This just seems like a bad idea.
Starting things and not finishing them is just... The default.
Whoever thinks that our society is too focused on commitment has really not been keeping up with social trends for the last few decades. Most people are cut loose from any kind of stability, community or enduring sense of identity.
I get that they're trying to go with "done does not need to mean perfect", but this way of putting it is too aggressive and I don't feel like it'll have good outcomes.
>Starting things and not finishing them is just... The default.
Exactly what I was going to write. I don't need a manifesto telling me to do this, this is what I do naturally unless I force myself to stick with something.
If anything, the "finish rarely [NOT never!]" bit is what needs emphasizing, yet the entire page is about the "start often" bit instead.
But why would a company say they do this?
It's because so many people believe that this happens anyway that there's next to no cost to them in saying it - and the buyers for this kind of technology think of this as a good thing.
It might be fake, but people being scared of your powerful technology is good for sales.
AI labs do the same thing by actively courting fearmongering.
People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so.
These companies are most likely lying or exaggerating their capabilities. Since so many people believe in audio eavesdropping anyway, it's in their interest to make the buyers of their software believe they're much more powerful than they really are.
It's the same as how it's good for AI companies to talk about how AIs are just on the verge of ending the world and must be regulated at any cost - more people believing that what they're selling is absurdly powerful is good for sales.
> People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so.
Can you link to people who have checked?
I had a couple of the last BlackBerry phones, that ran Android. They came with this "DTEK" [1] app that monitored when apps accessed your phone's sensors. And I remember every time I checked it, the various social media apps had all been caught snooping something like hundreds of times a day. This was happening even when I didn't use the apps, so there definitely didn't seem to be any reason that "makes sense" to do it. Not sure if it was microphone, or maybe just location or something, but audio eavesdropping isn't really out-of-character based on that.
Main reason is that audio is just tremendously inefficient compared to other signals. It's large and expensive to store and process and doesn't really give you that many bytes of information you can't get elsewhere for how expensive it is to handle.
That's not a very compelling experiment, compared to e.g. logging the actual traffic, core dumping the app, and decompiling the APK.
Could have a delay. Could only work when physically moving, indicating activity. Could only be activated for some user profiles based on usage patterns. Could only activate for device owner's voice, like the voice assistants.
I used to think audio would be prohibitively expensive for Facebook to eavesdrop. But they could easily sample at random, compute it on-device, then only send keyword hashes. I think it's much more technically feasible than you're giving it credit.
I agree they probably aren't. Most likely, they predict using their other spying, then people notice frequency illusion/coincidence. But I find it odd nobody's checked.
It's literally impossible on a CPU. Some people claim FP languages can make optimisations that are based on the fact that values are immutable and which other languages can't, and that's definitely true. But the problem is that those optimisations are almost never actually made by real programming languages, and when they are, they're still slower than a low level imperative language like C or Rust in very nearly every case.
No one needs to prove you wrong because that's not where the goal post actually is.
You could craft hand written assembly code which will be faster than optimised C code most of the time yet you don't. Plenty of programmers are perfectly writing imperative code in Java doing a ton of necessary boxing and unboxing. It's all a trade off between performance and usability. The fact is that the Ocaml compiler does a good enough job with functional code that its performance is actually comparable to imperative solutions most of the time.
If you compile your immutable program with LLVM, literally one of the cure steps is transforming it into functional form that does not allow mutations.
This is called Single Static Assignment form and its denial of mutation is crucial to optimization, from common expression removal, to efficient register allocation, and all sorts of control flow analysis.
> If you compile your immutable program with LLVM, literally one of the cure steps is transforming it into functional form that does not allow mutations.
You probably wanted to write something like 'If you compile your _mutating_ program with LLVM, [...]'?
The majority of the industry is made of people who care mostly about their own careers. If solving nasty distributed system problems is simple, you can't justify having a huge bloated expensive team. If your team doesn't spend a lot of money, you aren't seen as very important within the company. Since people want to be important, it's hard to get more productive languages to be adopted.
No, I don't think so. I think it's closer to "a plug-and-play computer for self-hostable apps, running locally, with most things configured so you're reasonably secure and you don't have to guess about everything."
That's pretty much what Urbit wanted to be, to be fair, just with a strong networking component powered by a decentralized identity system. It's just too esoteric to have meaningful traction as that.
I'd agree with you if it weren't for all the cultish red flags present here.
This is clearly a man who wants a cult-like mentality to form around him.
If he were just going ridiculously in-depth with his self-research and being open and honest about this, I'd actually admire him a lot, but it's all the grandiose talk about "Zeroth principles thinking" and "Aligning with what the 25th century would want" together with implying his detractors must be weak, scared and lacking in self-control that turns me off heavily.
How does that background translate to any kind of scientific competence? Because his website is heavy on the buzzwords and the Silicon Valley "glorious future"-talk and remarkably light on anything resembling responsible science.
He clearly doesn't want to advance knowledge about longevity, he wants to be the world's top longevity marketer and salesman. It's just a business long shot to him. And yes, that is perfectly congruent with his background.
As an entrepreneur myself, I can tell you that "needing the money" stops being a significant motivation after a while, or at least takes a back seat to the thrill of just getting people to buy the thing.
I get that they're trying to go with "done does not need to mean perfect", but this way of putting it is too aggressive and I don't feel like it'll have good outcomes.