IPFS is really just a mix of a torrent tracker with a torrent client, but once IPFS VMs start paying for themselves, people will sign-up in masses. I guess that's what Filecoin is about.
Edit: The way I see filecoin working is anyone can post a reward for a file and once the file is provided, the reward is paid. In other words, it's bit like a brokerage that connects downloaders with uploaders. The difficultly is that this brokerage needs to be distributed and resilient.
My interpretation of this message is that Google spends $20 billions/quarter and as the ad revenue has dried up, Google will have to spend its $100 billions of savings or consider other options. As far as employees are concerned, $6 billions goes to engineers, $4 to sales & marketing, $2 to administration.
...and it hurts America in the long term. It's a completely backwards idea to take away opportunities from the society members with highest potential. The inevitable outcome of this will be stagnation.
Cymatics. It's sound interference drawing some peculiarly complex, but cool looking patterns. Edit: I've tried to find actual math behind those pictures and only found piles of pseudoscience. There's a CymaScope app that draws them, but they are super secretive about it. I suspect that it's just the interference pattern in a tibetian bowl or a cup of tea. It's almost suspicious that wikipedia has detailed scientific articles with hardcore math on dumb topics, but not only wikipedia, but the entire math community seems to carefully avoid this topic. Edit2: I think the math behind this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mode. In this case, the picture can likely be derived by numerically solving the diff equation of a sound wave with a boundary condition on a circle. Edit3: This lead me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_membr... with Bessel equations and all the good stuff. Solving it (numerically) would supposedly create the cool picture of the 432 Hz note. Edit4: And I've returned to where I began: cymatics, cymaglyphs and that cymascope. It gives an impression of a lazy pseudoscience at first, because of the somewhat sloppy language they use, but after watching a John Stuart Reid's presentation (watch it, it's only 40 mins), I had to change my opinion. The indeed capture the interference patterns created by sound in a bowl of water and a picture of that rapidly moving pattern is called a "cymaglyphs". I'd say, visualizing sound and music is a solved problem and the solution is called cymaglyphs. Obviously, an app can't use a bowl of water to solve the diff equations, but it can do that numerically with a decent precision, and apply some smoothing techniques to deal with the rapid evolution of these cymaglyphs.
Here's another observation from an armchair economist. Money flow upwards by forces of debt and contracts. If we short circuit the very top with the very bottom, money will start flowing inside this loop. If we don't form this loop, the powerful vacuum cleaner at the top will break this mechanism. In other words, the amount of money in the system doesn't matter much. What matters is that money form a steady flow pattern.
This is the good old trick often done by startups: founders & investors create and generously give themselves a lot of shares, diluting the share of rank-and-file employees to zero.
Here's some deep analysis from a armchair economist. $6T goes to the US "board members": their share of the company (I mean, the planet's resources) grows, but the share of rank-and-file American employees (I mean citizens), probably shrinks. My guess: $5T will be hoarded by the US elites, $1T will trickle down to citizens, the world's GDP will shrink from $80T to $50T and the US's GDP will shrink from $20T to $15T. If these hand wavy assumptions are correct, the US citizens' share will grow by 5%, from 20/80=25% to 15/50=30%, while the elites will get an extra 5/50=10% share of everything. Everybody outside the 12 mile zone around the US land is going to lose.
TBH, $10M per senator per year is only $1 billion/year - a rounding error for America. And when a senator has F-U money, there is little incentive for him to take dirty money (true sociopaths will take both, of course).
I don't get it. The Big Pharma makes some serious money and it needs qualified chemists to make new drugs. The complexity of making these drugs is so high that there should only few chemists good enough for the job.
DNA by itself doesn't produce a human or a cell. You need another functional cell or human to create a replica. I would compare DNA with instructions to create a new car: the instructions are incomplete and assume the existence of a car factory. DNA tells "now paint the car with of these colors", but it doesn't tell how.
I think there are actually a lot of Paula Beans in FANGs, they just perform at an entirely different level. In short, in order to be called out an incompetent liar, someone needs to make an assessment, but if the domain is too complex, if the knowledge is spread across 100 people, nobody will ever be able to assess or even notice the incompetent do-nothing types. Senior management don't understand the technicalities, middle managers see only their own area, very technical architects are very technical only in their domain and so on.
There is a good chance that you're more qualified than all your interviewers except the 3rd one, who looks like a tenured "staff" engineer or manager. This is the reason you don't leave your job before you've landed a better one.
I'd need to prove it, they'd skillfully dodge the request, I'd have to hire expensive lawyers (500/hr) and make a more formal request that's harder to dodge, they'd say the data is distributed across the globe in multiple jurisdictions in a very complex form, I'd have to hire an entire law company that works with international cases (1M/month?), they'd drag their feet and mud the discovery requests as much as possible and at the end of the day it'll be about who runs out of money first and who has better connections. The copyright law is made to resolve disputes between big companies.
It's interesting how collecting or distributing files with music is a grave crime and corporations can take down anything they don't like with a half-assed DMCA request, with no repercussions for "mistakes", but a person's face image doesn't belong to that person and the same corporations can safely collect and distribute these images for profit.
Edit: The way I see filecoin working is anyone can post a reward for a file and once the file is provided, the reward is paid. In other words, it's bit like a brokerage that connects downloaders with uploaders. The difficultly is that this brokerage needs to be distributed and resilient.