vannevar

56 ms·

751.
by vannevar 6y ago
...would result in popular opinions being promoted, without regard to their value... I believe that's the case now. The only difference would be that, if you felt the existing top response was incorrect and there was no better post f
752.
by vannevar 6y ago
Yes, in contrast to the upvote, the downvote button is overloaded: it can signify disagreement, or it can signify a violation of community standards. I think the former is a poor use of the downvote, as it adds little or no value. What good
753.
by vannevar 6y ago
Or, "How Parler outsourced nearly every critical aspect of its business, incurring massive risk in pursuit of maximizing profits." This is the risk of the modern, ultra-lean online enterprise. Parler got kicked off for knowingly p
754.
by vannevar 6y ago
A lot of these expenses fulfill a necessary function for wealth-building: they are social signifiers. A lot of financial opportunities---particularly job offers---come through one's social network, and things like dining out are import
755.
by vannevar 6y ago
You can certainly contrive a counter-example---even in 1986, you could say much the same thing about assembly and something like C or BASIC. But once that leap of abstraction was made, we seem to have hit a plateau of expressive power. Is t
756.
by vannevar 6y ago
I don't think that Brooks was arguing that any given fixed programming task could not be made easier over time; clearly, even in 1986, there were programming tasks that had become trivial by use of existing code but were originally qui
757.
by vannevar 6y ago
I don't think moral considerations are going to have much influence on this particular decision. I suspect this will be more of a fiscal matter.
758.
by vannevar 6y ago
It’s far worse to accidentally suppress the truth than to share a lie. Falsehoods will reveal themselves in time because of the very fact that they are not true. The problem is that we are learning this is not true. Falsehoods can come so
759.
by vannevar 6y ago
What's a monopoly? What is a business expense? What's NSFW? There are lots of gray areas in regulation, to the point where ambiguity is more the rule than the exception. This is just another aspect of complex behavior that, now th
760.
by vannevar 6y ago
Yes, the problem lies not with the technology, but with the gross asymmetries created by wealth and power imbalances. There is an enormous difference in the danger posed by an individual salesperson using cognitive bias on a personal level,
761.
by vannevar 6y ago
I wrote a game with a friend early on for the App Store. I second the notion of validation. It's great you have a friend who can design graphics for the game, but prototype and test the basic mechanics before you get too wrapped up in
762.
by vannevar 6y ago
Exactly. I might not buy a satnav that was 66% accurate, but I would definitely buy a lottery number predictor with that accuracy. I don't know whether protein folding is closer to the former or the latter, but you can't make a bl
763.
by vannevar 6y ago
It's not a coincidence that Bitcoin is hitting highs at the same time as the stock market. Both are highly speculative at this point, and historically correlated. From back in June, a prediction that Bitcoin would catch up with the S&a
764.
by vannevar 6y ago
The notion that inequality is ok as long as everyone is getting wealthier is based on the fallacious assumption that people reason about wealth in absolute terms. Wealth is purely relative. It's probably more useful to think about the
765.
by vannevar 6y ago
Yes, but the "such as..." example incorporates the original "this statement is not provable" statement, so it seems a bit of a cheat. If you could exclude that statement, it would also by definition exclude any compound
766.
by vannevar 6y ago
Something I've always been curious about: does Gödel's theorem imply an infinity of inconsistent statements, or is the "this statement cannot be proven..." statement the only one? If it's the latter, then of what pr
767.
by vannevar 6y ago
Some create more wealth than others. Bob creating more wealth than Fred does not mean that Bob took it from Fred. There's nothing unfair about Bob creating more than Fred. Sure, I think this is pretty much universally recognized. But
768.
by vannevar 6y ago
Yes, I think the focus on "getting to the moon,", to use his analogy, ignores the fact that GPT-3 is an SR-71 in a world of 19th century balloons. It may not get to the moon, but it definitely points the way to lots of useful stuf
769.
by vannevar 6y ago
Would it be fair to say Retool is a spiritual successor to Visual Basic, upon which a whole generation of enterprise apps was built?
770.
by vannevar 6y ago
These are fair points, and if a buyer had 100% confidence in prefab, your argument certainly makes financial sense. But for most consumers prefab is a novel approach, and therefore likely to be perceived as risky. So that savings might need
771.
by vannevar 6y ago
Does prefab go much beyond framing? The NAHB estimates that framing is only 17% of the cost of a house(1), so even cutting that cost in half doesn't save much on the whole project. (1) https://www.nahbclassic.org/generic
772.
by vannevar 6y ago
Sort of. Nabarro criticized the notion of lockdowns as the primary mechanism. His essay on the subject is here: https://www.4sd.info/covid-19-narratives/reflections-about-t... In his first point, he notes: "People
773.
by vannevar 6y ago
Sure. But there's a wide range between the concentration of capital we have now, and the notion of it all being somehow distributed equally. It's not so much about giving capital to workers, it's more about retarding the na
774.
by vannevar 6y ago
It's inevitable only if we decline to regulate capital. Just as it's also inevitable that a speeding truck will crash, unless the driver puts on the brakes at some point. There is nothing in the laws of physics that dictates that
775.
by vannevar 6y ago
That "machinery and infrastructure" is on the assembly line, not in the C-suite. It is literally there to make the assembly line workers more productive, so it takes fewer of them to do the same work. Now, you can say that the wor
776.
by vannevar 6y ago
I think this a a demonstration that trickle-down economics doesn't work, because additional capital injected into a capitalist system tends to be captured by the capital at the top. Rationally, you would expect productivity gains to
777.
by vannevar 6y ago
I believe this model accounts for such individual response: "Heterogeneity in contact structure and individual variation in infectivity, susceptibility, and resistance are key factors..." (emphasis added)
778.
by vannevar 6y ago
You're assuming that the city had to pay for the roads entirely themselves, which of course they didn't. My intent was not to explain how Lafayette paid for their roads, it was only to say that the $32B replacement figure was plau
779.
by vannevar 6y ago
Just some back-of-the-envelope calculations: Louisiana population 4.65M Lafayette population 126k Miles of road in Lousiana: 130k ( https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/ ) Assume Lafayette
780.
by vannevar 6y ago
If you make the assumption that the frequency of opportunities is inversely proportional to their potential (ie, the bigger the opportunity, the less frequent they are), then in the short term you're going to be better off expending yo

More ›