As a matter of fact, I don't disagree in the slightest. That said, I think that trumpeting out this sort of prognosis in response to the problems we face is just the kind of "glass is half full" fatalism that shows me that once again conservatives aren't so interested in monkeying around with the existing feedback systems we have in place to work around these supposedly fatal flaws, but instead "count our blessings" (and then build a bomb shelter stocked with beans and a bible).

But yeah, I will concede that the civil war has had left us with some serious legal / geopolitical structural faults that could well be our undoing.

Well, I do believe it is true that our constitution is inadequate for how we are trying to govern so we can either wait for it to implode or amend it to reflect our current system. I would prefer actually restructuring our systems to align with the original intent. Whatever, it's all academic. The moral/religious portion of my post was a literal quote from John Adams so take that FWIW. Probably less than nothing here.

Blockchain/smart contracts and decentralized consensus seeking and distributed immutable databases are fads.

You already said that.

Its a technology that:
- is based on distrust in situations where trust has historically worked just fine
- requires trust in situations that have historically been the weakest point
- is based on perfect anonymity in situations where anonymity does not matter
- provides zero anonymity (retroactively) for your immediate business partners
- requires accelerating infrastructure investments by private individuals in exchange for rapidly diminishing returns
- handles transactions at the blistering speed of 10s a second
- is theoretically decentralized, but t in practice is generated by the software artifacts of a single centralized team which can do basically whatever they want with it (a central bank)

The currencies that arise from this technology have:
- the worst characteristics of fiat, and
- the worst characteristics of commodity,
- without being a legal tender

The users and proponents are:
- cryptocurrency survivalist nuts who somehow think that nvidia will still be around to supply mining hardware if fiat currencies collapse
- consultants who are trying to market the technology to traditional financial firms, but end up delivering a traditional database instead
- people who like fads


Blockchain isn't "like the internet", and saying Blockchain is a fad isn't like saying the internet is a fad. It's a specific solution to a specific problem that just happens to not actually exist.

Well you're not exactly a person I'm interested in having a substantive conversation about anything with so I'm not going to respond to any of that, but I would encourage anyone interested in the technology to not take that post with anything less than a shaker of salt.

You're officially uninvited to Jon's Gulch.

I'm not asking you to prove a negative. I'm asking you to use data to justify an assertion you made.

Well that sucks for you because I'm buying all the roads in and making them private toll roads.

Libertarian checkmate, *****.

It's too bad you aren't interested in having a substantive discussion, because I would be very interested to hear how you reconcile your interest in sustainable rural living with the energy costs of blockchains:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-is-unsustainable

As a rural-living person with a large amount of computer hardware, your answer would be very helpful to me.

What you are saying makes a lot of sense. I suspect the bigger problem is that there does not seem to be a time and place for a dialog between liberals and conservatives which could possibly address the deep philosophical differences between the two, once and for all. However, I am not really sure what the outcome of such a discussion would be, and I think the American people (citizens and elected officials alike) are neither sufficiently introspective, nor objectively and broadly informed about the world and its history, to recognize the shortcomings of the things they are clinging to, so that we could possibly work together to build something great.

I agree that proof of work is not a sustainable method of security, and my interests are in proof of stake based blockchains which is effectively (but not really) virtual mining. This is all experimental (as I guess all 'fads' are) and probably likely to fail, but if you're interested, the most promising development is happening with CASPER on the Ethereum blockchain. It's game theory heavy, but Vlad Zamfir is the lead researcher and has done a pretty good job of making a series of blog posts detailing the history of his team's work since 2014. Start at https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/01/introducing-casper-friendly-ghost/

If successful, this would at least allow a node to be run on a 5v computer like the pis, eliminating both the centralization of currencies like Bitcoin in places with state subsidized electricity, and the unfortunate effect that each Bitcoin transaction currently takes as much energy as the average American home for a weekend. This is integrated tightly with their plans for scaling past current transaction limits. My interests aren't really in replacing fiat currency with a blockchain currency (whose primary strength is the security of the database) though currencies are important. Check out Maker Market, also on Ethereum, for a project that aims to combat the volatility of cryptocurrencies that makes them basically non functional currency.

I don't believe there are shortcomings in the original intent of our system other than the obvious idea that every foreseeable situation couldn't be covered, hence the amendment processes. Obviously they saw that government is generally the root of most problems and appropriately structured a system that mostly operates as close as possible to the people. The main issue being that any system involving people is bound to be corrupt and the ink probably hadn't even dried on the the Bill of Rights before the scheming started. I dare say there are few if any intellects in politics today that rival those that structured the system we are supposed to operate under.

I mean TJ specifically seemed to think that farmers were the basic incorruptible people who could be counted on to participate in governance as citizens. So the problem (edit:from his perspective down there spinning in his grave) isn't that the government is too far from the people, it's that the people are too far from the land, and that results in a government reflecting the people.

I like what I am hearing, Wookie. I still think that by relying just on (hard to pass) amendments to handle each incompatibility the 18th century document encounters as technology continues to upend the world in which it was conceived, we are shoehorning a modern world with emergent complexity to fit a constructivist document whose primary impedtus seems to have been the shielding of the rights of landed people from abuses by government, whereas today the problems we face have more to do with externalities created by people having too many rights and whose effect become amplified by technology. I don't know if the Constitution can be updated to handle externalities, and the incentives to do so don't seem to exist (without reprisal from property owners). Which leaves us with the conclusion of liberals, that conservatives are standing up for the rights of corporations run amok, rationalized by language about property rights that were never meant to apply to bodies that welded so much influence over public life.

The civil war, for better or worse, set the country on a track for a federal government with vastly expanded powers, and liberals decided that they would use these powers to fix some of the shortcomings I just alluded to. But now we are seeing the sad backlash against that as the luddites smash the public sphere of society to oblivion.

Proof of stake sounds like an interesting protocol, and I promise to read about it when I have time. I do have one quick question you can probably answer, though.

There's a general information theory challenge to mass replication and eventual consistency, that being the system wide Omega(nodes*transactions) lower bound on total compute/bandwidth/energy, which is eventually an intractable overhead once the system becomes sufficiently popular. My understanding of the game theory is that this gradually pushes these types of distributed databases toward fewer and fewer nodes, as the number of transactions increase, until the system is effectively centralized. Does CASPER solve this problem? If so, it makes low-trust distributed databases more practical in general.

fwiw a lot of my scorn for Blockchain is because I dislike distributed databases in general, and more specifically because I think computers should only be used for video games and cat pictures.

I'm a software engineer in the quality/privacy/security tools space, by the way. I work on static and dynamic analysis stuff, i.e. programs that find bugs in other programs.

"Software is eating the world" isn't a marketing pitch, it's a warning.

My understanding is that Ethereum plans to rectify this through sharding. See FAQ https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ This is a sort of blockchains inside blockchains approach I suppose, which sounds to me pretty messy, but I get the impression that when I get to make a more nuanced survey of what they are doing after this semester (it's pretty high level for me and requires a lot of effort) it might seem more reasonable. I believe this is part of CASPER research but some of the scaling elements are implemented throughout the rest of the protocol.

Speaking of which, you're in luck, because with SWARM you will supposedly be able to effectively serve your cat pictures and retro 8 bit adventure games without data centers or servers.

You may also be interested in Gavin Wood's polka dot paper http://www.the-blockchain.com/docs/Gavin%20Wood%20-%20Polkadot%20-%20%20Vision%20For%20A%20Heterogeneous%20Multi-chain%20Framework.pdf

You can resolve Byzantine failures with sharding? Wow.

Edit: I'm a little sad you aren't pushing back on my neoluddism. I post a lot of BS on this forum but that's like the one topic I'm sincere and enjoy talking about.

This is quite interesting. I think it could be expanded to people being to far away from production. Any kind of production or, more simply, from being productive people. And then does that not sort of bring us back to the 47% Mitt Romney infamously mentioned?

"Ugh, game theory" - Mathematicians who don't do game theory

It's trivial, you know--just a fixed point theorem.

No Moore's Law, no supercomputers, no workable stellarator design, no nuclear fusion.

Honest question--how long before Trump starts a war? He's not going to be able to keep up this pace of breaking the laws and violating rights without an external enemy to galvanize the country.

Thanks!

Decision problems in NP have the interesting property of being polynomial time verifiable. What that basically means is that it's really difficult to come up with a good answer, but it's very easy for a teacher to grade it. That's why applications like this are good uses of computers; even if the software is crap, the result isn't going to hurt anybody so long as you remember to check the work at the end. There are similar problems in logistics for which computers can offer a significant competitive advantage, while offering little risk to the user.

You can't really say the same thing when computers are used to replace perfectly good manual processes or mechanical devices.

There is little evidence that back-office computing has offered any productivity improvement, but it has enabled whole new classes of crime and privacy challenges. It probably would have been very difficult to pull off identity theft for financial purposes, back when your financial records were paper ledgers held by your home bank branch. Today it is trivial.

Computers are also now used as slip-shod replacements for what were once carefully engineered mechanical devices, sometimes even as far as using software interlocks for safety instead of mechanical ones. All of this software is, of course, built by sub-par engineers on top of an industry standard technology stack that nobody understands. It's not entirely their fault, though, because nobody else knows how to build reliable software, either. The idea that a poorly-made air conditioner would let someone steal an entire retail chain's credit card transaction report, and lead to the CEO's ouster, should be absolutely astonishing. But it's not astonishing, because Target's air conditioner was controlled by a computer instead of a 5 cent rheostat.

There are even firms using computers, not because they're better, or even because they're cheaper, but because computers paired with bad laws let them control what consumers do with the products they buy (1) (2) (3).

And all of these little computers, the ones we brick up inside walls or install inside fridges and elevators and cars for no legitimate good reason, are probably going to kill themselves, and nobody's even keeping track of where most of these systems are. We pretty much have to wait for them to break before anybody even knows they're there. We're all (software quality tool developers, and our customers) only crossing our fingers, hoping that computer-controlled elevators and missiles aren't going to start killing people one day.

Edit: My favorite customers are game studios. They're the ones who get really engaged with our products, and seem to care the most about quality and security. Other industries require a lot of... er... top-down motivation, and even then a lot of them use static analysis as a bug metric instead of a bug finder. Your favorite AAA game from last year probably has better code and fewer software bugs than your car does. Sigh.

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Oh jeez, thanks for reminding us all of that, as if this week hasn't been enough to fuel our paranoia and anxiety.

I recently watched a video of a talk by Gerald Sussman, titled "We don't really know how to compute!", which I highly recommend to everyone who likes Jon's comment.

TL;DW: computers should work more like biological organisms, and people who think in terms of systems (electrical engineers, for example) probably know more about how to design software than programmers

Strangely enough, I think that conservatives and programmers suffer from the same problem described in Sussman's talk: in both cases, their brains are stuck in a loop, because they bit too hard on ideology with origins going back to the early days of the development of the complex system, when scarcity was a much bigger problem than it is now.

What makes things even worse is the group think where they synchronize with each other without justification....

Electrical engineers are software engineers, and hardware design verification is equivalent to software verification. It should be no surprise, then, that the tools and practices for hardware testing are the same as for software, only with funny sounding hardware-themed names (1) (2). Hardware only tends to be better than software because you can't usually push out a hotfix for silicon, so the designers are somewhat more cautious. Ultimately, the problem isn't the way we use software, the problem is how we use computers.

If you're curious, hardware designers usually write their tests in TCL. I don't know about you, but I thought that was fascinating. Who the hell uses TCL?

Edit: Unless you mean building control systems out of electronic sensors and relays. In which case, yeah, EEs all the way.

Hmm. I suppose you are right. I hadn't thought about the state of the art (i.e., newer than 1970). I didn't mean modern electrical engineers, but people like Claude Shannon, or your MIT instructor in a signals class.

In Sussman's talk, he suggests that adaptability is more important than correctness. Hardware that is too incorrect just isn't going to be usable at all, but he was speaking to software engineers who feel guilty for not having the time to make their software correct, and might want to hire Jon`C to help them do so, but can't justify it in their budget. Sussman was suggesting that it might be better to create machines that don't need to be correct to function properly in the first place. As an analogy he mentions the salamander who can regenerate elbows correctly after having its limbs severed above and below the elbow, and growing back the correct number of body parts after they are re-attached on the wrong sides.

Yes, that.

In my experiences, EEs being produced today are just bad software developers and bad physicists. The only advantage an electrical engineer has over the alternatives is a familiarity with signal processing and hopefully a bit more familiarity with circuits. Even so, I'd personally prefer a physicist 4/5 of the time over an EE.

E- so the conditioning on not modern electrical engineers is fair

First I have to ask an honest question of you for clarification. What laws and rights do you believe Trump is breaking/violating?

Interesting. I hadn't heard about the 2038 problem before. Just think about all of the great Y2K38 disaster movies we can look forward to in about 20 years!

For far more practical reasons, this sort of thing is what has turned me off to new vehicles. The vast amount of networked systems in a new vehicle is pretty phenomenal but it makes it very expensive to service and impractical for the home mechanic to work on. Something as simple as a power window switch is no longer a device that simply completes an electrical circuit to power the motor but device that sends a request to one of the computers to command the window up or down. Of course there are advantages to this. A window can be commanded up through an app or perhaps the car raises the window if it detects rain.

And then of course human error still rears its ugly head. About six years ago my refrigerator stopped cooling properly. I noticed through slots in the back that there was ice on the coils. I emptied the refrigerator, removed the back panel, defrosted the coils. Twice. I didn't know what else to do. Then I noticed an electric heating element, I didn't know much about refrigeration or how it worked then, that wraps around the coils. The plastic electrical connector was never securely locked together so it worked its way apart of time. Of course this happened when it was assembled. Easy fix but with everything that can go wrong with electronics and the fact that every tech is just going to through a new board in it for several hundred dollars every single thing we own becomes ridiculously expensive to repair and cheaper (or feels like it) to replace.

I wouldn't know, I'm not doing the research myself and am an idiot, but it seems like sharding is an important part of moving to an asynchronous network model, which I understand to be more fault tolerant.

I'm mostly not pushing back because you are obnoxious and exhausting to interact with. You're also talking to a guy who wants a steady state economy and to move to labor intensive civil services for full sustainable employment, who doesn't have a smartphone or a car, and incessantly mocks delusional people who think that vertical indoor farming, Elon Musk's cylon cars, and mystical carbon capture is going to save us from our probable extinction in this century. I'm likely more of a neoluddite than you, so I'm not sure why I would push back on that. That said, I see a lot of potential in some technology to enable some of the important parts of my vision for making our path to extinction a little more enjoyable, connected, and culturally enriching for the last few generations.

I also don't want to host my films on youtube anymore. And yes, the internet of things is probably going to result in nothing but awful disgusting suffering.


Wookie, I think that is a fair assessment in reality, but it's interesting to point out that TJ seemed to have a very specific assessment of the character of different productive classes. See this letter to john jay http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl33.php



I think this line of thinking, especially coming from someone as central to the founding as Jefferson, is important in assessing the kind of people the founding documents were intended for. But it has virtually no relevance to the 47% Romney mentioned, because that number is insane and far, far more than 47% of the people in this country are not productive in any fashion and the most egregious of them are the rugged individual job creators who lap up the ridiculous gruel Romney was serving up.

I had to take a little break from the computer and go visit my neighbors after reading that article about radiation poisoning... Also, speaking of human error on top of everything: Why was the same person who's patient was screaming for help and banging on the door working a month later frying another person's brain?

His extremely rash and un-American executive order which left hundreds of Iranian PhD candidates stranded in airports was halted within hours of an ACLU lawsuit.

As Bill Maher said on Friday, when Obama signed executive orders, they had been vetted by lawyers. Trump's executive orders are closer to signed tweets. Which is both incredibly frightening, but also encouraging in the sense that it is starting to turn more and more people against the idiot in chief.

I've skimmed the recent executive orders and haven't found the relevant portion. It could be that it's "hidden" in the USC references. They're certainly written by lawyers though. I've been impressed with most of what I've read so far.

LOL, multiple federal judges issued orders to temporarily halt the detentions to avoid the immediate human tragedy, without which, among other calamities, thousands of Iranian PhD candidates would have been deported or have their visas suspended. You are quite easily impressed by the apparent performance of Trump's lawyers.

If you don't think this is a massive flap, you are living in a ****ing bubble. My neighbour just donated $10,000 to the ACLU. And this is just in the first week, for Christ's sake.

The tepid response to this moral outrage from congressional Republicans is stunning, but frankly I've given up trying to suppress my suspicion that the Republican party probably selects for lack of empathy (I know you guys are suffering out there in West Virginia, but really, two wrongs don't make a "don't care").

We already have the signatures of six Fields Medalists and 37 Nobel Laureates, as well as over 7000 other American academics denouncing the executive order.

In other news, Trump has demoted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Director of National Intelligence from the National Security Council, to make way for J̶o̶s̶e̶p̶h̶ ̶G̶o̶e̶b̶b̶e̶l̶s̶ former executive chair of alt-Right propaganda house Breitbart Steve Bannon.

When does the war with Iran start?