The Simulation Argument and the Simulation Barrier - <AUTHOR> https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/the-simulation-argument-and-the-simulation-barrier <comment><USER3> A long time ago I wrote a blog post called "Statistical Immortality" that led others to recommend the concept of lazy immortality and the book "Permutation City" which I highly recommend.

And the very end of the day you have to take something on faith and proceed. Solipsism is internally inconsistent because it presupposes a mind that can evaluate a truth whilst simultaneously taking the argument that existence isn't knowable. Empiricism presupposes that our senses and mind can be relied upon to some degree. Theocratic foundations for selfhood are rooted in faith in a higher power.

So in a limited sense I agree with this article's argument. Once you allow that the simulation argument may be true you invalidate that your mind is capable of determining if this is likely.

<comment><USER4> As far as I'm aware solipsism only has a core tenet that nothing but you exists. That is certainly how I was introduced to it when I studied it in class and the only real overarching principle I could find when reading different viewpoints on it.

That said, unless you believe your mind can evaluate what is true it has to be (as far as I can tell) a faith-based stance. That isn't much different from a religious world-view, except there's not a higher power. There's only you.

<comment><USER5> I'm under the impression that solipsism is the rejection of the assumption that physical reality is the true reality. Cogito ergo sum. I am not the void. I can say that for sure. Everything else is up for debate.

This is a very different idea than believing that only the self is real. I don't think it's possible to strongly argue that. However, solipsism is a real case to make. Prove that your mind and body are connected and you will have debunked solipsism.

<comment><USER6> There's epistemological solipsism (which is what you describe) and metaphysical solipsism. The latter says that "only I exist." I don't understand the grandparent's objection in either case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is a lack of consistency between an implicit premise in Bostrom's argument and one in Feather's critique:

>any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations _of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);_

[emphasis added]

>This _lack of necessary overlap in metaphysics_ between the world that creates a simulation and the simulation itself could be called the simulation barrier.

[emphasis added]

Why would there be a lack of necessary overlap in metaphysics between the world an evolved organism inhabits and a simulation _of its own evolutionary history?_ Bostrom's reasoning for _why these simulations would exist in the first place_ clearly depends on extrapolating from various aspects of human behavior, so his argument necessarily posits that the beings _running_ the simulations are at least in this way (and probably in others) similar to humans. The similarity of the Universe, largely, follows.

Furthermore, the simulation argument fails to be really different from the dream argument when we omit Bostrom's motivation argument. If we can be in a simulation within matryoshkaed simulations thousands of layers deep, then surely we might be in a dream within a dream thousands of layers deep. We can provide all of the necessary metaphysical computational capacity to the dreamer that we would a simulator, can't we? The whole bit where creatures are _motivated_ to simulate themselves seems, to me, to be crucial.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this is saying that you can't simulate a VAX on a Z-80. But we know that you can, just not at full speed. But if time created by the simulator does that matter?

<comment><USER9> > But if time created by the simulator does that matter?

It probably does for those who created the simulation. Not sure they have infinite patience to see the outcome of their experiment.

<comment><USER10> I heard from someone about the relativity of spacetime, time is slowest near the center of a huge gravity source like blackhole so out here earth time is actually relatively fast and are speeding up due to expansion, as the further our galaxy/universe is flying apart the less mass and less gravity can slow them down

So our relative spacetime scale of a billion years here, might just be a few hours inside some of those crazy dense SUPER MASSIVE blackholes

And with that in mind and some loose sense our whole simulation might just took 1 second of the creator's relative time because...time is relative , just a loose assumption

<comment><USER11> The first time I heard of this being noticeable on a human timescale was the movie Interstellar. But I don't no think in real life there is that much of a difference between the rate at which time passes near a large mass.

This answer on Quora says the rate at which time passes on Jupiter is only a few nanoseconds off compared to Earth.

[https://www.quora.com/Will-time-pass-slower-if-we-go-to- Jupi...](https://www.quora.com/Will-time-pass-slower-if-we-go-to-Jupiter-for- example)

<comment><USER12> IIRC I read that for an outside observer everything that is sucked into a black hole does never actually pass "into" it. The closer it gets to the event horizon, the slower it's clock runs (from an outside perspective), and gradually stops upon approaching the horizon itself. [!] That seems like a rather large difference.

[!] Disclaimer: I don't know if that interpretation is still considered valid.

Edit: Formatting

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What bothers me about the idea of an ancestor simulation is the suggestion that a computer which exists inside the universe could simulate the universe with enough fidelity that it could actually serve as a useful ancestor simulation. An ancestor simulation seems to be a contradiction, like a box that contains itself within.

<comment><USER14> It's still possible, but you will have statistical inaccuracies. If your analysis shows that say almost all events in this area can be abstracted up to this value without losing a significant amount of accuracy that makes the inner box smaller. Factor in our limited speed of travel and the one way nature of causality relative to us on the cosmic scale, you get a theoretically feasible simulation.

<comment><USER15> It _may_ be possible, and the inaccuracies in such a simulation _might_ be useful to meet some goal, if a valuable use could be determined that would justify the costs involved, but there's nothing inevitably true about any of those propositions. It's a bit like the Drake equation, reasonable people can assign different probability values to the various factors and come to radically different conclusions.

For example if I think there's a very low chance a valuable enough use for such a simulation could be found, and there's a low chance such a simulation would meet the criteria to be useful, and that there's a low chance such a simulation would need to be so accurate as to have actually conscious simulated inhabitants to meet those goals, then the chance that we are in a simulation comes to be vanishingly small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If we are in a simulation it will be difficult to know that we are in a simulation because what we use to identify the simulation (mind) is itself simulated, our notion of simulation is acquired within the simulation. We are in this black box and are trying to see outside.

<comment><USER17> Since we're talking crazy stuff, what if similar to how we control matter a super advanced entity could control souls (say, like a form of slavery, or laboratory testing on animals), gathering them into batches and injecting them into simulations, that they control, without having control over the subjects?

I'm not proposing this as the situation, but if we're talking simulations, it's fun to think about.

<comment><USER18> Even more fun is to think that we are a class project of some sophomore at some university in "outer outside". That would explain a lot of things. Instead of a super advanced entity just some junior students creating their first universes.

<comment><USER19> In that case, we're probably being started from a snapshot provided by the teacher

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What would it take to simulate a conscious mind? Several orders of magnitude more processing power than is needed to perform the simple tasks we currently ask of AGI, I believe.

For example, in another part of biology, DNA seems to be a very inefficient as a data structure and tool for genetic replication. But you'd expect and forgive that from a system that self organized through chance, iteration, and a vast amount of time. Evolution has short horizons and lacks the long term planning required to be economical.

Human engineered systems are by contrast far more efficient with their resources. You can now sift through photos of cats and not_cats with a GPU and a few decades of collective technological progress. To get to the stage where a mind, artificial or natural, has self awareness, I can completely believe that it would require the level of processing only made available by a naturally inefficient evolution process.

We have minds that are focused on hunting, gathering, procreating, toolmaking, and surviving. Humans have succeeded at doing these things by growing vast brains that only accidentally became good at spotting incoming lions and finding mates. We are lucky that our complex brains evolved in such a way[1] as to allow conscious thought to emerge as a side effect.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory)

<comment><USER21> The theory is that the required technological advancement to create such a simulation is plausible to be achieved in x amount of time, as long as we keep progressing. Could be a thousand or a million years.

<comment><USER15> A counter-theory is that technology will always be constrained by the physical limitations of energy and matter. Given the material resources of a solar system, there's only so much you can do no matter how advanced your technology. Given that constrained matter/energy budget, how much of those resources are going to be devoted to ancestor simulations? Possibly not enough for it to matter.

Ok, you can assume an interstellar hegemonic civilization that can consume the resources of a galaxy, but if such a thing were possible how come we haven't already been absorbed by one yet? Ergo such a thing seems to be unlikely to be possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The simulation argument in my mind arises from thinking about the universe in terms of computation. The concept of computing and tractability comes from limitations and phenomena we see in the universe: energy and the arrow of time. Yet, the arrow of time doesn't appear to be fundamental to the constitution of the universe (with the laws of physics being identical in reverse), but only an emergent property of entropy. Like a human-inspired sentient creator, the simulation is the most in-reach explanation of creation for a given perspective.

We could look beyond the limitations of thermodynamics, and consider that the contents of spacetime may just exist in the same way as the contents of pi or the Mandelbrot set exists.

Why must the universe be "created" at all by computation, when computation doesn't even seem to be a fundamental, but only an emergent property of it?

</comment><comment><USER23> If we are in a sim it seems it render's what is percived by "intelegence" to stop any inconsistencies revealing themselfs to the observer ( Maybe to save on processing power, to estimate the overall picture only giving answers to the very small details when observed). We should look for limitations of this system that show up these inconsistencies such as Wigner's superposition thought experiment and many other quantum peculiarities. Could we hack such a system? maybe using quantum computers is a start? getting past the construct and utilising the vast processing power that would be needed to create the sim, getting past the rules of rendering to the observer by seemingly not looking, If Im in a sim id like to think we could hack the hell out of it, or at least try.

</comment><comment><USER24> The impossibility of being sure of the rules of the parent reality is why I find all arguments that we can't be in a simulation because it would take too long to calculate certain aspects of our reality to be unconvincing.

The computational complexity hierarchy could be different in a parent universe.

I do wonder though what things might have to be the same. I would be very surprised if any reality that allowed intelligent life forms able of creating and running simulations didn't have causality. What about the concept of number, or certain parts of logic? I think there may well be reasonable assumptions that can be made about a parent universe, even if they don't reach the level of complete confidence.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can someone help me imagine what a world with different math is like? It's easy enough to imagine a world with different physics (such as in video games). But math is just a list of rules/axioms and the results of following those rules. They might find different axioms more applicable but our math should still work in their universe even if it's considered pure math with no applications.

<comment><USER6> It's tricky because "world" already makes us imagine a reality whose fundamental operation works like it does here. In fact, "reality" and "operation" already come with that baggage. The very mechanism that we know as "mind" (or at least, intellect) may be incapable of imagining other possibilities. On the other hand, very strong psychedelic experiences (a la DMT) or meditation can certainly give the impression that other possibilities exist. The problem is, you can't bring those possibilities back here via memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have an inherent problem with these discussions: I'm not convinced a simulation can be conscious.

There's an xkcd comic titled "A Bunch of Rocks" at [https://www.xkcd.com/505/](https://www.xkcd.com/505/). Could dropping rocks in the sand to simulate a turing machine produce a conscious being? If not, why can a computer?

<comment><USER27> I love the bunch of rocks example and think about it a lot.

If a simulation cannot produce consciousness, what is special about life that makes it unrepresentable with physics? Where is the boundary between a conscious system and a non-conscious one?

Conscious minds certainly seem bound by their physicality, you can figure out how feelings and experiences are represented molecularly and electrochemically and affect those feelings and experiences experimentally. So far we've not found anything that cannot be broken down into physics (not to say we won't), but if we assume there's nothing else _but_ physics – then I think we're left with:

\- The physics consciousness relies upon is fundamentally uncomputable

\- Consciousness _is_ computable and all the weird consequences that follow (like sand computers) are true

I lean towards the second option, but I struggle to understand it in any intuitive sense.

What are your thoughts on why a simulation cannot be conscious?

<comment><USER28> I think you're missing another possibility (and some other posters are too): maybe it is the case that a simulation can produce consciousness, by simulating a brain for example, but that it takes a sufficiently powerful model of computation to do so.

So, consciousness being computable may not necessarily imply that any given computer could do so. One potential way for this to be the case is if consciousness is tied to some form of hypercomputation ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation)), which can provide outputs that are not turing-computable. This would mean that a traditional computer couldn't simulate consciousness, but that another hypothetical machine might be able to.

<comment><USER29> Yes, exactly.

Bostrom is assuming there's a thing called "computation" which is somehow a fully-specified solved problem. (It isn't).

Worse, he's also assuming that this "computation" can somehow simulate something called "consciousness" \- which unfortunately for him, is nowhere near to having the formal rigorous definition that "computation" as we know it today would require.

And finally after all that, you get something which is _subjectively_ indistinguishable from life itself.

Well - obviously. If you don't define any of your terms and assume your argument is correct because you don't show your working or get into specifics, you can argue whatever you like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So basically the author did not bother to read the pdf he had referenced at the bottom. It is short and quite clear.

</comment><comment><USER31> Anselm's Ontological Argument, redux.

</comment><comment> aaron-santos What does a blue pill attack look like in this scenario?

</comment><comment><USER32> All the axioms the argument is based on can be false. It's still interesting to debate but not necessarily close to reality.

</comment><comment><USER33> The crux of this article appears to be:

> it seems reasonable to allow that simulations, as experienced by their > inhabitants, could have entirely different models of math, physics, and even > consistency.

Which is a (shallow, informal) restatement of Hilary Putnam's work on externalism and its many responses. Just read some of that instead.

Software developers (or worse, tech entrepreneurs) often assume they have something to add to the discussion of simulationism just because computation is the simulation substrate du jour in Bostrom's work. But the philosophical discussion goes back directly to Descartes and indirectly even further. It's broad, complex, and not something a dilettante can just jump into after a teenage diet of scifi.

(This doesn't apply to Bostrom himself - the article's objection is a subset of his #2 option. If the "necessary overlap in metaphysics" is impossible or prohibitively expensive future civilizations are not likely to run them.)

<comment><USER34> > _Software developers (or worse, tech entrepreneurs) often assume they have > something to add to the discussion of simulationism just because computation > is the simulation substrate du jour in Bostrom 's work. But the > philosophical discussion goes back directly to Descartes and indirectly even > further. It's broad, complex, and not something a dilettante can just jump > into after a teenage diet of scifi._

So what? People should stop thinking for themselves and relegate it to the pros, lest they repeat informally something already investigated and rejected?

One could also point out how openness and encouragement of layman participation and collaboration with field outsiders have also been discussed extensively, and point people to read the relevant papers/books instead of your comment...

<comment><USER33> > People should stop thinking for themselves and relegate it to the pros, lest > they repeat informally something already investigated and rejected?

I didn't say anything about thinking. But yes, maybe many programmers (and celebrities and entrepreneurs - also called out by the article itself) should think more and publicly speak less.

<comment><USER35> Here's something I'm curious about, hopefully without coming across as too negative: what is the purpose of philosophical work such as Bostrom's?

As an argument it may or may not be convincing, but it's not obviously actionable. It's hard to see how it could be tested.

You seem to be saying that amateur philosophers shouldn't jump in with their own naive takes on it, as they don't have the required educational background. I can certainly believe that, but it takes away another avenue by which we non-philosophers can potentially engage with the work.

If there has been any notable followup or rebuttal, it hasn't made nearly as much of an impact in the public consciousness (and of course the simulation argument is a pretty niche thing in the first place).

How does, or should, this simulation argument affect the average person? How might it affect us in future? What does it change?

<comment><USER33> > what is the purpose of philosophical work such as Bostrom's?

This is a good question. This paper is _popular_ well in disproportion to its _impact_ , because it's a sexy scifi topic. I don't know Bostrom but I suspect it's popular far in disproportion to his desires also - it's just one small piece of his work on superintelligence, which is in turn only one part of his work on measuring existential risk.

The paper, it should be noted, is not an argument we are living in a simulation (it's often taken as one, but the simulation hypothesis predates Bostrom, the 20th century, etc.). Rather, it's an argument that there is a trilemma of which two options are material, and potentially even testable - <USER2> in a sense, it does allow the simulation hypothesis to be tested, if you buy his trilemma and reject the other options. (Based again on his other work, I suspect Bostrom may personally believe #1 - I personally am suspicious of both the validity of the trilemma and independently suspect #2.)

So this plays the kind of role in philosophy that a discovery of some unique way to synthesize a chemical we already have plenty of ways to synthesize in chemistry. It's a workaday paper - interesting if you are interested in the field, but of no great impact to most people's lives.

The result is that there's also not a lot of great ways to engage with the paper, in the same way it's difficult to engage with a refinement of the equivalence between inertial and gravitation mass.

If you want to engage with the simulation hypothesis and metaphysical realism more broadly, I would begin with Putnam's _Reason, Truth and History_. The philosophical work around the simulation hypothesis is maybe best thought of not as an attempt to actually answer it conclusively, but as particular lens on the relationship between reality, self-perception, and sense-perception. Clarifying those relationships is of immense use to the average person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If we are in a sim, most likely we are part of the sim program and not plugged in Matrix style.What differences could there be between reality and sim? I cannot see any plausible reason for a conscious dimension in actual reality, but we see lots of evidence for the conscious dimension interacting with reality in the quantum, quantum computing especially should not really be possible unless you are accessing processing power from else where,it seems to me very likely we are in a sim that's designed to produce intelegent life, big bang is someone turning the on switch that produces through the Hawking inflation theroy infinite combinations for intelegent life to exist within there created framework, where the sim computer only needs to collapse the quantum wave function and render what is percived where there is inteligence, we evan may be an attempt by AI to create conscious but if so our worlds history remains intact and genuine, but as musk says what's outside the sim,who created and programed it may have came from a very different universe than we can imagine, and what is there consciousness like? Would we call that a creator ?

</comment><comment><USER10> While I fancy simulated reality, Bostrom's hypothesis placed constraints and assumptions that "human" must exist in the least and sim's purpose are about their "ancestors" and "we" are the reason that ever more simulations will continue to co-exist

But why must it be post-human from future? why not a "pre-human-ancestor" from "relatively ages ago" that may have created a simulation to peek into simulated future?(so they can learn and won't make the same mistakes we did)

You may notice a contradiction in my example is IF the creator are instead from the past? How can they even be a human at all if they had to exist before human does?

The thing is chicken and egg "only" if we assume our creator themselves must be human, on the other hand

Today, we are designing/training artificial intelligence life form barely resembling us in simulations and most of their purposes are generally "forecast/solution/learning/gaming"

With the penultimate goal to create ASI to solve problems in nature, perhaps the reality is our universe may just be one of the branches as a result of such humble "exploration"

OBTW are you aware "I AM AI" a slogan favored by Nvidia is a cute palindrome itself that can also be rearranged to "AI AM I", "AM I AI", "AI I AM", "I A I AM" :D</comment>


'Nature is taking back Venice': wildlife returns to tourist-free city - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/20/nature-is-taking-back-venice-wildlife-returns-to-tourist-free-city <comment><USER2> In Manhattan I've noticed a huge drop in the number of tourists in the past few days, but what's more interesting to me is the total number of people out and about in central park (and other parks) hasn't dropped much. It seems like most of the tourists you usually see were just replaced by locals. I suppose now that everyone is "working from home", they've got time to take walks in the park and enjoy the nice weather. I've also noticed fewer taxis/cars in general on the roads, which is quite nice.

This, of course, is strictly anecdotal observation, so take it with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER3> The first day of lockdown in Bologna, half the city ended up sunbathing in the local park. The city council was then forced to close parks and gardens.

<comment><USER4> If people are keeping their distance, it shouldn't be a problem.

<comment><USER3> Their city parks are just not big enough to accommodate all those people at a safe distance. And of course couples and groups will never actually stay at a distance. Hence the order.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't cities just limit the number of people in the park, and presumably couples live together or are in contact anyway?

<comment><USER3> Do you really want to deploy even more already-at-risk police forces, just to count people in a park...? Let's be real here - people are now forbidden from walking in the city except to get food, let alone stroll in the park.

<comment><USER4> This is silly. I'm just suggesting that people can be informed about the risks, and told to keep their distance. Any enforcement can be pretty light handed. Testing is the key regardless and focusing our efforts there could alleviate many downstream problems.

<comment><USER3> _> Any enforcement can be pretty light handed._

From this statement I deduce you're not Italian. "Light handed enforcement" over there does not exist - people will not respect any rule unless they are somewhat certain that they'll be caught and punished for breaking it. Half- measures just don't work, they will be gamed out of existence in a few hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is an alternative timeline where tourism in Venice is prohibited or strictly restricted to a handful of people per day, and the city is fundamentally dead but used as a social livingroom for moneyed global elites. It would be utterly sad but probably very beautiful.

This crisis might help us rearrange our priorities a bit.

<comment><USER5> Venice is "dead" right now because the people who really live there can't compete with tourists for space. If you banned tourism then normal people would fill back in.

<comment><USER6> Are there places in the world that ban tourism?

<comment><USER7> A Japanese Shrine banned foreigners. [https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east- asia/article/3046010/jap...](https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east- asia/article/3046010/japans-watatsumi-shrine-bans-foreigners-after-vandalism- and)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> According to National Geographic, this story is false[1]. There were always swans in Burano, and the dolphins supposedly in Venice were in fact filmed elsewhere.

[1] [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavir...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavirus- pandemic-fake-animal-viral-social-media-posts/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Having reduced my pollution by about 90% over the past 5 years according to online calculators and discovered the joy, community, and connection that comes with acting on my environmental values, I hope people experience simplicity and non-polluting behavior enough to continue it for the rest of their lives and create long-term systemic change.

I used to love flying and didn't think twice about packaging, ordering online, or buying food out of season. I prefer this way more than I can describe, though I did my best in my TEDx talks [http://joshuaspodek.com/my-second-tedx- talk-what-everyone-ge...](http://joshuaspodek.com/my-second-tedx-talk-what- everyone-gets-wrong-about-the-environment-and-how-to-get-it-right-went-live), and the old ways evoke disgust the way a polluted canal would look after seeing how clean they become if given a couple weeks.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is actually the most hopeful thing I've read in a while. It makes me think that we're going to see a "Second Renaissance".

With the free time people have to think, and some deep introspection about their true worth as a wage slave, we'll see things change drastically after this is over.

This is possibly the best thing that could have happened to humanity.

<comment><USER11> How about you wait to see what the full effect is before saying that COVID-19 is possibly the best thing that could have happened to humanity

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is how I remember Venice ... from Tomb Raider 2 ;)

There are a lot more people out in nature at the moment. If this will lead to lasting changes? The lockdowns may be long enough to turn new behaviours into new habits.

<comment><USER11> I'd guess that habits are easily disrupted by major life changes, although that's mostly based off of my personal experience of trying to make 'good' habits and break 'bad' ones.

It's easy to break a bad habit I have when I'm traveling and easy to break my good habits when someone has come to visit or I have lots of obligations

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's taking back the world.

</comment><comment><USER14> This makes me...upset...and glad. As if it takes a virus to realise and change behaviour.

Edit: another upside was mentioned earlier in the CO2 drop. Will we in the future see politicans limiting number of aircrafts / year?

<comment><USER15> This water is not clean, only looks clean. To claim that the water is clean you would need to show chemical analysis, not photos of a cormorant in a sunny day. Sun reflection can make anything blue, same as computer colour correction.

There are several problems with this photos. Problems in the blue hues for example. Many of those photos show an unnatural (slightly milky) hue of blue. If they analyze this water I bet that they will discover traces of bleach and maybe some methylene

The seaweeds shown are also a bad, not good sign. Its population will increase in the next months probably. Is a chinese invasive species that shouldn't be in Venice.

So I'm afraid that Not, nature will not reconquest Venice in two weeks. This is publicity.

<comment><USER16> :( why the negativity!? It's just clearer... Quote from the article: The apparent cleanliness of the water is not in fact due to a lack of pollution, said Davide Tagliapetra, an environmental researcher at the Institute of Marine Science. He told a local TV station that the reason is the absence of motorised transport, which normally churns up the muddy canal floor.</comment></comment></comment>


Looking to read up on tech futurology. Can you recommend any authors? - <AUTHOR>

Looking to read up on tech futurology. Can you recommend any authors/journalists?<p>Preferably in the tech space. Or even sci-fi <comment><USER2> Highly recommend Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. 2007 Hugo Award for best novel. It's set in the near future (20~30 years?) and gives a compelling picture of what personal tech in the future might look like - especially how augmented reality is used by everyday people. Also touches on terrorism, security, hacking (no user serviceable parts!!).

You can see hints of what he wrote about coming about even today, but he merges everything into a smooth, believable world that makes you wonder why we're not there already.

</comment><comment><USER3> From a sci-fi perspective, William Gibson writes some good stuff. Spook Country has some interesting ideas around geo-location, wireless connectivity and augmented reality.

Actually, any of the cyberpunk authors might potentially be of interest to you.

Outside of that, there's Ray Kurzweil... and J. Storrs Hall has written a couple of good books on nanotech and AI. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Storrs_Hall>

</comment><comment><USER4> I was quite fond of Charlie Stross's Accelerando, but I don't know if it's what you're looking for since it may be too far in the future in parts. However, it's available as a free ebook or just plain html, so that's an advantage.

Also, I think he posts here occasionally, which I found interesting.

</comment><comment><USER5> A couple that come to mind right away are Ray Kurzweil and Jaron Lanier. I haven't read their books (though I have one of each of theirs on my to-read list), their names come up quite often.</comment>


Dell Technologies Open Source – The Code Team - <AUTHOR> https://thecodeteam.co <comment><USER2> This has been terminated by Dell:

[https://blog.thecodeteam.com/2018/02/22/final-thank-code- tea...](https://blog.thecodeteam.com/2018/02/22/final-thank-code-team/)</comment>


Is FB deliberately slowing deletes? - <AUTHOR> I try to clean up my FB profile, that means I delete everything I posted, commented, shared and liked. There are two tools that should be able to automate this, but both failed on me (i.e. 'Absterge' and 'Facebook Time Line Cleaner').
Additionally i have the feeling FB is making the delete function of posts deliberately slow, introducing a aproximatly 5 second delay on each mouse click.
Anybody have some tips? Scripts that work? Similar experiences? <comment><USER2> A couple of months ago my Twitter account was hacked by a spammer who subscribed me to a couple thousand other accounts. Since there is no mass unfollow feature, I wrote a quick and dirty javascript to kill everything on my page:

var a = $('.unfollow-text');for(var b=0;b<a.length;b++){a[b].click();}

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, something like that. facebook makes it quite hard to do that, because the delete is in a popup menue and even that is different from item to item. sometimes it's "delete" you have to click, sometimes it's "unlike" sometimes the best one can do is select "hidden from timeline" ...

for me it's quite clear: facebook does not want you to purge something, ever. if you dare to, you should suffer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I believe that there's an option you can use to automatically erase every trace of your profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, but then of course you are gone completely. that's not what i want (for now). i want to keep my profile and friendlist. every other content should be purged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's possible your deletes are registered instantly, but the cache of information that serves those functions were not wiped until the existing cache expired five minutes later.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not talking about deletes becoming "visible" on the timeline after a delay, I mean that the browser is completely blocked and unresponsive for 4-5 seconds (not minutes!). That makes deleting by hand lots of posts and likes a total PITA.

<comment><USER5> Could be, or could it be something that seethe user-agent and the influx of deletes from a tool as a denial of service and intentionally throttles responses?

Plausible deniability, right?</comment></comment></comment>


The one who caused the failure gets $1+b, those working (almost) nothing - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/wework-employees-feel-sting-as-ex-ceo-stands-to-reap-11571870011?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> Putting aside the attribution of blame for a moment, consider he and McElvey created from scratch an enterprise that created those jobs and their concomitant health care plans. Employees without significant voting equity get paid an agreed upon package until as such time the employer can or does not wish to continue the relationship. Fairness has nothing to do with it.</comment>


Koya Bound – Eight Days on the Kumano Kodo - <AUTHOR> http://walkkumano.com <comment><USER2> When I was 18 I traveled to Koya-san to begin and end my Shikoku Pilgrimage. I collected the calligraphy and stamps unique to all 108 temples (including the 20 bangai) along the 1000 mile trail. When I returned to Koya-san I went to the calligraphy window at the temple to have the final page of my nokyocho stamped and signed. The monk at the window took my book, flipping through the ink heavy pages that had taken me months of lonely backpacking to fill. Finally he arrived at the last blank page. He filled it in without question. Black ink strokes and three deliberate red stamps over the black completed my journey. He closed the book and handed it back to me through the window. We looked at one another for a moment in silence. I was sure this monk could sense the power this moment held for me. After a pause he raised his hand and pointed. I followed his finger to a sign on the right of the window. It took me a second to realize I owed him ¥1,000.

Koya-san is a magical place.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikoku_Pilgrimage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikoku_Pilgrimage)

<comment><USER3> Out of interest, what prompted you to make such a trip? When I was 18 (granted this was only a couple of years ago) all I managed to do was stay with a host family for a few weeks in Japan :)

<comment><USER2> To be honest, after a pretty lackadaisical first year of college I wanted to do something a bit more extreme. So naturally I dropped out and started looking at Pilgrimage trails. I didn't really understand much of the historical and spiritual significance of the Shikoku trail until I actually started it and spoke with other pilgrims. The experience, at least at the beginning, was more about taking a completely divergent turn and diving into a culture that had fascinated me for years. That said, if you want to go back, its a surprisingly affordable endeavor if you can clear 4-6 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those looking to create their own webpage like this, it looks like it was based on Lucas Bebber's Storytelling Map:

[http://tympanus.net/codrops/2015/12/16/animated-map-path- for...](http://tympanus.net/codrops/2015/12/16/animated-map-path-for- interactive-storytelling/)

<comment><USER5> Yes, they provide this info in the write up as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did this for two weeks back last spring. Walking and hitchhiking, camping in my tent on mountain tops and road stations. Best thing I've done in Japan I think. But be prepared if you set out to do this - the mountains don't lend themselves to camping that well and sometimes it actually takes a couple of hours to find a place to put up a tent in a safe way. You should also have some grasp of Japanese culture and preferably the language first - don't be the (in their eyes) ignorant and disrespectful foreigner who comes and abuses the opportunity. Camping in public areas is not really commonplace in Japan, so you want to be discrete and low-key about it. And yes, Koya-san is awesome in the true sense of the word. You can get lost there, place is yuge. It's got the best graves.

<comment><USER7> _> You should also have some grasp of Japanese culture and preferably the language first - don't be the (in their eyes) ignorant and disrespectful foreigner who comes and abuses the opportunity._

Every time I traveled in the past, I felt extremely self conscious. Like I was but a consumer, experiencing only the most superficial things, greedily taking what a place has to offer without giving anything back. So now I've been using all of my vacation days to go to the same country (Japan), slowly learning the language and culture, making long term friends, frequenting the same small local shops (staff recognize some me at a few places now), etc. It's been a very rewarding experience so far - it feels much deeper than any of the tourism I did in the past. I'll probably move there at some point.

Not really a point to my post, maybe some people would find going to the same place over and over again terribly boring - but thought I'd share.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely agree — this is why I keep going back to Kumano.

Japan has Nakasendo, Tokaido, the Shikoku pilgrimage, salt roads, Basho's backroads to the north, the paths of Dewasanzan, etc etc etc. It's nearly infinite. I figured if I spend ten years walking Kumano I might have the slightly chance of possibly understanding a small piece of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been to Koya-san twice. It's an amazing place/atmosphere, including the trip up.

Third time around I will have to walk there.

</comment><comment><USER9> Pictures taken from the point rain began look so ghostly and chilling they give me goosebumps. Beautiful journey, beautifully narrated.

</comment><comment><USER10> Koya-san is one of the most memorable places in Japan. I can recommend visiting in the deep winter when it's very cold with lots of snow and the atmosphere is otherworldly.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice web site. I like how the map flows with the photos and storyline. Thanks @metrognome for showing how they did it.

</comment><comment><USER12> The kickstarter link is broken :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops — fixed. Thanks. Was missing an http. Here it is if you were curious: [http://walkkumano.com/kickstarter.com/projects/craigmod/6152...](http://walkkumano.com/kickstarter.com/projects/craigmod/615288454/)</comment></comment>


Amazon EC2 Beta (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_ec2_beta/ <comment><USER2> It'll never take off. Even if people want to use it, which seems doubtful, there's no way it can ever be economical at scale. Where's the value prop here?

<comment><USER3> Ha, were people really saying this back then?

<comment><USER4> No.

<comment><USER5> Because there was no HN then :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fun to look through old EC2 email from back in the day (from 2007):

> We have an account at that is nearing its EC2 limit - we need to be able to > create more than 20 instances, preferably as many as you can give us. Our > application is exploding - we're doing well over 5M page views / day and > it's doubling every 2 or 3 days, so the request is rather urgent. Can you > have someone call or email us right away?

I remember at that time that it was just so much more expensive than physical servers at iWeb. Sure it was convenient, but the performance per dollar was something like 1/3 or 1/4\. Crazy.

<comment><USER7> The value in EC2 has never been in straight up cost, it's been in wild fluctuations in scale. In sites like Reddit, where your peak traffic can be 10x or 100x what your average traffic is, the ability to scale up to handle the top 5th percentile without paying a hundred times more year-round is where savings come in.

Now, though, the benefit in AWS is all the add-ons that you can manage through the same system; DNS, messaging, databases, firewalls, load balancing, etc.

That said, we massively overprovision our servers at my company and it's still probably less than half of what we'd pay at Amazon. That pays for my time to take care of the servers, at least.

<comment><USER8> actually renting servers is cheap. however renting a stable network isn't.

when you rent servers you either need a overlay network via a VPN or you end up renting a rack (1/3, half, full) and connect it yourself. but as you might guess you are now inside a single datacenter, if it burns or somehow looses it's connection you are offline. that's not a big deal for some sites, but some stuff will suffer from that.

AWS and Clouds are more about networks and traffic spikes than just a bunch of servers. It's also easier to just replace the system in a outage than on most other services where you mostly try to heal it up. On Clouds you just trash it. We have some small sites on 3 AWS Small instances and a AWS RDS Master- Slave. Whenever one instance breaks or AWS makes a notice that this instance will be recycled we just reprovision it. We are also on AWS Frankfurt which didn't have a real outage yet. Google pricing would be in favor but no RDS Postgres yet, same for Azure (even when we get 130 € per month on 7 accounts for free (startup program) for 3 years or so).

however our software is sold to customers as hardware and not designed to run on a cloud (yet), mostly because of sensitive data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kids today don't remember needing a purchase order to buy hardware that had to be shipped, racked and configured. Adding scale went from 6 weeks to 6 seconds.

<comment><USER10> The vast majority of business do not need to scale on a dime.

You're paying 30-40% more to provision in 6 seconds in AWS (and let's be real, it's low 5 minutes _at least_ for most resources like instances), but if you've got the cash to waste, go for it.

As always, marketing is key.

<comment><USER11> > and let's be real, it's low 5 minutes at least for most resources like > instances

If you've got a pre-baked application AMI, are using EBS-backed instances, and are starting them with auto-scaling or health-checks rather than manually using the console, then no, you really can have new instances up in a couple of seconds.

Mind you, the key (to getting a high ROI from AWS) isn't scaling _up_ on a dime. It's scaling _down_ on a dime, whenever your load decreases for even a minute or two, knowing you can just scale right back up. Being able to run with literally no paid compute-hours spent sitting around doing nothing waiting for a task can save you a rather large amount of money, usually quite easily compensating for that 30-40% AWS surcharge.

<comment> Alain-lf AWS charge by the hour, as soon as you power up an instance you are charged a full hour.

If you start and stop one instance 60 time in an hour, you will be charged 60 hours.

So scaling down on a dime and scalling right back up is more expensive than doing nothing.

<comment><USER10> Bingo. If you've scaled up, you stay scaled up for the instance hour. Otherwise, you just threw money away.

<comment><USER12> GCE only need 10 minutes and then you can spin down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hey Jeff, this EC2 thing sounds like exactly what I'm looking for, except that it seems to be just Linux. I'd like to get FreeBSD running on this instead... is there someone at Amazon I can talk to about making this happen?

</timemachine>

</comment><comment><USER14> I didn't realise that Jeff Barr has been doing these posts all the way back to 2006.

<comment><USER15> I started writing the AWS Blog way back in November 2004 and am coming up on 2600 posts!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really feel for pmarca

<comment><USER17> What's up with pmarca's website? It gives me a 404 on archive.org all the way back to 2007. I think that's the first time I've ever one do that using Wayback. Nothing but 404's.</comment></comment>


OAuth Core 1.0 Final Draft is out: Now go build stuff! - <AUTHOR> http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/10/04/oauth-core-10-final-draft-is-out-now-build-stuff/ <comment><USER2> for those that don't know what OAuth is:

<http://oauth.net/>

(I sure as hell didn't from just reading the blog post)</comment>


Whitehouse.gov passes XHTML validation! - <AUTHOR> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0 Proof the new administration cares about our standards. <comment><USER2> Yep, it passes. But it could be much, much better:

1) It's clearly not for the dial-up users, even though there's still a lot of them 2) Semantic IDs and class-names would really be nice. I disagree with some of the choices made for elements and headings too, but whatever.

The main issue I have with it is that they were too lazy to check their site with YSlow and correct some of the basic issues: minifying JS and CSS, settings up ETags and Expires Headers, and bundling those CSS and JS files for the deployment version of the site.

Other than that, great! A really, really nice site for those of us on faster connections. :)</comment>