clusterfoo

The Economist is a prime example that quality still sells, and always will. Even their new daily newsletters are top-notch.

IMHO they get right what most "old media" are getting wrong: The Economist isn't trying to compete with new media at what new media does best.

I don't need a magazine for opinion pieces, I have blogs for that; I don't need my local newspaper to tell me about Lady Gaga's new acting career, I don't need a magazine to tell me what's new and cool in fashion or music, and I certainly don't need CNN to tell me what's trending on twitter.

Give it up. You can't compete with the masses for that type of content. What I can't get from blogs and twitter is quality journalism: investigation, inside scoops, quality political analysis, etc.

When traditional media realizes that this is the domain where they excel, they will be just fine. Instead of cutting down on their investigative journalism departments, slash the entertainment reporters, slash opinion and talking heads. Cut your content in half, cut your staff, stop wasting resources on a hopeless battle, and focus on the one thing no blog or YouTube channel can do... give me concise, focused, quality journalism.

I don't think that's feasible either on a large scale. How about this strategy:

1. Pick the top three offenders (not in the same industry).

2. For each offender, find their cash cow, or top 3 most profitable products.

3. Make a concerted effort to boycott those products, and those products alone, indefinitely. Make some real damage.

The purpose here is to make an example out of someone. Build morale among protesters that if well organized, they can be effective.

First scenario: One million US/Canadian citizens sporadically decide to buy from company Y instead of company X... nobody notices.

Second scenario: Company Z suddenly loses 100,000 customers for their core product... I'll bet you someone notices.

What a great case for pure research:

> "He was a whiz with formulas and I think [his aim was] to construct those near counter-examples to Fermat's last theorem. So he developed a theory to find these near misses, without recognizing that the machine he was building, those formulas that he was writing down, would be useful for anyone, ever, in the future."

So... the Internet.

A growing millionaire class is not mutually exclusive with consolidation of wealth, if growth of millionaire class is less than reduction in middle-income class.

How do I access this from my phone? Same with other open source solutions... the only way to open it on my phone is to trust an unknown app developer to open it for me.

I trust GNU zip, but can I trust MiniKeePass? Can I trust iZip?

It's really turning out to be a beautiful general-purpose language as well.

I've been playing it for a few days now, and it's such a joy to work with. So many great forward-thinking libraries: (Reactive, Compose), excellent, readable code quality even down to the language implementation from very smart people...

If the language stack of the future looks something like Rust for systems, Julia for applications, and Elm for UI, I'll be a pretty happy developer :)

this is great! -- would be nice to add categories / filters.

Also interesting if each story had a 'stats' page with some numbers so it's not so much a black box.

Tangential pet peeve: but this kind of thinking, while noble in principle ("let's not waste resources / brain power on what doesn't matter"), tends to lead to stagnation, not innovation.

Paradigm-shifting discoveries tend to come from unexpected, unexplored territory. By taking away funding from "useless" pursuits (like pure maths, arts, theoretical researchers) and focussing solely on the bottom line (i.e: what matters, what is profitable), we make advances in a given field less likely, not more.

Reminds me of the Louie bit where David Lynch instructs Louie to "Be funny: 3... 2... 1... Go". -- That's not how things work. Achieving that level of mastery of his craft is 90% non-funny related activities (life experiences, personality, self-reflection etc.), and 10% actually focusing on "being funny" in itself.

What if the key to longevity comes from a cancer researcher, what the techniques needed come from an applied mathematician researching complex systems? What if the technology required to even model the problem in order to ask the right question is developed by computer scientists modelling data in a completely different field of research? There's just no way to know.

And who would you trust with manufacturing and programming such a chip?

And security. The biggest problem of course is that this a field ripe with potential for abuse... there's a fine line between a personalized book recommendation service, and a massive, streamlined propaganda machine.

We have the knowhow to build either (very near) futures: one in which we automate all the menial aspects of our day-to-day lives and are left to explore and create... and one in which our desire for convenience is exploited by governments and corporations.

The technical difficulty of achieving either is the same, the only difference between utopia and dystopia in this case is the foundation on top of which it's built:

One is built on openness: open data, neutral networks, open software and standards, all massively available so that anyone with the ingenuity to do so can pitch in and help build this future.

The other is built on a foundation of walled gardens and closed ecosystems: everyone building on top of platforms and technologies that are ultimately controlled by a handful of individuals whose interests we now have to trust align with our own.

Which leads to an unsettling thought:

> And culture builds on culture. (...) That cumulative process is what allows for the civilization that we now live in, but it raises a very interesting paradox and it’s interesting that it’s very rarely commented upon.

> Here’s the thought experiment: (...) imagine I showed you an Apple II running World of Warcraft. If you knew anything about computers you’d say, “Impossible. Impossible!” (...)

> Now, let’s think about human beings. Human beings are hardware that’s about 100,000 years old, but we run string theory, Lie algebra. We’re running 21st-century software! (...)

> I happen to be one who believes that the cultural becomes so complicated at a certain point that it won’t run on our brains. And in fact, you could argue that the reason why we’ve generated computational devices is consciously or unconsciously, we’ve come to recognize that our endogenous, organic computing power is not up to the task and we have to recruit machines to represent culture, because we cannot. I think there’s good evidence for that.

> I think that that ultimately might be what bounds us; that we’ll reach a point where our memory capacity and inferential power simply cannot accommodate the latest cultural artifact. At that point what happens? Does it become independent of us, or does it just stop? It’s like evolution coming to an end.

---

The whole thing is worth watching really, but that question really hit home for me. Though maybe I'm more optimistic: if we automated away all of the menial -- such as deciding what's for dinner, searching for the next book to read, etc. (unless it's done for pleasure of course) -- and the political -- automate a large portion of how our institutions are run -- all of these things that stifle and fragment our creative energies, so that we could focus all of our brainpower and energy on creative endeavours, how much more could we accomplish?

There's still a cognitive limit, but it seems to me that currently we are mired by so much unnecessary overhead that once we are able to remove it, we'll find that limit is a lot farther away than we expected.

I'd guess that for most of us, well over 50% of our creative energy is instead spent on the unnecessary and menial.

Especially since brains are not Turing machines, and the cost of overhead is not linear (50% overhead might mean more than 50% productivity loss): brains get tired over time, they burn out, they need rest, context switching is hard... that overhead burns you out and is making you less productive even when you're not actively thinking about it (what's for dinner, your personal finances, schedules, meetings, that dentist appointment, am I due for a haricut? did I already book the mechanic? my car is making that weird noise again, oh crap did I miss the new Game of Thrones last night, now I gotta catch up... etc etc etc etc) -- what a relief would it be to automate all of that and only focus on what's fun and what's important!)

> It's not just useful for convincing other, but also to notice when you’re being manipulated.

In my experience (having started uni in the humanities), this way of thinking (which is how most people think) actually makes you more susceptible to manipulation, not less, because you're basically trained to think that a convincing argument and a valid argument are the same thing.

Which really is how most people perceive reality: from political debates to the workplace, most people remember how well you "handled yourself" in a disagreement, how charismatic, how well you "stood your ground", etc. Not how sound your logic was. And this is how most of the world operates.

Programmers spend all of our day pointing out flaws in each others' work, we simply do not allow each other to be wrong and correct each other at every turn... this takes time to get used to when you're starting out (or come from a non-tech background), and would drive most people crazy and bruise their fragile egos (If this behavior has ever accidentally bled into your non-tech social life, you know this does drive most people crazy). But we do it because the damn thing has to work at the end of the day.

"Cargo cult programmers" are given a bad name, where in other professions you can make a career off of hopping onto the cargo cult of the day and parroting (or being) a charismatic talking head.

It's a "Sell me this pen" world, vs "Take this pen apart, tell me everything that's wrong with it, and build me a better pen".

It's not that there's no value in the humanities, but without technical training we end up with... well... the world as it is. There's a reason the tech community has been at the forefront of innovation for the past century, moving at light-speed while the rest of the "warm and fuzzy" world (from educational, to medicinal, to political institutions) is trying to catch up, like they're all still in the friggen 19th century communicating via carrier pigeons. And I don't mean only technical innovation: the tech community has been at the forefront of social innovation as well. Ideas like open data, open source, horizontal institutions, fast iteration and experimentation at the institutional level... nobody else does it. All other professions have their little cliques formed, where god forbid anyone question the Big Talking Head at the top or try to shake up things too much, or share too much information with anyone outside the in-group.

Agreed. This is the crux of the problem: if we're worrying about this leading to an "underclass"... does anyone think its illegality will prevent the ultra-wealthy from funding this technology?

And who will be overseeing the research? If it must be conducted in the dark and on a budget, does anyone doubt that human experimentation will take place?

No thanks.

Ethical or not, the cat is out of the bag and the only way is forward.