There's often someone who did predict something, or something similar. But in general, the future predicted 50 years ago is not the future we're in today, and the same will be true of any catastrophy scenario.
Remember, in stories, the world works the way the author needs it to work for dramatic purposes, not necessarily the way that it most likely would in reality.
The typical Mad Max scenario is unlikely. Just like SciFi authors thought we'd have flying cars and take our vacations on the moon, but didn't forsee the Internet and mobile phones, the real scenario will very likely be quite different from the movies you've seen.
Which basically means: Who the fuck knows which skills will be useful and which ones won't? Maybe computers will be worthless and shooting is important. But maybe supply of ammunition runs out a lot faster than electricity which we increasingly generate decentralized with solar and wind farms.
Maybe something entirely unexpected turns out to be the most important skill to have.
Also: Looking at history, civilization-destroying catastrophies are incredibly rare. Most civilizations enter a phase of decline and slowly fade away.
Even in European countries that have as many guns per capita as the U.S., murders rates are several times lower.
That's because our attitude to guns is different. Ownership is a secondary concern.
For example, in Switzerland pretty much every adult male owns a weapon. Locked away in a gun cabinet, intended for defense of the country in case it ever gets invaded.
Europeans, even where gun ownership is common, don't have the "gun culture" of the US. It doesn't have the same level of cool to go into the woods and shoot some rounds. There's a lot less presence of them in the public, it's not as easy to buy one (can't get them at WalMart), etc.
Basically, we're adults who handle guns, americans are kids who play with guns. The results are roughly what you'd expect from these two scenarios.
Yes, that's probably the reason why around the world, governments seem to be much less interested in following those revelations than one would assume - they fear their own dirty laundry could show up if a serious investigation would be launched.
I'm serious. He has serious mental issues and everything you write to him only adds oil to the fire, no matter how well-meaning it is. People with mental problems don't read your words the way your write them. It takes a professional to even talk to them.
The crazy thing is that with what we've learnt about the US the past years, and the governments total disregard for anything besides their own power, I'm not really sure if these claims are as outlandish as they sound.
I think we've come a good way when we no longer think that the claims of the crazy are untrue just because they sound crazy.
And yes, the volumes given are so tiny that it could very well be something that some agency discovered on their TODO list under the "do when you've got a minute" section.
For those who might listen, one might temper it by saying homeopathy *does* work, but it's thanks to the placebo effect.
I hate that line, because it's untrue. It's not the homeopathy that works, but the placebo effect. It's an important difference, because homeopathy is a system with claims to causal relationships.
Now the claim in medicine is always a comparison - it works better then doing nothing, or it works better than placebo. Actually, "works better than placebo" is pretty much the medical definition of "works at all". By definition it is impossible to have less of an effect than a placebo, unless your substance is a poison.
However, real medicine doesn't even work that way, that's just a simplification. Actual real-world medicine doesn't compare against placebo, that's just for very early tests to establish if your new drug has any effect at all. In the real-world, you compare against the best currently available medicine. Your new one must have either more effect or less side-effects. Otherwise, why bother?
Homeopathy does not work. Claiming it works because of the placebo effect is like going to the beach at 5 am, drawing symbols into the sand and then claiming that the sun rose because of your magic ritual. If something has the same effect with or without your hogwash, you can remove the hogwash from the equation.
If you want it mathematically:
if placebo + homeopathy = effect X and placebo = effect X then homeopathy = 0
But yes, you should be able to put a, say, $100 bill into a large bottle of water, shake it a lot, put a drop from that into another large bottle... repeat a couple times, and then hand them the final bottle as payment. According to their own theory, they are now rich beyond their wildest dreams!
It also gives Bitcoin a lot of reputation back. If you can actually trace what happens, then the resilience of the whole system is much higher than it appeared to be otherwise.
You haven't seen my tent and that of some other people I hang with. We don't go camping, we do LARP. My tent has carpets.:-)
That said yes, if you know this is your life, you'll of course do things differently. And of course if you've been born into it, then that's just how things are, you don't even notice most of it.
Still... I prefer being able to open the tap to walking two miles to get fresh water. Little things like that.
First, I'm not an expert on the subject, not even particularily interested. I've just gathered a few things here and there.
I think you dramatically underestimate the work of the hunter-gathere and overestimate the work of the modern men, mostly because you use different definitions.
You spend 8 hours a day at the office. During the week. How many of those hours do you really work, and how many of them are socializing with co-workers, Facebook,/. or goofing off? Let's be honest here, the average office worker does not spend all 8 hours working.
I don't think you're done with 2 hours of hunting or gathering, either. It depends on location and other details, but at least in Africa, early men and many still existing primitive tribes are persistence hunters, which can take all day.
You conveniently forget things like gathering water, which sometimes (again, depending on location) can take a few hours by itself.
You also conveniently forget that due to division of labor, most of the maintenance work of modern life is already included in your daily work, because with the money you earn there you go and buy stuff ready-made instead of having to make it yourself.
If you have a grand- or grand-grand-mother still alive, ask her about washing clothes before the washing machine was invented.
And you also assume that there's a strict split between work and leisure time. I'm probably not alone in saying that for most of my life, I've actually enjoyed my work, and I do it not just for the money but also because it gives me pleasure and purpose and challenge.
I simply don't think there is an easy comparison. I'm saying that all things considered, I would not want to switch places. Maybe the tribesmen wouldn't want to, either, and that's fine with me. Or maybe he would, you'll have to ask him, not me.
Don't forget that life expectancy figures in child mortality and that is high in all pre-modern cultures. Yeah, once you've made it past 5 or so, you could reasonably expect to see 40 or 50.
It's not only about hard work. It's also about famine and disease, for example. Not having to work hard is cool - until you suddenly have to just in order to not fucking die.
I spend quite a bit of my time outdoors, averaging a few weeks a year, often with no electricity, gas-powered cooking and living in a tent. It is definitely beautiful in its own way and I'm always happy to go - and I'm equally happy to come back to a warm, dry home with a hot shower.
The dark ages were called that for a reason, one of them being that it was a step backwards from what civilization had already accomplished. The ancient greek lived better in many ways than the medieval europeans 1000 years later.
But even if you take the best period in pre-modern human history, I wouldn't want to switch, at least not permanently. There's still disease and pain and war, crime rates are crazy compared to today (ignore the news, they are lying, google Steven Pinker for a scholarly analysis) and let's not even get started about the ignorance and the dominance of religion over daily life. Plus you'd be very lucky indeed to visit another country once in your lifetime, as someone else posted your meals would have a fraction of the variety they have today, and so on and so forth.
One has a life expectancy of 30-odd years, the other of 70+. He has access to literature, art and music from all over the world. If he breaks his leg, he is transported to a hospital, gets a cast and will be well again in a short time instead of getting an infection and having a 50-50 chance of surviving.
We have romantic thoughts about prior times mostly because we forget all the shit about them. Your average medieval market fair doesn't include the open-latrines, your village getting burnt down in one of the constant wars, the fact that women had a reasonably high chance to die when giving birth or the simple fact that most likely everyone reeked to high heavens. Or just the fact that 90% of us would be pig farmers or something.
I know what I'd pick if given a choice. If you think different, pick a tribe, learn their language and go and live with them for a few years.
You can totally work a few hours a day to satisfy basic needs and spend the rest doing whatever you want. Of course it will probably mean not being able to buy the latest smartphone every year or going on expensive holiday trips, or very much medical care or a car - but then, the tribesmen do without those as well, right?
That's a good point. An UI system has to be familiar to the user, and what is familiar changes over time.
But that's the visual appearance angle. Other things remain, like the state having to be clearly identifyable and a control element having to appear as such.
it's interesting to see modern UIs adopting some of the idioms that testing in the early 90s showed were awful (e.g. Gtk+ 3's state toggles).
Interesting but unfortunately not uncommon. I worked with the Gnome UI design group for a short time during the early days and basically gave up because of people with more enthusiasm than knowledge dominating the mailing list.
User interface design is a typical bikeshed problem. Everyone things it's not that difficult and he can do it and few people realize just how much effort and expertise goes into it. Heck, "Human-Computer Interaction" (Dox, Finlay, Abowd, Beale) is 800 pages.
I wish IArchitect's user interface hall of shame were still around.
Did you seriously see anything there that wasn't painfully obvious?
Many design failures were made because people thought testing wasn't necessary because things were obvious. It's better to throw a few thousand bucks at a design test than botching a product because you didn't. That failure would be at least a hundred times as expensive.
Yes. Flash crashes are basically positive feedback loops at 10,000 rpm.
Considering the volume of data inherent, the 'capacity' of a slot can be pretty damn high as to be inexhaustible from a practical perspective. Sure, the code should have a contingency for the condition and that should be tested, but it is unlikely to be a frequently hit contingency.
One thing I can guarantee is that if exhausting the capacity would give a trader any kind of advantage in any way, then it will be done.
The computer systems these people have put up are incredibly. They can easily bring your trading system to a halt if they are determined to do that.
If the whole point is to be x microseconds ahead of the other guys wouldn't a 500 ms delay simply mean the exact same game would become 'after 500 ms, still be a few microseconds ahead of the other guys'.
No, because HFT works by exploiting the tiniest of price differences and they are likely to vanish in those 500 ms.
I would imagine a more effective approach would be to process trades 4 times per second. A request for a trade always gets processed in the slot after the next slot (meaning no less than a 250 ms delay, but no more than 500 ms delay). Within a given slot of trading activity, randomly shuffle the requests so that someone beating someone else by less than 250 ms doesn't actually affect things.
That would work as well, but is more complicated and you could run into trouble when your slots reach capacity.
Anything predictable will just be gamed. These people have made a multi-billion dollar business out of gaming the system. You'd have to be insane to assume they'll just pack up and leave on the first sign of resistance.
Introduce randomness into the system and put a tiny tax (one professor of the field recommended 0.01%) on trades even if they don't complete. Because HFT also does a lot of trade-ohwaitIdidntmeanit-cancel abuse. Sometimes thousands of orders per second that they never had any intention to actually completing. Their margins on each trade are tiny, so even the smallest transaction tax will drive them out of business. Meanwhile, honest traders won't care. If you buy stock for 5k and pay 50cents additional tax on that, you're highly unlikely to be the slightest bit bothered.
Teaching kids programming is a total and complete waste of money.
Those who are interested will learn by themselves. Those who aren't, won't even if you make it mandatory. But the unintended consequences are what's going to get you: Everyone will think that programming is easy because it's something the kids learn.
School should teach basic skills that can then be applied to programming, but also to a long list of other skills. Teach critical thinking, logic, math. Teach people how to learn, not what. Teach them reading comprehension so they can study on their own. Teach them trial-and-error and that failure is an option because it teaches you what you did wrong.
Most of all, don't solve a shortage of programmers by creating a million bad and counterproductive ones. You don't solve a shortage of doctors by giving random people scalpels and a license to cut open bellies, do you?
Good programmers are a lot more difficult to find than any programmer. I'd rather hire one good guy then five students for the same price.
Slashdot Mirror
There's often someone who did predict something, or something similar. But in general, the future predicted 50 years ago is not the future we're in today, and the same will be true of any catastrophy scenario.
Submitter has read too many bad books.
Remember, in stories, the world works the way the author needs it to work for dramatic purposes, not necessarily the way that it most likely would in reality.
The typical Mad Max scenario is unlikely. Just like SciFi authors thought we'd have flying cars and take our vacations on the moon, but didn't forsee the Internet and mobile phones, the real scenario will very likely be quite different from the movies you've seen.
Which basically means: Who the fuck knows which skills will be useful and which ones won't? Maybe computers will be worthless and shooting is important. But maybe supply of ammunition runs out a lot faster than electricity which we increasingly generate decentralized with solar and wind farms.
Maybe something entirely unexpected turns out to be the most important skill to have.
Also: Looking at history, civilization-destroying catastrophies are incredibly rare. Most civilizations enter a phase of decline and slowly fade away.
Even in European countries that have as many guns per capita as the U.S., murders rates are several times lower.
That's because our attitude to guns is different. Ownership is a secondary concern.
For example, in Switzerland pretty much every adult male owns a weapon. Locked away in a gun cabinet, intended for defense of the country in case it ever gets invaded.
Europeans, even where gun ownership is common, don't have the "gun culture" of the US. It doesn't have the same level of cool to go into the woods and shoot some rounds. There's a lot less presence of them in the public, it's not as easy to buy one (can't get them at WalMart), etc.
Basically, we're adults who handle guns, americans are kids who play with guns. The results are roughly what you'd expect from these two scenarios.
Yes, that's probably the reason why around the world, governments seem to be much less interested in following those revelations than one would assume - they fear their own dirty laundry could show up if a serious investigation would be launched.
Please don't feed my troll.
I'm serious. He has serious mental issues and everything you write to him only adds oil to the fire, no matter how well-meaning it is. People with mental problems don't read your words the way your write them. It takes a professional to even talk to them.
It gets old quite fast. But I think he's going to go away soon, he's already started simply copying the same nonsense post everywhere.
Anyway, if you want him, you can have him. :-)
The crazy thing is that with what we've learnt about the US the past years, and the governments total disregard for anything besides their own power, I'm not really sure if these claims are as outlandish as they sound.
I think we've come a good way when we no longer think that the claims of the crazy are untrue just because they sound crazy.
And yes, the volumes given are so tiny that it could very well be something that some agency discovered on their TODO list under the "do when you've got a minute" section.
What would maximize the placebo effect?
Ben Goldacre has some things to say about that, the placebo effect part starts at 6:20 but the rest is worth watching:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_g...
How about letting people choose what methods of healing they want to use?
If they pay for it 100% with their own money, including all the research and assorted other stuff that tags along, we can discuss the point.
As long as I pay a part of it with my tax money and my insurance premiums, I get a say in the matter.
For those who might listen, one might temper it by saying homeopathy *does* work, but it's thanks to the placebo effect.
I hate that line, because it's untrue. It's not the homeopathy that works, but the placebo effect. It's an important difference, because homeopathy is a system with claims to causal relationships.
Now the claim in medicine is always a comparison - it works better then doing nothing, or it works better than placebo. Actually, "works better than placebo" is pretty much the medical definition of "works at all". By definition it is impossible to have less of an effect than a placebo, unless your substance is a poison.
However, real medicine doesn't even work that way, that's just a simplification. Actual real-world medicine doesn't compare against placebo, that's just for very early tests to establish if your new drug has any effect at all. In the real-world, you compare against the best currently available medicine. Your new one must have either more effect or less side-effects. Otherwise, why bother?
Homeopathy does not work. Claiming it works because of the placebo effect is like going to the beach at 5 am, drawing symbols into the sand and then claiming that the sun rose because of your magic ritual. If something has the same effect with or without your hogwash, you can remove the hogwash from the equation.
If you want it mathematically:
if
placebo + homeopathy = effect X
and
placebo = effect X
then
homeopathy = 0
Shaking, not rubbing. Pay attention!
But yes, you should be able to put a, say, $100 bill into a large bottle of water, shake it a lot, put a drop from that into another large bottle... repeat a couple times, and then hand them the final bottle as payment. According to their own theory, they are now rich beyond their wildest dreams!
It also gives Bitcoin a lot of reputation back. If you can actually trace what happens, then the resilience of the whole system is much higher than it appeared to be otherwise.
You haven't seen my tent and that of some other people I hang with. We don't go camping, we do LARP. My tent has carpets. :-)
That said yes, if you know this is your life, you'll of course do things differently. And of course if you've been born into it, then that's just how things are, you don't even notice most of it.
Still... I prefer being able to open the tap to walking two miles to get fresh water. Little things like that.
First, I'm not an expert on the subject, not even particularily interested. I've just gathered a few things here and there.
I think you dramatically underestimate the work of the hunter-gathere and overestimate the work of the modern men, mostly because you use different definitions.
You spend 8 hours a day at the office. During the week. How many of those hours do you really work, and how many of them are socializing with co-workers, Facebook, /. or goofing off? Let's be honest here, the average office worker does not spend all 8 hours working.
I don't think you're done with 2 hours of hunting or gathering, either. It depends on location and other details, but at least in Africa, early men and many still existing primitive tribes are persistence hunters, which can take all day.
You conveniently forget things like gathering water, which sometimes (again, depending on location) can take a few hours by itself.
You also conveniently forget that due to division of labor, most of the maintenance work of modern life is already included in your daily work, because with the money you earn there you go and buy stuff ready-made instead of having to make it yourself.
If you have a grand- or grand-grand-mother still alive, ask her about washing clothes before the washing machine was invented.
And you also assume that there's a strict split between work and leisure time. I'm probably not alone in saying that for most of my life, I've actually enjoyed my work, and I do it not just for the money but also because it gives me pleasure and purpose and challenge.
I simply don't think there is an easy comparison. I'm saying that all things considered, I would not want to switch places. Maybe the tribesmen wouldn't want to, either, and that's fine with me. Or maybe he would, you'll have to ask him, not me.
Don't forget that life expectancy figures in child mortality and that is high in all pre-modern cultures. Yeah, once you've made it past 5 or so, you could reasonably expect to see 40 or 50.
It's not only about hard work. It's also about famine and disease, for example. Not having to work hard is cool - until you suddenly have to just in order to not fucking die.
There's some truth to both sides, as usual.
I spend quite a bit of my time outdoors, averaging a few weeks a year, often with no electricity, gas-powered cooking and living in a tent. It is definitely beautiful in its own way and I'm always happy to go - and I'm equally happy to come back to a warm, dry home with a hot shower.
The dark ages were called that for a reason, one of them being that it was a step backwards from what civilization had already accomplished. The ancient greek lived better in many ways than the medieval europeans 1000 years later.
But even if you take the best period in pre-modern human history, I wouldn't want to switch, at least not permanently. There's still disease and pain and war, crime rates are crazy compared to today (ignore the news, they are lying, google Steven Pinker for a scholarly analysis) and let's not even get started about the ignorance and the dominance of religion over daily life. Plus you'd be very lucky indeed to visit another country once in your lifetime, as someone else posted your meals would have a fraction of the variety they have today, and so on and so forth.
One has a life expectancy of 30-odd years, the other of 70+. He has access to literature, art and music from all over the world. If he breaks his leg, he is transported to a hospital, gets a cast and will be well again in a short time instead of getting an infection and having a 50-50 chance of surviving.
We have romantic thoughts about prior times mostly because we forget all the shit about them. Your average medieval market fair doesn't include the open-latrines, your village getting burnt down in one of the constant wars, the fact that women had a reasonably high chance to die when giving birth or the simple fact that most likely everyone reeked to high heavens. Or just the fact that 90% of us would be pig farmers or something.
I know what I'd pick if given a choice. If you think different, pick a tribe, learn their language and go and live with them for a few years.
You can totally work a few hours a day to satisfy basic needs and spend the rest doing whatever you want. Of course it will probably mean not being able to buy the latest smartphone every year or going on expensive holiday trips, or very much medical care or a car - but then, the tribesmen do without those as well, right?
That's a good point. An UI system has to be familiar to the user, and what is familiar changes over time.
But that's the visual appearance angle. Other things remain, like the state having to be clearly identifyable and a control element having to appear as such.
it's interesting to see modern UIs adopting some of the idioms that testing in the early 90s showed were awful (e.g. Gtk+ 3's state toggles).
Interesting but unfortunately not uncommon. I worked with the Gnome UI design group for a short time during the early days and basically gave up because of people with more enthusiasm than knowledge dominating the mailing list.
User interface design is a typical bikeshed problem. Everyone things it's not that difficult and he can do it and few people realize just how much effort and expertise goes into it. Heck, "Human-Computer Interaction" (Dox, Finlay, Abowd, Beale) is 800 pages.
I wish IArchitect's user interface hall of shame were still around.
Did you seriously see anything there that wasn't painfully obvious?
Many design failures were made because people thought testing wasn't necessary because things were obvious. It's better to throw a few thousand bucks at a design test than botching a product because you didn't. That failure would be at least a hundred times as expensive.
More like the fact that CAD software packages cost many thousands of dollars, and no good free alternatives exist.
Cheetah 3D is like 70 bucks and I've used it to create models for 3D printing.
It's not free, but if you're into 3D printing then 70 bucks is nothing as everything else involved costs you a lot more.
Yes. Flash crashes are basically positive feedback loops at 10,000 rpm.
Considering the volume of data inherent, the 'capacity' of a slot can be pretty damn high as to be inexhaustible from a practical perspective. Sure, the code should have a contingency for the condition and that should be tested, but it is unlikely to be a frequently hit contingency.
One thing I can guarantee is that if exhausting the capacity would give a trader any kind of advantage in any way, then it will be done.
The computer systems these people have put up are incredibly. They can easily bring your trading system to a halt if they are determined to do that.
If the whole point is to be x microseconds ahead of the other guys wouldn't a 500 ms delay simply mean the exact same game would become 'after 500 ms, still be a few microseconds ahead of the other guys'.
No, because HFT works by exploiting the tiniest of price differences and they are likely to vanish in those 500 ms.
I would imagine a more effective approach would be to process trades 4 times per second. A request for a trade always gets processed in the slot after the next slot (meaning no less than a 250 ms delay, but no more than 500 ms delay). Within a given slot of trading activity, randomly shuffle the requests so that someone beating someone else by less than 250 ms doesn't actually affect things.
That would work as well, but is more complicated and you could run into trouble when your slots reach capacity.
This.
Anything predictable will just be gamed. These people have made a multi-billion dollar business out of gaming the system. You'd have to be insane to assume they'll just pack up and leave on the first sign of resistance.
Introduce randomness into the system and put a tiny tax (one professor of the field recommended 0.01%) on trades even if they don't complete. Because HFT also does a lot of trade-ohwaitIdidntmeanit-cancel abuse. Sometimes thousands of orders per second that they never had any intention to actually completing. Their margins on each trade are tiny, so even the smallest transaction tax will drive them out of business. Meanwhile, honest traders won't care. If you buy stock for 5k and pay 50cents additional tax on that, you're highly unlikely to be the slightest bit bothered.
Teaching kids programming is a total and complete waste of money.
Those who are interested will learn by themselves. Those who aren't, won't even if you make it mandatory. But the unintended consequences are what's going to get you: Everyone will think that programming is easy because it's something the kids learn.
School should teach basic skills that can then be applied to programming, but also to a long list of other skills. Teach critical thinking, logic, math. Teach people how to learn, not what. Teach them reading comprehension so they can study on their own. Teach them trial-and-error and that failure is an option because it teaches you what you did wrong.
Most of all, don't solve a shortage of programmers by creating a million bad and counterproductive ones. You don't solve a shortage of doctors by giving random people scalpels and a license to cut open bellies, do you?
Good programmers are a lot more difficult to find than any programmer. I'd rather hire one good guy then five students for the same price.