pbkhrv's comments

On Linux there is a nice little utility called “tree” https://packages.debian.org/stable/tree Not sure about Mac or Windows.

Grassroots-level adoption was key for things like Dropbox, IMHO - it solved a real need for individual people and it worked well and was easy to use. Same for Docker - developers adopted it in droves, and then enterprises followed.

Inrupt is trying to bootstrap a two-sided marketplace of sorts: product builders won't care until enough potential customers demand support for the "data pods", and regular people won't care until "data pods" solve real everyday problems for them.

Hopefully Inrupt's team has enough business-savvy people on it to find ways to gain traction to slog through some of the tough early stages of the product adoption cycle.

> "In many ways, 2017 marked the year that cryptocurrency stopped being about technologically innovative peer-to-peer cash and instead essentially became a new, unregulated penny stock market."

I don't think it stopped being about tech innovation - there is a ton of stuff happening around proof-of-stake, layer 2 networks, state channels etc. It's just that the stories around the speculative aspects of the cryptocurrency assets have been dominating in 2017.

My toddler is allowed about a half hour of cartoons on Youtube on the big TV per day. He's played with the iPad a few times in his life. Lots of books and Legos and physical toys in our house. Waiting for longitudinal studies to come out, not taking chances with the little brain.

Every other month I go on a media diet: no social media, no news, no unnecessary browsing of any kind - only books and a small number of podcasts are allowed (plus whatever Internet usage is necessary for work). I've been doing this for more than a year now, and it has helped me feel a lot less "fragmented". I highly recommend it.

Wait, so if I run a Go-playing program from 10 years ago on the AlphaGo cluster then it'll produce better results than it did 10 years ago?

> but what's to stop us from cloning big chunks of our civilizations... simulating them, but using vastly less power/resources for each simulation? Then writing software to have them pass knowledge among the civilizations? We have just a few hundred countries, what if we had a trillion communicating at the speed of computer circuitry?

The principle of computational irreducibility [1] is what will stop us from "cloning" civilizations. That and chaos theory - any tiny deviation in initial conditions of such a simulation or cloning process could produce unusable results.

"simulating them, but using vastly less power/resources" is a pipe dream.

[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComputationalIrreducibility.htm...

> If we have a computer program that is able to design better hardware, it can be improved by simply moving it to better hardware.

Could you please elaborate? What is it about "better hardware" that makes software that runs on it "better"? Can you define "better"?

But we, humans, aren't going at anything like the speed of light. What if we tweaked our DNA to produce human beings with the working memory capacity of 50 items instead of the normal 7-ish [1]? One such researcher would be able to work faster, on more problems at once, and to consider more evidence and facts. The next bottleneck for that person, of course, would be the input/output capacity (reading, writing, typing, communicating), but even with those limitations, I bet they would be a lot more efficient than the average "normal" human. The question is - would you call such a person more "intelligent"?

[1] http://www.human-memory.net/types_short.html

> Our environment, which determines how our intelligence manifests itself, puts a hard limit on what we can do with our brains — on how intelligent we can grow up to be, on how effectively we can leverage the intelligence that we develop, on what problems we can solve.

Consider internet to be the "new" environment, full of highly complex social networks, millions of applications to interact with etc. Our brains are way too limited to be able to deal with it. There's an opportunity for a much more powerful intelligence to arise that CAN effectively process that volume of data and appear to be a lot more intelligent in that particular context.

It's a firewall for attention. One day somebody will build an app like that for AR glasses.

None of the 15" Precision series laptops linked from that page seem to be available with Linux on their dedicated sales pages... Weird.

Edit: they don't list Linux as being available until you go to "Customize and Buy".

> Are there any movements to combat this and prevent more local papers and tv stations from becoming smaller delivery mechanisms for the same partisan bullshit?

Not sure about movements, but maybe build products and systems and infrastructure that would enable smaller newspapers and tv stations to make money while staying independent? Better crowdfunding, micropayments, better paywalls, better media distribution channels, tools for local communities to get involved? Bottom-up solutions like these are hard to implement, because they are decentralized and require an active base, but can be done.

On a cynical note, "young men immersed in alternate reality" is also an opportunity:

- It's a rapidly growing market

- those people will eventually need financial support systems beyond family - new forms of annuities?

- more demand for "gig economy" type jobs

- demand for jobs that can be done inside virtual realities that are better suited for humans instead of robots - this one is a stretch

- more demand for on-demand "life support" services - food, cleaning, medical, sex

This is veering into dark-ish dystopian territory, so imma stop now.

I'm with you, to some degree. By "solving problems" I was referring to the parent comment's phrase "provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved", which I read as "let (vague, unidentified) them solve the scarcity problem while I play video games".

> and starting your career in your 20s without an inherently marketable skill is terrifying for most people

Not as terrifying as starting your career in your 40s without an inherently marketable skill because 20s and 30s were spent playing video games...

> provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved (which I'd bet we'd be able to pull off).

I'm curious as to how we can pull that off given that an ever increasing percentage of young smart capable people are opting out of solving real world problems in favor of "toiling over their virtual realities"...

> Perhaps the "index subsystem" and "placement subsystem" are small enough for full-scale tests to be tractable, but certainly not cheap, and how often do you run it?

Rough guide:

CT = cost of 1 full scale test with necessary infrastructure and labor costs added up

CF = amount of money paid out in SLA claims + subjective estimate of business lost due to reputation damage etc

PF = estimate of probability of this event happening in a given year

if PF * CF > CT, then you run such a test at least once a year. Think of such an expense as an insurance premium.

What Netflix does with their simian army is amortize the cost of doing the test across millions of tests per year and the extra design complications arising from having to deal with failures that often.

Mainstream religions have been advocating various forms of fasting for centuries. Thank you science for explaining why and how it works.

You missed the second part: "But that was in the days of IPOs, now the investors prefer to keep the rise in equity to themselves. So you chances of winning the lottery are much less."