> The computer contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, which were cooled by 80 air blowers. More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms. It consumed as much electricity as a small town.
I still remember the CRT TV we had at home when I was kid. It was big but almost empty.
Vacuum tubes break too often. Once per year? But if you have a thousand of them you have to change one very often. So I guess they have a lot of space for humans repairing it.
There's also the possibility that we, as consumers, demand that the political system solves this issue with robust privacy legilsation that prohibits any entity from tracking our phones.
Democratic ones do. But for 95% of causes it's hard to become so loud that they are forced to respond.
That's exactly why orgs like EFF exist. Most laws also aren't passed because of overwhelming consumer feedback. It's lobbied by special interests. Which sadly took a negative connotation over the last few decades, but lobbies can be for the people too.
Studies show if 0% of the American population support a bill, it's 30% likely to be passed, and if 100% of the American population support it, it's 30% likely to be passed. Is America democratic?
I'm getting to the point where I believe representative democracy on the scale of hundreds of millions of people just doesn't work all that well. I've never been one of those "states' rights" people, but these days I am becoming convinced that the US should have a much smaller federal government, and states, counties, cities, and towns should have more autonomy in deciding their fates.
This is not an easy problem to solve. Certainly I want more things at the federal level than the authors of the constitution envisioned (currency, international diplomacy, military, etc.): some things really need to be done at the national level (like environmental regulation).
Anyway. Sure, those figures may be true for the US Congress (or not, I haven't verified), but I bet you those figures aren't even close to true for town and city councils and county government. And perhaps not even state government as well.
We could also demand that the government doesn't use the location data from private companies without a warrant, but elections aren't often granular enough to satisfy individual requirements. Better to figure out a way to create and use a competitor that doesn't do this to you.
UK uses "imperial gallons", which are no more metric than US customary gallons. Expanded to 3 decimals, a UK/imperial gallon is 4.546L, and a US customary gallon is 3.786, and a US gallon is close to 3.8L, than a imperial gallon is to 4.5L.
The point was more that the female characters turn up in books two and three. Three in particular.
If you like SF you can't go wrong reading all of Asimov IMO. The entire Robots/Empire/Foundation series is fantastic. It doesn't mean you can't also read other, "better" SF either. Asimov's main SF work will take a few months to read at most.
Are you referring to the literal planet rather than a woman? That character felt particularly of self insert fantasy (oo a hot 20 year old in love with the aged professor).
Regardless, stopping at the first book is a good recommendation. Asimov demonstrated he didn't understand what made his own work interesting. Granted mystery boxes are hard, but he took an immediate about-face on psychohistory and retconned any bit of intrigue with rather vanilla stuff. The first book is outstanding.
I read books because I enjoy them. I enjoy reading about hot 20 year olds and big breasted women in space actually. Women are allowed to have 50 Shades, I'm allowed to enjoy books too.
You are. And I'm allowed to read into the author's psychology when they wear it on their shoulder. And I'm also allowed to critique the author when they misunderstand their work and write rambling, uninspired sequels that ruin the original work.
Lucas and Disney couldn't help but copy even these bad parts of Foundation in the Star Wars prequels and sequels.
I've never understood this. The beauty of recorded media is authors cannot ruin or revoke their work, assuming no actual censorship, of course (copyright can also be a problem). Just ignore the subsequent works if you don't like them. This is the first time I'm hearing about people only reading the first Foundation book but it's definitely worth doing some quick checks before dedicating one's finite time to reading/watching/listening to anything.
The trilogy, prequels, and sequels are all "canon" and retcon the most interesting concepts of the original book as ruses, conspiracies, and lies. This is unambiguously a ruining of the original because the author went out of their way to mute the concepts rather than explore them.
The first book Orwell wrote is pretty good as well. Down and out in paris and london. It's a good picture of life in the slums at the time, and much more raw than other accounts - Orwell seems to have simply recounted his experiences.
It's a bit low for Asimov to just say Orwell was slumming it like a modern hippie. He was slumming it like in the olden days, and starved for weeks.
It sounds like HN relies on automated flamewar detection and not-immediately-moderated flagging and voting that doesn’t work that well for hot threads or poor user behavior.
I’ve been visiting since the late 2000s and have felt for some time that HN was really ADHD in its topics in the frontpage and that things frequently are unfairly flagged or voted down.
PG used to say something to the effect of “use humans to scale until you automate properly”; obviously the moderation needs human help.
Usually mentioning anything about doing proper epidemiology (e.g. analysing COVID numbers), or anything modern about atmosphere physics and climate-modelling gets taken down everywhere within 24 hours - by humans.
Mathematics and physics is something a lot of people don't like and really love to take down. Idiots censoring experts is a real problem. This place here has less idiots, but outnumbering experts with stupidity is something that works everywhere.
A random sampling of humans might be better. The problem with people that want to take things down and cause problems is they are not random. Brigaders, marketing agencies with an agenda, nation state propaganda teams, groups with religious motivations, idiots that have been propagandized to and think they are fighting the good war, all of these tip the scales away from user voting being useful on forums.
Current systems are indeed very vulnerable to professional manipulation - there is no real defence yet - and there are powerful players. But democratic sampling won't help much. Only the wrong guys are interested in voting - and once mass hysteria has set in any democratic majority will vote to censor anything that brings them out of their panic loop. Witch hunting lasted for hundreds of years.
I think just tagging things accordingly would be a lot better than raw censorship. In good old places of Usenet just tagging things as Spam worked quite well. Just filtering out some tags and putting some guys in a kill-file was good enough. But it required manual labour - and eventually that was too much. But with AI now I think tagging could be done efficiently.
If people like to filter out all the tags (sarcasm, math, physics, ...) they can have it - but the way how things work now is that a lot of important information just gets censored by stupid people everywhere. Just hiding information from everybody is quite harmful - being seriously uninformed already killed a lot of people...
One problem with tagging is how much false tagging bullshit happens. You can't trust the posters to put correct tags, but you cannot also expect malicious users not to put false tags to hide stories from others.
I've also always hated binary up/down voting systems. Slashdot had it better with meta moderation where you had a few options to choose from.
I suppose now with AI I could mock up a UI concept I call orange slice voting. Instead of a singular up/down vote, you get what looks like a orange sliced across its equator where each segment has a series of positive and negative vote options and the user gets one selection per post.
"I like this content", "I believe this is true", "Fits this thread", "Good post", and "Misinformation", "I don't like this content", "doesn't fit this thread", "etc"
These can be adjusted for a site as needed and gives more dimensions for people to search and filter by.
I wouldn't trust users for tagging. Let the AI tag things and let the users select what flavour of AI they want to use. The biggest problem are the people.
Especially people interested in tagging are really bad. Sane people have a life and don't have time for things like that. Web forums with a reputation system have proven that power users with a lot of reputation usually are the worst. After Usenet died it was like the trolls went to web forums, and as power users they were granted admin rights.
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