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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#551

Post by akolbe »

hotpotamus wrote: post #415
munificent wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

I've heard the streetlight one before but I also like "when you're a hammer, then every problem is a nail". I hadn't thought of it this way though perhaps I had felt it. It feels like this is the dream for AR/VR - to create a software defined reality that you can escape to.

Here is another version of that story, as told by Idries Shah. He attributes it to the Middle Eastern Mulla Nasrudin figure, and gives it a metaphysical interpretation.

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

A neighbor found Nasrudin down on his knees looking for something.

"What have you lost, Mulla?"

"My key," said Nasrudin.

After a few minutes of searching, the other man said, "Where did you drop it?"

"At home."

"Then why, for heaven's sake, are you looking here?"

"There is more light here."

According to Shah, the German clown Karl Valentin (1882–1948) used to act the story out on stage.

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

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#552

Post by dash2 »

dmitriid wrote: post #205
api wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're trying really hard to solve a problem that hasn't been solved yet, which requires placing oneself beyond the "reason" of skeptics. https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm Their solutions may not and perhaps probably will not work because it's a hard problem. The payoff for solving this problem is civilization without single points of failure. No more wheel of rising and falling empires that take all…

> Proof of work sort of kind of solves it, but not really, and at tremendous cost. Nevertheless the fact that it gets close is maybe suggestive It doesn't solve it, and it will never be close. If you ant just one reason, it's easy: enforcement . You smart contracts mean zilch if you can't enter a house some scammer just sold you.

Yup. Cheap slogan: noone has yet decentralized the gun.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#553

Post by ipaddr »

shebek wrote: post #469
munificent wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

What this line of reasoning seems to be missing is that society seems to be getting worse largely because of software.

Seems to and getting worse are two different islands. Things are better than ever for all progressive issues. More people are living healthier and wealthier than ever. Crime, wars are all down.

How is software making society worse?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#554

Post by themacguffinman »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #522
burntoutfire wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marriage is not a religious practice. Proof: non-religious people get married all the time.

> Marriage is not a religious practice. I, of course, agree with you in principle. However much of the controversy is around the religious aspect -- ie some religions have a narrow definition of marriage which we've codified into law. part of me wonders if it would be smarter for us to cede the terminology to the religious and just remove "marriage" as a term from the government and instead normalize another term, pe…

That sounds politically dumber. "Marriage" has been normalized for centuries/millennia but now you think you can just quickly normalize another term before we solve this equal rights thing? You know, just a quick errand before we restore equal rights: change the prevailing culture and change definitions throughout a complex set of laws.

This is exactly the junior developer mindset described in the thread parent: restoring equal rights to gay people is a problem but first let's spin our wheels inventing a different terminology and taxonomy for marriage and upending legal precedent and existing case law about marriage.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#555

Post by maerF0x0 »

nfw2 wrote: post #549

I generally agree with this essay, but I think the listed problems with society misses the mark. "Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." Is this really changing? I don't buy that people today have less empathy for each other than they did historically. The bulk of human history was cruel in ways that stagger the imagination. "The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening."…

presuming from the domain the author is Canadian and so likely this is more a proximal/recency comment on Canadian society, to which I actually do agree it is really changing.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#556

Post by nouveaux »

generalizations wrote: post #443
nouveaux wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical." 100% agree with the example of someone's tree on their 200 acre farm. However, if I have a dying tree that's a risk to falling on my neighbor's house, it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government. Proximity to others plays a big role.

> it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government The neighbor wouldn't be the tyrannical one. And, there's better solutions - put the liability for the tree on the person whose property it's on. That's a fair assignment of responsibility. I do think it would be tyrannical for the government to declare that all trees must be removed if they meet certain criteria.

Liability is a good deterrent in many situations but is far inferior to cooperation. Let's take an extreme example: the death of a child by a irresponsible corporation. Even with generous compensation, the family will not be made whole with the loss of a child's life.

Going back to the tree example, if a tree were to fall on the house, even if all the repairs were paid for by the tree owner, the loss in time and inconvenience will not be offset. There is also the chance that something personal is damaged and no amount of money can replace it. It is better if the tree never falls on the house in the first place.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#557

Post by maerF0x0 »

jspaetzel wrote: post #306

All of this is just pessimistic complaining. Flip this and be optimistic and you'll find life isn't all that bad. Think about the last hundred years... * Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history. * Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work. * Society is able to support mo…

> Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work.

You're assuming this axiomatically, at first blush this is simply nepotism which is typically a term w/ negative connotations.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#558

Post by almostkorean »

sva_ wrote: post #346
pjkundert wrote: post #39

This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theor…

> https://holo.host > HoloToken (HOT) is an ERC-20 token I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.

What makes you think Ethereum Foundation gave themselves the majority of Ether? I'm pretty sure it was 15% but I might be wrong

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#559

Post by wyre »

pjkundert wrote: post #507
beebmam wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-tr...

This seems like a bizarre definition. As someone who would accept a label of "conservative", and growing up and living in a world of mostly "conservative" people, I struggle to think of a single such person who wouldn't be appalled to find out they they were living under a single such law, let alone many such laws. Could you be so kind as to identify even a single instance of such a law?

Nearly any instance of a cop interacting with a black man compared to interacting with a white man.

The law isn’t like to explicitly favor one group over another, but the the systems of law have shown they do favor one group over another.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#560

Post by Nevermark »

delusional wrote: post #102
notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different. I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You…

Well everything ALREADY IS software. :)

Loosely speaking. Software in a computer, or in our brains.

With the "software in a computer" camp ascending rapidly, at the expense of the only alternative "software in a brain".

So we already need to solve all these problems with software soon. Or with a large amount of software as a required ingredient, anyway.

(I realize some people don't think machines will ever outthink biology (for ... hands and head waving around ... "Reasons! Man. Reasons!"). But, most of us probably agree that this is a loose goose first approximation of the long term trend we are in since the transistor, with no end in sight.)

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