proofofstake's comments

> Facebook collects on you when you interact with their systems

I do not think this is true. What happens with my e-mail address when someone else signs up to Facebook and shares their contact list (with my e-mail address in it)?

How did Facebook know who my friends are the very moment I signed in, without sharing my address list?

They already have collected information on my social graph, without my own explicit permission, but with implicit permission from less tech-savy friends.

And that's nothing to say about people tagging me in Facebook pictures to train their giant DeepFace algorithm.

In both scenario's I am not accessing or interacting with a Facebook system, while my information is still being abused.

I am in this Kafka-esque situation where I try to get an account deleted that is not even mine. I don't have and want a Facebook account, but Facebook does not agree.

I few years back I started receiving mail for an account that I never created. The name is not close to mine, but a silly sexual pun.

I have mailed security and account support multiple times, asking for the account to be deleted, or decoupled from my email address, because I keep getting login attempt notifications and even friend suggestions.

Just checking, and coincidentally the very last email is one for the Facebook account. "Hey, it seems you are having trouble logging in! Click here to sign in.". Yes, Facebook, someone, for whatever reason, is trying to log in to a Facebook account for 4 years now, and won't take no for an answer... "If this wasn't you, please let us know by clicking here". Ok, Facebook, this is not me, and it was not me the last 10 times I clicked that button.

(I now assume, that this account is somehow being used to mine my social connections. Something like a public ghost account.)

Timeline:

2013: Hi Fuck, you got more friends on Facebook than you realize! List of 6 people I know IRL.

2013: Hi Fuck, you have 1 friendship request. Log in to accept.

2013: Do you know [3 people I know]?

2013: Hi Fuck, Fuck placed something on your timeline and is waiting to see it.

2013: Do you know [9 people I know]?

2014: We've updated our Terms of Service

2015: Someone asked a new password for your account.

2017: Hey Fuck, it seems you are having trouble logging in.

2017: Hey Fuck, it seems someone tried logging into your account from a new location.

2017: Hey Fuck, we received your request to reset your account password. XXXXX is your reset code.

2017: Fuck, go back to Facebook in just one click.

2017: Hey Fuck, it seems you are having trouble logging in.

http://proceedings.mlr.press/v67/li17a.html is pretty good.

Scientists from fields that rely on data, like physics, often do well as data scientists.

I myself like Information Science more than Data Science, but I do not care that much for semantics. There was a need to specify a role of someone who makes sense out of data, gathers insights, using the tools from mathematics, computer science, statistics, and information theory. It's also a different type of science, data-driven science, as opposed to theoretical/metaphysical, empirical, or computational science.

There was an old joke that AI stood for Advanced Informatics. I think the commercialization of the term "AI" is a bit harmful and obfuscating. Companies tumble over one another to market their professionals as Applied AI or their products as AI. AI is the automation of human thought. It includes philosophy and cognitive science, both fields seem completely missing for applied AI.

I know many AI researchers already switched to calling themselves ML researchers a few years back. This, because the field of AI became muddied with futurist adherents of the Singularity. Did not help that the public perception of AI is somewhere between "Skynet is coming!" and "AI will take my job". Nowadays, ML is also heavily saturated and hyped beyond repair. Meanwhile the field of AI has not even solved the common sense problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonsense_knowledge_(artific...

But that's putting the cart before the horse. You need the ICO to get enough investment to build out your platform, when you have a fully functioning platform, who still needs investment?

And if a platform is a prerequisite: Just build the barest possible platform MVP, much like a pre-launch landing page.

See also this 1996 NSA paper "How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash", predating both Hashcash and Bit gold.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money...

(and OP seems factually correct: Satoshi was the inventor of Bitcoin).

Nice quip. To stick with analogy: Some people in this thread are in the 70s, telling record companies to ignore the disco genre entirely, because it is a fad that can't last more than a decade. Instead, telling them to stick with what they know: 50s rock and roll.

A slot machine is known to give a 200% ROI and allow a single pull each day. You play this slot machine every day for 500 days, until you notice it stops rewarding you.

Then someone says: "Look I told you so, I've been telling everyone for 2000 days now: This slot machine will crash one day!". And you say: "Ok. You were right. Guess the party couldn't last forever. Thanks for the warning!". Out of habit you play for 30 more days, but the rewards stay gone, so you exit with some nice profit.

Meanwhile, the other person knew of the existence of a highly profitable slot machine, while it was still profitable, but never actually played it, because they feared that one day it may not be profitable anymore.

Agreed, and there probably will be a year where nearly all coins tank. It would be foolish to invest all your profits back into the market, year after year.

But should this stop you (or any investment firm) to seriously look at the profit potential here? What do you get for correctly calling the bubble in 3 years? Nothing.

I agree with:

> The crypto market is still niche. There are stocks that make 100-1000% performance. But the stock market is "saturated" for representing assets, equities and companies. So its growth is limited.

so I do not see how my post was wrong. These are the numbers. With such numbers, it would be foolish to discard the crypto market as "too volatile" and stick with stocks.

There are crypto coins that did way better than Strat, but there was not enough volume to make a decent profit. Even Doge did 260%. The only "loser" is STEEM with a 80% ROI.

ROI of creating an investment portfolio 1 year ago, and selling today:

- All Bitcoin: ~500%

- Mix of top market: ~2800%

- All Strat: ~13500%

Meanwhile, stock investors call 12% a good year.

> why it took them this long

There is no direct business value in banning users from your platform. In fact, doing so is a short-term net negative.

This is also why Twitter was so slow to ban bots: you gain a fraction of satisfaction for your users that interact with annoying bots, at the cost of dwindling user numbers.

> suspending accounts that are politically opposing to their worldview

Because highly visible users of their platform (verified celebrities) started DMing the CEO and threatened to leave if bullies were not dealt with. Creating a safe space for the social elite is very much adding business value to Twitter and makes investors happy.

I think Twitter just awaited the US government reaction, and took as long as the law / future business prospects allowed them. That Twitter propaganda has become a major problem for the intelligence agencies and anti-terrorism units is evident. It takes a long time to properly deal with these problems, just like Twitter will probably take years to combat astro-turfing bots meddling with a foreign election (which seems to me, the logical next step in the evolution of mass automatic banning of problematic accounts).

While not quite planning, announcements do occur. Found a large number of accounts connected to the attackers from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack

when it was ongoing.

Minutes before the attack:

> #texasattack: "May Allah accept us as mujahideen."

Minutes after:

> Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire.

Also saw Salafists retweet an old cartoon by Charlie Hebdo of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hours before the Charlie Hebdo shooting occurred.

I'm divided about this issue. One the one hand, I've seen accounts that glorify the Paris attacks and link to bomb making materials, on the other hand, I've seen lots of video's from Syria and Palestine which does indeed radicalize youth, but is also not directly terrorist propaganda (a lot of this is newsworthy, but does not end up in the news, so it is valuable to share on social media). Should linking to an Anwar al-Awlaki video be grounds for a ban? Remember, these videos are on Youtube.

I like to think back 10-15 years when people had to self-host their websites. Stuff that, back then, would surely get you a knock on the door, slips through daily on social networks. I say: If you can't host it yourself, you can't rely on a third party to host it for you and protect your anonymity.

So yes, chase them underground, and apply more serious tracking to those that are acting more seriously (someone on Telegram writing about terrorism is way more serious than someone on Twitter writing about terrorism). Try to keep social media free of war propaganda. And be careful to not overdo it. America is a country where writing a Facebook post about Apple interspersed with quotes from Fight Club can get you SWATted [1].

[1] http://nyconvergence.com/2011/06/ny-man-uses-fight-club-quot...

An example of what I was aiming at is to use ML methods like deep nets to detect early-onset diabetic retinopathy. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness and at least 90% of new cases could be reduced with early detection and proper treatment. [1]

Especially in third world countries where there is no eye doctor in sight, these cheap automated methods can be deployed on a mobile phone and achieve near-human expert level accuracy. [2]

Then organizations like Watsi can use data science and predictive modeling to reduce fraud and get both detection and treatments to those most in need. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetic_retinopathy

[2] http://blog.kaggle.com/2015/09/09/diabetic-retinopathy-winne...

[3] https://dssg.uchicago.edu/

About IBM Watson, the entire thing is unfortunate, I completely agree. Their marketing department upsold IBM Watson for cancer treatment. But I know that a lot of great research scientists worked at IBM on Watson. What they were doing was legit advancing machine learning too. That's the thing about marketing: if IBM were to deploy 10.000 phones with a neural net to improve early detection of disease in a third world country, I probably won't even hear about it, and I work with ML. But for IBM Watson, everybody and their grandmother goes: That's the AI that beat Jeopardy. It's a thin line between being majorly successful in marketing and crossing the line into damaging your reputation and goodwill (or in this case: the entire ML industry).

Sure there is! ML helps with medical diagnosis, cures, and treatment, ML helps automate services that are unavailable to third world countries, ML helps catch criminals, money laundering, and fraudsters, ML saves wasteful energy consumption, ML improves customer support, ML helps optimize resources to focus on those in immediate need, ML supports science like high-energy physics, ML creates a new generation of digital artists.

All good uses of ML, but maybe not so sexy.

I bet the majority of ML is used neutrally: to add business value to a company. Depending on your view of capitalism of course.

Please, make it possible to directly report or ban automated DM messages from bots/apps.

There is probabilistic vs. deterministic cross-device tracking.

Deterministic assigns a unique device identifier to each device and then uses more data to connect device IDs to an individual.

Probabilistic cross-device tracking uses machine learning algorithms to match up devices and identities. For this they can use basically any data that you happen to give them, including behavioral data (you check a website both at home and during transit on your mobile phone, you use the mouse to select text during reading an article, you accidentally gave an application access to your location data and they have resold this, etc.). Probabilistic cross-device tracking can work with and without cookies. Of course ad companies employing these techniques for their customers claim very optimistic accuracy, but know that the accuracy is at least accurate enough to provide them with useful tracking data on individuals. This accuracy will go up if you push ad companies in a corner and confront them with a 10% (or whatever marketshare Apple browsers have) non-cookie-able surfers (as opposed to a fringe small sample of users that block cookies and did so for years).

When cookies got banned/required permission in Europe, European websites just started buggering everyone to accept cookies before you were able to read what you were coming for. While everyone already had the option to only allow cookies from trusted domains, now everybody gets pestered with giant pop-ups. Companies also switched to server-side analytics/tracking, or started requiring log-in to track you.

If cookies were accepted, one could just join a cookie swap program to mess with the advertisers. Probabilistic cross-device tracking is very hard to avoid, as not using javascript and a general browser like TorBrowser is also an informative fingerprint. And you can't realistically change your browsing habits, which exposes you to gender and age identification (they need this to identify individuals in a household using a single IP).

The end result for the customer is that the ad industry will switch to cross-device tracking for everyone.

Right now, you had an option to opt-out, by setting cookies to block. You were relatively safe.

Now the default will become a net of machine learning algorithms which can track you cross-device without requiring cookies. It is not possible to safeguard against that, unless you completely randomize your online browsing behavior.

Maybe in the short term, longer term it is no trouble. ICOs are far from the main use case for Ethereum. Speculation is driven by the price not close to matching the price if/when the technology matures. If anything, most ICOs pull money from Ethereum, they don't make the price go up.

Being interested in tokens for their "features" not the price is very archaic. This also does not happen with stocks anymore: People hold for a few months/days/minutes, then sell, they don't sit on stock for many years like we used to.

My guess: China will allow ICOs after drafting up proper legislation and regulation. It would not benefit China's economy to blanket ban a new emerging technology. They just want to prevent crypto as a way to move money out of China, take a cut of the profit.

Another guess: Regulation will be good for established players (like Ethereum and 2016/2017 ICOs), but bad for speculators and newcomers. It will thus shoot past its intended goal of protecting investors: Those who like to gamble with money they can't afford to lose will find other get-rich-quick schemes unrelated to crypto. In Las Vegas you are actually sure to eventually lose all your money.