implemented with little difficulty. So let's get rid of the thing because the implementation of the thing poses annoying problems. Not always a bad line of reasoning, but let's be honest about what this actually is: hardly anyone who is getting anywhere near the recommended level of sleep has a heart attack over rising an hour earlier than normal.
We carry canaries into a coal mine precisely because they're good at croaking under the least duress.
I've always viewed this kind of ridiculous medical argumentation as the tagline in a Save the Canaries campaign—probably sponsored by the paramedical profession—who really don't like getting up an hour earlier than normal on the busiest day of the year.
[*] medical profession : paramedical profession :: mariner : submariner
The implication here is that after being forced to work so hard, they spend the entirety of extra non-work time (which is not compensated) recovering from the extra work.
If you do the math that way, this is actually a net loss, as represented.
But any formulation that puts a non-zero (or non-negative value) on the extra non-work time exposes this for the passive-aggressive grousing it probably is.
I've never believed in the Randian uberfable of the lazy dragging civilization into the mud, though I do believe that the industrious value their time on this earth positively 23/6.
[*] Modulo misguided, heroic medicine. Once upon a time, we feared doctors because they couldn't save you, and now we fear doctors because they can save you—as evidence by your withering shell—when they probably shouldn't.
Linearity is good, and shares traded (effectively) as a real instead of an integer would probably be a good thing.
But who votes the share?
If a blockchain aftermarket is not endorsed by the corporation, then the shares get voted in the same old way: as integers.
If the share (or share block) is voted by majority within the share, that just makes things less linear than they were before. (Now a person with the Levi stake—0.501—is essentially exercising a voting power that is twice his or her economic exposure).
[*] Once upon a time, Levi 501s were the biggest meme since Woodstock, but I guess they died and went to Etsy.
Or you could solve the majority voting problem with employ stochastic dithering: a fair cryptocoin is flipped—on the blockchain almost certainly—so that every partial vote has an equal, pro-rated chance of voting the whole share (or share block). How the share's registered entity is compelled to recognize the internal coin flip (and vote accordingly) is another small problem to solve.
With stochastic dithering, you can make a lot more problems quasi-linear than ever before. The fair voting problem under a collective coin flip is almost impossible to implement without something like a blockchain to establish collective verification. Many, many things in this world would function better if the governance regime were closer to linear (non-linearity = more politics, almost assuredly, every time).
I tend to regard the stochastic nature of stochastic dithering is a feature, and not a bug, as it prevents micro-planning down to the last penny: the problem tilts from "how can we twist one last arm?" to "how can we twist one more arm, to reduce the lingering margin of uncertainty?". The first algorithm is accomplished by aggressive divide and conquer (henchman tactics, best pursued by being more of a dick), the second algorithm is accomplished by bulk persuade (cogent advocacy, best pursued by being less of a dick).
Cryptocurrency bachelorhood: mostly worthless.
Crytocurrency wedded to stochastic dithering: finally worth welcoming into the family in a big way.
Bright-line systems with their non-linear winner-take-all politics are potent dickhood incubators. Moths have never flocked to a flame along the pure, minimum-time geodesics of dicks to a bright line.
It's not censorship to shift dubious information to a place where the consumer has to lift two fingers instead of one, just as it wasn't censorship to confine pornography to pornographic magazines, and to make the consumer trudge an entire city block to the nearest newsstand (who was on his way for fresh smokes or a letter stamp to begin with).
If you can't even manage two clicks, no fin soup for you.
As it should be.
Similarly, it's not censorship when YouTube demonitizes your channel because it's politically hard-edged, depriving you of a large audience of lazy people who won't make two clicks to express their independent viewing preferences.
In the perfect world, lazy people would face a bland diet, all of the time.
On the other hand, if you're alert enough to look for something that's not already lying at your feet, then you're possibly alert enough to question what you find there. It's at least a good start.
If READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE is required to simply read a few files from a private configuration directory, the Android security model sucks beyond all possible comprehension.
Which it might. I would know this already for a real OS, only in this case I'm too afraid to even begin to peek under the hood.
I stopped installing apps years ago for precisely this reason: what you don't know can hurt you; I don't want to learn the Android security model without brain bleach, and I don't want to learn the Android security model with brain bleach, either.
Disable apps, no bleach required.
For at least a decade, there has been one major reason to stick with spinning rust. Hint: it's inside your pants, and it probably folds in half.
I've read that YouTube costs $6b per year to operate. If you don't think they'd shit their bloomers over another flood in Thailand, that's only because it's not your $6b outflow.
Do you really think YouTube is storing video of your drunken frat party on spendy SSD, long term?
All you manage to do with that attitude is cloud the difference, so that the real schnooks wind up pickled in the same barrel with the clueless, the clumsy, and the unfortunate.
The schnooks truly love this service you're providing, by parking your C.R.M 144 Discriminator under a shady tree, may it rust in peace.
Furthermore, the phrase "benefitting the people in power" provides immense scope to pluck hypothetical advantages out of your ass, unconstrained by harsh reality.
The only way to effectively police malfeasance is to be attentive and astute to the difference. This takes actual cognitive labour. There are no handy shortcuts. You can't just spread cynicism over a bagel with lox and call it a day.
Even Sesame Street makes hay with the distinction between the clumsy and the conniving.
Who's the least plausible character in all of literature? The supervillain, for whom the toast always falls butter side up, and then the butter doesn't even melt in his mouth. For precisely this reason, the entire MCU universe functions as infantile wish fulfillment.
I'll take my villain black please, with a 10-gallon black hat, an immaculate longhorn mustache, a private volcanic island, and orphanage bona fides grimmer than death.
This shtick would be far more compelling if the homicide squad ever took a day off in any major urban center that didn't sink without a trace into a vast ocean, 7000 years ago.
Friend of Sacagawea would certainly be better than an entire administration populated with the Friends of Sergei, but I can't say this heavy-handed proclamation compels blind allegiance.
Most serious of all is the underlying equation of false equivalence: that just because these companies are all humongous (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) means they all deserve the same regulatory scrutiny—and the same remedy.
Besides, unless we regain net neutrality, their pie is doomed to shrink, anyway.
Would sure be nice if this was couched in terms of principles, instead of merely pointing fingers at all the towering suspects.
* Revlon Redskin
Lewis and Clark got one look of the ultimate warpaint, hostilities erupted, and the next day she had to cut off her pony tails in self-defense.
The National Vulnerability Database is by design a lagging indicator: not lagging by great expanses of time, but lagging enough for the truth to pull its boots on.
A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes
— Jonathan Swift, 1710
It's no great feat to scoop a lagging indicator, as the swift had already figure out, 300 years ago.
Right, because the current incentive is the only incentive (according to Grimm's law of narrativium butterfly rivets).
And onions are turnips, too.
I could say FTFY, but it's closer to a brain transplant.
Step aside, world according to onions with one layer to make a welcoming cavity for inbound cerebral folds.
My comprehension regressed upon encountering this sentence.
This prose is pure, unadulterated, snotty-nosed imbecility.
Imagine the botched Apollo 13 stir had happened instead on Apollo 8.
Apollo 8
And then mission control radios up: "hey, we found a way to add another 24 hours to your failed main oxygen supply." But, sorry, they didn't find a way for the astronauts to live inside the Lunar Module Test Article, leaving them up the lifeline without a paddle.
That hoary "lifeline" cliche is less serviceable here than a boomerang on Loonie Tunes.
There aren't many black people where I live, and when I do encounter a black person, especially a very dark person, it is definitely more difficult at first to accurately read facial expressions.
This is probably a combination of my environment, my long relationship with my keyboard in a dark room, and a side order of actual physics (optics).
Terry Gilliam did some insider flighing in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)—mainly Robin Williams's head flying around on a Roman dinner plate (about as useful as the source code to Windows calculator).
Robin's expression is slightly on the mirthful side in this one, even by his own standards. Anything to do with Uma Thurman's brief nude scene, in her filmic debut?
Google's calculator, with it's magic unit conversions, is a different beast, whose source code would have some actual value.
The worst part of this tripe is the underlying dichotomy that having your own goals is inimical to answering to any other power.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the right hates evolution, on the whole, more than the left.
The message from evolution is this: not only does each individual organism have its own goals (a biological theorem on exact par with the non-existence of perpetual motion machines), but it's highly instructive to granularize this theorem all the way down to individual genes.
Fitness, in evolutionary biology, means the ability to thrive in your environment. And what is your environment? For a gene, it's all the other genes coexisting in the same organism, all the genes coexisting in related organisms, all the genes coexisting in supportive ecology, and a lot more. For an individual, it's your natural environment and your social environment.
The social environment is not to be messed with: this is why we have an evolutionary fascination with Survivor-style dramas, in which the ultimate punishment is being voted off the island (hot damn, we love us some punishment).
People on the right sometimes spurn social parasites by name (when it's not to risky to draw direct attention to the importance of the social environment), but they also encode this pervasive, throbbing fear in the klaxonic call to arms "free rider", in which formulation the importance of the social environment is indirect and unstated, but is not one tiny whit lessened in conception.
Socialism is a slippery slope with no feasible exit point. Even in the most extreme libertarian utopia, the social environment remains immensely powerful (and subject to almost all of the same rules of ecological self-organization). What you gain is making the villain more diffuse. Uncle Sam has left the building (but his fingers are still in your pockets, though you now label this "voluntary" association through contract). Trust me, those voluntary associations through contract will largely amount to offers you couldn't refuse. (The powerful shall remain powerful, and resistance shall remain a risky pain in the ass.) And it will be harder than ever to complain about this, because Uncle Sam has left the building, and the same old forces of extraction are now amorphous and spread thin. Under radical libertarianism, prostitution will no longer be illegal—the only question that remains is from what age of consent, if any—because those are conceptually individual transactions. But what about the pimps? The prostitutes shall surely demand that they need their pimps, because life is pretty bad when the mean don't police the mean (these being people most highly invested in the idea that they answer to no social construct but main force itself). Yada yada, libertarian ubiquity all around, and the pimps shall rule the earth.
Government is largely the idea that is we put all the pimps into a single giant bucket in the center of town, and at least forced them to answer to the electorate—some of the time—we could at least reduce this nasty, intrinsic aspect of the social order to a dull roar.
Government at scale is called the state, and the state retains the instruments of main force (it wouldn't be a giant bucket of pimps, otherwise). These instruments mainly being the police, the army, and the black swarm of TLAs.
Of course the TLAs answer to society (via the executive branch). Otherwise, we'd have extreme libertarianism by breakfast tomorrow. The only reason to have the government at all is to keep them minimally answerable to something.
It's the most interesting part of the whole equation: we put the pimps into a barrel in the center of town to better keep an eye on their abuses of power, but then they convinced us that their essential function of keeping us "safe" (we're all cowering prostitutes, deep down) is t
Look what I just found in my extensive digital records:
Digital Hoarding Can Make Us Feel Just as Stressed and Overwhelmed as Physical Clutter, Research Suggests — 8 January 2019
And, no, I don't feel stressed in the least.
Unfortunately, human intelligence is insufficient (so far as we can tell) to evaluate the predicate "just the same as a human". Which makes things very simple, until we have actual wetware clones that not even Blade Runner can tell apart from the "real" thing.
I've refused to use the term "AI" in my own notes since the 1980s. I've been using "AC" instead (for artificial cognition). They're basically the same thing, only for AC, Roger Penrose doesn't show up to tell you that you're doing it wrong (I found the central thesis of The Emperor's New Mind extremely annoying, even if the book was entertaining on other levels).
Beyond "shoo, Roger, shoo", at the end of the day terminological obsessions don't buy much. Prepare to sleep alone.
If you can trust Laszlo Bock's book, Work Rules: Insights from Inside Google (2015), Google had a very aggressive policy of matching compensation to achievement so as to retrain their best employees.
His comment on bands: if all the corporation in SV decide to trap people in bands, the best people will simply reprice themselves on the open market every two years. That said, the argument that you're exceptional probably doesn't make itself without a concerted push from the employee side.
No matter how progressive a shop might be, rarely is anyone going to force you to demand what you're worth. In fact, people in charge might make a concerted effort to ensure that no-one else ever helps you along by accident:
Newly unsealed documents show Steve Jobs' brutal response after getting a Google employee fired
Wikipedia editors revolt against board appointment of Arnnon Geshuri
This finally got back to Steve, who affixed a happy face, and passed it along to the unindicted co-conspirators within his own HR department.