patcon

Say what you will, but a million scientists and a network of sometimes-miscalibrated institutions (publishers, funders, universities, etc)... that feels less owned than maybe 4 companies having the edge on every [scientific?] field in the next few years...

Agreed. This human is the ray of sunshine I needed :)

I feel that there are some surprising blindspots within this thread, in sympathy to mathematicians.

Don't we as tech ppl understand "purpose"? You might not feel purpose in their work, but surely you see how when it comes for your own, you might revisit why it is such an imperative that we give AI all tasks for want of speed and efficiency?

Yeah, I can't tell if this is true fandom or really clever trolling of CloudFlare...

It's a distribution. If someone is moving down, then someone else is moving up relative to one another (which is how inequality is measured). Yeah, it might feel like one is more upward, but the net change can be equivalent if rich ppl move down, or poor people move up.

I'll take you up on that attempt to find a silver lining:

Previously privileged people having a hard time is maybe a good recipe for class solidarity, which is maybe something we could use in society. Maybe it will be good for us... collectively, if not individually.

Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.

EDIT: But also, I suspect I would be "fuck-you angry' at reading this comment if I had a family depending on me.

I suspect it's the consequence of a depth-first search for truth, when reality is deep.

Imho narrative and metaphor and feeling hits more like the breadth-first mode. Lots of compression in pursuit of demarking a reality, whether or not everyone likes where a story does its compression. It takes visiting a lot places (and listening to how lot of signals bounce back) to drop a good metaphor, or craft a good story, that reaches and affects a large quorum of minds.

> the Pantone company, launched in 1963.

I had a dyslexic moment, and read this as 1693 (!), and then gleefully went to Wikipedia with the the intent to enter a delightful rabbit hole :)

I do trust critique on this stuff from throwaways. The utter cheapness of manufacturing provocateurs against EU interests, mean you need to bring your reputation to be taken seriously with the potshots imho

Recursive self-improvement. Look to the mathematicians for the intelligent patterns of response to such exponential circumstances.

If your scathing critique is "it's slow", you don't understand what's happening or what the reasonable expectations of risk are, because that's a vapid critique.

From what I understand, it has gone great if your atoms exist on the other side of the cold war, no?