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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

841–850 of 924 posts

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, technical progress is key part of progress. Most innovators are not driven by the constant complaints of other people.

So protesting is useless, and necessity is not the mother of invention?

Protesting is mostly useless.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#843

I've been thinking a lot lately about first principles. For example, the Golden Rule is great, but the concept of reincarnation transcends it, making it self-evident. The Book of Genesis probably started "in a beginning", not "in the beginning". And so on. When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It…

We humans are gene making machines. We like to pretend we are superior and full owners of our choices, that we are above animalistic tendencies, that we are special and not like the others, but... couldn't be further from the truth. We are different, but not that different. Gene making still drives our behavior, whether we see it or not. And in more ways than most people imagine.

Why are people ok with being wealthy? Because having access to resources means more chances that your genes will be passed on - based on how it used to be in nomadic times. Maybe now that doesn't apply as much, but genes don't know it. For all our limbic brain and genes know, we're all still cavemen hunting, fighting for resources, foraging, etc. So yes, people will be ok with being wealthy.

Why is there no limit of wealth where people who have it say "ok that's enough, I don't need another one billion dollars"? Why do people keep hoarding absurdly until infinity? Because our genes are not used to infinity. It used to be that "the more the better". Famine would come. Let's save up as much as possible, let's get as many nuts as possible. There never was infinity of resources. We are not built to get it. This is what people need to understand about rich people that seem insane (besides possible trauma that drives other parts of their behavior). This is just how we are programmed.

Why is there so much political corruption and people stomp on top of each other to get more power? Why is it that morality seems to be such a fallible reason for people to act? Same. Exact. Reason. Evolutionary advantage based on millennia old hardware. If you kill my genes, yours go on, and mine don't. If you have more power, you have more access to resources. More chance of survival.

Asking someone to use their higher intellect and go against their instincts in favor of morality is often really hard. All of these are instincts. And unless we change humans' genetic code, or we somehow with AI merging change our intellect, we will continue being this way. We are the same guys that would burn witches, and chant "kill kill kill!" in gladiator coliseums. Just now the way we burn witches and chant that is different. More "sophisticated".

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would decentralized finance affect the advertising driven business model of web applications?

Micropayments have been suggested since Internet was young, but now that's available on top of the right cryptocurrent (eg SOL). Whether that's actually a model people want (vs saying they want) remains to be seen, but Substack seems to be doing well enough for their writers. 3 cents from each of 100,000 likes on Twitter/Insta/tt starts to add up for those with a large enough following to make several of those a mont…

We've already had actually nil transaction costs for micropayments to eliminate ads offered by Google and... nobody used it. If advertising is driving facebook/twitter/youtube/etc to prioritize content that angers people then micropayments to support some small blogger isn't what is needed. Instead, what is needed is for facebook/twitter/youtube etc to operate on micropayments.

But... advertising isn't why these services trend towards angering content. Engagement is why. Whether you are paying with ad views or micropayments, if services want you to keep engaged then they will be incentivized to promote this kind of content. And since things like youtube premium (or whatever it is currently called) exist today and per-view payment systems have been set up by Google in the past (and already died), I don't think that funding these websites with BTC donations or whatever would change a thing.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#845
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would decentralized finance affect the advertising driven business model of web applications?

I quite liked the coinhive approach of having the user run a blockchain workload as an alternative to ads. The project and economics didn’t work out for them but it was an interesting approach.

But that doesn't change a thing. Engagement is still the key metric for a service in this world. And that leads to the same problems.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#846

* Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves I was fortunate to have had a career with mild autonomy to help other team members even if it was slightly out of my job description. But this only happens in a shared office environment where you can see when someone is falling behind or overhear a problem. That physical presence also creates a bond with co-workers that's often more powerful than the corporate…

I know you didn't personally insult me here, but I hate this comment.

I'm a remote worker and I spend a large chunk of my time every week helping other team members. I'm very, very good at it.

From now on, I'm going to ask everyone about their attitude towards remote work during interviews, and I'll be a hard NO on anyone with the attitude displayed here.

You can have employees who hate remote or you can have remote employees. You can't have both.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#847

* Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves I was fortunate to have had a career with mild autonomy to help other team members even if it was slightly out of my job description. But this only happens in a shared office environment where you can see when someone is falling behind or overhear a problem. That physical presence also creates a bond with co-workers that's often more powerful than the corporate…

I know you didn't personally insult me here, but I hate this comment. I'm a remote worker and I spend a large chunk of my time every week helping other team members. I'm very, very good at it. From now on, I'm going to ask everyone about their attitude towards remote work during interviews, and I'll be a hard NO on anyone with the attitude displayed here. You can have employees who hate remote or you can have remote…

Lots of people have that attititude (80%?) - and it is not connected to remote work.

They do just the absolute minimum.

In some ways it is debatable if they arent right. Also: if you are the one who cares in a team of those who dont (which is the usual situation), then you are in a world of pain. Snafu.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#848

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…

You can't just assign random semantics to "consistency", "availability" and "partition tolerance" if you want to apply the CAP theorem.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now). i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, s…

I wasn't conscious until the early 2000s, so forgive me if my comment conflicts with any firsthand knowledge you may have. My guess is that those in those early days, the internet was a frontier less concerned with extraction of value because it much less clear how to do that versus today. The internet was probably going to play out roughly how it is now no matter what happened once you got enough people on it, overw…

> when the internet was in its infancy and on a plane of existence almost entirely apart from the real world

> there's a lot of power to be had and space for chaos to be sown

i'm seriously not sure if this is a GPT-3 generated response used to waste my time... lol

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#850
post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution. well yeah it's not ideal, yet the holochain foundation does all their work in the open and have to fund their development somehow ( https://github.com/holochain/holochain ). better doing an ethical ico-like crowdsourcing (based on a unit of computing power, like Airbnb but for processing power) than strapping i…

There's no such thing as an ethical ICO.

true. i wish they'd called it crowdfunding. they sold credits for a mutual credit currency that is very different to centrally issued credit.
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