noam87

Don't read it end-to-end like a novel. It's a great book to keep around. Open it, every once in a while (even at a random page), read a passage or two, think about it, and go on with your day. Over time the ideas seep in and really change how you approach certain aspects of life, I've found.

What do you use? -- I've tried with lynx and its ilk but I find that too many websites these days are completely broken without javascript, and the layout often unreadable without CSS.

I've been a (paying) user of NewsBlur (https://newsblur.com/) since Google Reader shut down and haven't looked back.

p.s: In HN spirit, it also happens to be one developer's side-project-turned-profitable-business, and the "social" features a totally non-intrusive, but there if you want to know what people are sharing and commenting on.

Perfect time to start moving (and contributing) to decentralized services.

I've been following the development of https://beakerbrowser.com and I really hope it captures wider attention. -- It's not just super user friendly already, it's actually easier to set up a Beaker website than one on the regular net (literally one click).

Idris?

It can compile small enough to run on an Arduino: https://github.com/stepcut/idris-blink

> "really understanding" is just something a computer program thinks it can do once it gets complex enough to be conscious.

At the same time, consciousness might not be a requisite of higher intelligence at all; it could merely have been evolutionarily advantageous early on in the development of complex brains because of our natural environment... it's hard to imagine an intelligent animal with no "me" program doing very well.

But maybe a digital intelligence (one that did not evolve having to worry about feeding itself, acquiring rare resources, mating, communicating socially, etc.) would have no use for a central "me" program that "really experiences" things.

Such a creature is kind of eerie to think about.

considering YouTube makes me watch 25 seconds of advertising for a 40 second video... could be a lot.

Anecdotal: nothing helped my IBS. Dietary changes, exercise, nothing. Drs said nothing looked wrong. By the time I was 26, it was so bad I would stay home and not socialize often. I would need immodium like candy just to get through a social function. It was truly a nightmare. I was ready to give up.

4000 UI vitamin D a day, and about four weeks in it magically goes away 90%. I've gotten thanks from other people I passed the tip to.

Incidentally, the symptoms started abruptly about a year and a half before my diagnosis of melanoma; another disease with a vitamin D link.

This article has too many holes to count and reads more like someone in denial.

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BUT, as an aside: I think a decent argument exists for the non-certainty of intelligence explosion.

The argument goes like this: it takes an intelligence of level X to engineer an intelligence of level X+1.

First, it may well be that humans are not an intelligence of level X, and reach our limit before we engineer an intelligence superior to our own.

Furthermore, even if we do, it may also be that it takes an intelligence of level X+2 to engineer an intelligence of level X+2 (Etc. for some intelligence level X+n.), in which case we at most end up with an AI only somewhat superior to ourselves, but no God-like singularity (for example, we end up with Data from Star Trek TNG, who in season 3, episode 16 fails to engineer an offspring superior to himself -- sure, Data is far superior to his human peers in some aspects, but not crushingly so).

> Brutal? Sounds like a regular blue collar job.

Which is to say: brutality is regular.

While of course the current move towards exposing harassment in the office is important, I don't hear much recognition that the people getting the most benefit are those whose prospects are already cushy to begin with... how much of this is actually "tricking down" to people working in often dehumanizing conditions?

I worked minimum wage until my mid-20's, and most of my high school friends didn't do college (or even graduate high school, in some cases); my parents (who both hold degrees) also worked in warehouses and stuff like that for a while when we first immigrated. In many jobs, being treated like trash, bullied, etc. is the norm. Being constantly talked down to and treated like a child is certainly the norm. And the sexual harassment stories are also much more frequent, and much worse. But people at the lower rungs don't have the social capital to take to Twitter safely, jump ship to a different company, etc. Doing so risks losing next month's bills, losing a good reference, etc. So it's just the way it is.

And I'm talking here in Canada where we have much better worker protection laws, so I can only assume it's even worse in the US.

Same with workplace safety. Sure, on paper you have the right to refuse unsafe work. But don't be surprised if all of a sudden you start getting less hours or get reprimanded for "not being a team player" or some crap.

There's no denying they promote a certain narrative in their PR, but are there known examples of leaks withheld by Wiki Leaks, where the whistleblower had to go elsewhere?

Eve looks interesting, thanks I'll try it out. (And the detailed response.)

Most of my programming is in the domain of "take some data, do stuff to it, produce an output" and my experience with Idris so far is very positive -- more so than Haskell (which I admittedly gave up on early on), the language does feel ergonomic, and like the type system is "guiding me" rather than getting in the way. I also find its approach to metaprogramming interesting. Whether this translates to Real World™ productivity / maintainability gains vs a mainstream language, it's too early for me to compare.

Pron, what are the better alternatives / more promising lines of research you keep referring to?

Heh, I've had the same thought (https://noamswebsite.com/r/books/). We are physical beings after all; at the end of the day our nervous system evolved for the sole purpose of helping our bodies do stuff within a a physical world.

I hope soon with augmented reality I can get the best of both worlds and, for example, point at a word on my book and immediately hear the definition.

I've noticed it too with a friend's TV. Some shows / movies become unwatchable because it's so distracting. -- I think part of it is that many of the artificialities of the screen become too obvious: the lighting, the makeup, the fact that many elements on a set a plastic / CG, oddities in perspective, etc... all of these elements are "fuzzed up" by a lower resolution and FPS, forcing your brain to fill in the gaps -- ironically more convincingly.

Sometimes in art, less really is more. Many modern Sci-Fi flicks fail to achieve that feeling of wonder precisely because they are shooting for too much realism in their special effects, I think. The problem is not CGI itself, but the technology does seem to make it too tempting for the filmmakers to fill in blanks that are perhaps better left up to the viewers' imagination.

I have, but I'm no security expert so perhaps I'm not seeing something obvious. -- Do you have a specific attack in mind? Is it an insurmountable vulnerability?

If so you can just explain it (or report it).

I don't know the internals of IPFS DHT implementation, but the whitepaper mentions Kadmelia and Coral. Coral tries to optimize for ping latency (you're not literally fetching from nearest geographical neighbor, I simplified to make a point).

Unless I misunderstand your point, but honestly it seems like people here are engaging more in "gotcha" nay-saying than honest efforts of criticism... it would've taken you two minutes of googling to find out this is a non-issue.

> Last I checked IPFS will not tolerate minute long latencies and requires a bandwidth above several kilobits per second. [...] It isn't hosted unless atleast one person keeps a copy online.

And the vacuum tubes in my Colossus might overheat at that rate too! -- Damn, you're right, we're just not smart enough to solve those problems.

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edit:

> Does sarcasm prove your point?

Fair enough, sarcastic Parthian shot removed. I get overexcited sometimes.

If data isn't embarrassingly cheap before mid-century we did something terribly wrong. Ditto electricity / battery life by the end of century.

(and again: content-addressing could drastically reduce data usage anyway.)

- Even assuming all this, a hybrid approach of HTTP + IPFS (or DAT) is still better than what we have now, since IPFS is essentially a worldwide CDN for static files.(Sorry: an inter-planetary one.)

- The content-addressing aspect makes it perfect for distributing commonly used libraries.

- We already cache all this content locally. What a waste! Why do I have to fetch jQuery from fricking California when it's sitting on my girlfriend's phone in the other room?

- This extends beyond the web: think about the benefits (both in security, practicality, and performance) of content addressing introduced into package managers (take it one step further even: combine this idea with the new move towards reproducible builds (https://reproducible-builds.org) and package managers like guix and nix and things get really interesting).

- It's actually easier to use for the average person. If you don't think this is the case I propose a simple experiment: download the beaker browser and set up a simple static site. I recently did this. It really is one-click hosting! Considering how complicated web hosting is to the average person (ever try to walk a friend through setting up a website? not. fun.) -- people would love to be able to set up personal websites this easily... and for free?

- As others have mentioned, there are many solutions being worked on for the mirroring of data (Filecoin etc).

- For websites that are visited regularly, this is not an issue -- all content is cached temporarily. It suddenly becomes basically free to serve an audience of millions... again: with one click.

- If history serves as precedent, if it does fail it would be in spite of being an objectively superior, practical solution. Getting a critical mass of people on this thing is the hardest problem to figure out. -- I suspect package management, academic data are the best place to start, then one-click personal hosting -- not even think about "apps" for now.

- Didn't you just read the web is about to go permanent? Do you really want to be archived for all history as one more nay-sayer? ;)

This is silly. Just because most people spend their time on the same handful of platforms, doesn't mean there's not plenty of traffic going to smaller websites. (In fact, in absolute terms, more traffic than ever.)

Nobody today is stopping you from hosting a forum about hobby endangered snail breeding from a Raspberry Pi in your closet if you want. I'm sure you've met people who make decent money off of niche websites -- and even giants like YouTube and Gmail have modest competition. Sure, not competition that's gonna eat their lunch, but does every business have to Take Over The World™ to be considered a success?

A few websites capturing most of the public's attention is to be expected to a certain extent: for better or worse, it's always been the case that a handful of media companies lead the conversation (that's why it's called "popular culture").

AWS increasingly monopolizing the web's hardware is something to worry about much more IMO; but so long as they don't get special treatment they can be circumvented.

I've been thinking recently that there is exists a completely unxplored market in tech. Local shops based around FOSS / open hardware where designers, hardware and software people work together to build custom projects for their clients. I would call this person a "technology artisan", because the closest analogue I can think of is a tailor or a carpinter.

So, for example, a family would go to their local technology artisan to put together a smart home system tailored specifically to their needs. Or perhaps a local band would commision some custom-made Raspberry Pi-based synthesizer with fancy lights for a show (https://youtu.be/_nBK8sAl9nw)

To the consumer, it would mean not only devices tailored to their needs, but also ones that are cheap and simple to get repaired and extended, because they would be based on open standards. No lock-ins, no secret surveilance.

What makes me think this is possible is how big the hobby space is around all these hackable technologies (raspberry pi / arduino, 3D printing, electronics)... people are already building home media centres and farm bots in their back yard just for fun. Hacker spaces are already a thing -- make them a service!

Synthetic biology.

Reminds of what the people of Red lang are trying to achieve: http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html?m=1

Maybe I'll finally give it a try!

Every once in a while I daydream about a sort of "distributed app platform" built on top of Scheme and IPFS. -- Perhaps Red would actually be perfect for this...

What field?

The level of ignorance and /r/iamverysmart-worthy pontificating that's on display in this thread is truly embarrassing.

Worse than embarrassing, it's the embodiment of banal evil; because it's precisely this ignorance and blitheness that's enabling the atrocities that continue to go on in South America.

For Christ's sake, people, travel -- or read a damn book at the very least before sharing such ill-founded opinions.

Except for rare uncontacted tribes, South American natives are actual people you can meet and talk to. Ask them yourself why they choose not to join our wonderful shiny way of life.

Yes, this thread is a fucking embarrassment.

> And they've already had multiple generations to assimilate.

And choose not to. They understand perfectly well what our culture has to offer, and want no part in it. Get it?

What are some good readings / places to start on this topic?

This week has really lowered my opinion of this industry and its members (and people in general, once again). From the flimsy and arrogant arguments presented on one side, to the inexcusable hysteria and verbal abuse coming from the other.

I've lost trust and respect for developers I followed and had for some reason assumed were level-headed adults.

This is highschool stuff guys. It's embarrassing.

More generally, if we can't trust our most capable minds to not act like children and blood-thirsty mobs, what hope is there for general discource as a society.