Kevin Beal

Hi fridolutin What? I have no idea what that means. The definition of the word example is: Can you offer me an anecdote? I would appreciate if you demonstrated what you are saying by use of actual events. For example, I said that I thought a woman nearby was a "hotty" and the woman I was talking to took offense and told me that I'm just a typical man who only cares about looks and doesn't appreciate women's personalities. (I just met this woman and she knew very little about me). This, to me, is an example of sexism against men. That's the sort of thing I'm looking for. I'm really not so good with abstractions and adjectives. Please indulge me if you can.

A calculator can do that if you program it to, but you have to program it to. Computers don't think, they just do as they are programmed. The power of computers is how they are programmed, and only secondarily how fast they are.

I wonder though if it really is a problem of communication. Certainly the better the communication, the, ... better. But I've tried communicating these ideas in many ways (even with a single person) and my success rate is sadly not that high. Most people aren't swayed with logic and good communication skills in my experience. But maybe that's just me. Stef is a very logical person and a great communicator and his audience is very big. What I would hate to be the case is that I've been focusing all of this effort on my ability to communicate ideas when it was never that in the first place that sways people. I'm mostly just thinking out loud. Feel free to tell me that I'm wrong.

Test compared to what? That's the issue. The computing power is not the reason a centrally planned supercomputer makes no sense. There are fast enough computers today to handle it already without quantum computing (probably) with, I think, a billion quadrillions of operations a second. As Stef said in his discussion with PTV, if there is a 2 + 2 = 5 problem, it doesn't matter how fast you make the computer. A computer performs the logic that's programmed into it. It doesn't actually reason logically the way billions of consumers do. So, how do you replicate the price mechanism? How do you determine economic efficiency using engineering efficiency? How does a computer reason this out for you? It's not impossible like an airliner to a neandertal, it's a whole other class of impossible.

Please, by all means, build amazing pieces of software. I'm just telling you, that this particular example is too impossible to even describe.

People have been asking the Venus Project for evidence that such a piece of software could even exist since the 70's. As far as I know, no evidence has ever been given. Instead it's consistently avoided. I'm not saying it's impossible necessarily, I'm saying it's effectively impossible. Billions of decisions (daily) have to be made in order to make a system such as this. The idea that it can be centrally planned is fantastical.

That's great. How do you design software like the kind you are talking about then? Please offer any detail of any kind.

So then, you're not going to elaborate? A talented developer can make some impressive looking stuff, but that's very different than building software to manage the kinds of things you are talking about. It's not about overcoming all of the problems there are with achieving your design goals, it's the design goals themselves that are the issue. I'm glad that you are able to create so much value with just two guys, but Google wont even attempt to centrally plan their design goals because their (incredibly successful) development model is to separate concerns as much as possible, because that's what works for larger endeavors such as theirs. How you are going about your software design goals is what is of interest to me. It seems on the face of it totally absurd, but you may know something that I don't (which is why I'm asking).

Welcome to the boards! Best case scenario, what would you like to do with a better developed ability to communicate these ideas? It's not meant to be a leading question, I don't know that I have an answer for that myself.

Google's mission statement is to gather and disseminate all the world's data. They also have billions of dollars at their disposal. Their approach is to have lots and lots of different API's (hundreds maybe) and a set of conventions / standards that govern how different API's are developed (which is evolving). They work with dozens of programming languages because there is no single programming language that could exist to cover that broad a scope, much less one API. And the Venus Project is an even bigger endeavor than that. All an API really is is the most elegant way of reading / writing information within the context of a single application, an abstraction from the actual database interaction. I'm not any kind of brilliant programmer or anything, but it's hard to imagine what a "base API" would even mean concerning the allocating and monitoring of all the world's resources. Could you elaborate?

What would it take to have the kind of relationship you would like with your daughter? What would make her less afraid of your rejection? In what way could you earn her forgiveness for whatever ways that you fucked up?

Arguing that X must be assumed in order to argue against X (given some additional reasoning) is not at all circular. A circular argument assumes itself. Describing how in order to argue you must accept UPB (with a definition of UPB given) is not the same thing as saying UPB is true because, ... UPB. Also, who said that "opposite" and "negation" are the same thing? Maybe someone did, as I haven't read every post, but that's not what I was saying. Also, you can't just provoke a response from someone and then reject them for responding that way. That's passive aggressive. In one word you completely dismissed PTB's response: "emotionality". Either he had a point or he didn't. Wasn't that your beef? That people were dismissing others prematurely without making a case? Come on guy.

Can you provide an example, . . . please?

But only if it's in accordance with the official doctrine of the boards

Thanks for the reply I'm confused as to what you mean. It's just a little too abstract for me. Can you give me some examples that I could relate to in my life as a man? I can't for the life of me see how I'm living at the expense of women, much less abusing them. Can you see how I might be skeptical about that?

You're right. I misspoke (misstyped?). I only meant to say that it doesn't make sense to describe opposite in the physical sense when describing propositions. "Opposite" can totally describe both, but obviously defining it in the physical sense is only going to confuse the issue regarding opposite propositions. Thank you for pointing that out. And a quick note about how I use the reputation system. I upvote posts that provide insight into the topic and downvote posts that are thoughtless appeals to the "truth", when in reality they have nothing to do with the truth (in my estimation). I think that's a good approach, but certainly I could be convinced otherwise.

Lucky Number 23 said he agreed with the OP on the basis that opposites do not exist in "classical logic". The rest of the necessary premises that show that the OP's criticism is invalid are covered very well by other people in this thread. My comment was not meant to be a syllogism, but rather a demonstration that if you state that an argument rests on a premise and that premise is wrong, then by your own admission, your argument is proven wrong. Also, a proposition is not a physical object so defining "opposite" within the context of propositions doesn't make any sense. That is why I offered the definitions that I did. They were the first two definitions that google provided in their search results. "Of a contrary kind" and negation are not worlds apart.

Hi fridolutin! I'm super curious why you think that men are blind to patriarchy. Are we guys situational sociopaths? Are we just totally unable to empathize with women? Are we all just lying about it to cover our tracks? I've heard about this male privilege that I'm supposed to have and I cannot see it at all. I'm inclined to believe that it's all bullshit, but I'm very interested to hear an explanation for it.

Stef mentions on a regular basis how important the donation model is to him with regard to ensuring quality. He would completely disagree with the implication here.

Murder and the Non-Aggression Principle are also defined, are also opposites and are what UPB evaluates. Thus there are opposites in logic and the OP's criticism is invalid.

You also benefit from getting data from a closer server farm. If one server goes down, it's still up and available. They often cache that kind of thing so it's in memory and don't have to read from disk. A whole lot of benefits that I've never heard about, I'm sure. A lot of people use CDN's when they want to reference CSS and Javascript libraries that lots of websites have (Bootstrap or jQuery for example) so that it's cached in the browser the first time you visit a website that requires that resource, and you don't have to download it any of the next times you visit a page that uses it. CDN's are all about uptime so that when you separate your app server from a huge list of files on a CDN, your app server can go down and all your files are still up. Also, they are built to scale so that you don't have to worry about huge numbers of visitors (except in how it affects your wallet).

"Going north instead of south" is different from "I decided to eat cheerios for breakfast rather than grapefruit". One has a sort of "opposite" kind of quality. The difference between the two is sort of important.

Nice website

Turn it into a joke.

We use cloudfront and Amazon S3 at the company I work at. We don't get 20TB / month of bandwidth by any means, but we chose that solution precisely because it is so scalable. And it's an awesome service using cloudfront because it's in the cloud, cached, quick etc. Their S3 pricing table looks like this:(Standard Storage vs Reduced Redundancy Storage vs Glacier Storage) First 1 TB / month$0.095 per GB$0.076 per GB$0.010 per GBNext 49 TB / month$0.080 per GB$0.064 per GB$0.010 per GBNext 450 TB / month$0.070 per GB$0.056 per GB$0.010 per GBNext 500 TB / month$0.065 per GB$0.052 per GB$0.010 per GBNext 4000 TB / month$0.060 per GB$0.048 per GB$0.010 per GBOver 5000 TB / month$0.055 per GB$0.037 per GB$0.010 per GB Cloudfront's pricing is very similar I believe