The second foundation was also made by Harry Seldon though, there wasn't a completely separate force that attempted to change history using his research.
Correct. Meanwhile in the “Count to the Eschaton” series, all the bad guys know enough of psychohistory to do a lot of damage. The future does not at all go according to the plan made by the good guys, and as time goes on a greater and greater percentage of the population knows and employs the mathematics of psychohistory in their daily lives.
In fact, that mathematics turns out to be much more widely applicable than mere Psychohistory, since it applies to all systems of all types and purposes, not just human societies. A small system like a web server is simple enough that you or I can confidently predict its eventual failure; the hardware simply doesn’t last forever so eventually a disk will fail or a capacitor will pop or whatever. But the company running the web server is a much more complex system that is much harder to predict. Does the company fail if it pivots to a different market and turns off the web server? Or if the cleaning lady unplugs it once a week to vacuum? If you want that particular web server, or the pages it serves, to last forever then you really have to design that corporation well. You don't want it to divert from the plans you gave it when the market changes and there is more profit to be made elsewhere. In fact to keep that web server running over the long term you really might have to design the society around it so that the situation _doesn’t_ change too much. Society will keep changing as fads come and go and people are born and die, but you want it to always orbit a chaotic attractor of your choosing in the phase space of possible societies.
The series takes this idea to its logical extreme, giving the main characters access to and control over larger and larger systems until they are controlling vast galactic superclusters. The degree to which the many myriad intelligences, human and otherwise, in those vast systems can carry out the main character’s purposes over deep time depends on how well the rules they have devised work and how well those intelligences understand and implement them.
I am not sure that I agree. Can you elaborate? Perhaps you mean that a story intended to play out over centuries might get bogged down every time someone tried to make himself king? I think the Count to the Eschaton series has an obvious counterexample to that, but you might mean something else.
I would rather companies do whatever they thought was best with no regards to the current administration, unless forced by law to take some action. Large companies feeling like they need to take actions to please the current President is not great.
Any scenario in which a billionaire, with all their power and resources, is deeply scared of pissing off the President - to the point of doing a public 180 on everything - is one in which us much less powerful regular people should be very scared.
A high grade consumer gpu a (a 4090) is about 80 teraflops. So rounding up to 100, an exaflop is about 10,000 consumer grade cards worth of compute, and a petaflop is about 10.
Which doesn’t help with understanding how much more impressive these are than the last clusters, but does to me at least put the amount of compute these clusters have into focus.
My point of reference is that back in undergrad (~10-15 years ago), I recall a class assignment where we had to optimize matrix multiplication on a CPU; typical good parallel implementations achieved about 100-130 gigaflops (on a... Nehalem or Westmere Xeon, I think?).
I’ve always thought the real answer was to stop the businesses from hiring people. Make an actually useful national ID system that employers can use to identify if someone is allowed to work in the US, and then come down like the hammer of god on anyone found to be employing people under the table.
People come here for economic opportunity. Remove the opportunity for people who enter without permission, and they stop coming. And that sort of solution deals with more than just border crossings.
Yes, you could stop it at the point of demand. I remember AZ implemented eVerify or some such, don’t know what effect or loopholes it had. In Texas:
Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.
That’s Canada’s approach and it is super effective. But when you look at who those employers are in the USA, say hotels, farms, construction companies, etc… people who are basically stereotypical rich Republicans (and even a former president/presidential candidate), it makes sense that this solution will never be proposed here. It also explains why only ineffectual solutions are proposed, it isn’t meant to be solved as neither side really wants it to be solved.
I agree that that would stop a lot of the people crossing illegally today. It's a great idea! I wouldn't help with people crossing for criminal activity and it ignores the looming threat of billions of climate refugees coming because their survival depends on gaining entrance into another country.
I doubt there’s a business model there because who is going to opt in to a scheme that loses them money?
What could work is social media giving people an easy button to block links to specific websites from appearing in their feed, or something along those lines. It’s a nice user feature, and having every clickbait article be a chance someone will choose to never see your website again could actually reign in some of the nonsense.
> I doubt there’s a business model there because who is going to opt in to a scheme that loses them money?
Agreed, of course.
In a reasonable world, that could be considered part of the basic, law mandated requirements. It would be blurry and subject to interpretation to decide what is clickbait or not, just like libel or defamation - good thing we're only a few hundred years away from someone reinventing a device to handle that, called "independent judges".
In the meantime, I suppose you would have to bring some "unreasonable" thing to it, like "brands like to have green logos on their sites to brag" ?
> What could work is social media giving people an easy button to block links to specific websites from appearing in their feed, or something along those lines.
I completely agree. It's a feature they have had the technology to implement such a thing since forever, and they've decided against it since forever.
However I wonder if that's something a browser extension could handle ? A merge of AdBlock and "saved you a click" that displays the "boring" content of the link when you hoveron a clickbaity link ?
Firing someone for having tattoos or having done sex work is completely legal in almost all US states. Generally speaking, the only things private employers can’t discriminate based on is things intrinsic to who the person is (race, sexuality, non-relevant disability), and religion. Past choices are completely legal to fire someone for, even if it has nothing to do with the job at hand.
You could freeze your credit, it you wanted to be careful. Realistically though, you should have already been monitoring to check if unexpected things were being done in your name. I’ve presumed that all our SSNs have been out there for years now due to one hack or another, that this hack just makes it indisputable doesn’t change much.
Just like a lock on the door, it raises the barrier to a non trivial level. It does not give you a ft Knox level impenetrable fortress.
I recently froze my credit with the big 3 and it was easier than I pictured. I don't know if they slow you down if you try to unfreeze it immediately after clicking "forgot password".
To me it’s similar to the whole “SSO wall of shame” thing, where a vital feature is locked behind more expensive pricing. As said in the article:
“We tried saying that we don't need any number of the 14 features that are included”
Which, to me, is the crux of the issue. Is it fair for Cloudflare to say “You are breaking the terms of service if you do not change your set up in this specific way, and also the way you need to chance your setup is locked behind a significantly more expensive pricing.” Being able to bring your own IP does not, to me, seem like something that should require a plan that is orders of magnitude more expensive than the standard. It seems much more to me like something that is more fundamental, and should be included as an option in a lesser version of the product Maybe I’m wrong, and there is actually significant overhead to Cloudflare for letting customers bring an IP. But as is, it feels very much to me like a situation where something vital was locked at the most expensive tier to force certain kinds of customer to pay more.
I'd say at that point it's essentially compensation for personal suffering.
Yes, BYOIP as a feature does not seem complex enough to warrant paying for an Entperise license. But the kind of customers who need BYOIP (especially if they need it to avoid harming your IP reputation) are likely to be at a higher risk of being flaky or otherwise painful so this is very much a tax on running that kind of business (just as porn sites often find it hard to find payment processors because of the high risk of credit card fraud).
As a freelancer I have absolutely made offers at 10x my going rate for client I did not want. The idea is that if they really want me to work for them, at least I get reimbursed for the suffering that will entail. This kind of pricing structure is no different.
