Criticizing cryptocurrency for it's energy consumption is absolutely ridiculous. Every step in technology requires ever increasing energy consumption... hell... the universe expects us to keep increasing complexity and energy consumption! Increasing entropy is basically our purpose...
And trying to decide what is - or isn't - a valid use of energy is pure arrogance. If anything, we should be arguing about energy sources...
I believe a simple moving average would achieve the same result and that mixing training and test data for validation invalidates your model results...
On a positive note, nice showcase of how simple implementation with Keras is.
can we stop telling other people what they should do?
these tech giants are worshiped for what they achieve and how they transform the world, not for their flaws. And yes, they are flawed... they are not "perfect" like the instagram role models you follow - and live vicariously thru.
and using bill gates as a good role model is just laughable to anyone who knows just a tiny bit about his work ethics as Microsoft CEO.
there's a relevant gap in his 'history of the internet' analysis where centralized web was basically all that existed for users (i.e. AOL walled gardens).
as many things in society, these internet trends seem to follow cycles of discovery/innovation and improvement/cost-efficiency.
and the same way the previous centralized web crumbled with the appearance of novel services, so will the current centralized networks. trust in innovation.
One side claims the blockchain immutability has been breached by draining the black hacker's DAO.
The other side claims, it hasn't been as there has been no rollback of transactions. In that view, it was just an additional special case rule added to the code that removed the usual restriction for one specific address.
Whatever side's opinion you share, there is one good thing that has achieved by this hard fork. The community has been split along those lines and the group that went Ethereum Classic is for the most part no longer involved with Ethereum.
Besides small bickerings on Twitter, there is no drama about this anymore and the Ethereum community is no longer concerned about this event (although not the obvious problems with the complexity of smart contracts but that is an on-going effort).
Imagine if Bitcoin would have split up along the SegWit / Big Blocks lines. We wouldn't have had a standstill for 3 years and we would have been spared that constant drama.
"Bailout" generally means you paid off some group of people by taking money from taxpayers. In this case, the only person who lost money was the thief. I'd call it a recovery of stolen funds.
I was not invested in TheDAO but supported the fork mainly because (1) to anyone who's not a blockchain purist, if you can recover a stolen $50M you obviously should, and (2) it was early days, and the precautions the contract authors should have taken were undocumented and basically unknown to the community, so I thought more leeway was justified. Even the official documentation had similar flaws.
Watching this documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY) about Shenzhen I got a very strong cyberpunk vibe, especially the last 1/3 of it. People at the streets fixing electronics, cheap/pirated circuit boards being sold at the curb, etc.
I was in Shenzhen not long ago. Good shout, but the city is actually very new. It's very clean and the subway is near spotless, so it doesn't give off a dark, dystopian cyberpunk kinda feel to it. Hong Kong is another good shout, specifically Kowloon region. Many Asian cities like these have lots of old neon signs, architecture, and technology that definitely gives off the Cyberpunk vibe
HK is a really good example of cyberpunk, you have both the kowloon side which is... it's hard to say "dark" but I would say it's more "real", "intense", and "chaotic" than the island, whereas the island itself has the shadowrun-esque clique of the mega-rich business conglomerates.
the only issue I see with HK being the perfect example of cyberpunk is victoria harbor keeps these two sides separate, whereas to fit the genre more I think they should be jammed up uncomfortably next to each other.
some HK films make use of the separation of kowloon / island, by placing the immaculate police headquarters on the island, but requiring the policeman/hero to go to the other side to get their hands dirty / get shit done / rescue the uncle/wife/child from the triad or whatever. when they go over to kowloon you know shit's going to go down.
I don't think they are talking about having NO sense of reality. They are saying that having filters that 'simplify', or make these signals more 'user friendly' bring evolutionary benefits in comparison to experiencing reality as is. In other words, we experience an altered reality sculpted by our cognitive engine.
This reminds me of Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception", by the way.
I disagree with that. I have put more than one hour in and have found many interesting planets, creatures and geological formations. I'm also captivated by the small stories. What are the Sentinels? What and who am I? What's at the center?
Off course, it takes time and patience. Many worlds are barren, many creatures as very bizarre. But if you explore enough, you finds gems. And that feeling of discovery is something no other game I can remember gave me.
This game in fact is a different experience. I get it if it's not everyone's cup of tea (in fact, apparently the game was built to be 'divisive' [1]).
What I recommend for people beginning is to take their time. Leave their ships behind somewhere and walk around the planet. After you distance yourself from your ship (enough that the return trip on foot is not an option, the only option is finding a beacon to call it), you'll start seeing changes on the terrain. An unexpected lake, sand dunes, cave networks, forests where there were none, etc. The variety on the game is quite impressive, actually... of course, some patterns do repeat. But isn't that true for the universe as well?
At least in theory, in a democratic society, "the government" should only do things that we've decided to allow. In the US, these decisions are made by representatives we've elected. As far as I know, the USG doesn't sell people's private information to anyone willing to pay to blackmail them, and uses your tax money to enforce the values of our society and the social contract we've constructed more so than to simply further its own power.
Now, obviously, different governments fall are at different points on the "furthering institutional power" versus "supporting ideals" spectrum, as do other institutions who work in the security space, but equating the actions of anyone who's ever used or traded an exploit hardly seems accurate.
It was meant as a sarcastic comment, of course it is inaccurate. :)
IMHO:
Unfortunately democracy doesn't work, in practice, as the theory might suggest. What we have in the majority of countries are people in power focused on either:
- Preserving their power (status quo), or tangentially the power of those who put them in office
- Shifting the power structure, so that they (and their group) can take control
There are few and far between examples of politicians (let alone governments) that act with true altruistic purposes, favoring the interests of "the people". The built-in incentives in our society (and some might argue, our own nature) unfortunately make this a rare occurrence.
By the way... I might argue that the government doesn't sell our information because there is no buyer. It is the user of this information. It is used to control (mainly to control dissent). ;)
Hah, thanks for clarifying, I had a suspicion, but still wanted to write out the argument in case there was some truth to the sarcasm.
It's hard to talk without going down into specifics. Different people got into power in different countries in different ways and are kept in power by different means. Switching out the hierarchy that's in power seems healthy for a society, and happens every once in awhile, as well (e.g. in Nigeria's recent election).
I don't think we should expect politicians to be altruistic and I think democracy is a spectrum. America has a somewhat democratic system, although almost half the eligible people don't vote, and a large portion of the population that does vote appears to mirror campaign spending, which is controlled by a much smaller, but still relatively diverse number of donors. Increasing the number of people with enough discretionary spending to give to campaigns makes this system more democratic, as does lowering the max amount an individual can contribute.
Perhaps one day we will have a society where everyone contributes ideas evenly to this distributed system that is democratic government, but for now, I think it's important simply to look for steps in that direction - get more people thinking and talking about political ideas, understanding the issues, and weighing the consequences of their vote.
Personally, I find the electoral college system the biggest barrier to engaging people... "what does it matter, our state is going for candidate X anyway".
I don't think the IC uses their capabilities to advise campaigns or blackmail dissidents anymore. They might have under J Hoover, but I imagine that to be wholly a blemish of the past.
Maybe, maybe not? I'd bet it depends on the people, depends on the job. Are you an anarchist assigned government drudgework? Bad news. Are you a chaotic neutral "forced" into fascinating meaningful government work? Might be great for everyone even if you wouldn't have taken the job normally.
"Those indicted include Johan Anders Gudmunds, identified by federal documents as an administrator of Darkode who created a large botnet of hacked computers that stole private information "on approximately 200,000,000 occasions.""
And on such a paltry amount of private information events compared to what the NSA captures!
And trying to decide what is - or isn't - a valid use of energy is pure arrogance. If anything, we should be arguing about energy sources...