I wrote a book on Merb and was an active contributor. Before that I had developed several apps with Rails.
That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition and I don't view the Rails vs Merb period as itself having been problematic.
Merb devs believed we could make app development both simple to start (as a single file like Sinatra) and easy to evolve (into a modular codebase with Rails-like conventions). Existing outside of the Rails ecosystem allowed Merb to pursue that distinct vision.
The Merge between Rails and Merb, accreted many of Merb's modular architectural enhancements to Rails, but sadly deprecated the overall Merb vision. To me that was a shame, but I still wouldn't describe any of it as toxic.
> I wrote a book on Merb and was an active contributor.
It might be a situation where you see it differently because you were involved or benefiting from the way things unfolded
> That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition [...] wouldn't describe any of it as toxic
Competition can be healthy, Rails vs Merb was anything but. Quotes from Yehuda himself:
••• "I was just so blinded by tribalism that I never even bothered to check how fundamental the disagreements really were."
••• "waging an all-out war against Ruby on Rails from inside of a company that makes its money selling Ruby on Rails deployment is a pretty bad life strategy"
••• "It's so easy for our brains to turn disagreements about priorities into value conflicts. It takes a lot of effort to see past that mistake."
Engine Yard's management took several strategic missteps over the years. One of them was stifling Merb. The quotes from Yehuda describe his difficulty in making the best of a forced merger.
Ezra's vision for Merb and DHH's vision for Rails were distinct. Both warranted development. Over time, I assume they would have collectively strengthened the Ruby community. It was a mistake for Engine Yard's management to have instead framed it as zero sum and forced a merger.
Mandarin speakers ability to understand slowed down Shanghainese is likely a recent development. This is because much of traditional Shanghainese diction, grammar, and even pronunciation has been reduced or morphed to better suit the newer generations of speakers whose principal language is Mandarin.
Namecoin isn't actually a "registrar" in this case, but the canonical blockchain used with Passcard.info. You can think of it as the self-registration alternative. The Namecoin link is definitely a conversion blackhole. This would be a bit better: https://github.com/namesystem/namesystem/wiki/Namecoin
Onename, which has designed Passcard.info, is attempting to standardize the identity protocol by decoupling it from its core identity registration service.
A somewhat fragmented space, here's an example of another blockchain based identity protocol using the id/* namespace on Namecoin: https://nameid.org/?name=domob
That link isn't any better than the first. Passcard bills itself as a service for non-technical users. Any and all sign-up links should point to clear, easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions. Neither the Namecoin front page nor a wiki page about important Namecoin esoterica fit that bill. :)
Note: I'm not trying to shit on the project (just as I'm not trying to shit on your comment). I'm sure it was a substantial amount of work, and is at an early stage in its development. If, however, one is launching a project that has non-technical folks as its audience, appropriate documentation is just as important as the software.
For educational purposes only and not legal advice:
This incentive plan is structured as restricted stock units that are paid out as shares upon an IPO or trade sale (called in the doc, the "Initial Vesting Event").
Tax laws in the U.S. will impose ordinary income tax on the fair market value of such shares when they are issued, which for clarity, is at the Initial Vesting Event.
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For the record, I am a bit peeved that the word "tax" is being used to describe aspects of this plan, as it may make looking up actually startup tax matters harder.
It's a good thing to know. Many employees who wanted to move on from companies find their stock options a financial penalty vs a financial benefit because of things like AMT.
Now if there was a way to do this and get the long term capital gains tax rate vs. the ordinary tax rate. I can't think of any without paying the IRS before hand to buy your options or doing some sort of strange cyclical loan program with investors.
FYI: The carry distribution schedule mentioned in the article (carry after 3x) is way off market for a VC GP-LP relationship.
The most typical arrangement is 20% after 1x in LP distributions, with some variation in what are called hurdle rates (that is, different percent carried interest at different multiples or IRRs).
So a prediction exists, with some evidence towards it, that it's possible to do computation that doesn't consume negentropy?
Well, I'll grant you one thing: not quite sure what it is you're computing, but assuming your plan works, that was a surprisingly short path to conserving the universe's resources until your computational substrate suffers proton decay.
I still have only hunches of what computation has to do with actual lives. Please, explain your Evil Plan out loud.
At least you're openly admitting that's your plan. So, you know, we can drag you behind the chemical sheds and shoot you for Criminally Irresponsible Use of Applied Phlebotinum.
In others words make a domesday robot that remembers people before it kills them.
As they die, some will take solace in a religious belief that numbers in the machine represent everything they were and ever will be. Others will just die.
In his defense, if you're dying anyway, you might as well leave a "ghost" behind. The ghost might not be you, and it will certainly have some psychological issues to deal with due to knowing that it's one ontological level "down" from a real, flesh-and-blood person, but you were going to die anyway.
I assume that ontological security matters. If I know my consciousness runs on meat, I know that I have my own personal substrate. If I know I'm in the Matrix, I know that whoever has `root` access can alter or deceive me as they please.
The one thing nobody ever specifies about these crazy schemes, which would otherwise be a great way for humanity to get the hell off of Earth and leave the natural ecosystem to itself in our absence, is who will be root, and how he's going to forcibly round up everyone who doesn't like your crazy futurist take-over-everyone's-minds scheme. Hell, what's going to stop him from rampaging across the real Earth and universe, destroying everything in sight, while everyone else fucks around having fun in VR?
I'm really wondering why this nasty, insane idea has been cropping up more frequently lately in geek circles.
And that's not even starting into the sheer ludicrousness of claiming people's consciousness is pure software when we know that all kinds of enzymes and hormones affect our personalities!
> And that's not even starting into the sheer ludicrousness of claiming people's consciousness is pure software when we know that all kinds of enzymes and hormones affect our personalities!
That's a bug to fix in implementation accuracy. I'd obviously prefer more accuracy, but if it comes down to a choice between less-than-perfect available implementation accuracy or dying of old age, I'll happily take a less accurate implementation, especially one that preserves enough information to fix that issue later.
The much more serious bug I am concerned about is the continuity flaw: a copy of me does not make the original me immortal. I'd like the original me to keep thinking forever. Many proposals exist for how to ensure that. The scary problem that needs careful evaluation before implementing any solution: if you do it wrong, the copy will never know the difference, but the original will die.
No human should ever be root. But we might just trust a Friendly AI. Well, provided we manage to make the AI actually Friendly (as in, does exactly what's good for us instead of whatever imperfect idea of what's good for us we might be tempted to program).
The question is not really whether such and such implementation is best. The question is, does changing implementation preserves subjective identity?
I bet many people here would not doubt the moral value of the emulation of a human (feelings and such are simulated to the point of being real), but would highly doubt that it would be, well, the "same" person as the original.
That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition and I don't view the Rails vs Merb period as itself having been problematic.
Merb devs believed we could make app development both simple to start (as a single file like Sinatra) and easy to evolve (into a modular codebase with Rails-like conventions). Existing outside of the Rails ecosystem allowed Merb to pursue that distinct vision.
The Merge between Rails and Merb, accreted many of Merb's modular architectural enhancements to Rails, but sadly deprecated the overall Merb vision. To me that was a shame, but I still wouldn't describe any of it as toxic.