I'm reminded of the saying "When you reach the top of the mountain the only zen you'll find the is the zen you brought with you." Or, alternatively the koan "If you meet the Buddha, kill him."
The idea is enlightenment comes from within. That's true for life satisfaction as well. The concept known as the "Hedonic treadmill"[1] ensures you return to your baseline happiness. If you want enduring life improvements you need to change that baseline happiness within yourself and not your external circumstances.
I was just listening to an interview with Elon Musk where he discussed the importance of reasoning from first principles as opposed to by analogy. The author of this wired article would benefit from taking that lesson to heart.
The Wired article is reasoning "by analogy". 4chan is like a teenager, or the soul of the internet, or the id of the internet, or whatever. Then, the author draws spurious conclusions based on those analogies. If 4chan is like a teenager, and it is fifteen years old, then surely it should be time for it to start getting more mature - right?
On the other hand, if you reason from first principles you see that the reporter's conclusions are nonsense. If you start with some basic assumptions - like that the culture of a web community is influenced by the mechanics of that community, you can conclude that 4chan is unlikely to change. 4chan is unlikely to change, not because it is in some psychological period of arrested development the way some human teens may be, 4chan is unlikely to change because the mechanics of how the board work are unlikely to change.
The behaviors on 4chan are better explained by the mechanics of the community than by psychological analogies. No registration. No persistent identities (or at least rarely used and abstruse persistent identities). No sorting of threads or replies. No persistence of threads or comments. Threads live or die based on the responses they attract and not any measure of quality.
The mechanics of 4chan, or any web community, influence how the users behave and not the age of the community. That's because 4chan is a web community and not a human teenager.
I believe accidents and fatalities per vehicle mile traveled are the most relevant statistics. If driverless cars can outperform humans on those metrics then they will be a great boon even if they roll over the odd cyclist or get in weird crashes.
Where I work the security guards greet you as you walk through the gate. I've always thought this was a mechanism for making sure the guards were paying attention. If someone comes in you have to look at the screen that shows their name (and image) and then look at the person to greet them. You are forced, in other words, to do a basic visual check of the image on screen versus the person walking through the gate.
An article I read yesterday mentioned that Japanese train workers will point and speak whenever they are doing something. This technique helps workers communicate and think about what they're doing and reduces mistakes.
Greeting customers as they enter may have similar effects. It makes sure someone notices the customer and acknowledges they are new. It lets the customer know they've been recognized as a new arrival. Acting like you're in a good mood may also help you feel that way too.
Oh, I don't know, just a boundless universe of knowledge, news, politics, and people to connect with. I'm not sure why contemplating boredom is more virtuous than reading or commenting on something on the phone.
I've read that most parents now are actually spending a lot more time with their kids than parents used to[1]. Probably your parents were working on chores that have been made easier by technology, or pursuing their hobbies while you played outside.
Assuming you have normal hand eye coordination I have a hard time believing you can't juggle. I learned by watching a YouTube video titled "Learn to juggle in five minutes" or something like that.
Learning the practice took longer than five minutes, but the theory only took about five minutes. I've also taught others to juggle this way too.
Step 1: With a single ball, toss the ball up in a gentle arc to be caught by the other hand. Repeat this step until you can do this ten times in a row without missing.
Step 2. Hold a ball in each hand. Throw from one hand first and when the first ball reaches the apex of it's arc, throw the second. Catch both balls. Repeat this step until you can execute ten times without error.
Step 3. Just add one more ball and throw whenever the last ball thrown reaches apex. Repeat until you can juggle.
If you were to follow these steps, and set aside a few hours, I'm quite confident you'd be juggling at the end of it. (Assuming normal hand eye coordination.)
I have known people who give up after ten or twenty minutes, but I don't know anyone who failed to juggle after really trying it.
If I had to sell a random exploit, I'd try the NSA. Email random NSA types or political appointees with the offer until someone got back to me. I'd give them the exploit first and ask for payment greater than what I estimated it was worth from disclosing it.
If the NSA failed to pay, I would disclose it and try to collect that way. I doubt the NSA would reveal I went to them first as that would reveal that they didn't pay for exploits.
Government organizations should have the money and an incentive to pay.
Still, Windows, or Android, works on hundreds of millions of machines for long periods of time. Stuxnet is a feat of engineering, but it's not as sophisticated as millions of lines of code written by tens of thousands of software developer over decades.
Complexity is about the number of interoperating parts. A math problem like 75533787543269^634678 may be difficult to do with pen and paper, but it's not complicated, whereas, take the result of 5^2, divide by the number of e's in these song lyrics, take that number of steps due North, and incline your head 60° while facing 3 o'clock - is a complicated set of directions even if none of the calculations are as difficult as the simpler one above.
I think the EM drive would've made for a dark future. How long would it be before maniacs were accelerating asteroids into the planet?
The EM drive seemed to be simpler and cheaper than a nuclear weapon. Anybody who could lift a few into space could attach to different rocks in the solar system and accelerate them to insane speeds. A weapon easier to acquire and more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
I think it really depends on the team you're on at Amazon. (well, the vesting, free drinks etc doesn't).
I never found the NYT article to be even slightly representative of my time at Amazon, and the group I was in at the time made additional changes to help improve morale that really worked. I believe you can find a good, or bad, team to work on at Amazon, and I assume the same is true of other big companies too (I have worked at another big company and it was true there too).
No, I couldn't live in such a city. If there was nobody to take out the trash we would have to raise more money to increase salaries for garbage men, etc. Some of it, I could live with less of, and some I'd pay more for.
Letting the economy balance itself seems a lot smarter than trying to control it and I think history provides many examples supporting this claim.
So get a place where you live next to artists if that's important. The idea that rent needs to be subsidized so the rich can have entertaining neighbors strikes me as facile and kind of sick.
I don't think we should try to guess the motivations of aliens. You can't really rule out, or make well founded assumptions about, how aliens will act or what they'll want.
Perhaps the aliens will just exterminate us to foreclose on the possible future where we become their equal or better. Perhaps they'll kill us for religious or ideological reasons. Perhaps they'll have a need to do something with our resources and no concern for our well being. Perhaps they'll be intelligent weapon systems programmed to kill and they'll identify us as enemies.
To me, that reads as passive aggressive. "It's unfortunate you didn't do your job..."
I think it's a better approach to say "The problems are X. We know this because of Y. My proposed solutions are Z. If you agree, let's get together and figure out how to do Z. If you don't agree, let's get together and figure out where our analyses diverge and how we can come together."
The idea is enlightenment comes from within. That's true for life satisfaction as well. The concept known as the "Hedonic treadmill"[1] ensures you return to your baseline happiness. If you want enduring life improvements you need to change that baseline happiness within yourself and not your external circumstances.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill