sanityUnbounded

Thank you, I always find listening to startup podcasts remarkably inspiring, even though I'm not sure whether or not I want to work on one yet. The "you don't need to be perfect, but you do need to care" message a lot of them share is applicable to a lot of things I work on.

Anecdote: I was working at a restaurant this past summer and was cleaning up at the end of the night while listening to the AirBnB episode of Masters of Scale with headphones. When they brought up the presidential cereal boxes I laughed, and one of the waitresses who I had been hitting it off with recently asked what I was listening to. I said a podcast about AirBnB. She looked at me funny and walked away. Smooth. I guess not everyone shares the same enthusiasm.

I think you are right. But while I think AR/VR is good for the types of research you mentioned at first glance, I have not seen any comprehensive prototype for working with elementary mathematics in 3D space taught in schools. So I hope you are wrong, and there is room for a hands on/physical type of math.

If something comes out that can help students who struggle with math visualize those concepts in a more (to them) natural way I will be thrilled. To me these concepts were always very visual, and allowed me to pick up concepts in class by thinking that way. I only have experience in the U.S. education system, and in my experience it felt that my teachers always taught in a way that emphasized problem memorization and notation over actually understanding, mentally, the abstract concepts and problem solving. This seems like a barrier for the average student, and leaves a lot of people feeling left behind or "not smart" even though it is likely a fault in the way they are taught.

If something comes out that will allow those mental barriers to be broken, I will consider it a win.

And it makes sense why it works so well. On a 2D screen, seeing data in linear rows and columns is the best option because it follows the same format we have been taught verbatim since birth. The first type of data processing a person does is learn to read. Left to right, each letter (column) represents a different sound (value), these letters build a picture, and the more of them there are the more information the story contains (debatable). Then we learn to build our own information by writing.

Then we move on to math, and we still do it with paper, almost as an extension of writing. When doing calculations in class it is natural to keep calculations and values in some type of invisible grid pattern that makes sense to the student. Then we get to the computer, and that format still follows.

Except that the first information processing a person does isn't reading at all. It's learning sounds and words, and we do that by listening and watching others do it. And the first thing we create isn't words on a page, it's likely something physical, in the form of building blocks or some other toy. This type of learning is great, but it can't be replicated well in a school system because it is expensive and doesn't scale well to the real world. If you're going to engineer and design a bridge, you're not going to start by making a bridge. So we're taught to make lines on paper that represent a bridge.

This is where (I hope) AR/VR becomes disruptive. An infinite amount of objects that can represent any piece of data on any scale in non space.

Think about how successful minecraft is. When I first played it made me realize how much creativity I had lost to pen and paper through no fault of my own. I was building logic gates without even realizing what formal logic was until I came to college.

Now make it engulf me, make it blank, and give me a wand and an in game terminal.

I have been in the apple ecosystem for about 10 years. For a company that has been priding itself on end user security, the bugs that have been creeping their way into the OS are just... disappointing. What is the point of paying a premium for a well polished hardware/software bundle if the OS is malfunctioning in a non trivial manner. Design? Right now when I use my calculator app on my iPhone and do 2+2+2 I get 24. That's a pretty awful design. Actually, it's a lie.

I think you are misunderstanding me. I agree there is no debate that those claiming they are Nazis are Nazis.

It is important to understand why people feel compelled to identify with Nazism. If we don't understand why something happened, there is nothing we can take away to prevent it in the future. What we have with Daily Stormer is a quite literal database of interactions of people who self identify as Nazis... I'd say deleting it is not the most productive thing we could do with such information.

I'd say it's more sad than terrifying. Terror implies immediate danger, most people will not feel the danger that shutting down of a Nazi website should entail. Most people are not Nazis.

The value of an online community exists within participation from those that visit the website. Anyone that visits can explore the ideology from the perspective of those that believe in it, which is an invaluable tool for education.

What happened in Charlottesville was a moment in american history, no matter which side you fall on. What google, godaddy, and cloudflare are doing is (understandably) limiting community engagement on extremist websites. However by doing that it is also restricting those that want to understand who-what-where-when-why-how from accessing the conversations that occurred, and obviously, they did indeed occur. Now, anybody that wants to explore both sides of the event has to do so by navigating a barrage of news articles which loosely throws around the term "nazi", and a smaller subset of opinion articles which view it as a censorship issue.

It makes the stance of anti-censorship & anti-nazi an impossibly difficult stance to take because these two issues are being viewed as two sides of the same issue. This is not conducive to a proactive internet culture. For the first time in history we have the opportunity to explore opposing political/race ideologies from inception to protest, and instead of using it to learn about human nature and group think, companies are hitting a mute button to win a popularity contest with investors.

This isn't related to the website but I also share the same sentiment towards alcohol in the workplace. It is amazing how a beverage can change an employees outlook on a company. On the company side though, it's an easy/inexpensive way to build culture.

People are strange.

Seems like a decent paper, only a few typos. Let's run a 300 million ICO

You could do that. However you then paint a target on your back saying "FBI please hack me" under the rule 41 change.

I recommend Creativity, Inc. to every person in a management position whom I have the opportunity to recommend it to. Although Et Catmull presents a depiction of Pixar and it's growth as a largely artistic endeavor, I feel that it is applicable to those that manage engineers especially.

The ratio of students that decided to major in engineering because they were good at math in high school vs. the students who decided to major in engineering because they they wanted to make something inspiring, I feel ( and let me stress my inexperience as a current undergrad, without experience in the actual field ) is vastly favored in career growth towards those that decide to create instead of simply learn.

While there is always room and lucrativity to tie engineers on a leash and juice mathematics and logic out of them until they reach an existential crisis, there is always (ALWAYS) room within the budget to let them set out upon a path which is in tune with their not necessarily young, but foolish and hopeful beliefs.

Curious, why do you have to remember that 2 + 2 = 4 & 3 + 2 = 5? Once you know the values the symbols represent, at that point isn't it similar in simplicity to roman numerals?

II + II = IIII

2 + 2 = 4

Don't see how the latter problem lends itself to any more memorization beyond symbols

I read the first two sections of On Writing and that was enough for me. The first is a memoir from Stephen King in which he goes through major events in his life. The second is a writing style guide which centers around one theme: simplicity in writing allows for greater imagination in the reader. The second section goes through sentence structure, syntax, verb/adverb choice, pronoun placement, ect.

I would agree that the first section does not say a great deal about writing, but the second section reminded me of sitting in my High School english class with my favorite teacher writing a couple sentences on the board as an example and passionately (oops) dissecting the structure with arrows and margin notes to explain how and why a certain picture was playing in my mind while reading them.

Placing King's personal anecdotes and thoughts about the "life of a writer" before the actual lesson felt to me, when I began the second section, like I was sitting in the classroom of an artist who has far more passion for his work than I have ever felt for anything in my life before then. It made the writing lesson more impactful, if anything.

But it certainly had a lot to say about writing.

I couldn't help but read this and think "old".

Yes, maybe I could have written that better. My attention is stuck between wikileaks and my professor talking about binary trees.

Typical 21st century bs.

The logistics of breaking into a house undetected to set up tiny microphones suggests a lot of manpower, and to do that to each house in the United States would be near impossible without raising suspicion.

The reason to care now is because it likely wasn't happening then.

Also, whether the CIA "gives a shit" is irrelevant. It is still happening regardless, and you cannot know for certain what the CIA does and does not "give a shit" about.

If you have documents showing what this data is being used for, do the world a service and release them.