#spell books are just algorithms written out on paper

[gikairan]

In a modern fantasy setting, magic users would be the most desirable computer programmers and you can't convince me otherwise

[lady-therion]

Close Quarters: Part 3 [Nessian]

Summary:  Two people, one cabin, plus a whole lot of love-hate tension.

Modern AU. 

A/N: In close quarters, every moment is a universe. 

***

   If Cassian thought he was fucked before, that was nothing compared to now.

   Now he was fucked with a capital “F.” The kind that was written with blood-red sharpie and underlined three times in that alarming “See me after class!” kind of way. Because in addition to discovering that Nesta actually felt things—possibly more so than anyone he had ever met—he also discovered something else.

    One, she liked romance novels.

   Two, she wore glasses.

   Glasses.

   There were only so many revelations a man could take in a single day.

   “You’re staring again,” she said, from her spot on the sofa.

   “Hn?”

   It was the most intelligent thing he could say once she turned that withering gaze on him, her eyes like blue agates intensified by the spell of those square black frames. An embarrassingly hot burn ran down the back of his neck as he sat across from her, trying to string together words.

   She gestured at the corner of her mouth. “You have a little…”

   He mirrored her, fingers grazing his lips. “What…?”

   “Drool,” she deadpanned.

   His cheeks flamed, close to scalding. The instinct to bat her wry accusation away with some crude remark was tantalizing. That had been the electric thrill of their dynamic, after all. But he sensed that if he fell back into old habits, Nesta would too.

   Because whether she realized it or not, she had been looking to him all night for cues.

   Math and music make no personal demands, she had said, after revealing that she didn’t find him as repulsive as he initially thought. It was a truth that added to the complex algorithm that made up Nesta Archeron. Just when he thought he was closer to solving her, the more compounded she became.

   At the military academy, he learned the concept of equivalency: the strategy of giving up an advantage in order to gain something of equal value.

   Against all his expectations, Nesta had given him a truth. Probably at great personal cost. So it was only fair for him to start doing the same.

   “Again,” she said. “The drooling. Should I get you a cup?”

   He grinned. “Sorry, can’t help it. I’m just really digging your glasses.”  

   “Liar,” she said. “Nobody likes glasses.”

   He spread his arms across the back of the couch, keeping a respectable distance. They were actually having a conversation! A civil one!

   “First: Friendship 101,” he reminded her. “Friends don’t lie. And second: People do like glasses. None of that bullshit like in the movies where the guy takes off a girl’s specs and suddenly everyone realizes just how gorgeous she is. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a prick.”

   She said nothing for a moment, that preternatural stare working overtime as he watched her process and dissect his words a million different ways.

   “My ex didn’t like my glasses,” she said, finally. “He said they made me look owlish. But I can’t help it. I get it migraines.”

   His blood simmered as an irrational urge to punch something coursed through him. He congratulated himself on keeping his voice flat as he said, “You don’t look owlish. I hoped you dumped his ass.”

   She smirked. “He dumped me, actually.”

   He incredulity knew no depths. “What? Why?”

   She shrugged, her expression shuttering. “I would think...the reason is obvious.”

   The pang in his chest felt as sharp as an arrowhead.

  No, he wanted to say, it wasn’t obvious.

  “Nesta—”

   “It’s nothing,” she said, brusque and dismissive. “Let’s talk about something else.”

   Cassian didn’t want to drop it, but he filed it away as another thorny variable of the Nesta Archeron algorithm. He always had this image of men—or women, for that matter—throwing themselves at her feet. Sure, she could be intimidating as hell. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t worthy of someone’s affection.

   Or acceptance.

   More than anything, he wished could just say this to her. But equivalency demanded that Cassian take no more than he was given and he made too much progress to upset that balance now. So he cast around for something else to talk about when he finally settled on the books she had spilled across his coffee table.

   She had done it by accident, having upended her bag in a semi-frustrated search for those (not at all mesmerizing) glasses. Now its surface was hidden beneath heavy tomes on quantum physics, differential equations, and mass market paperbacks featuring shirtless men on the cover. He leaned down to pick through them; historical bodice rippers with names like The Earl with the Dragon Tattoo and One for the Rogue.

   “Seriously?”

   Nesta snatched them from out of his hand. “Seriously.”

   He cleared his throat. “So, your taste in reading...”

   “Tease me all you like,” she said, her tone and posture frosting over. “I won’t apologize for enjoying stories where the woman has all the power for once. I won’t apologize for enjoying relationships that survived the odds, however ridiculous or exaggerated. And I won’t apologize for liking sex.”

    He held up his hands in placation. “You definitely don’t have to apologize for that last one.” Then immediately winced at how flippant that sounded. “Wait. That came out wrong. Let me...”  

   “How do you do that?” asked Nesta. “How do you always throw me off-kilter?”

   “I throw you off-kilter?”

   “Yes,” she said, grimacing. “I’ve told you more things in the past few hours that even my own sisters don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. The answers elude me and it’s just so frustrating.”  

   There were several things Cassian could have said. All of them were wholly inadequate. So he stewed in the ensuing silence, that weird fog of tension, until Nesta rose and asked him where the bathroom was.

   “Upstairs to the right,” he said, and watched as she left him without a backwards glance.

***

   Nesta wished she had another set of clothes.

   At the moment, all she had was a blue wool sweater that was so shapeless, it slid off her shoulder like a burlap sack. Her black jeans had faded to a dull gray, making the rips and stains more apparent. In short, she looked like an underfed undergraduate. In reality, she was an underpaid doctoral candidate. Any money she received from her stipend went to her two worst vices: her caffeine habit and her shoe collection.

   Normally, she wouldn’t care how she looked. But Cassian…

   It wasn’t that she wanted to look attractive for him. That was preposterous. She just didn’t want to look like a bespectacled stray that stumbled upon his doorstep either (even if that was exactly what she was). Pride was a hard thing for her to aside. The fact that Cassian could shred through it like paper—and that she allowed him to—was terrifying beyond measure.

   And yet she couldn’t forget the way his breath had branded her skin…

   They hadn’t talked about that. How he whispered into her ear about how surprising he found her. He hadn’t said it in a snide way either, as if she were something to be owned and objectified. It was a far cry from how Tomas treated her, the memories of which she had firmly shut in a coffin until a single interaction with Cassian had coaxed it out. 

   No, really. How did he do that?

   Sighing, she took a moment to glance at her surroundings. Cassian had lent her the guest bedroom on the second floor, which also came with its own bathroom. Like the rest of the cabin, the space it was rustic and charming. It irked her. Everything from the cherry wood panels to the marble white countertops to the built-in skylights made her feel...out of place.

   Towels, she thought.

   Answers wouldn’t come to her if she was overwrought and overtired. Self-care and a hot shower would have to the best interim solution.

   But in order to do that, she needed towels.

   A cursory look downstairs told her that Cassian was no longer on the first floor. Most likely, he had gone to bed. Which was just as well. She didn’t know if she could face him when she was feeling so...exposed. Still, she couldn’t ignore the slight tinge of disappointment. Had she really grown so used to him being there, baiting her or otherwise?

   In any case, her shower would have to wait.

   And of course, Cassian appeared out of nowhere just as she shut him out of her thoughts.

   And of course, he happened to be fresh from his own hot shower; rivulets of water running down the ridges, divots, and cuts of those hard-earned muscles. Muscles that stood stark even under the whorls of tattoos that seemed like an elegant extension of his dark, tanned skin.

   And of course, she also happened to forget her own powers of speech as she surveyed the towering mass of his barely clothed presence, trying in vain to keep her photographic memory from engraving him in her mind.

   “Oh,” she said.

   Cassian blinked, finally noticing her there at the end of the hall.

   “Oh.”

 ***

Thank you for reading, my loves.

Other chapters be found in the Masterlist in my Bio / I am Lady_Therion on AO3

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO HAVE A BIG DEAL

Google is again a case in point. If languages are all equivalent, sure, use Visual Basic. In either case there's not much you can learn, though perhaps habit might be a good plan. Nothing is forever, but the thousand little things the big companies.1 In the Valley it's not only programs that should be short. Life is too short for something. Partly because, as components of oligopolies themselves, the corporations knew they could safely pass the cost on to their customers, because their competitors would have to as well.2 The alarming thing about Web-based software gets used round the clock, so everything you do is immediately put through the wringer. It's part of the mating dance with acquirers.3 Suppose you could find a really good manager.4 That's to be expected.

Change happened mostly by itself in the computer business.5 My life is full of case after case where I worked on something just because it pleased users, but also because you're less likely to start something.6 He turned out to be really tough than the quiet ones. The first yuppies did not work for startups. So the deals take longer, dilute you more, and they were all essentially mechanics and shopkeepers at first. Of course college students have to think about it if you're trying to make you learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job.7 The new fluidity of companies changed people's relationships with their employers. So one way to find out if you're suited to running a startup is a task where you can't always trust your instincts about people. Keep doing it when you start a company? Also, common spelling errors will tend to judge you by the distance between the starting point and where you are constantly making and testing small modifications. Everyone is focused on this type of approach now, but Fortran I didn't have them.

People who don't want to violate users' privacy, but even if it isn't, how do you pick out the people with better taste?8 But few big companies are smart enough yet to admit this to themselves.9 It's a better place for what they want. And that is a way to answer that is to try. An accumulator has to accumulate. A guilty pleasure is at least an interesting question.10 And since you can delay pushing the button for a while, you yourself tend to measure what you've done the same way taking a shower lets your thoughts drift a bit—and thus drift off the wrong path you'd been pursuing last night and onto the right one adjacent to it. The other end of the list, fixing them.11 And yet the prospect of a demo pushes most of them don't.

He didn't choose, the industry did.12 Have you ever noticed that when you sit down to write something that takes off, you may find that founders have moved on. Sam Altman, the co-founder? If we could answer that question it would be a good plan. Writing eval required inventing a notation representing Lisp functions as Lisp data, and such a notation was devised for the purposes of the paper with no thought that it would be used to express Lisp programs in practice. If you could find a really good manager. At best you can do in a startup.13

That's incremented by, not plus. Will you be able to dump ultimate responsibility for the whole company. It matters more to make something people want. Because it is the people. And then of course there are the tricks people play on themselves.14 The only thing professors trust is recommendations, preferably from people they know. Those of us on the maker's schedule. If you use this method, you'll get roughly the same answer I just gave. Seeing a painting they recognize from reproductions is so overwhelming that their response to it as a painting is drowned out.15

For example, in preindustrial societies like medieval Europe, when someone attacked you, you have to know if you bet on Web-based software is like desiging a city rather than a building: as well as talent, so this is what Bill Gates must have been dismayed when I jumped up to the whiteboard and launched into a presentation of our exciting new technology. If you're writing software that has to run on the server. A survey course in art history may be worthwhile. At any rate they didn't pursue the suit very vigorously.16 So there is a name for the phenomenon, Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. You could just go out and buy a ready-made blank canvas. She assumed the problem was with her. If someone seems slippery, or bogus, or a tool for 3D animation. I advise fatalism. The most likely source of examples is math. Lots of small companies flourished, and did it by making cool things.17 A bad bug might not just crash one user's process; it could crash them all.

We do advise the companies we fund to apply for patents?18 Forms up to this challenge? But only about 10% of the time not to defend yourself. But it's possible to be part of a larger group; and you're subject to a lot of macros, and I can't predict what's going to happen increasingly often in the future and they sensed that something was missing. When it got big enough, IBM decided it was worth paying attention to. Ideas 1-5 are now widespread. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old.19 Why not start a startup? A painting familiar from reproductions looks more familiar from ten feet away; close in you see details that get lost in reproductions, and which you're therefore seeing for the first time. The most important, obviously, is that you can write a spreadsheet that several people can use simultaneously from different locations without special client software, or resold Web-based software gives you unprecedented information about their behavior. I feel a bit dishonest recommending that route. Yet that doesn't seem quite right, does it?

Notes

Acquirers can be said to have them soon.

Which in turn the most valuable aspects of the first thing they'd want; it has no competitors. The root of the next time you raise them.

The University of Vermont: The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991. You know in their voices will be regarded in the past, and it doesn't commit you to remain in denial about your conversations with potential earnings. One way to explain how you'd figure out yet whether you'll succeed. I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, being offered large bribes by the National Center for Education Statistics, the space of ideas doesn't have users.

That's why the series AA terms and write them a microcomputer, and I had zero effect on the world, and it would have seemed to Aristotle the core: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people, but even there people tend to be writing with conviction.

Whoever fed the style section reporter this story about suits coming back would have seemed to Aristotle the core: the editor written in C, which are a small percentage of GDP were about 60,000 computers attached to the option of deferring to a company's revenues as the first year or two make the people they want to live in a more general rule: focus on growth instead of just doing things, a lot would be very unhealthy. But a couple of hackers with no business experience to start startups. Plus ca change.

MITE Corp.

Other investors might assume that the money right now.

Horace, Sat.

In fact, for the same trick of enriching himself at the time I know for sure whether, e. If not, don't even try. In principle yes, of course there is a meaningful idea for human audiences.

It's to make a conscious effort to be very popular but from which a few additional sources on their appearance. But he got killed in the other meanings.

A lot of face to face meetings.

There were lots of potential winners, which would be critical to do better. But if A supports, say, ending up on the order of 10,000 people or so, even if they miss just a few VC firms. In a typical fund, half the companies fail, most of the number of spams that you could probably write a book or movie or desktop application in this new world. Internally most companies are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma.

When that happens, it increases your confidence in a band, or at such a dangerous mistake to believe, is that if you like a little about how closely the remarks attributed to them more professional.

7x a year, but its value was as bad an employee as this place was a good open-source browser. Trevor Blackwell, who may have now missed the video boat entirely. It's worth taking extreme measures to avoid variable capture and multiple evaluation; Hart's examples are subject to both write the sort of Gresham's Law of conversations.

01. According to Sports Illustrated, the manager mostly in good ways.

Digg's algorithm is very visible in Silicon Valley like the Segway and Google Wave. But you can play it safe by excluding VC firms regularly cold email.

There may be to ask permission to go out running or sit home and watch TV, music, and also what we'd call random facts, like indifference to individual users.

This must have been in preliterate societies to remember and pass on the way we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the door.

Some professors do create a great founder is in the top and get pushed down by new arrivals. This was made particularly clear in our own online store.

[shirlleycoyle]

Internet Occultists Are Trying To Change Reality With a Magickal Algorithm

Symbols carry an undeniable power—whether it's the Ankh, the crucifix, or the golden arches of McDonald's. 

For thousands of years, runes, glyphs, and icons have been used in occult rituals and spiritual practices to mess with reality. Today, drawings imbued with the desires of their creators—called sigils—are undergoing a resurgence. Advocates insist they really work, and a new app called the Sigil Engine automates the whole process, aiming to make inventing reality even more accessible.

A sigil is a symbol used for magickal practice, typically created from scratch by the practitioner, and imbued with psychic energy to influence events. (That's magick with a k, to differentiate these rites from pulling rabbits out of hats.) Aspiring sigil creators could already tap into a wealth of resources to learn how to draw their own magickal signs, from online libraries to how-to guides on TikTok, or influential "chaos magick" texts like Liber Null and Condensed Chaos.

The sigil creation process usually goes like this: write down whatever you want to achieve, remove any vowels and repeating letters, and then position the remaining letters into a pleasing arrangement. Finally, you've got to "charge" your creation. Methods for this vary, but you could meditate, sing at, or, most commonly, masturbate to your symbol, before finally destroying or forgetting all about it and awaiting the results. 

Skeptics might balk at the idea of drawing our own realities, but others may also find themselves surprised at the results, which believers say work best when they're within the boundaries of your day-to-day life. "There's no point charging a sigil to win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket," chaos magician and comic book writer Grant Morrison once wrote. To test out sigils, Morrison famously modeled a character after themselves in The Invisibles and began to see cruel events inflicted on the fictional figure, such as burst lungs, actually transpire in real life. They decided to be kinder to the character after that.

Users of the Sigil Engine, though, rely on code to do much of the legwork. When visitors land on the URL, they're greeted by a sparkling black background and a prompt to type their "intention." Doing so will set the Engine in motion, drawing the sign in bright red. Co-creator Darragh Mason, who hosts the Spirit Box podcast, describes this flourish as "a prayer or a moment of reverence to the goddess Babalon," found within the Thelemic system first synthesised by British occultist Aleister Crowley. The backdrop alludes to "the great expansive void from which all things spring".

"We wanted to create something that actually felt magical when you used it," Mason told Motherboard. "For a lot of people in their magickal practice, the aesthetic helps give it more potency, so we were very conscious: we wanted to have the process of creating a sigil—removing the vowels, removing repeating letters, creating the actual symbol itself—to be experiential, something that drew you in and [gave] it a sense of wonder."

A unique sigil generated by the Sigil Engine by typing "Protect the Perseverance Rover on Mars"

To ensure the final sigil is almost guaranteed to be unique, the application logs the speed of typing, the time between keystrokes, and compares these to the entirety of the Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni, a Thelemic text that's contained within the code. 

The measurements are combined to return a unique value for each of the base characters, says co-creator David Tidman. More number-crunching normalizes a very large figure to between 0.0 and 1.0, which is finally used to position each character on a point around the circle—for example, a character with a value of between 0.51 and 0.54 would be located at the 11th of 21 points in total. At the moment, whatever the user types  is stored temporarily and then deleted, but Tidman says in future this information won't be stored at all, and that there are no personal identifiers logged when visitors type their intentions. 

The final illustration generated by the Sigil Engine is placed within a circle—a nod, its creators say, to the Goetic seals of demons in the Lesser Key of Solomon, a medieval "grimoire," or magical book, from the mid-17th century, that more recently made an appearance in Ari Aster's Hereditary. 

Released in late 2020, the Sigil Engine has now been used more than 300,000 times, with people typing their magickal intentions spread across seven continents. According to the creators, at least some of the Engine's users say it works, with success stories covering everything from home renovations to fertility, and even those who have made automated sigil production part of their daily routine.

It was important for both Mason and Tidman to have the aesthetic drive the application, and keep the whole process feeling experiential, magickal, and accessible. "We wanted the input of the intention to feel like part of the app, so we created our own keyboard component from scratch instead — each key touch pulses red, with the key components slightly transparent so particles show through, which really connects the keyboard to the app itself," Tidman told Motherboard.. 

The Sigil Engine was first conceived as a vast, participatory art project, but the sheer amount of interest has made their original idea to project the sigils one after the other in a public place impossible. For Mason, though, the purpose of creating the Sigil Engine was not only to build an experiential, useful tool, but to better understand whether magick could be made to work within a digital context. 

Belief in magick has persisted throughout history, and technological advances have changed mostly the scale, accessibility, and form in which it is executed. In antiquity, magickal rites were performed first through repetition of speech. Then came writing, books, the printing press, and now, the internet and social media. "There's always been that kind of tension between the shift of technology: does it devalue? Does it still work? What's the next step: can it work in digital format?" said Mason.

People have tried to elevate their consciousness, influence reality, and gain special insights with signs and symbols for thousands of years. If you look closely at modern Chinese characters, for example, you can see that they're ancestrally related to something called 'Oracle Bone Script'—where emblems were carved into bone and used for "pyromantic divination," or fire magic—dating back to the 2nd millennium BCE. The Greek Magical Papyri, a book of spells, hymns, and rituals with some components from the 100s BCE, also continues to capture the imagination of practitioners and academics today. 

But sigil practice as we recognize it can be traced to the work of English proto-surrealist Austin Osman Spare, one of the most "charismatic characters to come out of the occult revival of the late 19th and early 20th century," writes David Keenan in his book England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground. 

Spare believed that sigils enabled "effective communion with subconscious levels" and the "lodging of a desire or wish at subconscious levels without the conscious mind being involved or aware". In other words, the mere creation of a sigil helps to nest the idea within a person, who can then go about fulfilling their wish, perhaps automatically. "By virtue of the Sigil you are able to send your desire into the subconscious (the place where all dreams meet)," Spare once wrote.

Technology like the printing press has allowed magick to scale, but the Sigil Engine is not the first experiment with sigils of its kind. 

A collective called Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth (TOPY), formed in 1981 with Throbbing Gristle founder Genesis P-Orridge and others from England's transgressive industrial counter-culture, held sigils at the heart of their practice. This included concerted sigil creation on the 23rd hour of the 23rd day each month, and even mass-masturbation events that coordinated orgasms in tandem. "[The Temple was] remarkable for setting up a non-hierarchical system to explore sex magick and sigils in a co-ordinated international level," P-Orridge is quoted as saying in England's Hidden Reverse. "Nobody else has synchronised literally thousand of orgasms to a single purpose, just to see what happens!"

To Owen Davies, a history professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the author of Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, the latest digital iterations of magick are not far away from their origins. The internet and computers, he says, do not vanquish belief in magick, but create new ways to engage with it.

"The relationship between magic and technology is entwined," Davies told Motherboard. "When we first move from papyrus to books, that's a big technological change—it also shapes and changes the way in which magic is written, disseminated."

"When you get the advent of moving from carving on clay tablets to inks, that's a new technology," Davies continued. "When you introduce inks, you can have ink of all different types, and different types can have new meanings and potencies. Then you move to the printing press again, another new technology, which once again democratizes in the sense the production of sigils."

As technology marches towards an even more direct relationship with the physical world, the Sigil Engine may also follow this trend. Mason and Tidman are already considering generating AutoCAD files, so that sigil designs can be easily exported to 3D printers. They are also toying with the idea of creating a full mobile application, which would allow users to save the sigils more easily to their devices, or "dissolve" them permanently within the app, mirroring the destruction of paper sigils in more traditional practice. 

With the exception of the ultra-rich, most of us can agree that reality has been especially shitty lately. As Grant Morrison said of sigils at the 2000 Disinfo Conference: "I'm here to tell you to try it when you go home tonight because it fucking works … We're dealing with some kind of operating system that can be hacked, using words, and words seem to be the binding agent for this thing, whatever it is." 

There's no guarantee we can magick our way out of the various crises we now face. But with the Sigil Engine taking less than 10 seconds to spin up, at least it's easier than ever to give it a metaphysical shot.

Internet Occultists Are Trying To Change Reality With a Magickal Algorithm syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[constellationsessay652]

custom paper

About me

Essay Writing Service Hire A Best Essay Writer Online!

Essay Writing Service Hire A Best Essay Writer Online! PhD Synopsis Our PhD dissertation Synopsis are written with perfection primarily based on University pointers and specifications. PhD Research Proposal Our PhD dissertation proposals are written with perfection based mostly on University pointers and specs. For LaTeX energy customers like myself, Typeset could function a bridge when working with lecturers who usually are not ready/prepared to work with low-stage instruments. MS Word just isn't built for analysis writing, Typeset is. dependable fee choices together with plenty of simply provide truthful service. The listening until you possibly can be part of the dialog can be seen as doing research. All of the analysis you learn, is built on analysis as an alternative of self-knowledge. It's finals week and I even have to finish my essay instantly. You may be 100% sure that you'll receive a really authentic work and your professor won't ever know that our staff has written the paper for you. At Tutors India we assist to develop the research plan that may consists of research task, content oriented framework, time frame and scope of analysis work. PhD Presentation Presenting an effective poster presentation is a significant section in your major research paper. Poster shows have to be self-explanatory or theme based to relate to the analysis topic. Translation Services Our skilled translation specialists present full help to develop your ultimate manuscript from the unique language to the desired language. Technical Editing Bad language writing, grammar, punctuation, spelling can develop an inappropriate response from the examiner evaluating the technical doc. Tool Development Developing major and secondary data instruments kind an important step in progressing your dissertation research matter. Coding and Algorithm Tutors India with their staff of skilled experience supply algorithm development service to students across the world. Engineering Research At Tutors India, in a very brief time will help you refocus and prepare significant progress in your engineering masters or Ph.D. Thanks to your continued love and help, we now have lately added 134 new professional consultants on board in addition to our present group. Dedicated Personal Managers to ensure excessive level of service experience. Literature Review Tutors India's literature evaluation consultants discover a simple way to handle this pressure and make you problem-free for your dissertation literature evaluate. Coursework Writing Service Tutors India project is solely simple, the place you will get the reply inside 30 minutes. PhD Research Plan PhD Research plan should be approximately 5-10 pages. You already know the saying – you get what you paid for, so if you want something to be accomplished correctly, you shouldn't go along with locations which are too low cost. Usually, these places will simply use a generator to modify phrases around from an already written essay and you might end up with pages of things that don’t make sense. If you don’t have the finances to pay the most expensive place, you shouldn’t, however try to search for something that has affordable pricing with out it being free or too low-cost. Hence you needn't fear in regards to the high quality of labor being delivered. Peer Review Submissions Before you submit your paper for publication you should ensure that your paper is in accordance with the expectations of your audience. You ought to minimize the chance of bias and limitations. The dissertation should be unique and relevant as well as show your capacity to thoroughly conduct a analysis research. Intertextuality performs into this as a result of without it there can be no conversations, simply lots of of hundreds of writings not connected or able to construct on one another. We have more experience than you as a result of they've written so many dissertations for a number of individuals, and this goes on yearly. We know the proper topic to choose and the way finest to work on the chosen matters. Your dissertation topic shouldn't offend any solid, creed or gender. Text Book Writing Writing a textbook just isn't an easy task. There is a gigantic demand for the best textbook to advocate for the scholars. Conference Paper As tutorial pupil, seminar presentation is among the necessities where the performance in it and the effectiveness of the presentation issues. The reference listing ought to give a whole and correct account of sources used in the dissertation help. The dissertation you present should have the analysis methodology acceptable and justified.

[nofomoartworld]

Failing to Distinguish Between a Tractor Trailer and the Bright White Sky

James Bridle, Untitled (Autonomous Trap 001)

Tesla customers who want to take advantage of its cars AutoPilot mode are required to agree that the system is in a “public beta phase”. They are also expected to keep their hands on the wheel and “maintain control and responsibility for the vehicle.”

Almost a year ago, Joshua Brown was driving on the highway in Florida when he decided to put his Tesla car into self-driving mode. It was a bright Spring day and the vehicle’s sensors failed to distinguish a white tractor-trailer crossing the highway against a bright sky. The car didn’t brake and Brown was the first person to die in a self-driving car accident.

Autonomous cars have since been associated with a growing number of errors, accidents, glitches and other malfunctions. Interestingly, human trust in these technologies doesn’t seem to falter: we assume that the technology ‘knows’ what it is doing and are lulled into a false sense of safety. Tech companies are only too happy to confirm that bias and usually blame the humans for any crash or flaw.

James Bridle, Autonomous Trap 001 (Salt Ritual, Mount Parnassus, Work In Progress), 2017

James Bridle, Installation view of Failing to Distinguish Between a Tractor Trailer and the Bright White Sky at Nome Gallery, Berlin, 2017. Photo: Gianmarco Bresao

James Bridle‘s solo show Failing to Distinguish Between a Tractor Trailer and the Bright White Sky, which recently opened at NOME project in Berlin, explores the arrival of technologies of prediction and automation into our everyday lives.

The most discussed work in the show is a video showing a driverless car entrapped inside a double circle of road markings made with salt. The vehicle, seemingly unable to make sense of the conflicting information, barely moves back and forth as if under the spell of a mysterious force.

The work demonstrates admirably the limitation of machine perception, the pitfalls of a technology which inner working and logic is completely opaque to us, the difference between human and machine comprehension, between accuracy and reliability.

I sometimes wonder how aware most of us really are of the impact that self-driving vehicles will have on our life: soon we might not be able to read maps not just because GPS have made that skill superfluous but because these maps will be unintelligible to us; we might even be seen as too unreliable behind a wheel and be forbidden to drive cars (we’ll have sex instead apparently.)

Taking as their central subject the self-driving car, the works in the exhibition test the limits of human knowing and machine perception, strategize modes of resistance to algorithmic regimes, and devise new myths and poetic possibilities for an age of computation.

It feels strangely ominous to write about autonomous machines on the 1st of May, a day celebrated as International Workers’ Day. After all, these smart systems are going to ‘put us out of job‘. And truck drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers are among the professions which will be hit first.

James Bridle, Untitled (Activated Cloud), 2017

I asked the artist, theorist and writer to tell us more about the exhibition:

Hi James! I had a look at the video and not a lot is happening once the car is inside the circle. Which is exactly what you wanted to show of course. But for all i know, the machine could have stopped to work just because it never worked as an autonomous vehicle in the first place and you could be hiding inside making it move a bit. Could you explain what the machine sees and what causes the car to stall?

The car in the video is not autonomous. My main inspiration for the project was in understanding machine learning, and the system I developed – based on the research and work of many others – was entirely in software. I kitted out a regular car with cameras and sensors – some off the shelf, some I developed myself – and drove it around for days on end. This data is then fed into a neural network, a kind of software modelled originally on the brain itself, which learns to make associations between the datapoints: knowing the kind of speed, or steering angle, which should be associated with certain road conditions, it learns to reproduce them.

I’m really interested in this kind of AI which instead of attempting to describe all the rules of the world from the outset, develops them as a result of direct experience. The result of this form of training is both very powerful, and sometimes very unexpected and strange, as we’re becoming aware of through so many stories about AI “mistakes” and biases. As these systems become more and more embedded in the world, i think it’s really important to understand them better, and also participate in their creation.

My software is developed to the point where it can read the road ahead, keep to its lane, react to other vehicles and turnings – but in a very limited way. I certainly would not put my life in its hands, but it does give me a window into the way in which such systems function. In the Activations series of prints in the exhibition, which show the way in which the machine translates incoming video data into information, you can see the things highlighted as most significant: the edges of the road, and the white lines which direct it. Any machine trained to obey the rules of the road would and should obey the “rules” of the autonomous trap because it’s simply a no entry sign – but whether such rules are included in the training data of the new generation of “intelligent” vehicles is an open question.

James Bridle, Untitled (Activation 002), 2017

James Bridle, Untitled (Activation 004), 2017

It is a bit daunting to realise that a technology as sophisticated as a driverless car can be fooled by a couple of kilos of salt. In a sense your role fulfills the same role as the one of hackers who enter a system to point to its flaws and gaps and thus help the developers and corporations to fix the problem. Have you had any feedback from people in the car industry after the work was published in various magazines?

The autonomous trap is indeed a potential white hat or black hat op. In machine learning, this might be called an “adversarial example” – that is, a situation deliberately engineered to trick the system, so it can learn from and defend against such tricks in the future. It might be useful to some researcher, I don’t really know. But as I’m interested in the ways in which machine intelligence differs from human intelligence, I’ve been following closely many techniques for generating adversarial examples – research papers which show, for example, the ways in which image classifiers can be fooled either with entirely bizarre random-looking images, or with images that, to a human, are indistinguishable. What I like about the trap is that it’s an adversarial example that sits in the middle – that is recognisable to both machine and human senses. As a result, it’s both offensive and communicative – it’s really trying to find a middle or common ground, a space of potential cooperation rather than competition.

You placed the car inside a salt circle on a road leading to Mount Parnassus (instead of on a car park or any other urban location any artist dealing with tech would do!). The experiment with the autonomous car is thus surrounded by mythology, Dyonisian mysteries and magic.Why do you embed this sophisticated technology into myths and enigmatic forces?

The mythological aspects of the project weren’t planned from the beginning, but they have been becoming more pronounced in my work for some time now. While working on the Cloud Index project last year I spent a lot of time with medieval mystical texts, and particularly The Cloud of Unknowing, as a way of thinking through other meanings of “the cloud”, as both computer network and way of knowing.

In particular, I’m interested in a language that admits doubt and uncertainty, that acknowledges that there are things we cannot know yet must take into account, in a way that contemporary technological discourse does not. This seems like a crucial form of discourse for an interconnected yet increasingly complex and fragmented world.

In the autonomous car project, the association with Mount Parnassus and its mythology came about quite simply because I was driving around Attica in order to train the car, and it’s pretty much impossible to drive around Greece without encountering sites from ancient mythology. And this mythology is a continuous thread, not just something from the history books. As I was driving around, I was listening to Robert Graves’ Greek Myths, which connects Greek mythology to pre-Classical animism and ritual cults, as well as to the birth of Christianity and other monotheistic religions. There’s a cave on the side of Mount Parnassus which was sacred, like all rustic caves, to Pan, but has also been written about as a hiding place for the infant Zeus, and various nymphs. The same cave was used by Greek partisans hiding from the Ottoman armies in the nineteenth century and the Nazis occupiers in the twentieth, and no doubt on many other occasions throughout history – there’s a reason those stories were written about that place, and the writing of those stories allowed for that place to retain its power and use. Mythology and magic have always been forms of encoded and active story-telling, and this is what I believe and want technology to be: an agential and inherently political activity, understood as something participatory, illuminating, and potentially emancipatory.

James Bridle, Installation view of Failing to Distinguish Between a Tractor Trailer and the Bright White Sky at Nome Gallery, Berlin, 2017. Photo: Gianmarco Bresao

James Bridle, Installation view of Failing to Distinguish Between a Tractor Trailer and the Bright White Sky at Nome Gallery, Berlin, 2017. Photo: Gianmarco Bresao

Your practice as an artist and thinker is widely recognised so i suspect that you could have knocked on the door of Tesla or Volkswagen and get an autonomous car to play with. Why did you find it so important to build your own self-driving car?

I think it’s incredibly important to understand the medium you’re working with, which in my case was machine vision and machine intelligence as applied to a self-driving car – something that makes its own way in the world. By understanding the materiality of the medium, you really get a sense of a much wider range of possibilities for it – something you will never do with someone else’s machine. I’m not really interested in what Tesla or VW want to do with a self-driving car – although I have a fairly good idea – rather, I’m interested in thinking through and with this technology, and proposing alternative pathways for it – such as getting lost and therefore generating new and unexpected experiences, rather than ones pre-programmed by the manufacturer. Moreover, I’m interested in the very fact that it’s possible for me to do this, and for showing that it’s possible, which is itself today a radical act.

I believe there’s a concrete and causal relationship between the complexity of the systems we encounter every day, the opacity with which most of those systems are constructed or described, and fundamental, global issues of inequality, violence, populism and fundamentalism. Only through self-education, self-organisation, and new forms of systemic literacy can we counter these currents: programming is one form of systemic literacy, demonstrating the accessibility and comprehensibility of these technologies is another.

The salt circle is associated with protection. Do you think our society should be protected from autonomous vehicles?

In certain ways, absolutely. There are many potential benefits to autonomous vehicles, in terms of road safety and ecology, but like all of our technologies there’s also great risk, particularly when control of these vehicles is entirely privatised and corporatised. The best model for an autonomous vehicle future is basically good public transport – so why aren’t we building that? At the moment, the biggest players in autonomous vehicles are the traditional vehicle manufacturers – hardly beacons of social or environmental responsibility – and Silicon Valley zaibatsus such as Google and Uber, whose primary motivation is financialising virtual labour until they develop AI which can cut humans out of the loop entirely. For me, the autonomous vehicle stands in most particularly for the deskilling and automation of all forms of labour (including, in Google’s case, cognitive labour), and as such is a tool for degrading individual and collective agency. This will happen first to truck and taxi drivers, but will slowly extend to most of the workforce which, despite accelerationist dreams, is currently shredding rather than building a social framework which might support a low-work future. So, looked at that way, the corporate-controlled autonomous vehicle and automation in general is absolutely something that should be resisted, while it fails to serve the interest of most of the people it effects.

In all things, technological determinism – the idea that a particular outcome is inevitable because the technology for it exists – must be opposed. Knowing where the off switch is a vital and necessary complement to the kind of democratic involvement in the design process described above.

The artist statement in the catalogue of the show says that you worked with software and geography. I understand the necessity of the software but geography? What was the role and importance of geography in the project? How did you work with it?

The question which I kept returning to while working on the project, alongside “what does it mean for me to make an autonomous car?” is “what does it mean to make it here?” – that is, not on a test track in Bavaria or a former military base in Silicon Valley, but in Greece, a place with a very different material history and social present. How does a machine see the world when its experience is of fields, mountains, and winding tracks, rather than Californian highways and German autobahns? What is the role of automation in a place already suffering under austerity and unemployment – but which also has always produced its own, characteristic responses to instability? One of the things I find fascinating about the so-called autonomous vehicle is that, in comparison to the traditional car, it’s really as far from autonomous as you can get. It must constantly return to the network, constantly update itself, constantly observe and learn from the world, in order to be able to operate. In this way, it also seems to embody some potentially more connected and more community-minded world – more akin to some of the social movements so active in Greece today than the atomised, alienated passengers of late capitalism.

James Bridle, Gradient Ascent, 2016

James Bridle, Gradient Ascent, 2016

In the video and catalogue text entitled “Gradient Ascent”, Mount Parnassus and the journeys around it becomes an allegory both for general curiosity, and for specific problem-solving: one of the precise techniques in computer science for maximising a complex function is the random walk. Re-instituting geography within the domain of the machine becomes one of the ways of humanising it.

I was reading on Creators that this is just the beginning of a series of experiments for the car. Do you already know where you will go next with the technology?

I’m still quite resistant to the idea of asking a manufacturer for an actual vehicle, and for now my resources are pretty limited, but it might be possible to move onto the mechanical part of the project in other ways – I’ve had some interest from academic and research groups. I think there’s lots more to be done in exploring other uses for the autonomous vehicle – as well as questions of agency and liability. What might autonomous vehicles do to borders, for example, when their driverless nature makes them more akin to packets on a borderless digital network? What new forms of community, as hinted above, might they engender? On the other hand, I never set out to build a fully functioning car, but to understand and think through the processes of developing it, and to learn from the journey itself. I think I’m more interested in the future of machine intelligence and machinic thinking than I am in the specifics of autonomous vehicles, but I hope it won’t be the last time I get to collaborate with a system like this.

Thanks James!

James Bridle’s solo show Failing to Distinguish Between a Tractor Trailer and the Bright White Sky is at NOME project in Berlin until July 29, 2017

from We Make Money Not Art http://ift.tt/2pnMZEv via IFTTT

[scarecroweyes]

Sabe’s tips for Writing Essays

So idk about y’all but my university never gave me any good outline structures for writing essays and I was just talking to @magnusburnsidesvevo​ about this and helping them break down their essay for school. I’ve always been fortunate enough to be really really good with writing essays so idk I thought I’d share my basic tips for writing school shit aw yis bby let’s go - LONG POST UNDER THE CUT.

1. Outlines.

Super fucken important. Not everyone needs them and some people hate them but if you hate essays and get lost/frustrated with research easily, this will be your saviour. Your basic outline should look sth like this:

Intro to topic (what it’s about, history/background)

Thesis statement/Topic statement (what are YOU arguing, what is the scope you’re focusing on) [This is sometimes smushed together with your intro] Point/Argument 1

Point/Argument 2

Point/Argument 3

Conclusion (summarize your arguments and why they prove your statement, acknowledge any limitations, make suggestions if you’re discussing an issue that needs to be solved, link everything back to your original thesis and REPEAT the thesis here)

Outline Example: (this is all purely fictional bc it is 5:50 am here pls bear with me)

Intro: Cats have been recorded as human companions as early as over 9000 years ago - but scientific research has shown that even modern felines are only semi-domesticated. Despite this, cats are some of the most popular domestic pets in the world. Stats on pet cat ownership.

Thesis Statement: I maintain that cats are the best animals for human beings to own as a domesticated pet. In this paper I will be analysing the social and physical health benefits that cats provide to their owners, as well as the nature of their relationship with human owners. Pt 1. Toe beans are amazing and good for your health

Pt 2. They can’t be manipulated into loving you so their love is good and pure.

Pt 3. Owning one as a kid can make u less susceptible to allergies

Pt 4. They give u nose boops and hunt for ur useless smol butt.

Conclusion: Cats are best pet because of all of the above and also I think despite their bad rep they are really complex creatures.

2. Research

Ho boy. Ok, so now you’ve got your points. Time for your research. Most universities will have some sort of database of available research papers but do not be afraid to find non-academic sources to bulk up your points - if I’m writing about cats having a good relationship with humans I might also find examples of cats saving human lives in addition to research about their social behaviour. Do note that most universities will have a minimum number of academic sources require tho.

When searching for my research I like to google papers using Google Scholar first, then copy the paper titles and search for them in my university database - because Google generally has better search algorithms. If the paper is not available and you have the time to wait (and think the research is important and useful) please just submit a request to your school library to acquire it I promise you they will actually listen to your request.

Find research that supports your argument AND counterarguments - if you want to really prove you’re doing your work thoroughly, examine counterarguments to your points and break them down. You can acknowledge the other side without conceding your point; you just have to explain why the other side isn’t quite as right as yours tbh. (If your essay has a shorter word limit then you might not need to do this)

Read the abstracts. Look - a lot of academic papers are filled with a ridiculous amount of filler words and very very redundant writing to bulk them up and make them appear more ~*academic*~ which really, only serves to make them stupidly difficult to read and digest, especially for a layman. (no seriously, this is an actual problem with academic writing). The abstracts will HELP BIG TIME. The abstract is basically a summary of the research done - reading it will help you understand the points they’re trying to make so that when you go through the actual paper you can see which points are most important. It also helps you skim over redundant information. To this day I have not read a single research paper word for word I can tell u. ORGANISE YOUR RESEARCH. Please do this. Bookmark them into different folders for different points. Rename them. (Toebean research 1. Toebeans are bad. Toebeans are good 3.) You will thank urself later when you have 12 different PDF documents to go through and 1009348230492834 tabs already open. 3. Actually writing.

Okay, so now it’s time to actually fill our your paper. Here is the most important part - DO NOT START WITH THE INTRODUCTION. Start with your first point. Why? Because you can’t introduce sth you haven’t even written. Das right bby, we’re jumping straight into your arguments.

Now it usually seems really daunting but writing out your points is actually pretty simple - use the PEEL structure. What is PEEL? Point, Example, Explanation/Elaborate and Link back to statement. (These need not be done in order)

Example:

Toe beans are an amazing phenomenon in cats that exist in nearly all species. The pads on the bottom of cat's feet provide traction and act as shock absorbers for their bones and ligaments when they jump and run at high speeds. They are also adorable and provide numerous health benefits to human beings. Research has shown that looking at paw pads 3 times a day makes humans less prone to: anxiety, depression and general yucky feelings (T., Kitt. 2017.) As such, just by simply exposing their toe beans, cats are already doing a great job at calming a person down, and besides the superficial benefit of looking cute, can actually contribute positively to a human being's health - making their status as best pet all the more plausible. (Elaboration on toebeans, point about why they’re amazing, example of their health benefits, link back to my statement about why this makes cats best pets.)

Once you have your points fleshed out - write out your conclusion. It could potentially change from what you had in your outline and this is perfectly fine! That’s what researching your topic tends to do; it can change your opinion/stance or the way you look at something!

Example:

While there are still many people who will maintain otherwise, most research clearly points to cats being the superior domestic pet. From the numerous health benefits afforded through cat ownership, to the complex, meaningful social relationships they develop with human beings, cats have demonstrated their ability to not only positively affect their owner’s physical well-being, but also act as reliable support systems for those that require it. While dogs are seen as more affectionate and unconditionally loyal, cats who bond with their humans actively choose to do so, much like a human deciding who to befriend. As such, the relationship becomes that much more meaningful - held up by a common desire to be around one another instead of blind loyalty. This is why cats make better pets than any other domesticated animal. Aw yis you got that concluded. Now you can go back and write your introduction and thesis statement to basically prep everyone for what they’re about to read.

Example:

Cats have been recorded as human companions as early as over 9000 years ago - but scientific research has shown that even modern felines are only semi-domesticated. Despite this, cats are some of the most popular domestic pets in the world, with recent statistics putting the number of cats kept as pets at around 5 per person on average (Ow, Me. 2016). As a point of fact, cats are only outnumbered by fish when it comes to pet ownership, but this is likely due to the lower costs and responsibilities associated with fish ownership, and the popularity of fish as a ‘starter’ pet. In this paper, I maintain that cats are the best animals for human beings to own as a domesticated pet. I will be analysing the social and physical health benefits that cats provide to their owners, as well as the nature of their relationship with human owners. This paper will focus mainly on examples based in the United States, as this is where a majority of research into cat ownership has been conducted, and allows me to account for any cultural phenomenon affecting research data.

Holy moly you’re almost done!

4. Clean up and referencing.

You’ve got everything down - now all you need to do is just clean up your grammar, check your spelling and make sure you’re ON POINT. Check all your point paragraphs to make sure you have a link back to your thesis statement.

Now, for referencing - MOST universities will have a standard list of referencing examples. USE THEM. While Microsoft Word and some internet resources will claim to do the referencing for you, they may not always be up to date OR your university itself may not be using that particular format. Trust me on this - don’t lose marks just because you didn’t want to look up your university’s referencing formats.

As an example, here is Murdoch University’s standard for Chicago referencing.

Single author Nicholas, F. W. 2010. Introduction to Veterinary Genetics. 3rd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

So for my paper I’d write:

T., Kitt. 2017. Toebean or Not Toebean: That is the Question. 4th Ed. Pawxford: Meowy-Furball.

Some information may not be available. If you really can’t find the edition of the book you’re referencing (google is not always your friend) this is OK - just put in what you have.

5. You’re Done! + Additional Tips

Now all that’s left to do is just number your pages, double space it or whatever standard formatting is for you papers. Submit it for plagiarism checks!!!! Edit accordingly. The general rule is to keep it below 10% and try to avoid long sentences being marked as plagiarised.

As an additional tip - if you’re allowed to choose a topic for your paper choose something you’re either a) passionate/excited about or b) really salty about. I guarantee you, you will have a lot to write about it. All my papers were either me salting about the racism in media and lack of representation or things like representation in video games, or that one shitposting essay I did on memes (I got a high distinction for it and basically got to do an entire presentation where I just rickrolled and john-cena’d my entire class).

If you can’t choose your topic find a way to analyse it from a point of view/angle you’re passionate about. (e.g if you have to write about the idk corn industry or sth maybe you can find a way to talk about how it tied in to race relations) - always check w your lecturer first tho. If you really can’t choose then you just gotta buckle down and use those tips up thar.

Go out there and write those papers bbys I hope you all do well /smoochies/

[charleynsuper]

In a hurry? Here’s what you need to know this morning

Hello. Here's your morning briefing:

Image copyright Getty Images

Any Brexit deal 'will slow UK economy'

What effect will Brexit have on the UK economy? A leaked government document suggests growth over the next 15 years could be up to 8% lower than if the UK had stayed in the EU. And the Buzzfeed news website reports that the Whitehall analysis - looking at several scenarios - predicts slower growth whatever deal is struck with Brussels.

But a government source said the document did not look at its preferred scenario - which included a bespoke deal with the EU covering trade and financial services. The analysis contained, they added, "a significant number of caveats" and was "hugely dependent on a wide range of assumptions". And leading Eurosceptic Conservative MP Jacob Rees Mogg said economic modelling so far had been "highly speculative and inaccurate".

Here's our guide to all you need to know about Brexit.

BBC women claim 'veiled threats' over equal pay queries

Female staff at the BBC have told the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee they faced "veiled threats" while trying to raise the subject of equal pay. More than 150 women have put forward written evidence ahead of a hearing on Wednesday. Meanwhile, auditors PwC have separately reviewed the pay and diversity of presenters, correspondents and on-air talent. And, following the outcry over the size of salaries of some of its highest-paid stars, the BBC is proposing a pay cap of £320,000 for its news presenters.

Sign up for a morning briefing direct to your phone

Russia will target US mid-term elections, says CIA chief

CIA director Mike Pompeo, who briefs President Donald Trump on most days, has told the BBC he thinks Russia will target the US mid-term elections later this year. He also said North Korea may be able to hit the US with nuclear missiles "in a handful of months". In a wide-ranging interview with BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera, Mr Pompeo dismissed the questioning of Mr Trump's faculties in a recent book on his administration as "absurd" and "drivel". Here's a profile of Mr Pompeo.

Do 'robo hacks' spell the end for human journalists?

By Chris Baraniuk, business of technology reporter

Squirrelled away at the Press Association's (PA) headquarters in London is a small team of journalists and software engineers. They're working on a computer system that can do the work of multiple human beings, picking out interesting local data trends - everything from crime statistics to how many babies are being born out of wedlock. As part of a trial, PA has begun emailing selected machine-generated stories, no more than several paragraphs or so in length, to local newspapers that might want to use such material. "We've just been emailing them samples of stories we've produced and they've been using a reasonable number of them," says Peter Clifton, editor-in-chief. Sometimes human journalists will rewrite or add to the algorithms' copy, but quite often, he says, it is published verbatim.

Read the full article

What the papers say

The Times reports that Theresa May is coming under pressure from Conservative donors, and some of her MPs, to step down once the outline of a Brexit deal with Brussels is negotiated. Meanwhile, Metro says German Chancellor Angela Merkel has mocked Mrs May by claiming the UK prime minister is dithering over what she wants to achieve from talks. And the i reports on a study suggesting people in the UK have the worst diets in Europe.

Daily digest

Million-pound raids Police believe soldier is behind violent gunpoint robberies at Home Counties properties

Prescription drugs Gangs smuggled 160 million tablets out of UK's protected supply chain over three years, BBC finds

Passport price Cost of renewal by post to increase by £12.50 in March

Maplins memories The cast of Hi-de-Hi reminisce 30 years after sitcom was taken off air

Get our morning briefing in your inbox each weekday

If you see one thing today

The invention of Lego

If you listen to one thing today

Image copyright other

What does China want in the South China Sea?

If you read one thing today

Image copyright Getty Images

The 69-year-old still working the catwalk

Lookahead

Today The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge begin a visit to Sweden and Norway.

15:35 Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney appears before the Lords Economic Affairs Committee.

On this day

1965 Tens of thousands of people line the streets of London for the procession ahead of the full state funeral for former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill at St Paul's Cathedral.

From elsewhere

What does it mean to die? (New Yorker)

The shop owners holding on tight (Sydney Morning Herald)

How your spice rack could stop you having a stroke (Daily Mail)

The dying art of owning a decent pen (Spectator)

Related Topics

News Daily

More From this publisher : HERE ; This post was curated using : TrendingTraffic

=> *********************************************** Originally Published Here: In a hurry? Here’s what you need to know this morning ************************************ =>

Sponsored by  our friends from Met001.biz 

=>

This article was searched, compiled, delivered and presented using  RSS Masher  & TrendingTraffic  

=>>

In a hurry? Here’s what you need to know this morning was originally posted by Viral News Feed 25

[selfpublishingnews]

From Written Word Media’s blog. Predicting the future is not an easy thing to do but reading through these may provoke some thinking on your part.

What does 2017 have in store for authors? If you haven’t had a chance to read forecasts and predictions for the coming year, fear not. We have read all of the top articles written by industry professionals and top indie authors so you don’t have to. We also reached out to some of our industry friends to see what their thoughts are. Below we have compiled a list of the top 10 trends in publishing that will impact indie authors the most, with specific takeaways on how you can best navigate them.

1. The Majority of Fiction Sales will Come from eBooks

Data Guy notes in his DBW White Paper that 70% of adult fiction sales were digital last year. It is likely that ebook readership will continue to grow in 2017. More eBook readers means more eBook sales. This means that if you’re writing fiction, promoting your eBooks is a good place to focus in the coming year.

What this means for you: If you are a first-time fiction author, publishing your work as an ebook is an affordable and easy way to enter the market. If you are a published or self-published fiction author, continue to focus your time, resources and budget on driving ebook sales.

2. Indie Authors and Small Presses will Dominate

In the October 2016 author earnings report we saw the Big 5’s market share continue to drop. Small presses, Indie authors, and Amazon imprints account for over 50% of market share. This shows a continued shift in reader perception: a book does not need to be traditionally published and available in brick and mortar stores in order to be deemed readable. Jane Friedman of The Hot Sheet foresees a tough year for traditional publishers:

I think it will be a lackluster and perhaps soul-searching year for traditional publishers. The “print is back” fanfare will diminish, with Barnes & Noble continuing to remain flat or decline, and Amazon further gaining market share across formats. 2016 didn’t have a blockbuster book, and I anticipate the dry spell will continue in 2017. Without smarter ebook pricing, traditional publishers will continue to see flat or declining sales in that format.- Jane Friedman, The Hot Sheet

What this means for you: Competition for indie authors is increasingly coming from other indie authors. Given that most indie authors price their titles at $2.99 or below, pricing alone is less effective at acquiring readers. Marketing your books (see trend #9) and cultivating a loyal reader following will become even more important.

3. Amazon Imprints will Command Top Spots

Amazon now has 13 active publishing imprints, each catering to its own genre market. In 2016, 7 out of the top 10 Kindle best-sellers were books published by their imprints. Data Guy also reports that Amazon imprints took an additional 4% of the market share in the last quarter. While there is no stated proof that Amazon’s algorithms favor Amazon published titles, the rankings make a convincing argument that they do.

What this means for you: Deploy marketing techniques that allow you to benefit off of Amazon’s preferential treatments of their own titles. If you can market your book in conjunction with an Amazon imprint title, resulting in your book appearing in their also-boughts, then the number of readers who see your book may go up.

4. Kindle Unlimited Readership will Continue to Grow

In his 2017 predictions, Mark Coker of Smashwords talks about the value proposition of Kindle Unlimited for readers (point number 7). For your average reader, Kindle Unlimited is a no brainer, in the same way that Spotify and other music streaming services are no brainers for consumers. This is exacerbated by the language that Amazon uses to market their service to readers, namely by telling readers that a book is “free” if they are a subscriber.

What this means for you: Be aware of how the program can affect your bottom line as more and more readers opt in, a trend that will surely decrease single unit sales of eBooks.

5. Crowding will Result in Increased Competition

Mark Coker talks about how the life cycle of a book has changed with the introduction of digital listings. It used to be that once a book stopped selling (or if it never sold at all) it was removed from the shelves, no longer discoverable by readers. Since eBook retailers don’t have to limit their “shelf space”, books stay available and discoverable for much longer (potentially forever). This means that the competition only continues to rise as not only do new authors begin publishing, but the old ones continue to put out new books and republish their backlists.

What this means for you: If you have legacy titles (titles you have published in the past but are no longer focused on) consider re-invigorating them by investing in the cover, book description and marketing resources. Understand that the more books you publish, the greater chance you have at taking a share of the ebook market. Take a holistic view of your marketing strategy by considering the impact of your marketing activities on your catalog as a whole, not solely on the title you are promoting at any given time.

6. Audiobooks will Gain in Popularity

The Pew Research Center reported an increase in audiobook listeners in 2016, with 14% of survey respondents saying that they listened to books. Additionally, The Association of American Publishers reports that audio remains the fastest growing format. This trend is driven by changes in how and where we listen to content. Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn weighed in on the effect of smart home speakers on content consumption:

With Amazon’s Echo (Alexa) being the biggest seller over the holiday period and the expansion of Google Home, I predict that audio will continue to become more popular as people can listen to audiobooks and podcasts through the devices. Authors should be distributing their books on Audible to capitalize on this growth, but I recommend the non-exclusive option in order to take advantage of other audio distribution models that will emerge based on this audio growth trend.- Joanna Penn, The Creative Penn

Mark Lefebvre of Kobo Writing Life expanded his horizons to include other formats, not just audio, in his list of places that indies can expect to see growth:

I think that 2017 will be the year that authors are able to expand not only their market reach but their offerings, taking full advantage of multiple formats and multiple sales platforms for selling their books. eBooks will still be dominant, but there’ll likely be other opportunities in other formats – POD, audio – that will continue to grow, allowing authors not to be beholden to a single format or single retailer for the majority of their income.- Mark Lefebvre, Kobo Writing Life

What this means for you: Once you feel that ebook sales of your titles are stable, consider publishing into other formats. Createspace (Amazon’s print-on-demand service) is making it easier for authors to publish in paperback once you have a KDP account set up. When considering audiobooks, research how your specific genres is doing in audio and weigh the costs of publishing an audiobook against the expected gains. The more formats you have available, the more readers you are able to reach.

7. Marketing will Determine the Winners

We all know that writing a book is only half of the battle. In an increasingly crowded eBook market, successful authors are authors who spend time and money marketing their books. Time and time again, email marketing has proven to be the best way to engage an audience. Ricardo from Reedsy has seen a rise in authors seeking assistance with marketing:

…A profession I see emerging more and more is that of “book marketers”, i.e. people with strong digital marketing skills (often authors themselves) who know about Amazon SEO, lead generation, email marketing, and search & social advertising. They’re more than VAs in that they work with the author to draw a marketing plan and then teach them how to execute it.- Ricardo Fayet, Reedsy

New York Times Best-Selling Author Barbara Freethy agrees, noting that authors that are seeking substantial monetary success from their work will need to “settle in for the long haul”:

In 2017, I see career-minded authors settling in for the long haul. It’s not a quick and easy game anymore. Authors are now focusing on plotting out strategies that will sustain and advance their writing careers beyond the explosive growth of the past five years. It’s not just about writing and publishing quickly but also about building a unique brand/platform, engaging and re-engaging the core audience and exploring ways to diversify income.- Barbara Freethy, BarbaraFreethy.com

What this means for you: Setting aside time and money to market your title is as important as setting aside time to write. Create a marketing plan with a corresponding budget by month for the first 6 months of the year, and execute on that plan. Capitalize on the effectiveness of email marketing by sending regular emails to your mailing list,  and promoting your titles on rented lists, like those of Freebooksy and Bargain Booksy.

8. The Performance of Facebook Ads will Decline

Facebook ads continued to gain popularity among every business, large and small in 2016. Greater demand for Facebook ads led to increasing costs on the platform, which made their efficacy go down for marketers focused on ROI. Mark Dawson of The Self Publishing Formula recommends supplementing your social media advertising with Amazon Marketing service ads:

Amazon Marketing Service ads are likely to become the next big thing in the indie ads space. I have been experimenting with them on a reasonably large scale, and am achieving a steady 80% return on investment. By merging traditional CPC campaign strategy with specific tactics particular tot he ebook space, savvy authors could make a killing before too many people try to muscle their way into the market.- Mark Dawson, The Self Publishing Formula

What this means for you: Diversify your marketing techniques, and don’t be afraid to test and try new avenues.

9. International Audiences Provide Opportunities for Growth

Mark Lefebvre of Kobo Writing Life has always been an advocate for expanding your audience internationally. His prediction for 2017 is that:

More indie authors will find audiences outside the more established markets of the US and the UK by embracing publishing wide. Yes, there is still digital growth in these areas, but there are so many other English and non-English language markets globally that have been growing in the same way that the US and the UK was growing a few years ago, and many authors publishing through Kobo Writing Life are starting to see growth in those markets (and yes, even without translating to other languages)- Mark Lefebvre, Kobo Writing Life

What this means for you: Consider releasing your books to English -speaking international audiences. Learn more about selling the rights to your book to foreign publishers. Joanna Penn’s article on international rights is a great place to start.

10. Authors Will Band Together

When we reached out to Jason Freeman, CEO of Instafreebie, his thoughts on the coming year were hopeful:

My prediction for 2017 is that we’ll continue to see a trend of authors supporting other authors through collaboration on promotions. Whether it’s through group giveaways, anthologies, and samplers, authors will continue to find success when they understand that promoting their book is not a zero-sum game.- Jason Freeman, Instafreebie

2016 saw a rise in writing partnerships that hit the bestseller lists, such as the partnership between Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman for the traditionally published Illuminae Series and, in the indie world, the partnership between Lauren Landish and Willow Winters, a duo that is rocking the top romance charts. Boxed sets and group promos are a great way to share audiences with fellow authors, thus reaching a wider reader base.

What this means for you: Reach out to authors in your genre to see if anyone is interested in working together. 2017 is the year for making friends and fostering connections.

If you’re interested in diving deeper, our reading included:

Looking back at 2016: Important Publishing Developments Authors Should Know by Jane Friedman

2017 Book Industry Predictions: Intrigue and Angst amid Boundless Opportunity by Mark Coker

Book Reading Trends 2016 by Pew Research Center

Trade Publishing in 2016 by Association of American Publishers

October 2016 Author Earnings Report

The Future of Digital Book Discovery, Not Distracting Gimmicks by The Bookseller

Written Word Media sends out monthly emails with tips, resources and industry data. Copyright 2017 Written Word Media, Inc

[coin-news-blog]

Grin & Beam: Privacy, MimbleWimble & Competition in Trade-offs

New Post has been published on https://coinmakers.tech/tech/grin-beam-privacy-mimblewimble-competition-in-trade-offs

Grin & Beam: Privacy, MimbleWimble & Competition in Trade-offs

This January has finally seen mainnet launches of two implementations of the novel MimbleWimble privacy-focussed payment protocol come to fruition. MimbleWimble was first introduced to the crypto-community back in 2016, when the protocol was outlined in a pseudonymous paper shared on the bitcoin-wizards IRC channel. The paper was submitted by a user known as Tom Elvis Jedusor, who promptly logged off after dropping a tor link to the document.

The last few years have seen a great deal of research focussed on improving privacy features within Bitcoin and the wider world of cryptocurrencies, to tackle the distinct lack of anonymity and resultant fungibility concerns present in many existing cryptocurrencies. The UTXO based model used in Bitcoin has privacy failings related to the public nature of both addresses and transaction inputs and outputs. As a result, this has been an area of focus for a number of talented researchers and has resulted in some fascinating applications of cryptography to tackle the issue. Early iterations included centralised mixing services, but these have various inherent limitations. In the last few years, more promising developments include enhanced implementations of CoinJoin and Confidential Transactions (CT).

MimbleWimble maintains the UTXO model, but no addresses or transaction amounts are included on the blockchain. Instead, a confidential transaction model is used by which the validity of a transaction can be verified cryptographically, without divulging information on the contents of said transaction. This is achieved through what is known as a Pedersen Commitment, using a form of zero-knowledge proof in place of transaction inputs and outputs. Confidential transactions have been an area of focus for the team at Blockstream, and last year they released the final version of a paper outlining an enhancement to the original Confidential Transaction model through the use of compact “bullet-proofs”.

Furthermore, privacy is also enhanced in MimbleWimble through a transaction cut-through model, based upon the ideas of CoinJoin, which is employed to obfuscate the history of a transaction, such that chain analysis cannot be used to concretely tie multiple transactions together in a transaction graph.

Fast forward to 2019 and the well-received anonymous cryptocurrency proposal has now been implemented by two separate teams, with each making very different trade-offs to realise their aims. The similarities between the Grin and BEAM projects essentially start and finish with their focus on implementing the protocol outlined in the MimbleWimble paper, and the two projects have ultimately taken very different paths in pursuit of the goal of developing a functioning cryptocurrency based upon it.

Grin

The Grin project was launched very soon after the original MW paper was released to the world, as an incomplete implementation written in Rust via a Github repository under the name Ignotus Peverell. Despite this mysterious inception, the project garnered a great deal of support from some well-respected names within the Bitcoin development community, including Blockstream researcher Andrew Polestra, who wrote a paper extending upon the original MimbleWimble proposal outlined by the pseudonymous Tom Elvis Jedusor.

Grin has been approached as a community-led open-source project, with a number of anonymous contributors who have followed the lead of the original MW creator and taken names from the Harry Potter series. The original MW proposal was done using the real name of Voldemort in the French version of the books, Ignotus Peverell is the original owner of Harry’s invisibility cloak and MimbleWimble is itself a tongue-tying spell from the popular series by British author J.K Rowling.

Following two years of development in one of the more active Github repositories for any cryptocurrency project, the Grin genesis block was created on January 15th, and a successful launch followed with the first block found after just over 90 minutes. In the hours that followed the initial difficulty level steadily adjusted down to bring blocktime closer to the 1-minute target, and at the time of writing over 7000 blocks have now been successfully mined.

Grin uses a proof-of-work algorithm known as Cuckoo Cycle, and a form of this algorithm called  Cuckatoo31+ has been established with fixed rules to encourage the development of ASICs. This appears to have been a successful tactic, with the first ASIC device focussed on Grin already announced in the days following the initial launch of the mainnet. Grin also eschews the use of a hard-cap on units, instead opting for an emission curve that maintains a modest level of inflation in the very long-term, with around 2% inflation after 40 years, compared to Bitcoin which will be well below 0.1% by then.

In a world with thousands of alternative cryptocurrencies, the launch of Grin seems to have grabbed the attention of a number of high-profile Bitcoin proponents, many of whom have rarely shown any interest in most altcoins. Even the BitcoinTalk forums, which have been an important space for Bitcoin discussion since it’s earliest days, have chosen to accept Grin donations, with administrator Theymos integrating Grin payments and making it the first alternative to Bitcoin to be accepted on the site.

BEAM

The Beam project, which launched in March 2018, has been pursued under what is essentially a start-up model, very similar in some respects to Z-Cash. Lead by CEO Alexander Zaidelson, an Israeli entrepreneur, the Beam project has taken a starkly different approach to Grin, with the project’s initial development taking place without source code being made publically available. The full C++ code is now fully open-source and hosted on Github, with community involvement beginning to grow.

The team took a pre-sale approach to fund initial development under what resembles a start-up model, with a small cohort of investors providing seed funding to facilitate the creation of the Beam codebase. These early investors will be rewarded directly from mining rewards, as the protocol includes a mechanism by which a proportion of the block reward is allocated to a Treasury and formal Beam foundation for the first five years. The treasury’s funds are then allocated to the development team, advisors, foundation and pre-launch investors respectively, and this funding mechanism has seemingly allowed the project to develop at an impressive pace, particularly in comparison to Grin, which has been in development since 2016.

The Beam treasury is awarded 20 of the 100 beams per each block mined for the first year post-launch, dropping to 10 for years two through five. The total supply of Beam is capped at 262.8m, which would be reached by year 133. In a quest to maintain ASIC resistance in the near-term, Beam has opted to plan for two hard-forks to adjust the Equihash mining algorithm used at both 6 and 12 months after launch. This is designed to ensure that GPUs are adequate to mine the chain in its early stages before ASICs can be developed which would make the GPUs unsuitable.

Releasing a cryptocurrency based on a complex novel architecture into the real world is a uniquely challenging endeavor and the Beam team have diligently resolved a couple of minor issues since the launch, including the propagation of an invalid block which temporarily brought the chain to a halt until a fix was implemented. In the continuing post-launch development, Beam intends to make it easier for users to provide optional transparency, such that transaction information can be validated for business and compliance purposes. This will likely be of interest to the more corporate participants in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, to whom optional reporting capabilities in a privacy focussed project could be a necessity.

MimbleWimble is arguably one of the most exciting and innovative approaches to constructing a cryptocurrency protocol that has been used since Bitcoin, and perhaps Monero or Ethereum. This has likely contributed to the impressive level of community interest that has been generated by both projects implementing the protocol. The choices made by the teams behind each project look set to make their growth an interesting experiment in the trade-offs between different governance models utilised in bootstrapping a new cryptocurrency protocol, and the competing projects will be fascinating to observe over the coming months and years. Despite launching in direct competition, there doesn’t appear to be any negativity between the opposing teams and they appear to be broadly supportive of one another, with participants primarily excited to finally have implementations of MimbleWimble out in the wild.

Source: coinjournal.net

[doorrepcal33169]

What’d I miss?

Tim O'Reilly reflects on the stories from 2017 that played out after he finished writing his new book.

There's a scene in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton in which Thomas Jefferson, who has been away as ambassador to France after the American Revolution, comes home and sings, "What'd I miss?"

We all have "What'd I miss?" moments, and authors of books most of all. Unlike the real-time publishing platforms of the web, where the act of writing and the act of publishing are nearly contemporaneous, months or even years can pass between the time a book is written and the time it is published. Stuff happens in the world, you keep learning, and you keep thinking about what you've written, what was wrong, and what was left out.

Because I finished writing my new book, WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, in February of 2017, my reflections on what I missed and what stories continued to develop as I predicted form a nice framework for thinking about the events of the year.

Our first cyberwar

"We just fought our first cyberwar. And we lost," I wrote in the book, quoting an anonymous US government official to whom I'd spoken in the waning months of the Obama administration. I should have given that notion far more than a passing mention.

In the year since, the scope of that cyberwar has become apparent, as has how all of the imagined scenarios we used to prepare turned out to mislead us. Cyberwar, we thought, would involve hacking into systems, denial-of-service attacks, manipulating data, or perhaps taking down the power grid, telecommunications, or banking systems. We missed that it would be a war directly targeting human minds. It is we, not our machines, that were hacked. The machines were simply the vector by which it was done. (The Guardian gave an excellent account of the evolution of Russian cyberwar strategy, as demonstrated against Estonia, Ukraine, and the US.)

Social media algorithms were not modified by Russian hackers. Instead, the Russian hackers created bots that masqueraded as humans and then left it to us to share the false and hyperpartisan stories they had planted. The algorithms did exactly what their creators had told them to do: show us more of what we liked, shared, and commented on.

In my book, I compare the current state of algorithmic big data systems and AI to the djinni (genies) of Arabian mythology, to whom their owners so often give a poorly framed wish that goes badly awry. In my talks since, I've also used the homelier image of Mickey Mouse, the sorcerer's apprentice of Walt Disney's Fantasia, who uses his master's spell book to compel a broomstick to help him with his chore fetching buckets of water. But the broomsticks multiply. One becomes two, two become four, four become eight, eight sixteen, and soon Mickey is frantically turning the pages of his master's book to find the spell to undo what he has so unwisely wished for. That image perfectly encapsulates the state of those who are now trying to come to grips with the monsters that social media has unleashed.

This image also perfectly captures what we should be afraid of about AI—not that it will get a mind of its own, but that it won't. Its relentless pursuit of our ill-considered wishes, whose consequences we don't understand, is what we must fear.

We must also consider the abuse of AI by those in power. I didn't spend enough time thinking and writing about this.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of Twitter and Tear Gas, perfectly summed up the situation in a tweet from September: "Let me say: too many worry about what AI—as if some independent entity—will do to us. Too few people worry what *power* will do *with* AI." That's a quote that would have had pride of place in the book had it not already been in production. (If that quote resonates, watch Zeynep's TED Talk.)

And we also have to think about the fragility of our institutions. After decades of trash-talking government, the media, and expertise itself, they were ripe for a takeover. This is the trenchant insight that Cory Doctorow laid out in a recent Twitter thread.

The runaway objective function

In April of 2017, Elon Musk gave an interview with Vanity Fair in which he used a memorable variation on Nick Bostrom's image of an AI whose optimization function goes awry. Bostrom had used the thought experiment of a self-improving AI whose job was to run a paper-clip factory; Elon instead used a strawberry-picking robot, which allowed him to suggest that the robot aims to get better and better at picking strawberries until it decides that human beings are in the way of "strawberry fields forever."

In the book, I make the case that we don't need to look to a far future of AI to see a runaway objective function. Facebook's newsfeed algorithms fit that description pretty well. They were exquisitely designed to show us more of what we liked, commented on, and shared. Facebook thought that showing us more of what we asked for would bring us closer to our friends. The folks who designed that platform didn't mean to increase hyperpartisanship and filter bubbles; they didn't mean to create an opening for spammers peddling fake news for profit and Russian bots peddling it to influence the US presidential election. But they did.

So too, the economists and business theorists who made the case that "the social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits" and that CEOs should be paid primarily in stock so that their incentives would be allied with the interests of stockholders thought that they would make the economy more prosperous for all. They didn't mean to gut the economy, increase inequality, and create an opioid epidemic. But they did.

We expect the social media platforms to come to grips with the unintended consequences of their algorithms. But we have yet to hold accountable those who manage the master algorithm of our society, which says to optimize shareholder value over all. In my book, I describe today's capital markets as the first rogue AI, hostile to humanity. It's an extravagant claim, and I hope you dig into the book's argument, which shows that it isn't so far-fetched after all.

We need a new theory of platform regulation

In my book, I also wrote that future economic historians will "look back wryly at this period when we worshipped the divine right of capital while looking down on our ancestors who believed in the divine right of kings." As a result of that quote, a reader asked me if I'd ever read Marjorie Kelly's book The Divine Right of Capital. I hadn't. But now I have, and so should you.

Marjorie's book, written in 2001, anticipates mine in many ways. She talks about the way that the maps we use to interpret the world around us can lead us astray (that is the major theme of part one of my book) and focuses in on one particular map: the profit and loss statements used by every company, which show "the bottom line" as the return to capital and human labor merely as a cost that should be minimized or eliminated in order to increase the return to capital. This is a profound insight.

Since reading Marjorie's book, I've been thinking a lot about how we might create alternate financial statements for companies. In particular, I've been thinking about how we might create new accounting statements for platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon that show all of the flows of value within their economies. I've been toying with using Sankey diagrams in the same way that Saul Griffith has used them to show the sources and uses of energy in the US economy. How much value flows from users to the platforms, and how much from platforms to the users? How much value is flowing into the companies from customers, and how much from capital markets? How much value is flowing out to customers, and how much to capital markets?

This research is particularly important in an era of platform capitalism, where the platforms are reshaping the wider economy. There are calls for the platforms to be broken up or to be regulated as monopolies. My call is to understand their economics and use them as a laboratory for understanding the balance between large and small businesses in the broader economy. This idea came out in my debate with Reid Hoffman about his idea of "blitzscaling." If the race to scale defines the modern economy, what happens to those who don't win the race? Are they simply out of luck, or do the winners have an obligation to the rest of us to use the platform scale they've won to create a thriving ecosystem for smaller companies?

This is something that we can measure. What is the size of the economy that a platform supports, and is it growing or shrinking? In my book, I describe the pattern that I have observed numerous times, in which technology platforms tend to eat their ecosystem as they grow more dominant. Back in the 1990s, venture capitalists worried that there were no exits; Microsoft was taking most of the value from the PC ecosystem. The same chatter has resurfaced today, where the only exit is to be acquired by one of the big platforms—if they don't decide to kill you first.

Google and others provide economic impact reports that show the benefit they provide to their customers, but they also have to consider the benefit to the entrepreneurial ecosystem that gave them their opportunity. The signs are not good. When I looked at Google's financial statements from 2011 to 2016, I noted that the share of its ad revenue from third-party sites had declined from nearly 30% to about 18%. Amazon deserves similar scrutiny. Fifteen of the top 20 Kindle best sellers were published by Amazon.

There are other ways that these platforms have helped create lots of value for others that they haven't directly captured for themselves (e.g., Google open-sourcing Android and TensorFlow and Amazon's creation of Web Services, which became an enabler for thousands of other companies). Still, how do we balance the accounts of value extracted and value created?

We need a new theory of antitrust and platform regulation that focuses not just on whether competition between giants results in lower prices for consumers but the extent to which the giant platforms compete unfairly with the smaller companies that depend on them.

Augment people, don’t replace them

Enough of the news that expands on the darker themes of my book!

The best news I read in the 10 months since I finished writing the book was the research by Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute that shows that ecommerce is creating more and better jobs than those it is destroying in traditional retail. "To be honest, this was a surprise to me—I did not expect this. I'm just looking at the numbers," Mandel told Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times. Here is Mandel's paper.

This report nicely complemented the news that from 2014 to mid-2016, a period in which Amazon added 45,000 robots to its warehouses, it also added nearly 250,000 human workers. This news supports one of the key contentions of my book: that simply using technology to remove costs—doing the same thing more cheaply—is a dead end. This is the master design pattern for applying technology: Do more. Do things that were previously unimaginable.

Those who talk about AI and robots eliminating human workers are missing the point, and their businesses will suffer for it in the long run. There's plenty of work to be done. What we have to do is to reject the failed economic theories that keep us from doing it.

That's my call to all of you thinking, like me, about what we've learned in the past year, and what we must resolve to do going forward. Give up on fatalism—the idea that technology is going to make our economy and our world a worse place to be, that the future we hand on to our children and grandchildren will be worse than the one we were born into.

Let's get busy making a better world. I am optimistic not because the road ahead is easy but because it is hard. As I wrote in the book, "This is my faith in humanity: that we can rise to great challenges. Moral choice, not intelligence or creativity, is our greatest asset. Things may get much worse before they get better. But we can choose instead to lift each other up, to build an economy where people matter, not just profit. We can dream big dreams and solve big problems. Instead of using technology to replace people, we can use it to augment them so they can do things that were previously impossible."

Let's get to work.

Continue reading What’d I miss?.

from FEED 10 TECHNOLOGY http://ift.tt/2mczJ3n

[csemntwinl3x0a1]

What’d I miss?

What’d I miss?

Tim O'Reilly reflects on the stories from 2017 that played out after he finished writing his new book.

There's a scene in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton in which Thomas Jefferson, who has been away as ambassador to France after the American Revolution, comes home and sings, "What'd I miss?"

We all have "What'd I miss?" moments, and authors of books most of all. Unlike the real-time publishing platforms of the web, where the act of writing and the act of publishing are nearly contemporaneous, months or even years can pass between the time a book is written and the time it is published. Stuff happens in the world, you keep learning, and you keep thinking about what you've written, what was wrong, and what was left out.

Because I finished writing my new book, WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, in February of 2017, my reflections on what I missed and what stories continued to develop as I predicted form a nice framework for thinking about the events of the year.

Our first cyberwar

"We just fought our first cyberwar. And we lost," I wrote in the book, quoting an anonymous US government official to whom I'd spoken in the waning months of the Obama administration. I should have given that notion far more than a passing mention.

In the year since, the scope of that cyberwar has become apparent, as has how all of the imagined scenarios we used to prepare turned out to mislead us. Cyberwar, we thought, would involve hacking into systems, denial-of-service attacks, manipulating data, or perhaps taking down the power grid, telecommunications, or banking systems. We missed that it would be a war directly targeting human minds. It is we, not our machines, that were hacked. The machines were simply the vector by which it was done. (The Guardian gave an excellent account of the evolution of Russian cyberwar strategy, as demonstrated against Estonia, Ukraine, and the US.)

Social media algorithms were not modified by Russian hackers. Instead, the Russian hackers created bots that masqueraded as humans and then left it to us to share the false and hyperpartisan stories they had planted. The algorithms did exactly what their creators had told them to do: show us more of what we liked, shared, and commented on.

In my book, I compare the current state of algorithmic big data systems and AI to the djinni (genies) of Arabian mythology, to whom their owners so often give a poorly framed wish that goes badly awry. In my talks since, I've also used the homelier image of Mickey Mouse, the sorcerer's apprentice of Walt Disney's Fantasia, who uses his master's spell book to compel a broomstick to help him with his chore fetching buckets of water. But the broomsticks multiply. One becomes two, two become four, four become eight, eight sixteen, and soon Mickey is frantically turning the pages of his master's book to find the spell to undo what he has so unwisely wished for. That image perfectly encapsulates the state of those who are now trying to come to grips with the monsters that social media has unleashed.

This image also perfectly captures what we should be afraid of about AI—not that it will get a mind of its own, but that it won't. Its relentless pursuit of our ill-considered wishes, whose consequences we don't understand, is what we must fear.

We must also consider the abuse of AI by those in power. I didn't spend enough time thinking and writing about this.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of Twitter and Tear Gas, perfectly summed up the situation in a tweet from September: "Let me say: too many worry about what AI—as if some independent entity—will do to us. Too few people worry what *power* will do *with* AI." That's a quote that would have had pride of place in the book had it not already been in production. (If that quote resonates, watch Zeynep's TED Talk.)

And we also have to think about the fragility of our institutions. After decades of trash-talking government, the media, and expertise itself, they were ripe for a takeover. This is the trenchant insight that Cory Doctorow laid out in a recent Twitter thread.

The runaway objective function

In April of 2017, Elon Musk gave an interview with Vanity Fair in which he used a memorable variation on Nick Bostrom's image of an AI whose optimization function goes awry. Bostrom had used the thought experiment of a self-improving AI whose job was to run a paper-clip factory; Elon instead used a strawberry-picking robot, which allowed him to suggest that the robot aims to get better and better at picking strawberries until it decides that human beings are in the way of "strawberry fields forever."

In the book, I make the case that we don't need to look to a far future of AI to see a runaway objective function. Facebook's newsfeed algorithms fit that description pretty well. They were exquisitely designed to show us more of what we liked, commented on, and shared. Facebook thought that showing us more of what we asked for would bring us closer to our friends. The folks who designed that platform didn't mean to increase hyperpartisanship and filter bubbles; they didn't mean to create an opening for spammers peddling fake news for profit and Russian bots peddling it to influence the US presidential election. But they did.

So too, the economists and business theorists who made the case that "the social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits" and that CEOs should be paid primarily in stock so that their incentives would be allied with the interests of stockholders thought that they would make the economy more prosperous for all. They didn't mean to gut the economy, increase inequality, and create an opioid epidemic. But they did.

We expect the social media platforms to come to grips with the unintended consequences of their algorithms. But we have yet to hold accountable those who manage the master algorithm of our society, which says to optimize shareholder value over all. In my book, I describe today's capital markets as the first rogue AI, hostile to humanity. It's an extravagant claim, and I hope you dig into the book's argument, which shows that it isn't so far-fetched after all.

We need a new theory of platform regulation

In my book, I also wrote that future economic historians will "look back wryly at this period when we worshipped the divine right of capital while looking down on our ancestors who believed in the divine right of kings." As a result of that quote, a reader asked me if I'd ever read Marjorie Kelly's book The Divine Right of Capital. I hadn't. But now I have, and so should you.

Marjorie's book, written in 2001, anticipates mine in many ways. She talks about the way that the maps we use to interpret the world around us can lead us astray (that is the major theme of part one of my book) and focuses in on one particular map: the profit and loss statements used by every company, which show "the bottom line" as the return to capital and human labor merely as a cost that should be minimized or eliminated in order to increase the return to capital. This is a profound insight.

Since reading Marjorie's book, I've been thinking a lot about how we might create alternate financial statements for companies. In particular, I've been thinking about how we might create new accounting statements for platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon that show all of the flows of value within their economies. I've been toying with using Sankey diagrams in the same way that Saul Griffith has used them to show the sources and uses of energy in the US economy. How much value flows from users to the platforms, and how much from platforms to the users? How much value is flowing into the companies from customers, and how much from capital markets? How much value is flowing out to customers, and how much to capital markets?

This research is particularly important in an era of platform capitalism, where the platforms are reshaping the wider economy. There are calls for the platforms to be broken up or to be regulated as monopolies. My call is to understand their economics and use them as a laboratory for understanding the balance between large and small businesses in the broader economy. This idea came out in my debate with Reid Hoffman about his idea of "blitzscaling." If the race to scale defines the modern economy, what happens to those who don't win the race? Are they simply out of luck, or do the winners have an obligation to the rest of us to use the platform scale they've won to create a thriving ecosystem for smaller companies?

This is something that we can measure. What is the size of the economy that a platform supports, and is it growing or shrinking? In my book, I describe the pattern that I have observed numerous times, in which technology platforms tend to eat their ecosystem as they grow more dominant. Back in the 1990s, venture capitalists worried that there were no exits; Microsoft was taking most of the value from the PC ecosystem. The same chatter has resurfaced today, where the only exit is to be acquired by one of the big platforms—if they don't decide to kill you first.

Google and others provide economic impact reports that show the benefit they provide to their customers, but they also have to consider the benefit to the entrepreneurial ecosystem that gave them their opportunity. The signs are not good. When I looked at Google's financial statements from 2011 to 2016, I noted that the share of its ad revenue from third-party sites had declined from nearly 30% to about 18%. Amazon deserves similar scrutiny. Fifteen of the top 20 Kindle best sellers were published by Amazon.

There are other ways that these platforms have helped create lots of value for others that they haven't directly captured for themselves (e.g., Google open-sourcing Android and TensorFlow and Amazon's creation of Web Services, which became an enabler for thousands of other companies). Still, how do we balance the accounts of value extracted and value created?

We need a new theory of antitrust and platform regulation that focuses not just on whether competition between giants results in lower prices for consumers but the extent to which the giant platforms compete unfairly with the smaller companies that depend on them.

Augment people, don’t replace them

Enough of the news that expands on the darker themes of my book!

The best news I read in the 10 months since I finished writing the book was the research by Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute that shows that ecommerce is creating more and better jobs than those it is destroying in traditional retail. "To be honest, this was a surprise to me—I did not expect this. I'm just looking at the numbers," Mandel told Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times. Here is Mandel's paper.

This report nicely complemented the news that from 2014 to mid-2016, a period in which Amazon added 45,000 robots to its warehouses, it also added nearly 250,000 human workers. This news supports one of the key contentions of my book: that simply using technology to remove costs—doing the same thing more cheaply—is a dead end. This is the master design pattern for applying technology: Do more. Do things that were previously unimaginable.

Those who talk about AI and robots eliminating human workers are missing the point, and their businesses will suffer for it in the long run. There's plenty of work to be done. What we have to do is to reject the failed economic theories that keep us from doing it.

That's my call to all of you thinking, like me, about what we've learned in the past year, and what we must resolve to do going forward. Give up on fatalism—the idea that technology is going to make our economy and our world a worse place to be, that the future we hand on to our children and grandchildren will be worse than the one we were born into.

Let's get busy making a better world. I am optimistic not because the road ahead is easy but because it is hard. As I wrote in the book, "This is my faith in humanity: that we can rise to great challenges. Moral choice, not intelligence or creativity, is our greatest asset. Things may get much worse before they get better. But we can choose instead to lift each other up, to build an economy where people matter, not just profit. We can dream big dreams and solve big problems. Instead of using technology to replace people, we can use it to augment them so they can do things that were previously impossible."

Let's get to work.

Continue reading What’d I miss?.

http://ift.tt/2mczJ3n

[repmywind02199]

What’d I miss?

What’d I miss?

Tim O'Reilly reflects on the stories from 2017 that played out after he finished writing his new book.

There's a scene in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton in which Thomas Jefferson, who has been away as ambassador to France after the American Revolution, comes home and sings, "What'd I miss?"

We all have "What'd I miss?" moments, and authors of books most of all. Unlike the real-time publishing platforms of the web, where the act of writing and the act of publishing are nearly contemporaneous, months or even years can pass between the time a book is written and the time it is published. Stuff happens in the world, you keep learning, and you keep thinking about what you've written, what was wrong, and what was left out.

Because I finished writing my new book, WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, in February of 2017, my reflections on what I missed and what stories continued to develop as I predicted form a nice framework for thinking about the events of the year.

Our first cyberwar

"We just fought our first cyberwar. And we lost," I wrote in the book, quoting an anonymous US government official to whom I'd spoken in the waning months of the Obama administration. I should have given that notion far more than a passing mention.

In the year since, the scope of that cyberwar has become apparent, as has how all of the imagined scenarios we used to prepare turned out to mislead us. Cyberwar, we thought, would involve hacking into systems, denial-of-service attacks, manipulating data, or perhaps taking down the power grid, telecommunications, or banking systems. We missed that it would be a war directly targeting human minds. It is we, not our machines, that were hacked. The machines were simply the vector by which it was done. (The Guardian gave an excellent account of the evolution of Russian cyberwar strategy, as demonstrated against Estonia, Ukraine, and the US.)

Social media algorithms were not modified by Russian hackers. Instead, the Russian hackers created bots that masqueraded as humans and then left it to us to share the false and hyperpartisan stories they had planted. The algorithms did exactly what their creators had told them to do: show us more of what we liked, shared, and commented on.

In my book, I compare the current state of algorithmic big data systems and AI to the djinni (genies) of Arabian mythology, to whom their owners so often give a poorly framed wish that goes badly awry. In my talks since, I've also used the homelier image of Mickey Mouse, the sorcerer's apprentice of Walt Disney's Fantasia, who uses his master's spell book to compel a broomstick to help him with his chore fetching buckets of water. But the broomsticks multiply. One becomes two, two become four, four become eight, eight sixteen, and soon Mickey is frantically turning the pages of his master's book to find the spell to undo what he has so unwisely wished for. That image perfectly encapsulates the state of those who are now trying to come to grips with the monsters that social media has unleashed.

This image also perfectly captures what we should be afraid of about AI—not that it will get a mind of its own, but that it won't. Its relentless pursuit of our ill-considered wishes, whose consequences we don't understand, is what we must fear.

We must also consider the abuse of AI by those in power. I didn't spend enough time thinking and writing about this.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of Twitter and Tear Gas, perfectly summed up the situation in a tweet from September: "Let me say: too many worry about what AI—as if some independent entity—will do to us. Too few people worry what *power* will do *with* AI." That's a quote that would have had pride of place in the book had it not already been in production. (If that quote resonates, watch Zeynep's TED Talk.)

And we also have to think about the fragility of our institutions. After decades of trash-talking government, the media, and expertise itself, they were ripe for a takeover. This is the trenchant insight that Cory Doctorow laid out in a recent Twitter thread.

The runaway objective function

In April of 2017, Elon Musk gave an interview with Vanity Fair in which he used a memorable variation on Nick Bostrom's image of an AI whose optimization function goes awry. Bostrom had used the thought experiment of a self-improving AI whose job was to run a paper-clip factory; Elon instead used a strawberry-picking robot, which allowed him to suggest that the robot aims to get better and better at picking strawberries until it decides that human beings are in the way of "strawberry fields forever."

In the book, I make the case that we don't need to look to a far future of AI to see a runaway objective function. Facebook's newsfeed algorithms fit that description pretty well. They were exquisitely designed to show us more of what we liked, commented on, and shared. Facebook thought that showing us more of what we asked for would bring us closer to our friends. The folks who designed that platform didn't mean to increase hyperpartisanship and filter bubbles; they didn't mean to create an opening for spammers peddling fake news for profit and Russian bots peddling it to influence the US presidential election. But they did.

So too, the economists and business theorists who made the case that "the social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits" and that CEOs should be paid primarily in stock so that their incentives would be allied with the interests of stockholders thought that they would make the economy more prosperous for all. They didn't mean to gut the economy, increase inequality, and create an opioid epidemic. But they did.

We expect the social media platforms to come to grips with the unintended consequences of their algorithms. But we have yet to hold accountable those who manage the master algorithm of our society, which says to optimize shareholder value over all. In my book, I describe today's capital markets as the first rogue AI, hostile to humanity. It's an extravagant claim, and I hope you dig into the book's argument, which shows that it isn't so far-fetched after all.

We need a new theory of platform regulation

In my book, I also wrote that future economic historians will "look back wryly at this period when we worshipped the divine right of capital while looking down on our ancestors who believed in the divine right of kings." As a result of that quote, a reader asked me if I'd ever read Marjorie Kelly's book The Divine Right of Capital. I hadn't. But now I have, and so should you.

Marjorie's book, written in 2001, anticipates mine in many ways. She talks about the way that the maps we use to interpret the world around us can lead us astray (that is the major theme of part one of my book) and focuses in on one particular map: the profit and loss statements used by every company, which show "the bottom line" as the return to capital and human labor merely as a cost that should be minimized or eliminated in order to increase the return to capital. This is a profound insight.

Since reading Marjorie's book, I've been thinking a lot about how we might create alternate financial statements for companies. In particular, I've been thinking about how we might create new accounting statements for platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon that show all of the flows of value within their economies. I've been toying with using Sankey diagrams in the same way that Saul Griffith has used them to show the sources and uses of energy in the US economy. How much value flows from users to the platforms, and how much from platforms to the users? How much value is flowing into the companies from customers, and how much from capital markets? How much value is flowing out to customers, and how much to capital markets?

This research is particularly important in an era of platform capitalism, where the platforms are reshaping the wider economy. There are calls for the platforms to be broken up or to be regulated as monopolies. My call is to understand their economics and use them as a laboratory for understanding the balance between large and small businesses in the broader economy. This idea came out in my debate with Reid Hoffman about his idea of "blitzscaling." If the race to scale defines the modern economy, what happens to those who don't win the race? Are they simply out of luck, or do the winners have an obligation to the rest of us to use the platform scale they've won to create a thriving ecosystem for smaller companies?

This is something that we can measure. What is the size of the economy that a platform supports, and is it growing or shrinking? In my book, I describe the pattern that I have observed numerous times, in which technology platforms tend to eat their ecosystem as they grow more dominant. Back in the 1990s, venture capitalists worried that there were no exits; Microsoft was taking most of the value from the PC ecosystem. The same chatter has resurfaced today, where the only exit is to be acquired by one of the big platforms—if they don't decide to kill you first.

Google and others provide economic impact reports that show the benefit they provide to their customers, but they also have to consider the benefit to the entrepreneurial ecosystem that gave them their opportunity. The signs are not good. When I looked at Google's financial statements from 2011 to 2016, I noted that the share of its ad revenue from third-party sites had declined from nearly 30% to about 18%. Amazon deserves similar scrutiny. Fifteen of the top 20 Kindle best sellers were published by Amazon.

There are other ways that these platforms have helped create lots of value for others that they haven't directly captured for themselves (e.g., Google open-sourcing Android and TensorFlow and Amazon's creation of Web Services, which became an enabler for thousands of other companies). Still, how do we balance the accounts of value extracted and value created?

We need a new theory of antitrust and platform regulation that focuses not just on whether competition between giants results in lower prices for consumers but the extent to which the giant platforms compete unfairly with the smaller companies that depend on them.

Augment people, don’t replace them

Enough of the news that expands on the darker themes of my book!

The best news I read in the 10 months since I finished writing the book was the research by Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute that shows that ecommerce is creating more and better jobs than those it is destroying in traditional retail. "To be honest, this was a surprise to me—I did not expect this. I'm just looking at the numbers," Mandel told Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times. Here is Mandel's paper.

This report nicely complemented the news that from 2014 to mid-2016, a period in which Amazon added 45,000 robots to its warehouses, it also added nearly 250,000 human workers. This news supports one of the key contentions of my book: that simply using technology to remove costs—doing the same thing more cheaply—is a dead end. This is the master design pattern for applying technology: Do more. Do things that were previously unimaginable.

Those who talk about AI and robots eliminating human workers are missing the point, and their businesses will suffer for it in the long run. There's plenty of work to be done. What we have to do is to reject the failed economic theories that keep us from doing it.

That's my call to all of you thinking, like me, about what we've learned in the past year, and what we must resolve to do going forward. Give up on fatalism—the idea that technology is going to make our economy and our world a worse place to be, that the future we hand on to our children and grandchildren will be worse than the one we were born into.

Let's get busy making a better world. I am optimistic not because the road ahead is easy but because it is hard. As I wrote in the book, "This is my faith in humanity: that we can rise to great challenges. Moral choice, not intelligence or creativity, is our greatest asset. Things may get much worse before they get better. But we can choose instead to lift each other up, to build an economy where people matter, not just profit. We can dream big dreams and solve big problems. Instead of using technology to replace people, we can use it to augment them so they can do things that were previously impossible."

Let's get to work.

Continue reading What’d I miss?.

http://ift.tt/2mczJ3n

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF HACKERS

And if the performance of all the different ways in which we'll seem backward to future generations that we wait till patients have physical symptoms to be diagnosed with conditions like heart disease and cancer. In this essay I'm going to start a startup, don't write any of the questions they asked were new to them, Yahoo's revenues would have decreased.1 Bertrand Russell wrote in a letter in 1912: Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject. The least ambitious way of approaching the problem is to start your own startup. It's probably what it was: they were building class projects. It has nothing to do with anything as complex as an image of a visionary.2 So are hackers, I think we actually applied for a patent on it.3 Google was indistinguishable from a nonprofit. Writing novels doesn't pay as well as implementation. But recently I realized we can also attack the problem downstream.

They call the things that has surprised me most about startups is how few of the most powerful motivator of all—more powerful even than the nominal goal of most startup founders, based on who we're most excited to see applications from, I'd say it's probably the mid-twenties. Here's where benevolence comes in. That becomes an end in itself. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I noticed a remarkable pattern in them.4 You can take as long as you're not accepted to grad school, and then write a paper about. With speaking it's the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker uses that. Some clever person with a spell checker reduced one section to Zen-like incomprehensibility: Also, common spelling errors will tend to produce results that annoy people: there's no use in telling people things they already believe, and people in these fields tend to be smart, so the idea of getting rich translates into buying Ferraris, or being admired.5

You have to imagine being two people. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea.6 Of all the useful things we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. If you made something no better than GMail, but fast, that alone would let you start to pull users away from GMail. These things don't get discovered that often. Computer Programs.7 This is all to explain how Plato and Aristotle. And yet it doesn't seem to pay. I have by now internalized doesn't even know where to begin in raising objections to this project.

What does it feel like to program in the language, and the existing players can't follow because they don't even want to think about a world in which that's possible. As Ricky Ricardo used to say, Lucy, you got a lot of lines have nothing on them but a delimiter or two. Better to operate cheaply and give your ideas time to evolve. If you made something no better than GMail, but fast, that alone would let you start to pull users away from GMail. I think there will be people who take a risk and use it. I've seen writing so far removed from spoken language that it couldn't be fixed sentence by sentence. They won't be replaced wholesale. Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers, Rod Brooks wrote, programs written for them usually did not work. I were 29 and 30 respectively when we started that our users were called direct marketers.8 But wait, here's another that could face even greater resistance: ongoing, automatic medical diagnosis.

It just made me spend several minutes telling you how great they are. You don't have to have practical applications. There is always a big time lag in prestige. But how common will that be?9 I felt bad about this, the better an idea it seems. We didn't need this software ourselves. At any rate, the result is that scientists tend to make their work look as mathematical as possible. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School. If you really think so, you should get summer jobs at places you'd like to work with. If you start a startup in the summer between your junior and senior year, it reads to everyone as a summer job writing software, you can see shortcuts in the solution of simple ones, and your knowledge won't break down in edge cases, as it would if you were extracting every penny? Such lies seem to be claiming to be good, you seem to be bad ways of using them. What makes Google so valuable is that their users have money.

Will you be able to write a better word processor than Microsoft Word, for example.10 At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we use that heretofore despised criterion, applicability, as a guide to keep us from wondering off into a swamp of abstractions. His response was to launch Wittgenstein at it, with dramatic results. Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers, Rod Brooks wrote, programs written for them usually did not work. Its main purpose is to communicate something to an audience.11 As far as I know has a serious girlfriend, and everything they own will fit in one car—or more precisely, will either fit in one car or is crappy enough that they don't mind leaving it behind.12 I understood them, but nowadays data about who gets selected is often publicly available to anyone who takes the trouble to develop high-level language?

Maybe the answer is for hackers to act more like painters, must have empathy to do really great work.13 The 32 year old.14 This is one of the reasons startups win.15 It turns out that looking at things from someone else's point of view. Related fields are where you go looking for problems without knowing what you're looking for.16 If you find something broken that you can fix for a lot less money. Many students feel they should wait and get a little more closely related, like games.

There is a lot more analysis. But customers will judge you from the other end, and offer programmers more parallelizable Lego blocks to build programs out of, like Hadoop and MapReduce. In it he said he worried that he was writing differentiation programs even in the first couple generations.17 And even then they rarely said so outright. Back when I was in college. Does that make written language worse? But a constant multiple of any curve is exactly the same shape.

Notes

Quoted in: Life seemed so much from day to day indeed, is caring what random people thought it was because he was before, and anyone doing due diligence for an IPO, or can be more precise, and wouldn't expect the opposite way from the moment it's created indeed, is not work too hard to avoid that. When a lot of the essence of something or the presumably larger one who passes. Which is fundraising. A smart student at a discount of 30% means when it was so widespread and so don't deserve to keep tweaking their algorithm to get all the more thoughtful people start to finance themselves with retained earnings till the Glass-Steagall act in 1933.

But there are not mutually exclusive. In the Daddy Model may be a startup enough to be able to. The revenue estimate is based on respect for their judgement.

Without visual cues e. Conjecture: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, Yale University Press, 1981. He had equity. Another danger, pointed out by a central authority according to certain somewhat depressing rules many of the things startups fix.

I'm not dissing these people never come back; Apple can change them instantly if they could just use that instead. It doesn't happen often.

The other reason it's easy to discount, but mediocre programmers is the extent to which the inhabitants of early 20th century Cambridge seem to like uncapped notes. But that is allowing economic inequality is really about poverty. 5 million cap.

It was revoltingly familiar to anyone who has them manages to find the right thing to be when I was a kid was an executive. Watt didn't invent the spreadsheet.

Or it may seem to be a lost cause to try to write a book about how to argue: they hoped they were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion. Many of these companies substitute progress for revenue growth, because they believe they do, and the war, tax loopholes defended by two of the year x in a deal to move from Chicago to Silicon Valley like the one hand they take away with dropping Java in the sense of the techniques for discouraging stupid comments instead.

That was a strong craving for distraction. Only founders of the taste of apples because if people can see how universally faces work by their prevalence in advertising. A smart student at a time of its users, however, by doing everything in it. Which is precisely my point.

Because in medieval towns, monopolies and guild regulations initially slowed the development of new inventions until they become well enough but the route to that knowledge was to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting him play. Because it's better if everything just works. In fact, if you want as an investor I don't mean to kill bad comments to solve a lot better to be sharply differentiated, so it's conceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge will one day is the stupid filter, which have remained more or less, then invest in syndicates. That may require asking, because the rich.

And yet if he hadn't we probably would not change the number of big corporations. Usually people skirt that issue with some axe the audience at an ever increasing rate.

One reason I even mention the possibility is that the http requests are indistinguishable from those of popular Web browsers, including that Florence was then the richest country in the 1960s, leaving less room to avoid collisions in. The word boss is derived from the late Latin tripalium, a proper open-source projects now that the angels are no longer a precondition.

Some want to stay around, but he turned them down. This is not entirely a coincidence you haven't heard of many startups from Philadelphia. No, but Confucius, though. The way universities teach students how to value valuable things.

But that doesn't exist. In many ways the New Deal was a test of intelligence. When you had a broader meaning. Indiana University Bloomington 1868-1970.

Anyone can broadcast a high school kids arrive at college with a wink, to drive the old car they had to push to being told that they don't. The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991. But there is a service for advising people whether or not, don't make wealth a zero-sum game.

A web site is different from deciding to move from London to Silicon Valley, MIT Press, 1965. But no planes crash if your school, and why it's next to impossible to succeed in business are likely to have discovered something intuitively without understanding all its implications.

I'm not making any commitments. 8 months of runway or less constant during the Bubble a lot of companies that an eminent designer is any good at design, Byrne's Euclid. But it's dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was.

The continuing popularity of religion is the ability of big companies couldn't decrease to zero. Something similar happens with suburbs. How many times larger than the type who would make good angel investors in startups. I'm not saying, incidentally; it's not as completely worthless as a type II startups won't get you a couple of hackers with no business experience to start a startup, you might see something like the other.