Category: society
line goes up
Crypto and its problems
“Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs” - Folding Ideas
and
[M]arkets are distributed systems.
Even though there are, in fact, very strict regulators and regulations, I can still enter into a contract with you without ever telling anyone. I can buy something from you, in cash, and nobody needs to know. (Tax authorities merely want to know, and anyway, notifying them is asynchronous and lossy.) Prices are set through peer-to-peer negotiation and supply and demand, almost automatically, through what some call an “invisible hand.” It’s really neat.
As long as we’re in the continuous control region.
As long as the regulators are doing their job.
Here’s what everyone peddling the new trendy systems is so desperately trying to forget, that makes all of them absurdly expensive and destined to fail, even if the things we want from them are beautiful and desirable and well worth working on. Here is the very bad news:
Regulation is a centralized function.
The job of regulation is to stop distributed systems from going awry.
Because distributed systems always go awry
…
I find myself linking to this article way too much lately, but here it is again: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. You should read it. The summary is that in any system, if you don’t have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one.
Despite my ongoing best efforts, I have never seen any exception to this rule.
Even the fanciest pantsed distributed databases, with all the Rafts and Paxoses and red/greens and active/passives and Byzantine generals and dining philosophers and CAP theorems, are subject to this. You can do a bunch of math to absolutely prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that your database is completely distributed and has no single points of failure. There are papers that do this. You can do it too. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
<several PhDs later>
Okay, great. Now skip paying your AWS bill for a few months.
Whoops, there’s a hierarchy after all!
Tô Minh Sơn’s comment on apenwarr:
“Men prefer to will nothingness than to not will”
and also pointed me to chainalysis’s ranking of crypto adoption with Vietnam being on top
conflict theorists
People who vie for power are locked in the most obvious zero sum game in existence, and so they’re necessarily conflict theorists. People who have no lust for power themselves and try to explain the world in terms of mistake theory are basically forced to speculate that Power does not exist at all except as epiphenomenon of some poor coordination or whatever, or does not matter. It exists and matters a great deal, however, and shapes the way they live and think, and seeks to triumph over them ever harder. They just don’t know yet.
the shopping cart
The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it.
No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you, or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.
A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it.
The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society.
As To Minh Son says: “4chan shit”
baby boomer christmases
- some guy on reddit
democracy as a terminal value
telling people that they only get to win elections if they vote for things they don’t actually want is isomorphic to telling them they don’t get to vote. The point of voting is securing one’s preferences. If voting can’t do that, voting is pointless.
I do not believe anyone involved in this discussion at any level considers democracy itself as a terminal value. If a durable 75% majority of Americans supported reinstating slavery of a specific ethnic/racial group, it would be madness to expect the other 25% to simply accept this outcome because them’s the rules, so whaddya gonna do? If you convince people that they do not have a reasonable hope of achieving their preferences through the political system, they will work to achieve those preferences through other systems.
- /u/FCfromSSC
society is not ready 2
I had a thought the other day, that if there really is a Superman. he would have used his superhearing and hear the cries and whispers of people locked in cellars/basement all over the world.
I dare WarnerBrothers to make a movie about that.
society is not ready
The impact of sexual abuse on female development: a longitudinal study - HN thread
I was once in a law lecture on medical ethics. We were discussing genetic testing of newborns and how this could detect incest/abuse. A medical doctor in the class was dead against such testing. In his experience, amongst pregnant teenagers (17 and younger) about 10% were pregnant by their own fathers/brothers. His opinion was that our society is not ready to deal with this, that such abuse is far more common than anyone is willing to admit. He actually said: You better build some more prisons before you start testing babies for this.
- sandworm101
they are talking about that big cat
A couple years back, one of the big cats at the local zoo escaped his enclosure. High on freedom, he roamed the other habitats and killed eight other animals, none of which he even partially consumed. Wildlife experts were interviewed to explain that this “surplus killing” was the result of his instincts interacting with the unnatural, constructed environment. He was overstimulated, he saw movement, he attacked. “It was completely natural behavior that is in no way reflective of a bad cat.”
Not long after, my dad and I happened to be watching the local news together. The anchor reported yet another murder in a high-crime neighborhood. Disgusted, Dad changed the channel. “The way they talk about these people. It’s like they’re talking about that big cat loose in the zoo.”
It stuck with me. I’m sympathetic to the life circumstances that make poverty or crime all but inevitable for people less fortunate than me. I want to understand these dynamics so we can fix them.
But yeah, sometimes when I’m talking to progressive friends, they use almost the exact same language about people from unfortunate backgrounds who do horrible things as the wildlife experts used about the wild animal loose in the zoo.
- /u/raggedy_anthem
bullshit jobs
If a man calls a girl 3-5 times who doesn’t want to hear from him an tells him to fuck off everytime, its harassment and he can be charged… if a man calls 100 people a day who all tell him to fuck off and continues that everyday for 20 years… we call that a [sales] career.
…
the fact that expertise in a particular field of compliance and expertise in the government bureaucracy mandating the compliance is the exact same skillset and a common career path is jumping back and forth between the two “Sure i can help you comply with these rules! I was the one enforcing them!” “Sure i can help you write and enforce the rules! I’ve spent the past 4 years complying with them!” Does very little in my confidence for this field.
- /u/KulakRevolt
teenagers lost rights
I think it’s important to recognize that, whether his argument is sound or not, teenagers do occupy a rather historically unique position in the present. People between the ages of 12 and 18, or even 12 and 21, are probably the only group who have steadily lost rights over the last century and a half (maybe dating from 1880 in the US?) as a result of their membership in an immutable group, rather than gaining equal rights with others, as has been the trend for other such groups. Obviously age is more mutable than e.g. race in the absolute sense, but certainly it’s immutable in the sense that it’s not alterable by any human power, only by time itself.
This does seem a bit strange, considered from the perspective of an alien observer: 250 years ago, Alexander Hamilton was selling cargo at 15, publishing influential political writings while attending Columbia University in New York City at the age of 17 and serving as Washington’s aide-de-camp at 19. Now, at those ages respectively, he couldn’t work, instead being forced to be in school, he wouldn’t even be able to drive in NYC, and he couldn’t knock back eggnog with old Georgey either. And why is this? I don’t really know.
- some user on /r/TheMotte
microsoft acquires activision blizzard
It’s wild how Microsoft has been able to vertically integrate gaming. They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they’re missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway.
- curiousllama (HackerNews)
smoke-filled dark pools
An Atonomy of Bitcoin Price Manipulation
Eh 20-ish years ago the shit happening on Island and Archipelago would blow most people’s minds. Undocumented, conditional, non-displayed order types. Routine wash trading. Shear-but-don’t skin multi-venue arbitrage. The ECNs were the Wild West. Smoke-filled dark pools. Island and Arca are NASDAQ and NYSE now. But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have dual-class share structure, and IPO without a profitable quarter. What’s a share of SNAP entitle you to exactly? Ah right, you think someone will buy it for more. Crypto will have it’s 2001-style GC cycle, the useful stuff will stick around until Goldman owns it and the SEC makes a show of regulating it, the tulip garbage will wash out leaving behind a bunch of rich guys who are really annoying because they never built anything, and we’ll go back to arguing about programming languages.
discussion on HackerNews about census 2020
I’m in favor of removing the race question from the census. It proliferates collectivist thinking (my people/kin vs others, based on bloodlines or appearance) over individualism. It is also used as a justification for implementing discriminatory policies, ironically in the name of fighting discrimination.
copenhagen interpretation of ethics
Current situation:
So let me get this straight… Up until now, Amazon/AWS hasn’t donated anything to cURL. And noone hated them for it.
Suddenly when someone - probably some manager with a limit of $5000 on donations - pushes through a donation of $5000, everyone hates them? Are you serious? If I was a cURL developer this would absolutely make my day.
When you develop OSS (Open Source Software), you aren’t doing it for the money, you don’t even know whether anyone is going to be using your software. And sure, you could limit the license so that big corps have to pay, but because that’d become a legal nightmare for them quickly, they (and probably by extension everyone else as well) will just skip your software and use or make something else.
So you make it copyleft or fully open, and then thank for donations no matter their size. A shitton of OSS devs don’t get any donations.
Philosophical followup:
why don't MC change the world
As for the newly appointed Duke of Star Lake, due to his gentle attitude towards governance (he did not care about it), his lack of taxation (he had no ambition), and his freedom (he had no sense of existence), he soon gained a good reputation in the fiefs and villages.
However, this made some people rather dissatisfied.
“That’s it?”
During a martial arts class one day, Mallos was summoned to the capital for something at the last minute. D.D, who was in charge of training, relaxed and complained to the prince in the “lumberyard”. “I thought that with your courage, wisdom, and knowledge, you would do something… different in Star Lake Castle?”
Thales raised his wooden sword and exchanged blows with Wya as he replied,
“Very good, Wya. I like this move—something different, like?”
D.D. flicked his armor, feeling bored.
“I don’t know. Reform, improve, innovate, and improve? Just like some knights’ poems said, a knight with broad horizons obtained his own fiefdom, enacted a new policy to sweep away all of his lingering problems, accumulate land troops and food, and finally become a developed and advanced country. He swept through the world and created history?”
social graph
Eugene Wei’s “And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep”
In my three pieces on TikTok, I wrote about how that app’s architecture is fundamentally different from that of most Western social media. TikTok doesn’t need you to follow any accounts to construct a relevant feed for you. Instead, it does two things.
First, it tries to understand what interests you by observing how you react to everything it shows you. It tries to learn your taste, and it does a damn good job of it. TikTok is an interest graph built as an interest graph.
Secondly, TikTok runs every candidate video through a two-stage screening process. First, it runs videos through one of the most terrifying, vicious quality filters known to man: a panel of a few hundred largely Gen Z users. Okay, yes, that’s not quite right. Anyone can be on this test audience for a video. It just happens, however, that TikTok’s user base skews younger, so most of the people on that panel will be Gen Z. Also, it’s a known fact that a pack of Gen Z users muttering “OK Boomer” is the most terrifying pack hunter in the animal kingdom after hyenas and murder hornets. If those test viewers don’t show any interest, the video is yeeted into the dustbin of TikTok, never to be seen again except if someone seeks it out directly on someone’s profile.
Secondly, it then uses its algorithm to decide whether that video would interest each user based on their taste profile. Even if you don’t follow the creator of a video, if TikTok’s algorithm thinks you’ll enjoy it, you’ll see it in your For You Page.
Recently, Instagram announced it would start showing its users posts from accounts they don’t follow. In many ways, this is as close to a concession as we’ll see from Instagram to the superiority of TikTok’s architecture for pure entertainment. …
Rebuttal on HBD
It’s better if you read the thread.
The hard statement, on the other hand, is that where you have two populations that can be reliably distinguished by their gene pools, any phenotypic gap is likely to be essentially genetic in origin.
- /u/JuliusBranson
and the rebuttal:
This is a fatal error, and anything which flows from it can be immediately discarded as unsupported.
irony as a mode of political action
Edit: included rebuttal
IRONY AS A MODE OF POLITICAL ACTION
We are generally used to the assumption that the motivation driving political action is sincere. All past political movements fit that criteria. Progressives were, and still are sincere about curing racism from the world. Nazis were sincere about doing Nazi things. And so were Protestants, Catholics. Augustus Caesar and his army were sincere in wanting to rule an empire.
There is a growing current now, present particularly in forms of youth culture like 4chan and now TikTok, that everything cool and memetically attractive should be deeply layered in irony. The most striking example to me was a series of TikToks about Holocaust themed pornography, that were lambasted by mainstream media - but the culture that produced them continues to go on unabated.
This sort of phenomenon wouldn’t be news to Baudrillard or Nietschze - the lack of sincerity of belief would just be an obvious symptom of modern life. Normally, these insincere people are cast as politically helpless, last men and slaves to a few rules who control their lives effortlessly. But suppose that the way to move them into taking action was through the opposite of sincere ideology, instead only through the insincere.
The most clear, and perhaps only example of this - was the debacle involving the Gamestop stock. A bunch of normal people were willing to throw their money at something for reasons that were mostly insincere: memes and shitposting at the man. Mocking the man with graffiti is nothing new, but usually there is a framework held in opposition to what the man believes. The 60s radicals had their communism to hold against the pseudocapitalism of 60s America. Antifa today still does, and still is sincere, even if their ideas are pathetic and wrongheaded. But what does r/wsb believe in?
societal confidence
I’m sure having every mistake catalogued doesn’t help. But I see a lot of this coming from the culture. In part by removing the literature of the past. We spend a lot of time worried that our reading lists are too European. We worry that our history courses celebrate our achievements too much or without being sure to tell students that the people doing this were bad in some way. We can’t talk about industrialization – a process that ultimately raised humanity to wealth, health and endless luxury on a scale unimaginable beforehand – without being sure to mention the environmental devastation, or the wealth inequality, or something else.
China has the same Internet we have, and do a lot less self flag elation over their past misdeeds. They don’t remove Chinese literature in favor of French or Indian literature. They don’t talk about whatever Confucius did wrong. And it seems to give them the self confidence to do amazing things. The Chinese absolutely believe in progress, and that they can and should go for it. They could build a fully functional hospital in a week. They’re building highways in Africa.
is there a paradox of tolerance
The solution to intolerant ideologies is to speak up, debate, make them look foolish, exhort people to stand up for what they believe is right.. This is done all the time, the far-right British National Party, which had built up some momentum througout the 2000s crashed and burned when their leader Nick Griffin was given a platform on the BBC’s Question Time which he used to make a fool of himself. A healthy liberal society should be able to rebuff attacks without giving up on its own principles to do so, if a society is healthy there should be no shortage of enthusiastic, charismatic and intelligent supporters ready to be called to its defence.
The reality behind the paradox of intolerance is this: that if you are at the point where you think an open debate will lead to the loss of the liberal side to the openly intolerant, then your society is no longer a liberal one and nothing you can do, no law you can pass, is going to change that. The Nazis didn’t take power because the liberals were too hesitant to clamp down on them, they took power because faith in liberalism had already collapsed. “
chinese debt trap
Theoretically but from a different perspective, I’d argue that the countries don’t really have an incentive to push back. I’m going to just paraphrase from Prof. Brautigam’s book The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (Oxford Press, 2010) here. Essentially, the ‘debt trap’ meme is drastically overplayed here and the lending program has been largely received positively by the governments that take on China’s loans. Brautigam is rare among Western academics with her research as she has conducted a fair amount of field research, so a lot of what she cites comes from government documents and on-the-ground analysis. From that, Brautigam argues that China’s lending diplomacy seems to in actuality be much more about sharing China’s development experiences with countries that might not traditionally attract a lot of outside investment and countries that participate seem to be rather receptive of these lending tactics in part because they have no where else to turn to. One prime example here is the whole development cycle of an Indonesian port; she writes about it here.
VN - English as a global language
Tiếng Anh với tư cách là ngôn ngữ toàn cầu
- Tác giả: Dan Dascalescu
- Đăng: 09/2008
- Sửa lần cuối: 12/2019
- Dịch bởi: TĐHV
Mục tiêu:
Không phải sẽ thật hay nếu tất cả mọi người trên thế giới hiểu nhau, bất kể ngôn ngữ?
Nếu bạn trả lời “Không” với câu hỏi trên, bài này không dành cho bạn, và thực ra sẽ khá vô nghĩa để thuyết phục được bạn là, mọi thứ sẽ rất hay, từ nhiều quan điểm khác nhau, nếu tất cả mọi người hiểu nhau, bất kể ngôn ngữ mự đẻ. Bạn cũng có khi nên tìm trợ giúp tâm lý chuyên nghiệp.
Thế nên tôi sẽ giả định là chúng ta đồng ý rằng,
“Sẽ thật hay nếu tất cả mọi người trên thế giới bằng cách nào đó hiểu nhau, bất kể ngôn ngữ mẹ đẻ”
international developer after 1 year
The path for a foreign worker that came to the US through university is very straightforward if they want to live a life here afterwards. My assumption here is that you’re not rich, that you don’t have family that is already a permanent citizen (green card) that can pull you over, you’re not marrying a US citizen, and you’re not eligible for like asylum/diversity visa. Oh and you’re not super-talented and wins awards, and got papers, or save the pope’s life etc. etc.
conservative universities
In the Islamic world, universities have, since the 1960s, been a strongly conservative influence. This wasn’t always true - there were thriving leftist, socialist and secular nationalist movements at them for much of the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries - but beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative religious intellectuals began to dominate. A lot of academic religious figures came to power, and student bodies became much more religiously conservative - customs like gender segregation, strict modest dress codes actually became common in Pakistani and Egyptian universities, among the middle classes, in the 1980s before they did so among many more common urban people. The universities of the Arab world played a key role in the increase in religious conservatism in the region since the siege of Mecca - particularly the most famous Muslim university, Al Azhar, which has been an intellectual center for Sunni Islam for over a thousand years. Similar things occurred in Shia Islam - is it not interesting how so many student revolutionaries in 1979 helped an austere religious conservative overthrow a secular government? Many didn’t know what they were doing, but many did - religious Islam offered many young people unsatisfied with secular nationalism a spiritual philosophy in the waning decades of the 20th century.
Across Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Morocco, Algeria and Syria, many of the most ardent and committed (and radical) Islamist figures were converted or radicalised at university. The common tale of some moderate or secular-ish, kind of hippie son who smokes and flirts with girls who goes to a university and comes out a thawb wearing Islamist is, well, common. As the failure of secular nationalism in the MENA region became clearer, the Islamist intellectuals were waiting in the wings.
So the idea that intellectual culture trends progressive is clearly false. It is possible to have a conservative or reactionary academy, even one much more right wing than the population as a whole. But it probably has to be religious in character.
Can’t find the link
vietnam POWs
How were South Vietnamese, in general, treated by North Vietnam ?
warrior society
The problem with all this is China’s reversal of fortune was not “sudden” at all: the country had been in a perpetual civil war for three decades before World War 2, and, though under-equipped, its armies had exceptional infantry and officers who consistently surprised the Japanese. It would not be an exaggeration to call interwar China the period’s only “warrior society”. As Jonathan Fenby points out, most of the men had been levied to fight for this or that warlord, usually several times in their lives, and often starting as child soldiers. This gave all Chinese warlords - Mao included - a massive reserve of military talent to tap into. Contra popular belief, the Chinese army that entered Korea received no extensive Communist training before entering the country and was made up mostly of new volunteers and Kuomintang defectors. “PLA tactics” were nothing unique, but simply standard operating procedure for Chinese armies, developed over decades of fighting and familiar to tens of millions of veterans. It is telling that once this “warrior generation” aged out of military eligibility, the PLA completely floundered in Vietnam.
Reminds me of the Taliban
why translate?
Just consider the huge amount of online and offline knowledge that’s simply unavailable to you for the silly reason that it’s written in a language you don’t understand. Should we encourage this status quo by promoting the learning of more languages so that people can generate more knowledge in more languages? Should we keep translating from the most common languages into a myriad of other languages?
How about instead we focus on one language, and better knowledge, for instance by making it as easy as possible to learn that language, and by translating knowledge into it?
- Dan Dascalescu
Definitely will translate this at some point.
a glimpse of the future
A participant in OpenAI’s Codex invitational recently posted on HackerNews an unlisted video of how the DOM is manipulated by Codex with natural language text.
I’m reminded of this quote:
” Once technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road. “ – Stewart Brand
I don’t think people realize just how much the future is already here (psssst, the guy in the bottom is not real as well).
enlightenment
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” - Denis Diderot
“Denis Diderot (/ˈdiːdəroʊ/;[3] French: [dəni did(ə)ʁo]; 5 October 1713 – 31 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie”
Philosophers are very opinionated.