Kevin Beal

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

Opposite Statements can absolutely have opposites. That is to say that a diametrically different; of a contrary type. "Negation" is opposite, but also any other kind of mutually exclusive proposition (to the degree to which it is mutually exclusive). UPB looks at theories and it's two primary standards are logical consistency and universality. So obviously UPB is concerned with opposing moral propositions. You cannot say that there are no "opposites" in logic simply by saying that "3 is not the opposite of 4", and especially without defining "opposite". It's just sort of lazy.

I just discovered this guy Dave Asprey (the "bulletproof executive") who is super interesting. He does a lot of marketing in his speeches and interviews which sort of put me off just a tad, but the guy has a shit load of interesting stuff to say about nutrition and technology as it relates to a healthier body and mind. Like he puts strange electrodes on his head to induce "gamma state" in the brain. He also makes a very interesting point about healing the brain. He talks about how the brain has no nerve endings really (save for a few spots) and that it doesn't really know when it's traumatized the way that a broken arm will hurt like hell, send the appropriate hormones (and whatever else that's involved with healing, idk) etc. So there are biofeedback machines that measure all kinds of things that help you consciously see objective measures indicating how stressed you are (for example). The most interesting is a machine he talks about that senses how and where you are using your brain and puts out different tones and different volumes based on that data, so that the brain can actually see itself. Without you even doing anything the brain can see where it's hurt and heal it appropriately. It can also affect IQ he claims. He has an interview on the Joe Rogan show which is awesome and why I became so excited to see Stef on the show.

Very interesting. In what ways would you like to see men stepping up? Personally, I think that (at least for myself) stepping up is mostly just putting myself out there and being willing to make mistakes and / or be rejected. I think it would be really great to see more men do that kind of thing. Maybe it's just projection or something, but I see most guys have a very limited area that they feel it safe to have strong opinions like with sports or politics or something like that, and it's sometimes really difficult to lure guys like squirrels to acorns out into speaking their minds about things like relationships, about what it means to be a man and that sort of thing. It seems like a real shame. I don't know for sure, but I don't think that's really as much of a problem for women, as they are kind of looked to by most people as being the ones who get relationships, get empathy and emotional health, so I see a little more inhibition there. Is that sort of what you mean?

Great call this week! I'd really encourage others to try it I can get anxious about this sort of thing, like what if I mess it up in some way or some other insecurity, but the folks and the format are great so I'd encourage you (if you are on the fence) to push through that a bit and give it a shot. It was my first time calling in, and the diversity of opinion was really interesting I thought. Thanks Phil for putting this on. I'm totally on for next week if there's a show next week!

I am not a programmer, and have done very little of it. I've been scripting in PHP and Javascript almost everyday for the past 3 years, and it's never made much sense to me why anyone would ever want to become a programmer. If you want to create actual programs, then you are going to have a very limited amount of exposure, or they are web-based solutions done on some server somewhere, in which case I would be WAY more inclined to use a scripting language that isn't ridiculously verbose (like any C based language). Anything that compiles and doesn't have to cache is going to be faster (in most cases), but if programmers have that concern about PHP or server-side javascript or Python or something like that, then either they are working on sites that see millions of users a day or they are micro-optimizing which is the least helpful kind of optimizing. Scripting languages are way less daunting, have bigger better online support and are much more enjoyable to write. They are way less strict which means it's easier to write bad code than to write good code, but that's more than worth it to get people involved. And getting involved in web development has never been so easy as it is today between all the frameworks, libraries and services out there to handle all the stuff you'd rather not. I don't understand why people would want to get involved in programming. If you are a computer scientist and you like low level handling of memory and all that jazz then that's cool, but personally, I find that stuff boring. I'd rather create custom and complex interfaces within days using simple HTML, CSS and Javascript (and a REST server). And if you are trying to get started in the world of software development, you should really be putting as few barriers in front of you as possible. The goals should be the goal, and not the process. I got involved in scripting languages because I wanted to do cool things, and not to learn the endless over-complexities of languages like C++. That being said, the Go programming language looks pretty cool. It's not exactly statically or dynamically typed, it's not exactly low level or high level programming. It's not exactly object oriented (at least in the classical sense) or procedural. It handles concurrency really well and it's compile time is negligible. It's like what I think (not being a programmer) programming should be. /rant