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The Web Browser is Not Your Client (But You Don't Need To Know That)

22 Error 22 April 2016 12:12AM

(Part of a sequence on discussion technology and NNTP. As last time, I should probably emphasize that I am a crank on this subject and do not actually expect anything I recommend to be implemented. Add whatever salt you feel is necessary)1


If there is one thing I hope readers get out of this sequence, it is this: The Web Browser is Not Your Client.

It looks like you have three or four viable clients -- IE, Firefox, Chrome, et al. You don't. You have one. It has a subforum listing with two items at the top of the display; some widgets on the right hand side for user details, RSS feed, meetups; the top-level post display; and below that, replies nested in the usual way.

Changing your browser has the exact same effect on your Less Wrong experience as changing your operating system, i.e. next to none.

For comparison, consider the Less Wrong IRC, where you can tune your experience with a wide range of different software. If you don't like your UX, there are other clients that give a different UX to the same content and community.

That is how the mechanism of discussion used to work, and does not now. Today, your user experience (UX) in a given community is dictated mostly by the admins of that community, and software development is often neither their forte nor something they have time for. I'll often find myself snarkily responding to feature requests with "you know, someone wrote something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it."

Semantic Collapse

What defines a client? More specifically, what defines a discussion client, a Less Wrong client?

The toolchain by which you read LW probably looks something like this; anyone who's read the source please correct me if I'm off:

Browser -> HTTP server -> LW UI application -> Reddit API -> Backend database.

The database stores all the information about users, posts, etc. The API presents subsets of that information in a way that's convenient for a web application to consume (probably JSON objects, though I haven't checked). The UI layer generates a web page layout and content using that information, which is then presented -- in the form of (mostly) HTML -- by the HTTP server layer to your browser. Your browser figures out what color pixels go where.

All of this is a gross oversimplification, obviously.

In some sense, the browser is self-evidently a client: It talks to an http server, receives hypertext, renders it, etc. It's a UI for an HTTP server.

But consider the following problem: Find and display all comments by me that are children of this post, and only those comments, using only browser UI elements, i.e. not the LW-specific page widgets. You cannot -- and I'd be pretty surprised if you could make a browser extension that could do it without resorting to the API, skipping the previous elements in the chain above. For that matter, if you can do it with the existing page widgets, I'd love to know how.

That isn't because the browser is poorly designed; it's because the browser lacks the semantic information to figure out what elements of the page constitute a comment, a post, an author. That information was lost in translation somewhere along the way.

Your browser isn't actually interacting with the discussion. Its role is more akin to an operating system than a client. It doesn't define a UX. It provides a shell, a set of system primitives, and a widget collection that can be used to build a UX. Similarly, HTTP is not the successor to NNTP; the successor is the plethora of APIs, for which HTTP is merely a substrate.

The Discussion Client is the point where semantic metadata is translated into display metadata; where you go from 'I have post A from user B with content C' to 'I have a text string H positioned above visual container P containing text string S.' Or, more concretely, when you go from this:

Author: somebody
Subject: I am right, you are mistaken, he is mindkilled.
Date: timestamp
Content: lorem ipsum nonsensical statement involving plankton....

to this:

<h1>I am right, you are mistaken, he is mindkilled.</h1>
<div><span align=left>somebody</span><span align=right>timestamp</span></div>
<div><p>lorem ipsum nonsensical statement involving plankton....</p></div>

That happens at the web application layer. That's the part that generates the subforum headings, the interface widgets, the display format of the comment tree. That's the part that defines your Less Wrong experience, as a reader, commenter, or writer.

That is your client, not your web browser. If it doesn't suit your needs, if it's missing features you'd like to have, well, you probably take for granted that you're stuck with it.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Mechanism and Policy

One of the difficulties forming an argument about clients is that the proportion of people who have ever had a choice of clients available for any given service keeps shrinking. I have this mental image of the Average Internet User as having no real concept for this.

Then I think about email. Most people have probably used at least two different clients for email, even if it's just Gmail and their phone's built-in mail app. Or perhaps Outlook, if they're using a company system. And they (I think?) mostly take for granted that if they don't like Outlook they can use something else, or if they don't like their phone's mail app they can install a different one. They assume, correctly, that the content and function of their mail account is not tied to the client application they use to work with it.

(They may make the same assumption about web-based services, on the reasoning that if they don't like IE they can switch to Firefox, or if they don't like Firefox they can switch to Chrome. They are incorrect, because The Web Browser is Not Their Client)

Email does a good job of separating mechanism from policy. Its format is defined in RFC 2822 and its transmission protocol is defined in RFC 5321. Neither defines any conventions for user interfaces. There are good reasons for that from a software-design standpoint, but more relevant to our discussion is that interface conventions change more rapidly than the objects they interface with. Forum features change with the times; but the concepts of a Post, an Author, or a Reply are forever.

The benefit of this separation: If someone sends you mail from Outlook, you don't need to use Outlook to read it. You can use something else -- something that may look and behave entirely differently, in a manner more to your liking.

The comparison: If there is a discussion on Less Wrong, you do need to use the Less Wrong UI to read it. The same goes for, say, Facebook.

I object to this.

Standards as Schelling Points

One could argue that the lack of choice is for lack of interest. Less Wrong, and Reddit on which it is based, has an API. One could write a native client. Reddit does have them.

Let's take a tangent and talk about Reddit. Seems like they might have done something right. They have (I think?) the largest contiguous discussion community on the net today. And they have a published API for talking to it. It's even in use.

The problem with this method is that Reddit's API applies only to Reddit. I say problem, singular, but it's really problem, plural, because it hits users and developers in different ways.

On the user end, it means you can't have a unified user interface across different web forums; other forum servers have entirely different APIs, or none at all.2 It also makes life difficult when you want to move from one forum to another.

On the developer end, something very ugly happens when a content provider defines its own provision mechanism. Yes, you can write a competing client. But your client exists only at the provider's sufferance, subject to their decision not to make incompatible API changes or just pull the plug on you and your users outright. That isn't paranoia; in at least one case, it actually happened. Using an agreed-upon standard limits this sort of misbehavior, although it can still happen in other ways.

NNTP is a standard for discussion, like SMTP is for email. It is defined in RFC 3977 and its data format is defined in RFC 5536. The point of a standard is to ensure lasting interoperability; because it is a standard, it serves as a deliberately-constructed Schelling point, a place where unrelated developers can converge without further coordination.

Expertise is a Bottleneck

If you're trying to build a high-quality community, you want a closed system. Well kept gardens die by pacifism, and it's impossible to fully moderate an open system. But if you're building a communication infrastructure, you want an open system.

In the early Usenet days, this was exactly what existed; NNTP was standardized and open, but Usenet was a de-facto closed community, accessible mostly to academics. Then AOL hooked its customers into the system. The closed community became open, and the Eternal September began.3 I suspect, but can't prove, that this was a partial cause of the flight of discussion from Usenet to closed web forums.

I don't think that was the appropriate response. I think the appropriate response was private NNTP networks or even single servers, not connected to Usenet at large.

Modern web forums throw the open-infrastructure baby out with the open-community bathwater. The result, in our specific case, is that if we want something not provided by the default Less Wrong interface, it must be implemented by Less Wrongers.

I don't think UI implementation is our comparative advantage. In fact I know it isn't, or the Less Wrong UI wouldn't suck so hard. We're pretty big by web-forum standards, but we still contain only a tiny fraction of the Internet's technical expertise.

The situation is even worse among the diaspora; for example, at SSC, if Scott's readers want something new out of the interface, it must be implemented either by Scott himself or his agents. That doesn't scale.

One of the major benefits of a standardized, open infrastructure is that your developer base is no longer limited to a single community. Any software written by any member of any community backed by the same communication standard is yours for the using. Additionally, the developers are competing for the attention of readers, not admins; you can expect the reader-facing feature set to improve accordingly. If readers want different UI functionality, the community admins don't need to be involved at all.

A Real Web Client

When I wrote the intro to this sequence, the most common thing people insisted on was this: Any system that actually gets used must allow links from the web, and those links must reach a web page.

I completely, if grudgingly, agree. No matter how insightful a post is, if people can't link to it, it will not spread. No matter how interesting a post is, if Google doesn't index it, it doesn't exist.

One way to achieve a common interface to an otherwise-nonstandard forum is to write a gateway program, something that answers NNTP requests and does magic to translate them to whatever the forum understands. This can work and is better than nothing, but I don't like it -- I'll explain why in another post.

Assuming I can suppress my gag reflex for the next few moments, allow me to propose: a web client.

(No, I don't mean write a new browser. The Browser Is Not Your Client.4)

Real NNTP clients use the OS's widget set to build their UI and talk to the discussion board using NNTP. There is no fundamental reason the same cannot be done using the browser's widget set. Google did it. Before them, Deja News did it. Both of them suck, but they suck on the UI level. They are still proof that the concept can work.

I imagine an NNTP-backed site where casual visitors never need to know that's what they're dealing with. They see something very similar to a web forum or a blog, but whatever software today talks to a database on the back end, instead talks to NNTP, which is the canonical source of posts and post metadata. For example, it gets the results of a link to http://lesswrong.com/posts/message_id.html by sending ARTICLE message_id to its upstream NNTP server (which may be hosted on the same system), just as a native client would.

To the drive-by reader, nothing has changed. Except, maybe, one thing. When a regular reader, someone who's been around long enough to care about such things, says "Hey, I want feature X," and our hypothetical web client doesn't have it, I can now answer:

Someone wrote something that does that twenty years ago.

Here is how to get it.



  1. Meta-meta: This post took about eight hours to research and write, plus two weeks procrastinating. If anyone wants to discuss it in realtime, you can find me on #lesswrong or, if you insist, the LW Slack.

  2. The possibility of "universal clients" that understand multiple APIs is an interesting case, as with Pidgin for IM services. I might talk about those later.

  3. Ironically, despite my nostalgia for Usenet, I was a part of said September; or at least its aftermath.

  4. Okay, that was a little shoehorned in. The important thing is this: What I tell you three times is true.

Turning the Technical Crank

43 Error 05 April 2016 05:36AM

A few months ago, Vaniver wrote a really long post speculating about potential futures for Less Wrong, with a focus on the idea that the spread of the Less Wrong diaspora has left the site weak and fragmented. I wasn't here for our high water mark, so I don't really have an informed opinion on what has socially changed since then. But a number of complaints are technical, and as an IT person, I thought I had some useful things to say.

I argued at the time that many of the technical challenges of the diaspora were solved problems, and that the solution was NNTP -- an ancient, yet still extant, discussion protocol. I am something of a crank on the subject and didn't expect much of a reception. I was pleasantly surprised by the 18 karma it generated, and tried to write up a full post arguing the point.

I failed. I was trying to write a manifesto, didn't really know how to do it right, and kept running into a vast inferential distance I couldn't seem to cross. I'm a product of a prior age of the Internet, from before the http prefix assumed its imperial crown; I kept wanting to say things that I knew would make no sense to anyone who came of age this millennium. I got bogged down in irrelevant technical minutia about how to implement features X, Y, and Z. Eventually I decided I was attacking the wrong problem; I was thinking about 'how do I promote NNTP', when really I should have been going after 'what would an ideal discussion platform look like and how does NNTP get us there, if it does?'

So I'm going to go after that first, and work on the inferential distance problem, and then I'm going to talk about NNTP, and see where that goes and what could be done better. I still believe it's the closest thing to a good, available technological schelling point, but it's going to take a lot of words to get there from here, and I might change my mind under persuasive argument. We'll see.

Fortunately, this is Less Wrong, and sequences are a thing here. This is the first post in an intended sequence on mechanisms of discussion. I know it's a bit off the beaten track of Less Wrong subject matter. I posit that it's both relevant to our difficulties and probably more useful and/or interesting than most of what comes through these days. I just took the 2016 survey and it has a couple of sections on the effects of the diaspora, so I'm guessing it's on topic for meta purposes if not for site-subject purposes.

Less Than Ideal Discussion

To solve a problem you must first define it. Looking at the LessWrong 2.0 post, I see the following technical problems, at a minimum; I'll edit this with suggestions from comments.

  1. Aggregation of posts. Our best authors have formed their own fiefdoms and their work is not terribly visible here. We currently have limited support for this via the sidebar, but that's it.
  2. Aggregation of comments. You can see diaspora authors in the sidebar, but you can't comment from here.
  3. Aggregation of community. This sounds like a social problem but it isn't. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to "hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community." Non-prominent individuals can theoretically post here; yet this is the place we are decrying as moribund.
  4. Incomplete and poor curation. We currently do this via Promoted, badly, and via the diaspora sidebar, also badly.
  5. Pitiful interface feature set. This is not so much a Less Wrong-specific problem as a 2010s-internet problem; people who inhabit SSC have probably seen me respond to feature complaints with "they had something that did that in the 90s, but nobody uses it." (my own bugbear is searching for comments by author-plus-content).
  6. Changes are hamstrung by the existing architecture, which gets you volunteer reactions like this one.

I see these meta-technical problems:

  1. Expertise is scarce. Few people are in a position to technically improve the site, and those that are, have other demands on their time.
  2. The Trivial Inconvenience Problem limits the scope of proposed changes to those that are not inconvenient to commenters or authors.
  3. Getting cooperation from diaspora authors is a coordination problem. Are we better than average at handling those? I don't know.

Slightly Less Horrible Discussion

"Solving" community maintenance is a hard problem, but to the extent that pieces of it can be solved technologically, the solution might include these ultra-high-level elements:

  1. Centralized from the user perspective. A reader should be able to interact with the entire community in one place, and it should be recognizable as a community.
  2. Decentralized from the author perspective. Diaspora authors seem to like having their own fiefdoms, and the social problem of "all the best posters went elsewhere" can't be solved without their cooperation. Therefore any technical solution must allow for it.
  3. Proper division of labor. Scott Alexander probably should not have to concern himself with user feature requests; that's not his comparative advantage and I'd rather he spend his time inventing moral cosmologies. I suspect he would prefer the same. The same goes for Eliezer Yudkowski or any of our still-writing-elsewhere folks.
  4. Really good moderation tools.
  5. Easy entrance. New users should be able to join the discussion without a lot of hassle. Old authors that want to return should be able to do so and, preferably, bring their existing content with them.
  6. Easy exit. Authors who don't like the way the community is heading should be able to jump ship -- and, crucially, bring their content with them to their new ship. Conveniently. This is essentially what has happened, except old content is hostage here.
  7. Separate policy and mechanism within the site architecture. Let this one pass for now if you don't know what it means; it's the first big inferential hurdle I need to cross and I'll be starting soon enough.

As with the previous, I'll update this from the comments if necessary.

Getting There From Here

As I said at the start, I feel on firmer ground talking about technical issues than social ones. But I have to acknowledge one strong social opinion: I believe the greatest factor in Less Wrong's decline is the departure of our best authors for personal blogs. Any plan for revitalization has to provide an improved substitute for a personal blog, because that's where everyone seems to end up going. You need something that looks and behaves like a blog to the author or casual readers, but integrates seamlessly into a community discussion gateway.

I argue that this can be achieved. I argue that the technical challenges are solvable and the inherent coordination problem is also solvable, provided the people involved still have an interest in solving it.

And I argue that it can be done -- and done better than what we have now -- using technology that has existed since the '90s.

I don't argue that this actually will be achieved in anything like the way I think it ought to be. As mentioned up top, I am a crank, and I have no access whatsoever to anybody with any community pull. My odds of pushing through this agenda are basically nil. But we're all about crazy thought experiments, right?

This topic is something I've wanted to write about for a long time. Since it's not typical Less Wrong fare, I'll take the karma on this post as a referendum on whether the community would like to see it here.

Assuming there's interest, the sequence will look something like this (subject to reorganization as I go along, since I'm pulling this from some lengthy but horribly disorganized notes; in particular I might swap subsequences 2 and 3):

  1. Technical Architecture
    1. Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client
    2. Specialized Protocols: or, NNTP and its Bastard Children
    3. Moderation, Personal Gardens, and Public Parks
    4. Content, Presentation, and the Division of Labor
    5. The Proper Placement of User Features
    6. Hard Things that are Suddenly Easy: or, what does client control gain us?
    7. Your Web Browser Is Still Not Your Client (but you don't need to know that)
  2. Meta-Technical Conflicts (or, obstacles to adoption)
    1. Never Bet Against Convenience
    2. Conflicting Commenter, Author, and Admin Preferences
    3. Lipstick on the Configuration Pig
    4. Incremental Implementation and the Coordination Problem.
    5. Lowering Barriers to Entry and Exit
  3. Technical and Social Interoperability
    1. Benefits and Drawbacks of Standards
    2. Input Formats and Quoting Conventions
    3. Faking Functionality
    4. Why Reddit Makes Me Cry
    5. What NNTP Can't Do
  4. Implementation of Nonstandard Features
    1. Some desirable feature #1
    2. Some desirable feature #2
    3. ...etc. This subsequence is only necessary if someone actually wants to try and do what I'm arguing for, which I think unlikely.

(Meta-meta: This post was written in Markdown, converted to HTML for posting using Pandoc, and took around four hours to write. I can often be found lurking on #lesswrong or #slatestarcodex on workday afternoons if anyone wants to discuss it, but I don't promise to answer quickly because, well, workday)

[Edited to add: At +10/92% karma I figure continuing is probably worth it. After reading comments I'm going to try to slim it down a lot from the outline above, though. I still want to hit all those points but they probably don't all need a full post's space. Note that I'm not Scott or Eliezer, I write like I bleed, so what I do post will likely be spaced out]

This year's biggest scientific achievements

9 Elo 13 December 2015 05:26AM

For our solstice event I tried to put together a list of this year’s biggest scientific achievements.  They can likely all be looked up with a bit of searching and each one is worthy of a celebration in their own right.  But mostly I want to say; we have come a long way this year.  And we have a long way to go.

I tried to include science and technology in this list, but really anything world-scale (non-politics or natural disaster) is worthy of celebrating.


  • Rosetta mission lands on a comet

 

  • using young blood to fight old age (rats)

 

  • kinghorn human sequencing machines (Sydney relevant)

  • 100,000 genomes project

 

  • the world's oldest cave art @ 40,000 years old

 

  • tesla battery//released their patents on their electric engines for use by anyone.

 

  • Virtual reality (cardboard) 

 

  • Astronauts growing their own food 

 

  • Self driving cars

 

  • cubesats

 

  • Lab grown kidneys successfully implanted into animals 

 

  • synthetic DNA

  • Chicken with a reptile face 

 

  • nearly an altzeimers cure (ultrasound techniques)

 

  • DAWN orbits Ceres

 

  • Deepdreaming machine learning (and twitch-deepdream)

  • Prosthetic limbs that transmit feeling back to the user 

  • Autonomous rocket landing pointy end up 

  • Lightsail project 

  • Ion space travel engine 

  • Anti - aging virus injected into the patient 0

  • Super black substance made 

  • Q-carbon 

  • High temperature superconductor (-70c)

  • 23&me were allowed to open back up

  • Enchroma colourblindness adjusting glasses

  • Google releases "Tensor Flow" which whilst its not very good at the moment has the potential to centralize the Deep Learning libraries.

  • CRISPR's ability to change the germ line.

  • Deep Dreaming, but also image generation.  Faces generated, bedrooms generated and even a toilet in a field. Its clear that within the next few years you will have pictures entirely generated by Neural Nets. (Code: https://github.com/soumith/dcgan.torch).





from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015

April 29 – The World Health Organization (WHO) declares that rubella has been eradicated from the Americas.

July 14 - NASA's New Horizons spacecraft performs a close flyby of Pluto, becoming the first spacecraft in history to visit the distant world.

September 10 – Scientists announce the discovery of Homo naledi, a previously unknown species of early human in South Africa.

September 28 – NASA announces that liquid water has been found on Mars.


Recommendations from the slack:

china makes a genetically modified micropig and sells it: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/03/micropig-animal-rights-genetics-china-pets-outrage

psyc studies can’t be reproduced: http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/27/9216565/psychology-studies-reproducability-issues

zoom contact lenses

http://mic.com/articles/118670/this-painless-eye-implant-could-give-you-superhuman-vision#.4S5ihAKNE

room temperature synthetic diamonds

http://phys.org/news/2015-11-phase-carbon-diamond-room-temperature.html 


Notable deaths

terry pratchett passed away

malcolm fraser

John Forbes Nash Jr

Oliver Sacks

Christopher lee


Nobel medals this year

Chemistry – Paul L. Modrich; Aziz Sancar and Tomas Lindahl ("for mechanistic studies of DNA repair")

Economics – Angus Deaton ("for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare")

Literature – Svetlana Alexievich ("for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time" )

Peace – Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet ("for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011")

Physics – Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald ("for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass")

Physiology or Medicine – William C Campbell, Satoshi Ōmura ("for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites") and Tu Youyou ("for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria"[116])

 

Other:

The dress 

Ebola outbreak

Polio came back 

(also this year) - upcoming spaceX return flight on the 19th dec

runner up: vat meat is almost ready.

runner up: soylent got a lot better this year

runner up: quantum computing having progressive developments but nothing specific

 

Things that happened 100 years ago (from wikipedia):

  • March 19 – Pluto is photographed for the first time
  • September 11 – The Pennsylvania Railroad begins electrified commuter rail service between Paoli and Philadelphia, using overhead AC trolley wires for power. This type of system is later used in long-distance passenger trains between New York City, Washington, D.C., and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
  • November 25 – Einstein's theory of general relativity is formulated.
  • Alfred Wegener publishes his theory of Pangaea.
Birth: 
  • Thomas Huckle Weller, American virologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 2008)
  • Charles Townes, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2015)
  • August 27 – Norman F. Ramsey, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2011)
  • Clifford Shull, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2001)
  • November 19 – Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr., American physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1974)
  • Henry Taube, Canadian-born chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2005)
Deaths:
  • Paul Ehrlich, German scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1854)
  • December 19 – Alois Alzheimer, German psychiatrist and neuropathologist (b. 1864)
Nobel Prizes:
  • Chemistry – Richard Willstätter
  • Literature – Romain Rolland
  • Medicine – not awarded
  • Peace – not awarded
  • Physics – William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

Meta - This list was compiled for Sydney’s Solstice event; I figured I would share this because it’s pretty neat.

Time to compose: 3-4hrs

With comments from the IRC and slack

To see more of my posts visit my Table of contents

As usual; any suggestions welcome below.

A list of apps that are useful to me. (And other phone details)

10 Elo 22 August 2015 12:24PM

Edit: updated list http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nh3/update_to_the_list_of_apps_that_are_useful_to_me/

I have noticed I often wish "Damn I wish someone had made an app for that" and when I search for it I can't find it.  Then I outsource the search to facebook or other people; and they can usually say - yes, its called X.  Which I can put down to an inability to know how to search for an app on my part; more than anything else.

With that in mind; I wanted to solve the problem of finding apps for other people.

The following is a list of apps that I find useful (and use often) for productive reasons:


The environment

This list is long.  The most valuable ones are the top section that I use regularly.  

Other things to mention:

Internal storage - I have a large internal memory card because I knew I would need lots of space.  So I played the "out of sight out of mind game" and tried to give myself as much space as possible by buying a large internal card.

Battery - I use anker external battery blocks to save myself the trouble of worrying about batteries.  If prepared I leave my house with 2 days of phone charge (of 100% use).  I used to count "wins" of days I beat my phone battery (stay awake longer than it) but they are few and far between.  Also I doubled my external battery power and it sits at two days not one (28000mA + 2*460ma spare phone batteries)

Phone - I have a Samsung S4 (android Running KitKat) because it has a few features I found useful that were not found in many other phones - Cheap, Removable battery, external storage card, replaceable case.

Screen cover - I am using the one that came with the phone still

I carry a spare phone case, in the beginning I used to go through one each month; now I have a harder case than before it hasn't broken.

MicroUSB cables - I went through a lot of effort to sort this out, it's still not sorted, but its "okay for now".  The advice I have - buy several good cables (read online reviews about it), test them wherever possible, and realise that they die.  Also carry a spare or two.

Restart - I restart my phone probably most days when it gets slow.  It's got programming bugs, but this solution works for now.

The overlays

These sit on my screen all the time.

Data monitor - Gives an overview of bits per second upload or download. updated every second.

CpuTemp - Gives an overlay of the current core temperature.  My phone is always hot, I run it hard with bluetooth, GPS and wifi blaring all the time.  I also have a lot of active apps.

Mindfulness bell - My phone makes a chime every half hour to remind me to check, "Am I doing something of high-value right now?" it sometimes stops me from doing crap things.

Facebook chat heads - I often have them open, they have memory leaks and start slowing down my phone after a while, I close and reopen them when I care enough.

 

The normals:

Facebook - communicate with people.  I do this a lot.

Inkpad - its a note-taking app, but not an exceptionally great one; open to a better suggestion.

Ingress - it makes me walk; it gave me friends; it put me in a community.  Downside is that it takes up more time than you want to give it.  It's a mobile GPS game.  Join the Resistance.

Maps (google maps) - I use this most days; mostly for traffic assistance to places that I know how to get to.

Camera - I take about 1000 photos a month.  Generic phone-app one.

Assistive light - Generic torch app (widget) I use this daily.

Hello - SMS app.  I don't like it but its marginally better than the native one.

Sunrise calendar - I don't like the native calendar; I don't like this or any other calendar.  This is the least bad one I have found.  I have an app called "facebook sync" which helps with entering in a fraction of the events in my life.  

Phone, address book, chrome browser.

GPS logger - I have a log of my current gps location every 5 minutes.  If google tracks me I might as well track myself.  I don't use this data yet but its free for me to track; so if I can find a use for the historic data that will be a win.

 

Quantified apps:

Fit - google fit; here for multiple redundancy

S Health - Samsung health - here for multiple redundancy

Fitbit - I wear a flex step tracker every day, and input my weight daily manually through this app

Basis - I wear a B1 watch, and track my sleep like a hawk.

Rescuetime - I track my hours on technology and wish it would give a better breakdown. (I also paid for their premium service)

Voice recorder - generic phone app; I record around 1-2 hours of things I do per week.  Would like to increase that.

Narrative - I recently acquired a life-logging device called a narrative, and don't really know how to best use the data it gives.  But its a start.

How are you feeling? - Mood tracking app - this one is broken but the best one I have found, it doesn't seem to open itself after a phone restart; so it won't remind you to enter in a current mood.  I use a widget so that I can enter in the mood quickly.  The best parts of this app are the way it lets you zoom out, and having a 10 point scale.  I used to write a quick sentence about what I was feeling, but that took too much time so I stopped doing it.

Stopwatch - "hybrid stopwatch" - about once a week I time something and my phone didn't have a native one.  This app is good at being a stopwatch.

Callinspector - tracks ingoing or outgoing calls and gives summaries of things like, who you most frequently call, how much data you use, etc.  can also set data limits.

 

Misc

Powercalc - the best calculator app I could find

Night mode - for saving batter (it dims your screen), I don't use this often but it is good at what it does.  I would consider an app that dims the blue light emitted from my screen; however I don't notice any negative sleep effects so I have been putting off getting around to it.

Advanced signal status - about once a month I am in a place with low phone signal - this one makes me feel better about knowing more details of what that means.

Ebay - To be able to buy those $5 solutions to problems on the spot is probably worth more than $5 of "impulse purchases" that they might be classified as.

Cal - another calendar app that sometimes catches events that the first one misses.

ES file explorer - for searching the guts of my phone for files that are annoying to find.  Not as used or as useful as I thought it would be but still useful.

Maps.Me - I went on an exploring adventure to places without signal; so I needed an offline mapping system.  This map saved my life.

Wikipedia - information lookup

Youtube - don't use it often, but its there.

How are you feeling? (again) - I have this in multiple places to make it as easy as possible for me to enter in this data

Play store - Makes it easy to find.

Gallery - I take a lot of photos, but this is the native gallery and I could use a better app.

 

Social

In no particular order;

Facebook groups, Yahoo Mail, Skype, Facebook Messenger chat heads, Whatsapp, meetup, google+, Hangouts, Slack, Viber, OKcupid, Gmail, Tinder.

They do social things.  Not much to add here.

 

Not used:

Trello

Workflowy

pocketbook

snapchat

AnkiDroid - Anki memoriser app for a phone.

MyFitnessPal - looks like a really good app, have not used it 

Fitocracy - looked good

I got these apps for a reason; but don't use them.

 

Not on my front pages:

These I don't use as often; or have not moved to my front pages (skipping the ones I didn't install or don't use)

S memo - samsung note taking thing, I rarely use, but do use once a month or so.

Drive, Docs, Sheets - The google package.  Its terrible to interact with documents on your phone, but I still sometimes access things from my phone.

bubble - I don't think I have ever used this

Compass pro - gives extra details about direction. I never use it.

(ingress apps) Glypher, Agentstats, integrated timer, cram, notify

TripView (public transport app for my city)

Convertpad - converts numbers to other numbers. Sometimes quicker than a google search.

ABC Iview - National TV broadcasting channel app.  Every program on this channel is uploaded to this app, I have used it once to watch a documentary since I got the app.

AnkiDroid - I don't need to memorise information in the way it is intended to be used; so I don't use it. Cram is also a flashcard app but I don't use it.

First aid - I know my first aid but I have it anyway for the marginal loss of 50mb of space.

Triangle scanner - I can scan details from NFC chips sometimes.

MX player - does videos better than native apps.

Zarchiver - Iunno.  Does something.

Pandora - Never used

Soundcloud - used once every two months, some of my friends post music online.

Barcode scanner - never used

Diskusage - Very useful.  Visualises where data is being taken up on your phone, helps when trying to free up space.

Swiftkey - Better than native keyboards.  Gives more freedom, I wanted a keyboard with black background and pale keys, swiftkey has it.

Google calendar - don't use it, but its there to try to use.

Sleepbot - doesn't seem to work with my phone, also I track with other methods, and I forget to turn it on; so its entirely not useful in my life for sleep tracking.

My service provider's app.

AdobeAcrobat - use often; not via the icon though.

Wheresmydroid? - seems good to have; never used.  My phone is attached to me too well for me to lose it often.  I have it open most of the waking day maybe.

Uber - I don't use ubers.

Terminal emulator, AIDE, PdDroid party, Processing Android, An editor for processing, processing reference, learn C++ - programming apps for my phone, I don't use them, and I don't program much.

Airbnb - Have not used yet, done a few searches for estimating prices of things.

Heart rate - measures your heart rate using the camera/flash.  Neat, not useful other than showing off to people how its possible to do.

Basis - (B1 app), - has less info available than their new app

BPM counter - Neat if you care about what a "BPM" is for music.  Don't use often.

Sketch guru - fun to play with, draws things.

DJ studio 5 - I did a dj thing for a friend once, used my phone.  was good.

Facebook calendar Sync - as the name says.

Dual N-back - I Don't use it.  I don't think it has value giving properties.

Awesome calendar - I don't use but it comes with good reccomendations.

Battery monitor 3 - Makes a graph of temperature and frequency of the cores.  Useful to see a few times.  Eventually its a bell curve.

urbanspoon - local food places app.

Gumtree - Australian Ebay (also ebay owns it now)

Printer app to go with my printer

Car Roadside assistance app to go with my insurance

Virgin air entertainment app - you can use your phone while on the plane and download entertainment from their in-flight system.


Two things now;

What am I missing? Was this useful?  Ask me to elaborate on any app and why I used it.  If I get time I will do that anyway. 

P.S. this took two hours to write.

P.P.S - I was intending to make, keep and maintain a list of useful apps, that is not what this document is.  If there are enough suggestions that it's time to make and keep a list; I will do that.

Entrepreneurial autopsies

7 Clarity 13 July 2015 03:27AM

Entrepreneurial ideas come and go. Some I don't give a second thought to. Others I commence market research for, examine the competitive landscape and explore the feasibility for development. This can be time consuming, and has yet to have produced any tangible, commercialized product.

I figure it's about time I devote the time I would spend to exploiting my existing repertoire of knowledge to develop an idea, to exploring parsimonious, efficient techniques for assessing viability.

In my search I found [Autopsy.io], a startup graveyard. Founders describe why their startups failed, concisely. It made me think about my past startup ideas and why they haven't flied.

I'm going to work that out, put it in a spreadsheet and regress to whatever problem keeps popping up - then, I'll work on improving my subject matter knowledge in that domain - for example, if its the feasibility of implementing with existing technology - I might learn more about the current technological landscape in general. Or, more about existing services for investors, if my product is a service for investors, like my last startup idea, which I have autopsied in detail here

I just thought I'd share my general strategy for anyone who'd want to copy this procedure for startup autopsy. Please use this space to suggest other appropriate diagnostic methods.

edit 1: Thanks for pointing out the typos :)

 

'Charge for something and make more than you spend' - Marco Arment, Founder of Instapaper

Innovation's low-hanging fruits: on the demand or supply sides?

3 Stuart_Armstrong 25 February 2014 02:58PM

Cross-posted at Practical Ethics.

This is an addendum to a previous post, which argued that we may be underestimating the impact of innovation because we have so much of it. I noted that we underestimated the innovative aspect of the CD because many other technologies partially overlapped with it, such as television, radio, cinema, ipod, walkman, landline phone, mobile phone, laptop, VCR and Tivo's. Without these overlapping technologies, we could see the CD's true potential and estimate it higher as an innovation. Many different technologies could substitute for each other.

But this argument brings out a salient point: if so many innovations overlap or potentially overlap, then there must be many more innovations that purposes for innovations. Tyler Cowen made the interesting point that the internet isn't as innovative as the flushing toilet (or indeed the television). He certainly has a point here: imagine society without toilets or youtube, which would be most tolerable (or most survivable)?

continue reading »

The innovation tree, overshadowed in the innovation forest

12 Stuart_Armstrong 25 February 2014 02:11PM

Cross-posted at Practical Ethics.

Many have pronounced that the era of innovation dead, peace be to its soul. From Tyler Cowen's decree that we've picked all the low hanging fruit of innovation, through Robert Gordon's idea that further innovation growth is threatened by "six headwinds", to Gary Karparov's and Peter Thiel's theory that risk aversion has stifled innovation, there is no lack of predictions about the end of discovery.

I don't propose to address the issue with something as practical and useful as actual data. Instead, staying true to my philosophical environment, I propose a thought experiment that hopefully may shed some light. The core idea is that we might be underestimating the impact of innovation because we have so much of it.

Imagine that technological innovation had for some reason stopped around the 1945 - with one exception: the CD and CD player/burner. Fast forwards a few decades, and visualise society. We can imagine a society completely dominated by the CD. We'd have all the usual uses for the CD - music, songs and similar - of course, but also much more.

continue reading »

How effectively can we plan for future decades? (initial findings)

11 lukeprog 04 September 2013 10:42PM

Cross-posted from MIRI's blog.

MIRI aims to do research now that increases humanity's odds of successfully managing important AI-related events that are at least a few decades away. Thus, we'd like to know: To what degree can we take actions now that will predictably have positive effects on AI-related events decades from now? And, which factors predict success and failure in planning for decades-distant events that share important features with future AI events?

Or, more generally: How effectively can humans plan for future decades? Which factors predict success and failure in planning for future decades?

To investigate these questions, we asked Jonah Sinick to examine historical attempts to plan for future decades and summarize his findings. We pre-committed to publishing our entire email exchange on the topic (with minor editing), just as Jonah had done previously with GiveWell on the subject of insecticide-treated nets. The post below is a summary of findings from our full email exchange (.docx) so far.

We decided to publish our initial findings after investigating only a few historical cases. This allows us to gain feedback on the value of the project, as well as suggestions for improvement, before continuing. It also means that we aren't yet able to draw any confident conclusions about our core questions.

The most significant results from this project so far are:

  1. Jonah's initial impressions about The Limits to Growth (1972), a famous forecasting study on population and resource depletion, were that its long-term predictions were mostly wrong, and also that its authors (at the time of writing it) didn't have credentials that would predict forecasting success. Upon reading the book, its critics, and its defenders, Jonah concluded that many critics and defenders had  seriously misrepresented the book, and that the book itself exhibits high epistemic standards and does not make significant predictions that turned out to be wrong.
  2. Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) did a surprisingly good job of climate modeling given the limited information available to him, but he was nevertheless wrong about two important policy-relevant factors. First, he failed to predict how quickly carbon emissions would increase. Second, he predicted that global warming would have positive rather than negative humanitarian impacts. If more people had taken Arrhenius' predictions seriously and burned fossil fuels faster for humanitarian reasons, then today's scientific consensus on the effects of climate change suggests that the humanitarian effects would have been negative.
  3. In retrospect, Norbert Wiener's concerns about the medium-term dangers of increased automation appear naive, and it seems likely that even at the time, better epistemic practices would have yielded substantially better predictions.
  4. Upon initial investigation, several historical cases seemed unlikely to shed substantial light on our  core questions: Norman Rasmussen's analysis of the safety of nuclear power plants, Leo Szilard's choice to keep secret a patent related to nuclear chain reactions, Cold War planning efforts to win decades later, and several cases of "ethically concerned scientists."
  5. Upon initial investigation, two historical cases seemed like they might shed light on our  core questions, but only after many hours of additional research on each of them: China's one-child policy, and the Ford Foundation's impact on India's 1991 financial crisis.
  6. We listed many other historical cases that may be worth investigating.

The project has also produced a chapter-by-chapter list of some key lessons from Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, available here.

Further details are given below. For sources and more, please see our full email exchange (.docx).

continue reading »

Risques existentiels en Français

5 Stuart_Armstrong 02 June 2013 05:19PM

I've just been interviewed by Radio-Canada (in French) for their program "Dessine moi un Dimanche". There really wasn't enough time (the interview apparently lasted nine minutes; it felt like two), but I managed to touch upon some of the technology risks of the coming century (including AI).

The segment can be found here: http://www.radio-canada.ca/emissions/dessine_moi_un_dimanche/2012-2013/chronique.asp?idChronique=295886

Notes on Autonomous Cars

21 gwern 24 January 2013 03:09AM

Excerpts from literature on robotic/self-driving/autonomous cars with a focus on legal issues, lengthy, often tedious; some more SI work. See also Notes on Psychopathy.

Having read through all this material, my general feeling is: the near-term future (1 decade) for autonomous cars is not that great. What's been accomplished, legally speaking, is great but more limited than most people appreciate. And there are many serious problems with penetrating the elaborate ingrown rent-seeking tangle of law & politics & insurance. I expect the mid-future (+2 decades) to look more like autonomous cars completely taking over many odd niches and applications where the user can afford to ignore those issues (eg. on private land or in warehouses or factories), with highways and regular roads continuing to see many human drivers with some level of automated assistance. However, none of these problems seem fatal and all of them seem amenable to gradual accommodation and pressure, so I am now more confident that in the long run we will see autonomous cars become the norm and human driving ever more niche (and possibly lower-class). On none of these am I sure how to formulate a precise prediction, though, since I expect lots of boundary-crossing and tertium quids. We'll see.

continue reading »

Robot ethics [link]

3 fortyeridania 01 June 2012 03:43PM

The Economist has a new article on ethical dilemmas faced by machine designers.

Evidently:

1. In the event of an immoral decision by a machine, neural networks make it too hard to know who is at fault--the programmer, the operator, the manufacturer, or the designer. Thus, neural networks might be a bad idea.

2. Robots' ethical systems ought to resonate with "most people."

3. Proper robot consciences are more likely to arise given greater collaboration among engineers, ethicists, policymakers, and lawyers. Key quotation:

Both ethicists and engineers stand to benefit from working together: ethicists may gain a greater understanding of their field by trying to teach ethics to machines, and engineers need to reassure society that they are not taking any ethical short-cuts.

The second clause of the above sentence is quite similar to something Yudkowsky wrote, perhaps more than once, about the value of approaching ethics from an AI standpoint. I do not recall where he wrote it, nor did my search turn up the appropriate post.

Best shot at immortality?

4 tomme 22 March 2012 10:29AM

What looks, at the moment, as the most feasible technology that can grant us immortality (e.g., mind uploading, cryonics)?

I posed this question to a fellow transhumanist and he argued that cryonics is the answer, but I failed to grasp his explanation. Besides, I am still struggling to learn the basics of science and transhumanism, so it would be great if you could shed some light on my question.

One pixel electronic contact lens tested on rabbits [link]

2 Kevin 22 November 2011 11:31AM

Gerald Jay Sussman talk on new ideas about modeling computation

16 cata 28 October 2011 01:29AM

This is a bit-over-an-hour-long talk with slides that I found extremely interesting from this year's Strange Loop conference, and I thought I would share it with any programmers in the audience here that hadn't seen it.

It's about Sussman's ideas about the potential of modeling computation with sophisticated constraint-propagation/dataflow-esque constructs that have some really interesting properties, and might be of interest to anyone thinking about how an AI might create and maintain Bayesian beliefs.

It would be accessible to anyone who can read a little Lisp, and I strongly recommend it unless this is all old hat to you already.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-Compute

Unfortunately, I don't see a transcript yet.  But here's a brief timeline I of the video I jotted down, in case you want to skip early parts of it and get to a piece that interests you:

0:00 - 10:40: Preface discussing the extreme flexibility and low latency of biological systems as opposed to human-designed systems. Programmers naturally design systems with very rigid constraints, but few natural systems are like this.  Sussman feels that flexibility, not efficiency or correctness, is the central problem holding back human programmers.  Example of Kanizsa's "triangle" figure-ground illusion where humans immediately see the shape of a triangle between other shapes.

10:40 - 23:45: Recap of the existing capability for compile-time flexibility in static languages and Lisp; gives an example of doing symbolic algebra in Lisp and building Lisp system for solving problems in classical mechanics.  Suggests that the most powerful flexibility we have is to define new operators at runtime and redefine operators to operate on data in new ways at runtime.  There is a direct tradeoff between this kind of flexibility and the ability to prove programs correct.

23:45 - 25:30: Sussman says that future computers are inevitably going to have to operate on a hugely parallel architecture where individual processors are plentiful and cheap.  A solution to the flexibility problem needs to be highly parallel.

25:30 - 28:10: Discusses his experience teaching EE to students at MIT.  Explains how strong engineers do network analysis on electrical circuits:  They take some assumptions about parts of the circuit and scientific models to gradually conclude more and more about the voltage in different parts of the circuit.  If an assumption turns out to be wrong, they can back it out with minimal effort.

28:10 - 32:50: Sussman and RMS wrote a Lisp program to replicate the process of how engineers analyze a circuit.  Discusses how Lisp syntax helped him write an exploratory program to model the different parts of a circuit and a process in code.  Sussman's program could take the wiring diagram of the circuit and the various rules for current to answer similar questions, calculate the current at some point, and then recapitulate the assumptions and rules that led the program to its answer, like an expert engineer could.

32:50 - 35:00: Sussman summarizes this idea as a "propagator" that has stateless machines moving pieces of data between stateful cells.  Each machine is monitoring its inputs and pushing out some outputs when the inputs change.  This is a good parallel architecture. 

35:00 - 40:30: Expression-oriented languages have a problem in the syntax.  Nested expressions have many inputs but one output.  The intermediate sub-expression outputs aren't named or retained.  This is not like real-world systems.  You can change this to a propagator model by taking each intermediate output and making a propagator cell out of it that a machine can watch and act on.  Shows a simple Lisp implementation of Newton's method modeled as a propagator.

40:30 - 42:45: Propagators can work in such a way that they update information multi-directionally; shows how he encodes the rules for resistors as propagators in Lisp.

42:45 - 46:45: Presents the interview-esque problem of "how do I measure building height given a barometer and a ruler and a stopwatch."  You can make multiple measurements to solve the problem.  Since propagators work multi-directionally, you can model the problem in a way where taking multiple measurements not only narrows your error margin for the building result, but the inputs feed back and narrow the error margin for the other inputs.

46:45 - 50:15: Describes monads as "lambda-calculus plumbing" to carry along metadata together with a value.  Shows how information going into a propagator network can carry metadata about its premises, so that outputs can keep track of which premises they depend upon.

50:15 - 55:00: Humans don't give up if different belief subsystems come to a contradictory conclusion.  Presents the idea and Lisp implementation of a "truth maintenance system" developed by him, RMS, and his students. Each cell in the propagator network can keep track of multiple pieces of data, each dependent upon different premises. Premises can be believed or disbelieved and the output can be produced according to the current "worldview" with minimal necessary recomputation.

55:00 - 56:45: Truth maintenance systems can maintain locally consistent worldviews in the presence of globally contradictory inputs.  The propagator network can automatically identify which beliefs are inconsistent, and very efficiently do backtracking and find sets of beliefs which are internally consistent.  All of this works well in parallel.

56:45 - 60:00: Presents a logic puzzle where 5 people live in 5 houses with different rules saying which person may be or may not be assigned to each house.  With normal recursive backtracking, solving the problem would take 3,000 backtracks.  Sussman's propagation network reasoned out the right assignment with 63 backtracks.

58:00 - 1:04:20: Closing remarks on the potential application of propagation-based ideas.  Points out that the triangle illusion plausibly seems like the result of a propagation network; pieces of evidence in the figure all contribute as inputs to the perception of the triangle in the background.  Sussman doesn't know if this is right but feels like we need some drastically different model of computation to ever approach the functionality of natural systems.

Finally, here's the information which Sussman and his student have published about their propagator work so far, with code included:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/propagators/

Brain emulations and Oracle AI

7 Stuart_Armstrong 14 October 2011 05:51PM

Two talks from the Future of Humanity Institute are now online (this is the first time we've done this, so please excuse the lack of polish). The first is Anders Sandberg talking about brain emulations (technical overview), the second is myself talking of the risks of Oracle AIs (informal presentation). They can be found here:

Fesability of whole-brain emulation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nIzPpF635c&feature=related, initial paper at http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3853/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf, new paper still to come.

Thinking inside the box: Using and controlling an Oracle AI:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz9zYQsT-QQ&feature=related, paper at http://www.aleph.se/papers/oracleAI.pdf

[LINK] Why did Steve Jobs choose not to effectively treat his cancer?

8 michaelcurzi 12 October 2011 11:37PM

From Quora:

"Now Mr. Jobs always was a free thinker, a strong believer in spirituality, a vegetarian and a known skeptic of conventional medicine. He chose to reject conventional medicine altogether. He's not alone in that. We come across many people like this and we all know someone in our midst that uses homeopathy or has this known fear of anything "chemical" (to those I always say that everything is chemical, if you think dihydrogen oxide sounds scary you should stop drinking water). Individual freedom of thought and choice is a cornerstone of our modern society and the medical world makes no exception."

Peter Thiel warns of upcoming (and current) stagnation

24 SilasBarta 04 October 2011 05:30PM

SIAI benefactor and VC Peter Thiel has an excellent article at National Review about the stagnating progress of science and technology, which he attributes to poorly-grounded political opposition, widespread scientific illiteracy, and overspecialized, insular scientific fields.  He warns that this stagnation will undermine the growth that past policies have relied on.

Noteworthy excerpts (bold added by me):

In relation to concerns expressed here about evaluating scientific field soundness:

When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields? [!!! -- SB]

Grave indictors:

Looking forward, we see far fewer blockbuster drugs in the pipeline — perhaps because of the intransigence of the FDA, perhaps because of the fecklessness of today’s biological scientists, and perhaps because of the incredible complexity of human biology. In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one-third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and a half. [...]

The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled. To a first approximation, the progress in computers and the failure in energy appear to have roughly canceled each other out. Like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, we (and our computers) have been forced to run faster and faster to stay in the same place.

Taken at face value, the economic numbers suggest that the notion of breathtaking and across-the-board progress is far from the mark. If one believes the economic data, then one must reject the optimism of the scientific establishment. Indeed, if one shares the widely held view that the U.S. government may have understated the true rate of inflation — perhaps by ignoring the runaway inflation in government itself, notably in education and health care (where much higher spending has yielded no improvement in the former and only modest improvement in the latter) — then one may be inclined to take gold prices seriously and conclude that real incomes have fared even worse than the official data indicate. [...]

College graduates did better, and high-school graduates did worse. But both became worse off in the years after 2000, especially when one includes the rapidly escalating costs of college.[...]

The current crisis of housing and financial leverage contains many hidden links to broader questions concerning long-term progress in science and technology. On one hand, the lack of easy progress makes leverage more dangerous, because when something goes wrong, macroeconomic growth cannot offer a salve; time will not cure liquidity or solvency problems in a world where little grows or improves with time.

HT: MarginalRevolution

Why are certain trends so precisely exponential?

16 orthonormal 06 August 2011 05:38PM

I was reading a post on the economy from the political statistics blog FiveThirtyEight, and the following graph shocked me:

This, according to Nate Silver, is a log-scaled graph of the GDP of the United States since the Civil War, adjusted for inflation. What amazes me is how nearly perfect the linear approximation is (representing exponential growth of approximately 3.5% per year), despite all the technological and geopolitical changes of the past 134 years. (The Great Depression knocks it off pace, but WWII and the postwar recovery set it neatly back on track.) I would have expected a much more meandering rate of growth.

It reminds me of Moore's Law, which would be amazing enough as a predicted exponential lower bound of technological advance, but is staggering as an actual approximation:

I don't want to sound like Kurzweil here, but something demands explanation: is there a good reason why processes like these, with so many changing exogenous variables, seem to keep right on a particular pace of exponential growth, as opposed to wandering between phases with different exponents?

EDIT: As I commented below, not all graphs of exponentially growing quantities exhibit this phenomenon- there still seems to be something rather special about these two graphs.

Kasparov interview

-5 ThomasR 08 January 2011 06:59PM

with Peter Thiel on technology progress etc.:
http://videos.arte.tv/de/videos/durch_die_nacht_mit_-3619996.html
I am just looking it, sounds interesting. That real innovations reduced to arrive at homeopathic dosis fits my perceptions. I would even guess stronger variants.  

The Long Now

14 Nic_Smith 12 December 2010 01:40AM

It's surprised me that there's been very little discussion of The Long Now here on Less Wrong, as there are many similarities between the groups, although the approach and philosophy between them are quite different. At a minimum, I believe that a general awareness might be beneficial. I'll use the initials LW and LN below. My perspective on LN is simply that of someone who's kept an eye on their website from time to time and read a few of their articles, so I'd also like to admit that my knowledge is a bit shallow (a reason, in fact, I bring the topic up for discussion).

Similarities

Most critically, long-term thinking appears as a cornerstone of both the LW and LN thought, explicitly as the goal for LN, and implicitly here on LW whenever we talk about existential risk or decades-away or longer technology. It's not clear if there's an overlap between the commenters at LW and the membership of LN or not, but there's definitely a large number of people "between" the two groups -- statements by Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil have been recent topics on the LN blog and Hillis, who founded LN, has been involved in AI and philosophy of mind. LN has Long Bets, which I would loosely describe as to PredictionBook as InTrade is to Foresight Exchange. LN apparently had a presence at some of the past SIAI's Singularity Summits.

Differences

Signaling: LN embraces signaling like there's no tomorrow (ha!) -- their flagship project, after all, is a monumental clock to last thousands of years, the goal of which is to "lend itself to good storytelling and myth" about long-term thought. Their membership cards are stainless steel. Some of the projects LN are pursuing seem to have been chosen mostly because they sound awesome, and even those that aren't are done with some flair, IMHO. In contrast, the view among LW posts seems to be that signaling is in many cases a necessary evil, in some cases just an evolutionary leftover, and reducing signaling a potential source for efficiency gains. There may be something to be learned here -- we already know FAI would be an easier sell if we described it as project to create robots that are Presidents of the United States by day, crime-fighters by night, and cat-people by late-night.

Structure: While LW is a project of SIAI, they're not the same, so by extension the comparison between LN and LW is just a bit apples-to-kumquats. It'd be a lot easier to compare LW to a LN discussion board, if it existed.

The Future: Here on LW, we want our nuclear-powered flying cars, dammit! Bad future scenarios that are discussed on LW tend to be irrevocably and undeniably bad -- the world is turned into tang or paperclips and no life exists anymore, for example. LN seems more concerned with recovery from, rather than prevention of, "collapse of civilization" scenarios. Many of the projects both undertaken and linked to by LN focus on preserving knowledge in a such a scenario. Between the overlap in the LW community and cryonics, SENS, etc, the mental relationship between the median LW poster and the future seems more personal and less abstract.

Politics: The predominant thinking on LW seems to be a (very slightly left-leaning) technolibertarianism, although since it's open to anyone who wanders in from the Internet, there's a lot of variation (if either SIAI or FHI have an especially strong political stance per se, I've not noticed it). There's also a general skepticism here regarding the soundness of most political thought and of many political processes.  LN seems further left on average and more comfortable with politics in general (although calling it a political organization would be a bit of a stretch). Keeping with this, LW seems to have more emphasis on individual decision making and improvement than LN.

Thoughts?