That is true. In the early days, those really great contributors were more prominent. Now they are drowned out more easily. Pretty much like it was before the moderation system started to work properly.:-)
But yes, I forgot to mention that one thing - "slashdotting" was a thing. I think it was 99 when my server got the treatment for the DeCSS story. Down it went.:-)
He was very noticeable earlier than that. When I joined/. (sorry, don't remember when it was, but definitely before 99) it still had that feeling of a personal blog that was unusually successful. We didn't even call them "blogs" back then.:-)
The main differences in/. between then and now are: * it now feels more "under editorial control" and less personal * the meta-moderation system didn't exist * the old comment system was better.:-)
As compared to neo-liberalism, which punishes everyone equally (except for the top 0.01%, but that gets ignored as a rounding error) and is based on greed.
It's actually quite simple. but not many want to hear it:
If you put pressure on a system, the weak parts start to blow.
Since the end of the Cold War, and thus the disappearance of a real, available, other way of life, however inferior and more poor it was, has made the western way of life a monopoly, and if you paid attention in Economics 101, you know what monopolies do - extract monopoly rent. This takes the form of pressure on the social systems to extract money from the lower classes to give to the already rich. The pressure comes in the form of higher taxes, less real-money wages, financial crises, falling pensions - the exact way in which it manifests varies slightly from country to country, but everywhere in the west today the current generation has less social security, more work hours, more "flexibility" (and thus uncertainty) and in general more stressors than the last generation.
People are starting to blow and we're only seing the beginning of that. A few years ago, a depressed airline pilot in Europe steered a passenger plane into a mountain. After some initial scandal, no actual actions were taken to ensure that pilots are in a good mental state. Additional checking was briefly discussed, but no steps to actually improve the mental health of people who do a stressful job full of overtime.
Funny fact, the country with the strongest base of small to medium companies, Germany, also has a lot more regulation than other countries that are dominated by huge multi-nationals.
Regulation can be abused and a terrible obstacle, or it can be used properly and level the playing field. Like a gun or a knife, it can be used in different ways, not all of them harmful.
Maybe. I have reasons to believe that's not the case, though. Didn't own a car for about 10 years while living in the center of a large city, and aside from public transport I also drove taxis a lot, for everyday stuff (you can drive a lot of taxi before it becomes more expensive than buying and owning a car).
So there's a bit of taxi experience there, and I've never had any one driver try funny games. If that's a filter bubble, I suggest you figure out how to get inside of it.
No... f-taxis. I will never ride in an american taxi again. For all of their problems, Lyft and Uber provide a degree of transparency that
But maybe the problem isn't with taxis, but the way they are run in the USA? Here in central Europe, taxis are incredibly reliable, and as a passenger your list of rights is longer than for plane travel. They also charge by the meter, exactly. In all my life, I've never had a taxi driver run any funny games.
There's a fine line between something that's just really useful and something that you depend upon.
The smartphone has become such an essential part of everyday life, that whenever I leave the house and forget mine, I very much notice it. But - it rarely actually stops me from doing anything. It's just an unusual feeling because it became a habit. Now habits might be hard to break, but they are not yet dependencies.
I can imagine that teenagers who grow up without ever having lived without a smartphone depend more strongly on it. And some individuals certainly develop a dependency on the level of addiction. And yes, more and more of the world around us simply assumes that you have a smartphone. There is a lot of truth to it. But the real world is rarely as black and white as manifestos make it.
Come to socialist Europe, here the minimum warrenty is 2 years. I actually got a brand new iPhone SE recently, two months short of the 2 year period, when my old one failed.
But hey, we're just communists over here, with healthcare and proper laws. Don't get any ideas.;-)
With proper logistics planning, the recharge is actually not a problem. You just time the operations nicely, or even use the loading/unloading times for (partial) recharges.
Wasn't JavaScript this buggy hack that you can't use to run anything real (bad PNRG) and that was originally designed to make scrolling text before the devil replaced it with the marquee tag?
Maybe things have changed, but the last time I did work with JS, it still felt like a supersized tool that adults shouldn't be using. Did I miss some fundamental changes to the language, or has the other half of the world gone crazy?
I bought a new car just now, and incidentally, I live in Austria.
Here's why it wasn't an electric car, despite me checking both Tesla Model S and Hyundai Ionic, i.e. both ends of the spectrum.
These are cool cars, but just not there, yet. The Hyundai is the better value for money, but lacks range (200 km, that's a city car, useless for any serious travel). The Tesla has the most amazing acceleration I've ever seen in any car, ever, by far. But for a car this price, I expect a better designed interior. The decision to go all-out touchscreen is crazy, and a navigation system without speech output? In a 100,000 Euro car? You're kidding me?
Electric cars are a gimmick at this point, sadly. Manufacturers are testing the waters, mostly with smaller cars. There are no serious electric cars on the market at this time. I would've bought one if there were.
Conversely, what has he done that makes you think he's really an achiever in disguise?
You seem to think that anyone who doesn't shout "impeach him! impeach him!" is a fan who gets a hard-on at the thought of Trump looking at him.
I don't really care that much, except that I'm happy Hillary didn't win because I'm not much in the mood for another war with Russia.
I just believe that the media bias in reporting on Trump is very, very obvious and that the image transported is not the truth. That doesn't mean he's an achiever.
Let me put it in numbers. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say he's somewhere in the 3 or 4 range. Definitely below average. But I'm pointing out that the media makes it seem that he's a solid 1 and that's only because the scale doesn't go lower.
So let's compare GWB: * accelerated banking deregulation, which caused the financial crisis we still feel today * started two completely pointless wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) that did the opposite of what they were supposed to do (i.e. we got more terrorism) * public perception was in the gutter before 9/11. Especially internationally, he was the laughing stock of the world, easily on par with Trump.
On speech, GWB couldn't speak clearly, Trump chooses not to. His speaking patterns are just that: Patterns. If you search on the Internet you will quickly find that a lot of experts, including university professors, have spent time analyzing his unusual style, and generally came to the conclusion that it might appear he's rambling, but there are enough hints in there that it is clear his "ramblings" are very much engineered.
Yes, he is a below average performer - and yet he grew his net worth by 300% in 30 years. That's 10% a year on average. Below average compared to other billionaires, but not exactly a shitty growth rate.
most incompetent President
Bush Jr. ?
Setting aside your personal preference, on which objective scale do you compare?
Forbes estimated that Trump's net worth in 1988 was $1 billion, growing to about $4 billion in 2015 â" a comparatively meager 300% increase
Sure "below average". I'm sure you don't want to switch places, right? Who'd want a puny 4 billion?
But keep believing it's all an act if that makes you feel better...
"all" is such a word. As I said: He's definitely not the most wholesome person, but if you think that he is as stupid as he seems on TV, he fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
But don't take it from me. You can also listen to, say, Bernie Sanders.
Trump is by far not as stupid as the persona he projects appears. There are some great videos on YouTube that analyse his speech patterns, and those patterns are not likely to be accidental. He plays dumb because it suits him. He's probably an egomaniac and a dozen other things, but stupid? Don't think so.
rock-paper-scissors is trivial to balance because it has a clear payoff matrix with one dimension.
But once you have more complexity, can you say for sure that you have the correct weighting between, say, speed, offensive power and armor ? That is exactly what I'm getting at.
Only if they're allowed to enter. Otherwise, sanitised computers with only the required software (i.e. the game in question) installed will ensure the competition is limited to the human participants you can see on the gaming stage
For the tournament level that will work. But one level below, it already fails, the same way we don't do drug tests at little league games.
Asimovs rules are actually a good start. An agreed upon protocol that is part of every AI development. It could be as simple as having a mandatory "off" switch.
Yes, there remains a risk of a rogue developer. This can be minimized by having those rules or emergency switches be in the libraries - most developers will not start an AI from scratch once basic functionality is available as a library. That would go a long distance to eliminate death-by-stupidity.
For malicious players, I guess my profession (information security) is going to have a new topic a few years into the future.
Book hint: "Finite and infinite games" by J.P. Carse.
Short version: Everything is a game. Some games just have more complex rules than others, and some games have rules that change while you play (life is not the only such game, Nomic is a good example of a table game that does).
But that's obvious to anyone with three working brain cells.
North Korea is a non-issue. They make a big fuss every time they need some outside support to fend off some internal food shortage or whatever. And also, they're a tiny nation that would break down the same hour a war started.
Their role in world politics is to be a distraction.
It was obvious that e-sports will be short-lived because bots are going to beat us all within a short time. Soon you'll be able to run them on your home machine and nobody will be the wiser. Anti-cheat mechanisms will work for a short time, and then go to the dustbin of history.
But what I'd find even more interesting is the output of those learning algorithms. If it can amass lifetimes of experience, can it answer the question which heroes are over- or underpowered? All we'd need to check is its picking preferences. Can it figure out if there is one optimum loadout? One optimum skillset? Will it find an optimum strategy, especially once the whole team is bots (who know that the others are bots, or even a network of bots that communicate) ?
Using such bots not at tournaments but during game development will do miracles for balancing.
The whole point of security is that I can verify it. If I can't, it is not secure, period.
Putting the carrier in charge means I can't. When they turn of encryption and authentication during nightly maintenance and forget to turn it back on - nobody will be the wiser.
Slashdot Mirror
That is true. In the early days, those really great contributors were more prominent. Now they are drowned out more easily. Pretty much like it was before the moderation system started to work properly. :-)
Kids these days...
But yes, I forgot to mention that one thing - "slashdotting" was a thing. I think it was 99 when my server got the treatment for the DeCSS story. Down it went. :-)
He was very noticeable earlier than that. When I joined /. (sorry, don't remember when it was, but definitely before 99) it still had that feeling of a personal blog that was unusually successful. We didn't even call them "blogs" back then. :-)
The main differences in /. between then and now are: :-)
* it now feels more "under editorial control" and less personal
* the meta-moderation system didn't exist
* the old comment system was better.
As compared to neo-liberalism, which punishes everyone equally (except for the top 0.01%, but that gets ignored as a rounding error) and is based on greed.
It's actually quite simple. but not many want to hear it:
If you put pressure on a system, the weak parts start to blow.
Since the end of the Cold War, and thus the disappearance of a real, available, other way of life, however inferior and more poor it was, has made the western way of life a monopoly, and if you paid attention in Economics 101, you know what monopolies do - extract monopoly rent. This takes the form of pressure on the social systems to extract money from the lower classes to give to the already rich. The pressure comes in the form of higher taxes, less real-money wages, financial crises, falling pensions - the exact way in which it manifests varies slightly from country to country, but everywhere in the west today the current generation has less social security, more work hours, more "flexibility" (and thus uncertainty) and in general more stressors than the last generation.
People are starting to blow and we're only seing the beginning of that. A few years ago, a depressed airline pilot in Europe steered a passenger plane into a mountain. After some initial scandal, no actual actions were taken to ensure that pilots are in a good mental state. Additional checking was briefly discussed, but no steps to actually improve the mental health of people who do a stressful job full of overtime.
Funny fact, the country with the strongest base of small to medium companies, Germany, also has a lot more regulation than other countries that are dominated by huge multi-nationals.
Regulation can be abused and a terrible obstacle, or it can be used properly and level the playing field. Like a gun or a knife, it can be used in different ways, not all of them harmful.
Maybe. I have reasons to believe that's not the case, though. Didn't own a car for about 10 years while living in the center of a large city, and aside from public transport I also drove taxis a lot, for everyday stuff (you can drive a lot of taxi before it becomes more expensive than buying and owning a car).
So there's a bit of taxi experience there, and I've never had any one driver try funny games. If that's a filter bubble, I suggest you figure out how to get inside of it.
How much south you want? I'm in Italy in three hours by car. That's not even central Europe anymore.
No... f-taxis. I will never ride in an american taxi again. For all of their problems, Lyft and Uber provide a degree of transparency that
But maybe the problem isn't with taxis, but the way they are run in the USA? Here in central Europe, taxis are incredibly reliable, and as a passenger your list of rights is longer than for plane travel. They also charge by the meter, exactly. In all my life, I've never had a taxi driver run any funny games.
There's a fine line between something that's just really useful and something that you depend upon.
The smartphone has become such an essential part of everyday life, that whenever I leave the house and forget mine, I very much notice it. But - it rarely actually stops me from doing anything. It's just an unusual feeling because it became a habit. Now habits might be hard to break, but they are not yet dependencies.
I can imagine that teenagers who grow up without ever having lived without a smartphone depend more strongly on it. And some individuals certainly develop a dependency on the level of addiction. And yes, more and more of the world around us simply assumes that you have a smartphone. There is a lot of truth to it. But the real world is rarely as black and white as manifestos make it.
Still by far a net positive for me, so cry as much as you want. :-)
Come to socialist Europe, here the minimum warrenty is 2 years. I actually got a brand new iPhone SE recently, two months short of the 2 year period, when my old one failed.
But hey, we're just communists over here, with healthcare and proper laws. Don't get any ideas. ;-)
With proper logistics planning, the recharge is actually not a problem. You just time the operations nicely, or even use the loading/unloading times for (partial) recharges.
Wasn't JavaScript this buggy hack that you can't use to run anything real (bad PNRG) and that was originally designed to make scrolling text before the devil replaced it with the marquee tag?
Maybe things have changed, but the last time I did work with JS, it still felt like a supersized tool that adults shouldn't be using. Did I miss some fundamental changes to the language, or has the other half of the world gone crazy?
I bought a new car just now, and incidentally, I live in Austria.
Here's why it wasn't an electric car, despite me checking both Tesla Model S and Hyundai Ionic, i.e. both ends of the spectrum.
These are cool cars, but just not there, yet. The Hyundai is the better value for money, but lacks range (200 km, that's a city car, useless for any serious travel). The Tesla has the most amazing acceleration I've ever seen in any car, ever, by far. But for a car this price, I expect a better designed interior. The decision to go all-out touchscreen is crazy, and a navigation system without speech output? In a 100,000 Euro car? You're kidding me?
Electric cars are a gimmick at this point, sadly. Manufacturers are testing the waters, mostly with smaller cars. There are no serious electric cars on the market at this time. I would've bought one if there were.
Conversely, what has he done that makes you think he's really an achiever in disguise?
You seem to think that anyone who doesn't shout "impeach him! impeach him!" is a fan who gets a hard-on at the thought of Trump looking at him.
I don't really care that much, except that I'm happy Hillary didn't win because I'm not much in the mood for another war with Russia.
I just believe that the media bias in reporting on Trump is very, very obvious and that the image transported is not the truth. That doesn't mean he's an achiever.
Let me put it in numbers. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say he's somewhere in the 3 or 4 range. Definitely below average. But I'm pointing out that the media makes it seem that he's a solid 1 and that's only because the scale doesn't go lower.
So let's compare GWB:
* accelerated banking deregulation, which caused the financial crisis we still feel today
* started two completely pointless wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) that did the opposite of what they were supposed to do (i.e. we got more terrorism)
* public perception was in the gutter before 9/11. Especially internationally, he was the laughing stock of the world, easily on par with Trump.
On speech, GWB couldn't speak clearly, Trump chooses not to. His speaking patterns are just that: Patterns. If you search on the Internet you will quickly find that a lot of experts, including university professors, have spent time analyzing his unusual style, and generally came to the conclusion that it might appear he's rambling, but there are enough hints in there that it is clear his "ramblings" are very much engineered.
I'll grant you the other points.
Yes, he is a below average performer - and yet he grew his net worth by 300% in 30 years. That's 10% a year on average. Below average compared to other billionaires, but not exactly a shitty growth rate.
most incompetent President
Bush Jr. ?
Setting aside your personal preference, on which objective scale do you compare?
Forbes estimated that Trump's net worth in 1988 was $1 billion, growing to about $4 billion in 2015 â" a comparatively meager 300% increase
Sure "below average". I'm sure you don't want to switch places, right? Who'd want a puny 4 billion?
But keep believing it's all an act if that makes you feel better...
"all" is such a word. As I said: He's definitely not the most wholesome person, but if you think that he is as stupid as he seems on TV, he fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
But don't take it from me. You can also listen to, say, Bernie Sanders.
You drink too much mainstream media bullshit.
Trump is by far not as stupid as the persona he projects appears. There are some great videos on YouTube that analyse his speech patterns, and those patterns are not likely to be accidental. He plays dumb because it suits him. He's probably an egomaniac and a dozen other things, but stupid? Don't think so.
rock-paper-scissors is trivial to balance because it has a clear payoff matrix with one dimension.
But once you have more complexity, can you say for sure that you have the correct weighting between, say, speed, offensive power and armor ? That is exactly what I'm getting at.
Only if they're allowed to enter. Otherwise, sanitised computers with only the required software (i.e. the game in question) installed will ensure the competition is limited to the human participants you can see on the gaming stage
For the tournament level that will work. But one level below, it already fails, the same way we don't do drug tests at little league games.
Asimovs rules are actually a good start. An agreed upon protocol that is part of every AI development. It could be as simple as having a mandatory "off" switch.
Yes, there remains a risk of a rogue developer. This can be minimized by having those rules or emergency switches be in the libraries - most developers will not start an AI from scratch once basic functionality is available as a library. That would go a long distance to eliminate death-by-stupidity.
For malicious players, I guess my profession (information security) is going to have a new topic a few years into the future.
Book hint: "Finite and infinite games" by J.P. Carse.
Short version: Everything is a game. Some games just have more complex rules than others, and some games have rules that change while you play (life is not the only such game, Nomic is a good example of a table game that does).
But that's obvious to anyone with three working brain cells.
North Korea is a non-issue. They make a big fuss every time they need some outside support to fend off some internal food shortage or whatever. And also, they're a tiny nation that would break down the same hour a war started.
Their role in world politics is to be a distraction.
It was obvious that e-sports will be short-lived because bots are going to beat us all within a short time. Soon you'll be able to run them on your home machine and nobody will be the wiser. Anti-cheat mechanisms will work for a short time, and then go to the dustbin of history.
But what I'd find even more interesting is the output of those learning algorithms. If it can amass lifetimes of experience, can it answer the question which heroes are over- or underpowered? All we'd need to check is its picking preferences. Can it figure out if there is one optimum loadout? One optimum skillset? Will it find an optimum strategy, especially once the whole team is bots (who know that the others are bots, or even a network of bots that communicate) ?
Using such bots not at tournaments but during game development will do miracles for balancing.
The whole point of security is that I can verify it. If I can't, it is not secure, period.
Putting the carrier in charge means I can't. When they turn of encryption and authentication during nightly maintenance and forget to turn it back on - nobody will be the wiser.