Amazing user interface. Seriously inspiring stuff.
Like you, I've built some C++ analytics infrastructure that I would have loved to have in an earlier corporate gig. But unlike you, I have no idea how to build a UI that people will want to use. I do everything at the terminal.
Can you recommend the best way to get going with UI development? Like, what tools should I use, what should I read? Is it even possible to get started with ~1week investment in learning?
But it does take a state to load out an MQ-180 with hellfires that will automatically target anyone whose IMSI has been within 100 yards of someone in the "disposition matrix".
> Then we started putting “safety” before everything else.
One caveat.
It's safety first, unless they decide to go to war to ensure continued access to cheap commodities (Iraq) or to play weird sociopath power games (Vietnam).
It's going to be kind of rich when they ask people from podunk towns in "flyover country" to go fight their next war, after years of ridiculing them and decimating their local economies.
Didn't a ban on space weapons forestall the weaponization of space by a few decades?
Didn't bans on chemical and biological weapons keep research in those fields small enough to prevent the emergence of politically potent factions with a pecuniary interest in their development?
The nuclear test ban treaties have held up well.
There is a big difference between "states openly develop these things and rich people lobby for more budget", and "states have secret programs as a hedge against noncompliance by the other side".
I have a theory that people who hate rms skew authoritarian and collectivist. I'm not sure why.
I do know that authoritarian collectivist societies tend to organize themselves around cults of personality, and tend to have cultures where public figures are either heroes or villainous enemies.
It's like they don't have a concept of "this person did important world changing work that should be celebrated, but also has a lot of problems and flaws".
> In the US the way to influence politics is campaign contributions to politicians.
I mean, the US has a ton of industry funded "think tanks" that are effectively unregistered lobbyists. If they spend >50% of their time lobbying, they have to register. Some probably cross that line and don't register.
Spending money on lobbying makes a lot of noise, but donating to a "think tank" can be stealthy.
It could be interesting to scrape / crowd-source the public calendars of house/senate committee members and agency commissioners to identify these orgs and the scale of their lobbying activities. The results might surprise you.
There's a Russian language documentary on YouTube worth watching.
It's unlikely that he's given up mathematics. Publishing, yes. Mathematics, no. If he'd finished his proof a few years later, I suspect Perelman would have followed Satoshi's lead and published as an anon. He just dumped dumped it on the arxiv, on the random.
In the documentary, Gromov seemed a little miffed at Perelman. As Gromov sees it, other mathematicians spent a lot of energy helping Perelman progress and he kind of "owes" it to the community to interact and mentor.
On the flip side, we should probably ask ourselves why someone like Perelman would rather be a recluse than participate in the community. The politics around his proof were particularly nasty, but I have to wonder if he sees deeper problems.
> Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too?
"Value creation" generally reveals itself through a rightward shift in the distribution of household incomes, increased standards of living, and resilient supply chains. At least that's what Adam Smith had in mind when he wrote "The Wealth of Nations".
If the only "value creation" KPI that ticks up is corporate earnings in offshore tax havens, the system starts to look like a non-governmental tax authority.
Like you, I've built some C++ analytics infrastructure that I would have loved to have in an earlier corporate gig. But unlike you, I have no idea how to build a UI that people will want to use. I do everything at the terminal.
Can you recommend the best way to get going with UI development? Like, what tools should I use, what should I read? Is it even possible to get started with ~1week investment in learning?