This has everything to do with our societies being powered by fossil fuels and nothing to do with bitcoin. High energy usage may be deemed wasteful, but if it was coming from solar power, it wouldn't be bad for the planet.
Life pro tip, if you don't want to be seen as a "crazy" person, slap on a pair of headphones and activate your phones voice recorder. You can pretend to be on a phone call, record your thoughts, and no-one will be any of the wiser.
Well maybe... it's certainly a different approach than being tracked, surveilled and served up personal ads.
Brave is using cryptocurrency as an alternative revenue model for content creators than advertisements, and in some ways it's much more of a "white mirror" kind of tech.
It's also fundamentally untenable in a world where the purpose of the ads they replace is to pay for the content you're viewing.
The web needs a real solution to the problems ads present at the moment, but we're unlikely to get one when the dominant browser vendor has deep interests in keeping users trackable.
I think the key here to replicating the success is the deployment of deep learning effectively. But I would argue that deepmind's resource pool is immense, it's backed by Google. The resources of GPU's (and more advanced TPU's) are in abundance... not to mention the many brilliant PhD scientists who work there.
Blizzard took away the winnings from one of their own loyal / hard working gamers, whom other gamers are sympathetic to as it could have been "them". This was a public forum with a specific person who seemingly did nothing wrong being punished unfairly, leading to the controversy were seeing.
Apple just removed some apps that people in the west weren't really using that much. More anonymous and somewhat blameless, a-lot of people aren't app developers and can't relate to that experience.
>Apple just removed some apps that people in the west weren't really using that much
HKers didn't really care either, those who had installed the app still have it on their phones and the rest have no trouble accessing the same information from tens of other sources.
Not many had it on their phones - it was only able to be installed by anyone for a few days because previous attempts at app store approval were rejected.
Great question, one could use existing known chemicals as a starting point. There could be a potential to use fMRI readings on a model organism in realtime to generate data.
Compelling. I wonder what else this could be applied to in addition to psychedelics? Anti-anxiety and other sensory affecting drugs?
If you wanna get Black Mirror-esque, perhaps a Soma-like medication from Brave New World (essentially pacifies/zombifies you by creating endless bliss) could be made. Or the "bliss" drug episode of Doctor Who.
Wait till you find out that all the world's cash crops are essentially genetic clones of each other. We're literally one superbug away from global famine.
I doubt its that dire. There are a lot of things currently that can destroy crops but they are mostly prevented from spreading by border controls on things like fruit not being able to cross over.
You're correct. Rice and corn are almost tied as staple crops. Wheat, potatoes and bananas trail those two relatively closely. There may be little genetic diversity inside any particular staple food, but there are nevertheless several unrelated staple foods that feed the world.
If blight were to wipe out one or two, things would get bad but I'm confident we'd pull through as a species.
There will be no famine as a result of a single type of crop in a local area getting killed. It still takes at least weeks for the virus to spread around to other crops which is plenty of time to become aware of it and stop its spread. There is also nothing preventing imports of healthy foods over the border.
There is also no real incentive to bring bad crops over the border to a safe area.
Yes, biodiversity in major crops is a serious problem.
Global famine? Give me a break.
That would require the failure of multiple crop species extending across thousands of miles. It's never happened in human history on that scale.
Why would it now? Yes, losing all the Cavendish bananas would be really bad. But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road?
The biodiversity issue is intraspecies not interspecies.
> But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road?
Simply, copies.
If a superbug is able to destroy all the world's bananas, it would grow in population 1 million fold to do so. A bacteria or virus with a million times as many members will evolve a million times as quickly.
Given such, a species jump wouldn't be hard to do. And after the first couple, the superbug would likely start to tailer itself to genes that many plant species share, making the next jumps even easier.
I suppose I should be sitting up in terror for the superbug that comes after us from ants, then? After all ants outmass humans worldwide by a decent margin...
Thing is, I'm pretty sure that ants and humans are only a few times further apart than potatoes and corn are. (Monocots and Dicots split ~140-150 Myr ago [0], Arthropoda and Chordata about ~1000 Myr ago [1]) (I initially thought the Monocots/Dicots split was further back... looks like a closer comparison would be to marsupials, diverging ~170 Myr ago)
There haven't been a lot of species that are all genetic clones of each other until recently, either. Such a condition makes the arrival of a superbug much more likely.
A species entirely made up of genetic clones is what this whole thread is about. I'm surprised you missed this.
You seem to be acting under the assumption that virii are actively malicious things instead of mere self-propagating feedback loops. Propagation is what causes it to grow - killing its host is a dead end for growth.
This isn't Pandemic - there is no neural or neural analog on viruses - hell we couldn't even do that with networked nanomachines.
It would be far more plauisble for all housecats in the world to coordinate and plan the conquest of humanity as they at least have the ability to think and communicate.
This is hard to respond to, because I don't know what you think I think. I don't think viruses have some sort of “neural or neural analog” or coordinate in some way, so I suspect you don't understand what I'm saying.
I just think, on average, an individual virus particle will mutate at a certain rate. If there are a million times the population, a virus as a whole will then mutate 1 million times faster. So, if a certain virus would given a certain mutation, would jump to another species, and that had a certain chance to do so, then that same virus with 1 million times its normal population would have 1 million times the chance to do so.
That's about as spelled out and basic I'm able to make it.
Especially because before 1950 the Gros Michel was about as popular as the Cavendish now. And then it got wiped out by a fungus so instead of diversifying, all banana plantations collectively switched to Cavendish. Now there is a new fungus the Cavendish is susceptible too, so perhaps in a few years we'll all be eating something else. Hopefully more than a single alternative variety is found this time...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana:
"After years of attempting to keep it out of the Americas, in mid-2019, Panama disease Tropical Race 4 (TR4), was discovered on banana farms in the coastal Caribbean region. With no fungicide effective against TR4, the Cavendish may meet the same fate as the Gros Michel."
The veterinary science in the corporate meat/dairy business is better at disease management than the CDC. Vaccines are developed in a matter of weeks. Quarantining animals and employees is completely enforced. Culling is possible. I wouldn’t be scared. A lot of smart people are going to make sure you have real ice cream. Do you worry that some disease is going to kill off all the elite marathon runners? Not much genetic diversity there either. Genetic diversity just isn’t that important for survival with modern medicine.
About 2/3rds of China’s pork production is not modern. Too many humans involved and they roll out vaccines in 6 months rather than 3 weeks. For now it is just slow and uncoordinated problem solving.
Right. Everything you said about food supply resiliency only applies to modern production in the US. To be fair: that's the topic of the article. But it is inapplicable to 2/3rds of the world's population -- where disease & monoculture are huge threats to global food supply.
China’s agtech is modernizing, and the Americas and Europe is already modern. We divert enough calories for 1 billion people into biofuels. The only realistic thing that will cause a famine is a breakdown in global trade/markets. I think you are being overly dramatic about the disease threat. I am not quite sure why you think genetic diversity within a species is so important. What is important is to have species diversity and trade to avoid potato famines.
That's what trade is for. Trump just sold lots of pork to China. Admittedly not all places are as integrated into the world economy as China though, so not everyone can afford food, but aid programs are usually well funded and effective. Right now, the only places where people are starving are ones where aid programs don't have access e.g. because of war.
And terrible enforcement and political incentives due to decades of underinvesting in veterinary and agricultural supervision.
> Why did African swine fever spread so fast in China?
> Systemic problems in China may have accelerated the spread of African swine fever, a dangerous pig virus that has no cure or vaccine. According to an investigative piece by Chinese business portal Caixin last month, divergent interests of central and local officials, money worries and "political tasks" created incentives to hide disease reports. Lacking reliable information, farmers panicked and liquidated herds when they heard rumors of disease in their neighborhood. Big regional price differences due to localized pig liquidations and quarantines created strong incentives to truck pigs and pathogens around the country. Traders flouting bans easily evaded authorities--and were often abetted by corrupt veterinary officials who sold fraudulent health certificates and ear tags.
That was a prion disease. They were actively being stupid to try to save a quid and are still being punished in the markets for it.
It is like putting crocodiles in hotel rooms up an elevator or a foot high stack of stairs - too steep for them to climb on their own. If crocodiles eat people then it is clearly the fault of the people who put crocodiles in the hotel rooms in the first place because they couldn't get there on their own as they are aquatic ground clingers.
This is a good example of where UX means a different thing to the user than to the developer. Just because it's available on another page doesn't mean the customer is going to take the time to go figure that out. Take these criticisms graciously and learn how your user's use your software it's going to improve your products immensely.
