Yeah. The impression I get from this article (which is pitifully short on specifics) is that they're going to exploit some of the seemingly-nonlocal properties of QM, like quantum teleportation.
So, a normal refrigerator decreases entropy in one region and increases it in another, but they're directly adjacent regions and the entropy (heat) is moving from one to another along a simple, everyday path (like a heat exhaust tube). It sounds like the researchers have proposed using some quantum-teleportation-like trick to have the heat show up in some unconnected region of space.
Is it sad that my second thought reading that was of weaponization. Depending on how you project this energy, you could put it somewhere very much unwanted. Or the opposite, remove it from somewhere very much needed.
The situation seems almost identical to when Reddit axed r/jailbait: one of their more embarrassing communities started to get too much attention, its users were increasingly behaving in a way that was damaging Reddit, and Reddit decided to kill it (ostensibly for the greater good of the site).
But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational.
Previous Reddit CEO's have made lots of statements about wanting the site to allow relatively free expression, aside from things like doxxing and pedophilia. Ellen Pao has instead talked about turning Reddit into a "safe space", which is a common euphemism for eliminating dissenting viewpoints.
FPH in and of itself isn't the most defensible or tasteful subreddit, but they're going to start by banning the least defensible subreddits first. Once the precedent is made, they can start banning political dissent subreddits.
Pao is attempting to "clean up"... in an environment that cherishes its traditional freewheeling and unrestrained discourse. Even if the stuff getting cleaned up is just the stuff that most people agree deserves it - for some value of deserves - it's a troubling precedent to set.
Some people find themselves wondering what opinions will be deemed unsafe next. The policies are not exactly clear-cut, and neither are the actions of the administration.
I think this is a little dramatic. It's not about censorship of "unsafe opinions" - you are free to hold your opinion and talk about it, just not on Reddit. It's akin to a hotel owner disallowing a Klan meeting in the conference room. I think any business owner deserves that right.
> The policies are not exactly clear-cut
I dunno, the blog post seems fairly clear cut to me. It's not about blocking content, it's about blocking subreddits whose sole purpose was harassment of individuals.
> It's akin to a hotel owner disallowing a Klan meeting in the conference room. I think any business owner deserves that right.
Sure. But if your business derives its customer base from its longstanding support of freewheeling speech, more than a little pushback is to be expected.
> I dunno, the blog post seems fairly clear cut to me. It's not about blocking content, it's about blocking subreddits whose sole purpose was harassment of individuals.
If your only context is the blog post, it seems exceptionally clear. From following some of the discussions, I'm also aware that they came down on exactly five subreddits while ignoring many others. In a few cases, they appear to have tacitly approved of some.
So the result is that it's not clear what they come down on, why, when, or what gets their attention. Except bad PR - that seems to work miracles.
Business owners deserve that right, certainly. I don't have to patronize the businesses that won't cater to everyone; Internet forums would do well to remember the definition of forum, and realize that they outmode themselves when they stray from it.
Tell me; Would you support that same hotel owner disallowing the NAACP from renting a room? He disagrees with their economic views. Would you support him ignoring requests from GLAAD, because their color scheme doesn't fit with his drab hotel? Private enterprise refusing to serve those they disagree with should be treated no differently than any other form of bigotry.
I don't think anyone's saying reddit isn't within their legal rights to remove that or any other subreddit. They're saying that by banning fph, reddit violates the spirit of the community they've built up, and generally make reddit a shitter place.
I think this is a something without general and clear-cut answer. I don't think there is something inherently wrong if you run a hotel only for women or people of a specific religion, probably because your offering is tailored to your audience in some way. But if every hotel would start to randomly decided to set up rules who can and can not stay there, I would definitely see this as a case of discrimination. There is tension between your right to run your business the way you like and the right of your potential customers to not be discriminated and there seems not to be a general and easy way to draw the line.
There are easy ways to draw the line. There are also comfortable ways to draw the line. There are precious few that are both. Therein, I submit, lies the tension.
Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational.
Well, she has basically said that she wants to start cleaning up the "objectionable" sides of reddit. Plus, there is a strong sentiment that content that's critical of her (even the less hateful stuff) has been removed often in the past.
Just because the volume of hate has been turned up to 11 does not in any way mean that the majority of Reddit users feel this way, and this is something that many people seem to be forgetting.
Take a look and see how much reddit gold has been gifted recently. Reddit is doing just fine.
Hey I wanted to thank you for your comments and links in the Kindle thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9365567 - I used them to successfully improve my device. Replying here cause replying on the other thread is closed.
Cheers!
/r/all is not the front page. Reddit is at a scale at which this will probably blow over, likely for a better Reddit. Other teacup storms like the removal of /r/jailbait, their handling of 'the fappening' and gamergate don't seem have affected reddit much at all. It seems almost more like this
> "But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational."
I mean its almost like her being an asian woman rather than a white male makes a difference
> It's pedantic, sure. Isn't 1.16180 close enough? Yes, it probably would be...
For some reason he didn't see fit to delete that section of the article after realizing it was pointless. Which is too bad, because the rest of it is pretty solid.
I didn't interpret that sentence the way you did I guess. It made sense to me when in context of whether the target of the golden ratio mattered in the first place.
In other words, the golden ratio is an irrational number. Given limits of decimal precision being unreachable by realistic building standards, it'd be a silly target to go to far into the decimal points to perfect your structure. But it doesn't matter anyway because the ratio isn't 'golden,' its 'perfection' is subjective and therefore not meaningful to constrain your projects to.
It has nothing to do with decimal systems or irrational numbers. It is impossible to exactly build something to any number. Choose 1. Can't do it, not with perfect accuracy. It's no harder to make something exactly the golden ratio than to make it pi, sqrt(2), or 6.
Roughly, a sound that happens during some measure of music, or an arbitrary point during that duration.
Imagine folding a strip of paper exactly in half. Now you have a crease at the middle of it. If you fold it again, you have a couple more creases at the 1/4 and 3/4 points. The above quote is talking about the same thing, but with a length of time instead of a strip of paper. The more folds you have to make in order to put a crease at a certain point (event), the less salient it is.
There are niche-case advantages. Some artists (Tool comes to mind) refuse to sell on iTunes etc for the reason mentioned in the article: they only want to sell albums. Currently their only option (that I'm aware of) is to not sell digital music, or sell it through their own website.
So the advantage to the consumer would be that if GhostTunes catches on, we might at least have the convenience and price advantages of being able to buy these artists' music digitally, instead of having to choose between physical media, piracy, or going without.
For 99+% of artists currently selling music? No clear advantage.
Can anyone explain the bit about 1x1.gif being the only way, to this day, to vertically center elements? AFAIK there's still no way to vertically center a dynamic height element without javascript, so if invisible gifs can do it I'd at least like to know how.
I don't know about spacer gifs, but you can use tables. Or fake tables using CSS. JavaScript definitely isn't required, even to vertically center things in IE6.
I don't think this problem is solvable in any elegant form, but it is solvable. You'll just end up with massively conjunctive questions that you can't even hold in your head at once, like "27: Are you a non-practicing Catholic with exactly three children, or an asian owner of a minivan produced between 1998 and 2004 that isn't green, or a licensed boat mechanic with astigmatism, or..." and so on for the next 6 pages.
In short, you can draw categories to include or exclude as precise a number as you like, you just have to be willing to draw really, really complicated boundaries.
Sounds like a premise for a dystopian sci-fi story: a future where every identity is exactly planned, where everyone's life is determine by ... 33 bits. Donald Sutherland can be the benevolent ruler that tells the protagonist how the unbridled greed of the 21st century brought us here (Hollywood adaptation can add an ironic anti-consumerist twist).
Perhaps this could be a retro sci-fi a la "Brazil", with each person carrying around a punch card with his 33-bits on them. A computer error means two people are issued the same bit pattern. In a defining shot, they hold up their punch cards up against the sun and see the holes line up. Maybe an Egyptian tomb opens too!
I wonder if the right maths applied to existing genetic and forensics big data sets could produce the 33 questions.
I'd imagine that genetic markers would be the best way to do to (Disclaimer: I'm no biologist and might have made completely wrong assumptions here). They're less likely to change than, say, someone's political or religious beliefs; one could get a nasty hit on their head and forget.
The thing with genetics is that they can change over time. Some gene's turn on and off. Attributes like your face and fingerprints change over time. They're not constants.
If you could identify a set of 33 lifetime constants, you'd end up with a life-long UUID. If you expanded beyond 33 bits and included genetic markers which change over time, such as gene's which flip on/off, you could end up with a point-in-time (PIT) UUID.
UUID = Constant throughout life.
PIT+UUID = UUID plus markers identifying you at a particular point in time.
A constant would be something like, do you have a Y chromosome? (there is fault in this question: XYY syndrome)
Also, you'd probably need more than 33 bits. 33 will encompass all living humans today in 2013 ADE, but would have to be expanded as the living population grows, and to include the billions of deceased humans.
In the end, a "true" unique identifier, encompassing any human, would be their UUID plus a list of all PIT+UUID's they generated during their lifetime. Or in english, an entire record of their genetics from start to end:
What if the twins are delivered via Caesarean, with the exact same datetime recorded? Including datetime (even as a string) also includes the aforementioned falsehoods about time.
I don't think so. How do you come up with time invariant questions? If you used these big conjunctions, how do you uniquely identify every person in just 33 bits?
Those are bad examples because those questions don't split the population in two. Very few people are non-practicing Catholics with exactly three children. If you want to limit the number of questions to just 33 then you have to choose your questions very carefully.
I think you misunderstood. powrtoch proposed having a set of questions in which each individual question is itself very complicated. For example, being a non-practicing Catholic with exactly three children is only one small facet to a single question. By or'ing a bunch of really specific questions together you can come very close to getting exactly 50% of the population to answer yes to a single question.
That's kinda cheating though isn't it? Like chaining a dozen statements on one line with semicolons and going, "look I can write that program in one line!"
That depends what constraints you choose to define on the problem - if they need to be knowable, memorable,... then yes probably. Anyway, sz4kerto has a good comment about using a Karnaugh map which might help see how this works - it's a lot cleverer than just chaining things randomly - but does break a lot of hypothetical arbritary restrictions.
So, a normal refrigerator decreases entropy in one region and increases it in another, but they're directly adjacent regions and the entropy (heat) is moving from one to another along a simple, everyday path (like a heat exhaust tube). It sounds like the researchers have proposed using some quantum-teleportation-like trick to have the heat show up in some unconnected region of space.