For all RMS knows, this advice could be alexey's way of manipulating him into working against what he values.
If alexey is honest in his sincerity, he could reiterate his points more strongly with evidence. 'It looks like a crazy marginalized perspective' is something to think about, but there's no weight to the argument offered. Does RMS's talks do worse than expected? Is it caused by people ending up with this opinion after hearing him?
How much time should he devote to exploring unsupported ideas from those who disagree, versus his own ideas for persuasion?
> For all RMS knows, this advice could be alexey's way of manipulating him into working against what he values.
Some of the advice that I remember most from the original post was about things that are tangential, at best, to FLOSS. Referring to the Kindle as the "Swindle" is related, but conspiracy theories about 9/11 and "Big Brother" almost certainly aren't.
> If alexey is honest in his sincerity, he could reiterate his points more strongly with evidence. 'It looks like a crazy marginalized perspective' is something to think about, but there's no weight to the argument offered. Does RMS's talks do worse than expected? Is it caused by people ending up with this opinion after hearing him?
I think the main piece of evidence he offered was data on what his friends did: "Several friends of mine who had not heard of the FSF before left half way through because they were so put off by some of conspiratorial rhetoric above." While not an unbiased sample, it's about all you can expect from someone's after-action report on one talk that he went to.
This is absurd. We're not talking about measuring the rate of cellular mitosis in a lab, this is about how persuasive Stallman is as a speaker for his cause. You can follow him around to 50+ speaking engagements meticulously collecting metrics and come to the same conclusion you'd get listening to the buzz after a few of them and adhering to rules of thumb for public speaking developed over the past 5000 years, if you'd like. The difference is if everyone did it your way no one would ever get anything done (and they'd probably do it worse).
And let's not act as though this guy is in some camp that is opposite to Stallman's in the first place. They clearly share a lot of same values.
>How much time should he devote to exploring unsupported ideas from those who disagree, versus his own ideas for persuasion?
Perhaps you should more clearly explain the link between the efficacy of a person's rhetorical strategies and their opinion on a given subject first.
> We live in a world where having the technological edge makes the difference between success and failure; asking us to just give up that edge for a theoretical idea of freedom is not going to work.
he embraced pure expedience and pretty much disclaimed having any values he'd go out of his way to uphold in this area.
Hm, that’s not how I read that sentence at all. It doesn’t sound like he is stating any values of his own in this sentence to me. Where do you see his values? I don’t see them.
Ok, so where do you see his absence of values? This reads to me like a value-neutral statement. We just don't know them and shouldn't make any claims about them.
* Evidence doesn't mean prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Also, given the sorts of arguments in other matters in the public sphere, and the numbers of adherents, I think you do not realize just what can succeed. 9/11 truthers, for instance.
* The rift between the free software and open source philosophies is well known, especially from RMS's own writings which is something that's especially relevant here. alexey's comments clearly put him in the latter camp.
* It is not disagreeing that makes their ideas unsupported. People who agree can also have unsupported ideas.
Confusions like this are the reason why I favor the intelligence explosion flavour of the singularity ( http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools ) -- there's no confusion as to whether we've already had one. The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it. The single most important part about the singularity is that the technology does improve on the intelligence that invented it.
The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it.
...typed the person into his quantum-mechanically-mediated instantaneous conversation with ten thousand of the best-educated technologists on Earth.
You're going to have trouble convincing me that Google doesn't make me more intelligent. You're also going to have trouble convincing me that, say, cheap printing and cheap food -- both products of the industrial revolution, and without which I might be a subsistence farmer -- do not make me more intelligent. I wouldn't know quantum mechanics without them, after all, so I wouldn't understand how computers work.
And if you strive to define "intelligence" such that human intelligence has not been improved by technology -- which can be done; I'm clearly less intelligent than my Cro-Magnon ancestors by many criteria -- you are going to have a hard time convincing me that the future will be any different. If technology hasn't worked to improve "intelligence" before, why should it do so later?
Not to forget that IQ tests (for whatever they may actually measure) had to be constantly rescaled over the last half century to stay centered at 100. So an average IQ these days is comparable to a borderline genius IQ from the middle of the 20th century.
Edit: it's called the Flynn effect, and if this phone had decent copy and paste, I'd give you the wikipedia link, which you now are forced to find on your own. But at least I can rest reasonably assured that your general intelligence is sufficient for solving that task ;-).
Yes and no. HN is the proximate host of the conversation. But HN is linkable and indexed by Google, so if you make a sufficiently interesting comment it really does have the potential to be read by everyone with an Internet connection and a reading knowledge of the language it is in.
Perhaps the scientific revolution was not an innovation of a single person, but of the collective entity formed by the proto-scientists of civilization. That conceptual advance, along with communication, tool, and other conceptual advances since that time, have continued to accelerate civilization's collective intelligence.
We don't expect the singularity to improve the intelligence of transistors. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect that previous intelligence explosions of a collective being massively improved the intelligence of the humans comprising it.
The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it.
I bet it led to a significant increase in the average IQ. It may not have been a Singularity with a capital S, but it certainly did reflect back on its creators.
The qualitative and quantitative improvements from the flynn effect and the population increase reflected back on humanity as a whole, not the creators of the industrial revolution. This is why we've got accelerating growth, but it's also why the second derivative is still small.
This is nice. I was a little saddened that the replay and analyse option after games did not actually analyse games, but with the export I can download the games into my favourite chess engine and have it analyse the games for me.
[edit: noticed that there is a forum, don't go there. While someone occasionally posts an interesting game like http://lichess.org/analyse/0mbole the level of conversation is roughly what you'd expect from a 4chan /chess/ board.]
Shouldn't there be a debate about the technical merits of the idea? I want my libraries and tools to make unwise things hard to do, and the wise easy and obvious. It's a framing issue, one that I think Marco's right about. But I'd like to hear what OpenSSL has to say about this and other, other, other things.
The solution seems obvious now, but the problem had to be framed that way to get it. I can only speak for myself, but this had not occurred to me before reading the article. I suspect that it would be the same for most -- considering that people argue the positive impact of piracy on business in terms of marketing, not revenue.
The embed-ads-that-travel-with-the-game solution is fairly well known among casual-games developers I think. That doesn't make it a bad idea, but I'd be surprised if it's really patentable, unless the "invisibility" they discuss is particularly novel. I'm not exactly sure what they mean by that part, so hard to say.
Here's a CNET article from 2007 touting the benefits of ads embedded in flash games, one of which is "Even if the game is stolen, even if it runs on a site surrounded by other HTML ads, the ad can still play in-game": http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9797689-2.html
I think they mean the ads only appear if the animation detects that it's been served from a website other than the original.
I don't think this is especially novel; not for ads but I remember writing code back in the 90s for Java applets to check that they were being served only from the original website.
Originality of solution is not in developing a technology (though getting patent for that might mean it is), but identifying a key problem in business and using technology in an innovative way to solve the problem.
It does seem unnatural, but I think it's unavoidable when you're showing images of a web interface inside another web interface (especially one with similar design cues). It's going to look strange either way, but it's a little more comfortable for the brain to keep the boundary when the inner image is tilted or perspective-shifted in some way.
The best answer would be an isolated image over black (or a lightbox effect) but alas their CMS probably doesn't support this kind of display.
If alexey is honest in his sincerity, he could reiterate his points more strongly with evidence. 'It looks like a crazy marginalized perspective' is something to think about, but there's no weight to the argument offered. Does RMS's talks do worse than expected? Is it caused by people ending up with this opinion after hearing him?
How much time should he devote to exploring unsupported ideas from those who disagree, versus his own ideas for persuasion?