I've been off of facebook for years now, but I doubt nowadays most people see the "like" buttons as an instrument for teaching the website algorithms to help keep themselves open minded. (Assuming this stratategy indeed works, since it's known this isn't the only variable they consider)
And I don't think this isn't the purpose of feed 'customization' either. It's about making money by assuring advertisers that their ads will be paid some attention to. In order to do that, they need to try and keep people's eyeballs glued to the screen as much as possible.
So basically you "Like" everything you read? I've heard this is overwhelming common behavior in some southeast Asian companies, like Thailand, if I remember correctly.
Instead of reevaluating how our simplified models damage discourse and complex thinking, further simplifying human interaction to better fit over-simplified models only further skews us from the complex reality that our fake world obscures from us.
Ex: many journalists "favorite" tweets to refer back to later for their stories, but an uninformed observer might draw the wrong conclusions from seeing a New York Times journalist's twitter profile "favoriting" incendiary tweets by white supremacists or ISIS propaganda outlets.
I would imagine that in the sense of "usable product" for costumers, things will level out somehow.
But waste would certainly be lessened within certain steps of production. For example, sometimes you have containers used for long distance transportation, which you can't remove all of a product from, and you have to wash in between refillings.
15 billion to develop and deploy to space over four thousand satelites (not ignoring the fact that developing the prototype costs orders of magnitude more than simply assemblying the rest) seems like a gross underestimation...
Musk's real practical talent seems to be as a "scaling enthusiast". While I don't want to come across as a fanboy, I've been re-thinking my assumptions recently based on his perspective of what the real costs of things should be when manufacturing, testing and QC is mostly automated and I can't find fault with a lot of his calculations.
If they can put up 20 sats per launch, that's a cost of $75m per launch. With first stage re-usability each launch might cost ~$35m, leaving $2m to pay for each of those 20 satellites. This isn't taking into account the cost of ground stations and operational costs such as personnel, but it doesn't seem completely outlandish.
Elon Musk != Donald Trump. When he makes statements/estimations, even if they prove significantly conservative, they are truly grounded in verifiable facts.
People have been trying this for decades without success. McCaw and Gates tried it in the 90s with Teledesic, for example. Iridium also tried it without success. IIRC, Teledesic's early estimates 20 years ago were ~$10B.
But hasn't satellite technology changed significantly in the interim since 90's with much smaller payloads i.e CubeSats and FemtoSats. These should theoretically result in lower deployment costs:
Sure, but smaller payloads == smaller capabilities. Telecommunications satellites need massive switching capabilities and also massive power. They also need large antennas to service particular areas and they need propellant to maintain their orbits. How many CubeSats would be required to stream HD video to many thousands of people, for example? Not saying it can't be done, just saying that it isn't an easy problem to solve and there has been a lot of money already spent trying to solve it prior to Musk's announcement.
Yep, and, not that having to learn and become acquainted with shortcomings of new sets of languages/tools every other year isn't a fact of life for many devs that one ought to just accept. But having something run just (or as close as possible to) the same across many platforms make it more likely that that knowledge you acquired will remain among your best options when approaching a wide range of problems for a longer time.
Java 4 FOREVER!!!! f*ck maven... we like complex Ant configs... Generics can go to hell.
I mean this is a bit of hyperbole, but the point is that languages and platforms evolve, and given that JS has a bigger target surface than anything else in the history of computing, with more resources than anything else ever being poured into it, multiplied by approaches and opinions, how can it not be diverse. The world doesn't have the same houses everywhere either... Oh noes, they're building different styles of roofs over there.. the sky is falling.
I too watch from the sidelines, but I think that if I were a voter I would either not vote or vote third candidate.
I wish there wasn't so many troubling things about Hillary's deals and ties.
This is what I do not understand. If you are so troubled by Hilary, then make a stand against her. If you think Trump is worse (I do) then vote against him in a way that counts; vote for Hilary. This is not an election to sit on the sidelines. Make a choice that matters.
This is not really directed at you per say, but to Americans who could vote and are expressing this "do not vote/ vote third party" sentiment. I can only guess that they are Trump supporters hoping a three way split helps them.
(1) I suspect every voter has a threshold of evil-ness beyond which they simply can't in good conscience vote for Candidate X, even if Candidate Y is evil-er. For me, we've passed that threshold.
(2) I don't live in a swing state, so my vote already has only symbolic significance. As such I'd rather go on record voting no confidence in either Clinton or Trump, and vote for someone that I think would actually do a reasonable job if by some miracle they became president.
(3) I know Gary Johnson and the other third-party candidates have no chance of winning - _this_ time. I accept that (in my opinion) we're screwed for at least the next four years no matter whether it's Clinton or Trump, but if as many votes as possible go third-party this election, maybe - just maybe - third-parties will gain enough credibility to have a reasonable chance next election, or else the two major parties will finally get the message and pick better candidates.
>or else the two major parties will finally get the message and pick better candidates.
You'd think that after Bill's success in 1992, Gore's failure in 2000, Kerry's failure in 2004, and Obama's success in 2008, the DNC would finally have gotten a clue about how important it is to have a candidate who's well-liked and popular with the younger voters. But apparently not.
>(1) I suspect every voter has a threshold of evil-ness beyond which they simply can't in good conscience vote for Candidate X, even if Candidate Y is evil-er. For me, we've passed that threshold.
> This is not an election to sit on the sidelines. Make a choice that matters.
If you tell a kid that it's having green beans for dinner, it will throw a tantrum because it doesn't like green beans. If you ask it: "what do you want for dinner, green beans or spinach?", it will happily choose the beans because it likes spinach even less. The illusion of choice is a very powerful one.
You get to choose from a grand total of 2 pre-vetted candidates. Do you really think it matters which one you pick ?
The purpose of an election is not so the people can choose their leader, it's to make the people think they chose their leader. It prevents revolution.
Trump is a lot of things, but pre-vetted isn't one of them.
There was a robust primary season this time around, perhaps the most robust in over a century. The results are hogwash, and we can discuss what happened and what we can do about it. But it's not entirely rigged.
> Trump is a lot of things, but pre-vetted isn't one of them.
No, the republicans made a mistake by actually letting the people's vote decide and they will correct it before the next elections. The Democrats have already made this kind of mistake in the past[1] which is why they now have superdelegates to correct for that.
So yeah, Trump supporters managed to game the system this one time, unfortunately they wasted their one opportunity by choosing that clown.
Actually, the Democrats aren't the only ones that have something to protect against that: while the Democrats have superdelegates to tip the scale in favor of insiders (though, as yet, the supers have never actually, AFAIK, tipped the result in a different direction than the majority of pledged delegates), they, unlike the Republicans, actually assign pledged delegates in a basically proportionate manner (there are state by state differences, but all of them are fundamentally around a proportionate baseline.)
The Republicans also have a system to prevent a popular outsider from winning, its just a different system. Rather than assigning pledged delegates in a basically proportional manner and then establishing superdelegates as a safety valve, they have designed a system to favor candidates with establishment support by, in most primaries/caucuses, giving vastly disproportionate delegates to the plurality or majority winner (in some cases, winner-take-all), a system designed to favor candidates who start off ahead, which is assumed to be (and usually is) those with the most party pedigree and establishment advance support preparing the ground.
This backfired on the establishment in this election largely because the establishment started out backing a candidate that was so unappealing to their own key supporters that even major donors were bad mouthing him from the beginning of the primary campaign and talking about how they were only giving to him because they felt compelled out of loyalty to the Party and the candidates family, which gave plenty of opportunity for a celebrity candidate to leverage free media to a powerful lead while the establishment was scrambling to adjust, which they never managed to do.
>No, the republicans made a mistake by actually letting the people's vote decide and they will correct it before the next elections. The Democrats have already made this kind of mistake in the past[1] which is why they now have superdelegates to correct for that.
What are you talking about? The superdelegates weren't even a factor in nominating Hillary; she won the popular vote in the DNC primaries even without taking into account the SDs. You can argue that media complicity and other factors like CtR had a big hand here, but in the end, it was the Democratic voters who pulled the lever for her. So just like the Republican voters managed to choose a clown, so did the Democratic voters, except it was even worse for the Dems: on the Rep side, at least they can point out that it was actually a minority of Rep voters who chose him, and he won because of vote-splitting between all the other candidates. This just isn't a case on the Dem side, where all the other candidates aside from Sanders got almost no votes at all, and Hillary won a clear majority.
> What are you talking about? The superdelegates weren't even a factor in nominating Hillary;
Who's talking about Hillary ? I'm just saying they have a mechanism in place to make sure there is no actual democracy going on. I didn't claim they had to use that mechanism in this election.
They may have a mechanism in place, but your argument falls flat at complaining about this mechanism (or any undemocratic mechanism) when it hasn't even been used to change the final results of any election.
I guess you could say that Democratic voters are a lot better at nominating the person their party leadership wants them to than the Republican voters.
The solution that forces you to choose between two not acceptable outcomes is a very bad solution. If both choices are not acceptable then there should be a way to reject both of them.
Sadly IMO, most people think that way, therefore we get to make this exact same choice every 4 years, where we vote for the overtly racist party to defeat the blacks, or the other party to think of ourselves as a friend to the blacks (or because we are the blacks) and ignore the terrible effects of bipartisanship. The only reason this election is interesting is because a critical mass of people are irritated by the two parties in general; normally, this would be a Jeb Bush v. Hillary Clinton election, and Sanders would have dropped out after the first Democratic primary debate.
Of course, if things had been going normally, Hillary Clinton would be serving the end of her second term. The potential energy for change has been building for a while, 9/11, the Iraq debacle, the housing bubble, the rise of the social Internet, the death of the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers turning 70 have had a huge effect on how political thought amongst the American masses is distributed.
I'm troubled by both Hillary and Trump. I'm excited by the inevitable outcome that we are going to elect a weak President after a couple of decades of Executive branch expansion. I'm excited to vote for someone other than the two parties to promote ideas that are usually excluded from the public discourse for reasons other than their merits.
What's so troubling about Hillary's deals and ties? I can see that many people are upset about them, but when I look into details, I don't see anything particularly serious. I don't think her ties are any more troubling than, say, Romney or Trump, and no one really talked about those.
I think that once one has accepted that he/she must start at that moment no matter what, and it will a long time till finishing, then starting with the hard stuff makes all the sense. You might be feeling drained by the end, when you were to take on those hard problems/subjects. Or the easier stuff you can attack at other times, during breaks, while it might be difficult to advance on the harder stuff without a bigger more comfortable time frame.
If you put a bunch of humans (children) together, each with no previous knowledge of language, on an isolated island, they will in all likelihood come up with one. (Something close to this, as a live example, is a documented case I remember having read years ago of an all-new sign-language that emerged spontaneously among a large group neglected deaf-mute children at an institution a few decades ago. I think this was in Nicaragua or some other country in that region)
What I mean is, our linguistic ability isn't dependent on culture (though tremendously enriched by it), it's biological.
Why wouldn't the same hold for dolphins. I think they're very smart, but I don't believe they ever had something we could decently call a language.
Language is a strange and large territory. And, almost by definition, any social animal must be able to communicate with each other; And, in order to communicate, there must be shared formal rules. In essence: syntax.
Well, yeah, but those rules will only be unique and useful for probably 5 or 10 dolphins. The rest of dolphin kind won't have any innate concept of the vocabulary they've developed.
Grammar, syntax, vocabulary, implicit context, mood and tone. You'll be starting at square one, with every separate pod, with minimal potential of cross-pollination across pods, based on dolphins that leave one group, and join another, and whatever they bring with them, and manage to learn from new dolphins they meet.
Even the presumable token words, which surely must exist: air, water, fish, dirt. One pod in isolation from the rest might not build these conceptual ideas, or use their noises the same way, and then what of another pod halfway around the world, which they've never met?
Sure, the capacity for language remains, but there's no persistent implementation. Each variant of a dolphin language dies with the dolphin that knows it.
And what do businesses say when they actually need people with some quality?
It is usually a natural consequence of your skills being in high demand that you'll be able to ask for a higher salary.
Business may be saying that only because those are expensive as you charge, but if however they are actually in need of certain skills those would probably be expensive just the same.
Considering that 1)Scientific knowledge is so important for everything in our global society and 2)The US stats in science education are below those in other developed economies, I'd say probably the demand is real.
And I don't think this isn't the purpose of feed 'customization' either. It's about making money by assuring advertisers that their ads will be paid some attention to. In order to do that, they need to try and keep people's eyeballs glued to the screen as much as possible.