> But if the startup gods aren’t smiling, and you can’t either figure out the cause and/or figure out how to correct it, it’s time to start working on a Plan B for the business. Plan B often includes kicking off a strategic process that ends up in the sale of the company before it becomes as obvious to others as it is to you that you’ve got a dying shark on your hands.
> But something tells me that our society and economy derives zero benefit from nanosecond resolution trading vs. trading with say 1 minute resolution.
Not only does nanosecond resolution provide zero benefit, models indicate that it actually harms liquidity. To be specific, serial order processing in continuous-time is more efficient in "time-space", but less efficient in "volume-space". The better mechanism is batch order processing in discrete-time (i.e. process all arriving orders simultaneously in batch every 100 milliseconds, rather than one-by-one every nanosecond): http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/HFT-Fre...
A point of controversy is whether or not the 43 students were incinerated. The indedentent experts (GIEI) report insist that it was impossible:
> Dr. José Luis Torero, an internationally recognized fire-investigation expert, was hired by the GIEI to conduct an independent examination into the incineration scenario. Torero, a Peruvian who participated in the forensic investigations of the World Trade Center attacks, has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously a professor of fire security at the University of Edinburgh. He currently heads the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland, Australia. The incineration of forty-three bodies in an open-air terrain like that of the Cocula dump, Torero concluded, would have required some thirty-three tons of wood or fourteen tons of pneumatic tires, along with the same amount of diesel fuel; the fire would have had to burn for sixty hours, not the twelve that the P.G.R. claimed it had, based on the confessions of captured Guerreros Unidos sicarios. The smoke from such a fire would have risen nearly a thousand feet into the sky and would have been visible for miles around; no such pillar of smoke was spotted, or even captured by satellite imagery.
The pro-government media is pushing back that its just one scientist's opinion, which is at odds with the opinion of scientists at UNAM (national university of mexico) who participated in the government investigation and concluded that the missing students _were_ incinerated.
Specifying a solution is easy; that's a purely technical exercise. The hard problem is figuring out how we get from where we are now (A) to where we want to go (B); that's a political problem.
The other day, I ran across this in a Yudkowsky article[1]:
> Suppose that earthquakes and burglars can both set off burglar alarms. If the burglar alarm in your house goes off, it might be because of an actual burglar, but it might also be because a minor earthquake rocked your house and triggered a few sensors. Early investigators in Artificial Intelligence, who were trying to represent all high-level events using primitive tokens in a first-order logic (for reasons of historical stupidity we won't go into) were stymied by the following apparent paradox: [.. snip ..] Which represents a logical contradiction, and for a while there were attempts to develop "non-monotonic logics" so that you could retract conclusions given additional data.
> In a hypothetical cyber-utopia or something, this could all just be a simple protocol (say, um, combining aspects of Direct Connect, BitTorrent, NNTP, Gopher, Bitcoin, GPG)
The article does mention p2p and decentralization, but the browser isn't whats holding that back. The client-server development paradigm is.
Currently, every dev making a p2p app has to roll their own platform because there's no standard (i.e. no LAMP, rails, or Heroku for deploying p2p apps). Some projects are working to change this, namely BitTorrent Maelstrom (which is a fork of Chromium with native support for magnet URLs, so it auto-renders an html/js package distributed via torrent); and http://ipfs.io (a sort of content-addressable p2p filesystem, or bittorrent on steroids).
Javascript package managers like npm tend to work much more seamlessly than the old unix ones. Wouldnt mind scrapping them all for https://node-os.com/
Microsoft's first customer was IBM because an IBM VP sat on the board of Seattle National Bank with Bill Gates's mother (the bank was founded by Bill's grandfather).
> Can we entirely rule out the possibility of AI researchers making advancements over time, and then eventually some research lab building one that's super intelligent compared to us? Why?
That's not the thing we should be worried about, or at least that's the point I got from the article. The thing we should be worried about is the way machine learning is applied in the here-and-now: the ethics of big data social networks, the robustness of complex (API-driven) systems, and so on. I fully agree that these issues are much more pressing and worrying than some emergent super-intelligence.
But I thought the article was weak in its discussion of dreams, creativity, and linear "flat data". It links to a June 2015 popular mechanics article about applying a genetic search optimization algorithm to discover gene regulatory networks, downplaying it as not-true-intelligence. But it does not mention deep neural networks and their higher-dimensional abstractions, particularly the psychedelic "inception" images.
The author also mentions "linear reasoning", and says he expects we'll learn more about intelligence from stem cell and Alzheimer's research, and the "tissues surrounding neurons, and the roles they play in contextual regulation." As if to set up some dichotomy between machine and biological intelligence. But what about deep neural networks?? I'm not sure how that would affect the author's arguments, but I'd like to see it discussed.
In the comments of a recent mathematics-without-apologies blog post[1], there was a back-and-forth between Jacob Lurie and Urs Schreiber (the author of the OP article on nLab). I've been trying to parse the material on nLab for years, good to know I'm not the only one who seems to have trouble with it. A refreshingly blunt discussion, not to be missed!
> I’d only add that the corrupt elites were not only overspending, but they were involved in vendor finance scams. Hundreds of millions in bribes on some single deals. The credit came through to sign the contracts, and the bribes were rolled into the contracts. On one deal alone, Siemens, you had the Greek defense minister take hundreds of millions to approve a tens of billions deal. He is in jail, so are members of his family, but then there are 64 others being prosecuted as well for this one deal. Think about it, hundreds of millions spread to 64 people (who probably doled out more themselves).
> You can't deny the fact that in the last decade, greeks have become accustomed to a certain life style that can no longer be maintained.
The point of the article is that the 'moral hazard' of lending and borrowing cuts both ways. What about the lifestyle of European bankers & elites? The lifestyle of elites was funded by their reckless lending, buying up "idiot paper" left and right (not just Greece). They believe themselves entitled to collect high-interest rents regardless of the risk which is priced into the interest rate!
To stretch an analogy, it'd be like Venture Capitalists blaming the startups for failing to earn returns on their investments.Rather than take responsibility for making risky investments, they demonize startup founders and employees, and threaten to break their legs until they pay back the firm.
Its "loan-shark theatre" between governments and central banks, with politicians stoking nationalist sentiment and stereotypes (as politicians do) in the service of elites (i.e. the creditors). Maybe you should read the article, instead of asserting "undeniable facts" (p.s. the greek economy has been in a worsening great depression for the last decade; and your handful of gamer acquaintances are a non-representative sample).
This is just begs the question of what the tax policy should be. If mainly income is taxed, then the rich get (proportionally) more votes. If mainly consumption is taxed, then everyone else (those who spend their income rather than save/invest it) gets more votes.